Laydeez and gennulmen ... the loneliest place on earth? Photograph: Mike Powell/Corbis
There's a saying about students. It goes: "Students". It doesn't work so well written down. But I guess that's why they call it a "saying" rather than a "writing".
Tonight's gig is at an on-campus student bar, and I'm compering. As compere, it looks like you're the host and the whole production is somehow your responsibility. This can be a tricky role when the actual producers are students. Students, in my experience, have a strange idea of how the world works, and what constitutes normal behaviour.
I did a student gig once that involved an overnight stay - the hospitality was half-fantastic, half-terrible. They provided meals, brought us drinks, took us out to nightspots, but then expected me and the headliner to share a room, and one of us had to sleep on the floor. In a way you couldn't feel too cross with them.
When you get to comedy gigs, the promoters often give you a reason why the audience turnout might be small. They like to get in their excuses in advance - just in case, like British athletes. Inevitably, in this country, it's often the weather - it's too hot, too cold, too wet, or it's altogether too temperate: "Good God, it's 16 degrees out there. And with this 20% chance of precipitation, I'll be surprised if we get anyone." Other excuses are more annoying, such as major sporting events. Like when you turn up to a gig and a promoter tells you that they're not expecting many in, because it's the World Cup final. (Yes, hmm, I can see how that could have taken you by surprise.)
But the students' excuse tonight beats the lot. "We're not expecting many in - it's exam time," they tell me when I arrive, giving me a good half-hour to let the disappointment sink in. Of course. When this gig was scheduled, how could anyone have been expected to know that an exclusively student audience might have their attention attracted away from matters comedic in the summer term?
Anyway, a smattering of people swells the room to almost a fifth capacity. A collection of those who don't have exams, those who do have exams but are probably going to fail them, and those who are so on top of their subject they don't have to do any revision. I try to imagine the audience is largely of the last group: comedy-loving polymaths.
As compere, I have to be chirpy all evening, and as it turns out the audience is nice enough. Both the acts are also playing another gig across town (the opener here is closing there, and vice versa), so they have a mid-evening taxi dash to enjoy. I get to stay put. I'm the audience's stay-at-home parent tonight.
Towards the end of the evening, a late-arriving audience member takes a phone call. Had she been in the club all night, I like to think, I'd have taught her better manners. The headliner is on stage at the time, and he is particularly - and rightly - annoyed by this bursting of the bubble. Audience disbelief is always rather tenuously suspended in a sparsely attended gig such as this, and a phone conversation is generally enough to break the spell and turn what most people call "a show" into "a man talking into a microphone".
The headliner wraps things up shortly after this, so I go on to close the show and say goodnight. Luckily our militant anti-art campaigner with the phone has left by now (gone to burn some books, or maybe spit on some paintings). Then the guy who puts out the chairs takes the stage to say goodnight, which is an acceptable, if rather amateurish, way to end the evening.
It's still slightly insulting to the compere - as if there was something I should have said, but failed to - but I manage not to be too mortified. Then it gets worse: the guy who puts out the chairs gives in to audience pressure, and is persuaded to put another act on - one of the students who had done a good spot in the first half. Now it's as if the insult is directed mainly towards the headliner, implying he wasn't good enough to top the bill.
As the audience leave, and the guy starts to put the chairs away again, I try to calm myself with the mantra: "They mean well, they mean well."
Not all gigs are annoying like this, of course. Some are annoying in completely different ways ...
