Madness!

We've been working hard at the LLC, but it's been dull work like printing leaflets, updating websites and replying to e-mails, and we haven't had much time to think up funny stuff. So we agreed to pick one date when me, Cal and Al would do the whole middle section and the topic happens to be madness.

So today's blog is a random trawl through the mad, which will hopefully be the first stage in writng 20 minutes of material.

The picture is (I think) Mark Twain, who said...

"...in one way or another all men are mad. Many are mad for money...Love is a madness...it can grow to a frenzy of despair ... All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions, passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are incipience madness, and ready to grow, spread and consume, when the occasion comes. There are no healthy minds, and nothing saves any man but accident--the accident of not having his malady put to the supreme test.
One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is not merely common, but universal."

And he looks a bit nuts himself doesn't he. He has that Einstein haircut. Einstein, also a bit doolally, he had identical clothes so he wasn't distracted from important things by choosing what to ware. An example of how madness is close to genius, although in reality the examples where madness is closer to idiocy seem more common.


Some people call Salvador Dali mad but you can't really be mad and still paint that well. I went to his home / museum. It may be a bit mad to want a gold plated orang-utan skeleton in your bedroom, but to actually be able to afford it you must basically have your head screwed on the right way.

Another mad is the 'Zany' which we avoid at all costs. It's a fine line. Monty Python is great. People who go to Monty Python conventions are 'Zany'. We're pretty open to weird stuff at the LLC, but if people ever come up after a show and say 'You guys are just crazy! Seriously, that was great but you guys are just too much!' then we know we've gone too far. 'Zany' people are about as far from real rebellion, danger or madness as it is possible to get. 'We're mad, we just thought lets come to the party in cowboy hats, for, like, no reason! I know, we're insane.'

Some times madness is just the loss of a faculty we're not really aware of. If someone doesn't recognise you because they're blind, we accept it. The faculty of sight is gone and we can understand that. But if someone has lost their faculty to interpret visual signals as 3 dimensional objects, and they don't recognise you because they thought you were the Lake District, we think they're mad. There are loads of cases like this in 'The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat'. One chapter is devoted to people who can only interpret words literally. Which make it impossible for them to talk to sarcastic policemen without getting arrested. Another group had lost the ability to interpret language, but had an increased ability to interpret gesture and tone. The chapter ends with an anecdote about both groups