Rob Gilroy: Making A Stand #10

“Ooh, hello you! Is that a new top? It’s lovely. Where did you get it? I’ll have to get myself one of those.”

“Get you with your fancy new car; very swish.”

“Try this new wonder drug – it will revolutionise your life. Either that or it will give you crippling abdominal pains and cause you to bleed while you wee.”

See that? That’s how most people react when faced with new things. Everyone loves new things, it’s like being reborn. It revitalises you, brings a bit of sunshine to your day. Opening a new DVD is like crack cocaine to me; most of the time I buy DVDs just to open them. In fact it’s the perfect addiction because even when you run out of money new DVDs are readily available. You just need to run into HMV and start tearing them open. It doesn’t really matter about watching the films – you can get round to that during recreation time in prison. Nothing beats something new – that fresh smell, the feeling of earning it, those fiddly tags you bite off with your teeth because you don’t have the patience to find the scissors. Perfect. Agreed? Agreed.

Right, well you tell that to an audience when I try out new material. There’s no “Oooh, fancy” or “Looking good” when I try out new stuff, at best it a mixture of utter confusion and ambivalence. You’d think these people would be grateful to receive some newly hand-stitched comic jokery, but no. It’s like it’s not worth a moment of their time. As if they’d rather sit there reading the back of the beer mat, whilst sipping their Britvic – ungrateful. AND I wore a new top – nobody batted an eye.

To be fair; some of that could be down to me. I suppose spending five minutes scribbling any old thing down on the back of a prescription (for abdominal pain, if you must know) isn’t really dedicating the time it needs. It’s a funny one, writing new material – for me anyway. Somehow, when you first start out you can write all the material you want and it just comes to you, like Occado of the imagination – but without the extortionate delivery costs. Then you spend a long time honing that material, adding bits, subtracting bits, lengthening that bit with the really long pause because that will surely make it funnier, un-lengthening that bit with the really long pause because, actually, it doesn’t. The whole set ebbs and flows constantly, never quite settling down – not unlike that week Paul Young lost his bobble hat – and eventually you get it to a point where it’s, if not perfect, then at a point where the evolution slows right down to telephone banking levels of inactivity. So the time calls for you to write something new. Only…how the hell do you do that?

I’ve spent far too long staring at my laptop waiting for a ‘You look like you’re trying to write a hilarious stand up routine, need some assistance?’ text box to pop up. It still hasn’t. Get on it Bill Gates – Apple are on to the iPad 60 now and you’ve only just managed to add a couple of extra graphics to the back of the solitaire cards. The idea of having to write a new set or new material is, I find, incredibly daunting. I seem to have lost sight of how I do it. Most of my strongest jokes came as natural developments to the original material I had. Whereas it’s very hard to spring off new ideas when they don’t exist to begin with. Have you ever tried to trampolining without a trampoline? It’s not as easy as it looks. In fact, you could just call it jumping.

So, I wrote some stuff. No idea whether it would work of not – that’s sort of how it is with this comedy lark, could go either way – but I wrote it down, highlighted it and everything, and took it to The Stand the other night. The hope is that not only do you blow the roof off the place (metaphorically; I’m not a terrorist) but that you can remember each, individual laugh. You can’t. Like the comedown from a good smash and unwrap in HMV all you’re left with are distant memories, slight disorientation and bits of cling film in your teeth. It’s a struggle to remember how each joke went down, which is why I like to film it, that way you can revisit that moment of spontaneity in the cold light of day when you can no longer hear the laughs. I imagine the closest thing to this would be inviting the surgeon round to yours after a particularly intensive colonoscopy so you can watch the footage back together. It’s not an easy watch, and popcorn only makes things more awkward.

It’s a difficult thing trying to gauge what works and what doesn’t but you have to pick it apart and judge every line, every single word on their own merits – you can’t just wing it; it’s not Countdown. If you’re lucky, of that ten minutes of new material, five of it might be worth exploring further and after a second or third attempt; a minute and a half of it. And once all is said and done and the editing has really commenced you’re left with a third of a sentence that maybe uses some of the same nouns. It’s a tiring process but hopefully by the end of it you have something that gets the biggest laugh of the night.

And if not then the best you can hope is that somebody notices your lovely new top.