Travels With My Bongos Part 1

I think that the real sign of being very good (or at least well-practised) at something is when you can make it look easy. It is a theory that requires a little bit of work given that no-one makes particle physics look easy, although we will mention ‘A Brief History of Time’ later in this blog. My intention when I get on stage though is always to make people feel as though I just stepped up, relaxed and wanting to chat to them about my life. I almost want them to forget that they are watching ‘an act’ and I think that sometimes that has unfortunate consequences.

I had to blag my way into the Bath Comedy Festival. I am short on videos but long on arm-twisting and I was thrilled to be given a spot in a competition heat in The Bell Inn. A week before the date, I set off to The Bell to take in the surroundings, time the journey and visualise how it would work – as I say, a lot of work goes into making anything look easy. The Bell had a fabulous stage area by the bar and I imagined how easy it would be to engage with the audience and perform from that spot. I am glad that i took time to imagine it because that was not where the performances took place.

I arrived at The Bell on Wednesday night and the first thing that I encountered was confusion. I introduced myself to the woman behind the bar and she asked, “are you performing music or comedy?” and I replied, “both”. It turned out that the ideal stage was for a band booked for the same evening. I was told to find a bearded man on the phone who would show me out back to the comedy venue.

As we walked out the back of the pub to the ‘outhouse’, the man explained to me that the Comedy Festival was nothing to do with him and he had no idea what was going on. The outhouse was a single room at the end of the pub beer garden with a couple of toilet cubicles attached. I was shown in to find a few comedians sitting around writing notes, tapping on ipads or otherwise looking busy. It smelt of sweat. There was no ventilation. One of the other acts said that it smelt like hamsters. I pondered if it smelt of failed dreams.

Comedians are so wonderfully serious. There was a little interaction between us but there was an air of nerves and people checking out their competition. If a conversation built, everyone was watching to see who could top it with a joke. The sponsor of the event was Lovehoney, the sex toy manufacturer, and one of the other acts talked about how the prize included a selection of sex toys. He was convinced that the winner’s trophy would be a giant penis. There was a reasonable laugh. Someone added that he would be disappointed if he won and did not receive a giant penis. Another reasonable laugh. I added that if he won and did not receive it, he would be angrily demanding, ‘where’s my penis?’ of the judges. This surreal image got a laugh but, like all the other laughs, it was cut short as people sized up the competition.

A succession of people came into the room and it became pretty clear that they were all comedians and no-one really had an idea of what was going on. It could easily have been the start of a weird sci-fi story in which the world’s comedians were being abducted ... but I would be left behind as I am a bongo-based entertainer rather than a stand-up. These definitions will be crucial when the aliens do arrive to remove hilarity from the planet. I did chat to a few of the other acts. The only other musician was from Bridgend (you wait hours for a Welsh music-based comedy act and then two come along at once) and there was a moment of confusion when the pub’s sound guy asked me if I wanted my guitar amplified and I lifted up my bongos and explained that they were not a guitar. He did not find that very funny.

Eventually, the MC arrived. He was a performing comedian named Chris and he got the set list together. I was on towards the end, which meant waiting the longest but also having the crowd at their drunkest and most relaxed. To be honest, I think that the best line of the whole night came at this point. The MC was clearly a little bit worried about the lack of an audience and so he asked the acts if we had brought along any friends. I could not resist replying, “Would I be doing comedy if I had any friends?” This time the reasonable laugh from my fellow acts might have had a little recognition in it too.

I like watching comedy and that includes other comedians. I like to be generous in my applause and encouraging in my praise. An audience was rounded up from the pub and being late on the bill meant that I had time to work out what they enjoyed. Would a sex toy joke go down well? Back to our theme, making it look easy takes a lot of work.

The MC started the evening with a mix of jokes and picking on audience members at the front. I hope that audience members expect this. Certainly there was a bald man at the front who received a lot of attention from the MC but who gave as good as he got when it came to heckling. We will be coming back to him later. The MC did miss an obvious joke when an audience member said that her hobbies were 'reading and gardening'. She then could not name a book that she had read. The MC could have suggested she read about herbs - 'A Brief History of Thyme'? Not the worst pun of the night had he thought of it ...

I would feel bad repeating any of my fellow comedians’ jokes word for word (they have to pay rent too, after all) but there were a few stand-outs. There were a few comedians concentrating on their health or nationality or other aspects of who they were to raise a few laughs. Some were reciting pun after pun, others telling stories. You could tell those who could ride through laughs or lack of laughs and those were thrown by them. I noticed a few who had prompts written on their hands. I feel that if you are going to do an act properly, you ought to memorise your material and trust yourself to remember it. When you look at your hand, you break the spell with the audience as you remind them ‘this is not me, I’m only doing this from a script’. It should look effortless.

There was a Lithuanian woman who did a long set of jokes about being Lithuanian but used a large number of props to do it, my favourite being large cardboard cards with text messages written on them to explain how hard it was to follow the English used on the internet. Props make you memorable and they were genuinely funny too. I would have been happy if she had won the heat that night. She was another loser – oh yes, you have guessed that I did not win, I hope?

What I would look for in a comedy act was how they thought on their feet, adapted and worked with the audience. People who criticise the audience for not laughing would immediately be out for me (even the ‘I thought that I’d get a bigger laugh for that one’ makes it sound like they have failed rather than you). There was a woman from Abergele performing at the end of the second half and she asked the audience if anyone had been to Abergele. I would bet that the answer is usually ‘no’ but I am an honest audience member, so I shouted out ‘yes’. She was prepared for that though and I rather liked her act. Again, had she won I would have thought it a fair decision.

The woman from Abergele had a train to catch though and so she was moved up the order and I ended up last on the bill. I have closed many a show and it was a chance to make the obvious joke about ‘it’s your last chance to laugh, so do it now’. The audience were certainly relaxed by now and the MC announced, ‘this is what promises to be one of the most interesting acts of the night’ and up I went. That is the thing with the bongos, they immediately mark you out as different. The guitarist before me, he did a couple of bits of songs but everyone has seen comedy guitarists, people are immediately thinking ‘this is a bit different’ when you step on stage with bongos.

I always try to make some connection with my audience by referencing the surroundings. The sponsors were Gem Ales and Lovehoney so I gave a quick shout out to them – “Gem Ales, the only beer I’ll be drinking tonight” and “Lovehoney, the only sex toys I’ll be using tonight” and speculated on Lovehoney bringing out a range for disappointed comedians (“when you can’t get a laugh, you can always get a giggle”). I punctuated this with saying ‘I’ll start the act in a minute’. Of course, I had been rehearsing all this in my head for two hours, but the impression was that I had just stepped on stage, looked at the posters and made a few comments. When you are relaxed, you give the audience permission to relax. Then I started singing.

“Desperate Rhymes for Desperate Times” is my go-to song for those who have not heard me before. It is the one with the terrible rhymes and I can invite the audience to guess each rhyme before it happens. My delivery of it over the years has improved to really maximise the laughs. My originally improvised line about Debbie – “She dumped me, but I got two songs and a short story out of her, so who really won, eh?” also gets more of a laugh than it should do really.

It went well. I had people laughing along. If you will permit me a little diversion, it is a clever song at heart – it sets up the joke, goes a little bit controversial, gets a bit rude, changes tune, brings you back to the original joke and then sets up a final line. There is nothing accidental in that song. If it sounds like a lightweight song about bad puns then good, but it is skilfully crafted and practised. The more lightweight it sounds, the harder it has been refined and thought about.

At the end there was a cheer and big applause. I would not say that I brought the house down, but I closed the show in style. I can bet that if the audience was asked what they had seen the next day, they would have said a bloke with the bongos singing about women among their top memories. Was I the best? I would have put myself in the top three of the ten who performed, but we had to wait for the judges to deliberate.

At this point, the bald man came over to me and told me that I was too young to remember the T-Rex song ‘Deborah’. I do, of course, have the hairstyle and glitter make-up to be a T-Rex fan, but I let him talk. His point was that the song would have worked if only Debbie had been known as ‘Deborah’. ‘She should have moved to Bath and been posher!’ he said. I laughed along with his observation because it was true and because despite what I sometimes say, I like people coming up to me and talking about the songs. I wonder how many other acts had people engaged with what they did to that point? There is something about me saying to an audience, ‘step in to my world and let me tell you something about it’. In fact, I think that too much comedy is based on a rather bland consumption - I tell a joke and you laugh. I think that it is better and is indeed the future of comedy to have a more collaborative approach where you bring the audience in to your act. That is scary though and it takes some practice. It is almost an act of trust and people reward you for that trust.

Judges however, do not. The competition was won by someone who I have not mentioned. I enjoyed his act, but I would not have said that he was the stand-out act from among us. The Lithuanian woman was robbed! Still, you can never tell what judges are looking for. Well, other than not me. Then again, as Decca Records once famously noted, the sound of bongo-based entertainment is on its way out ...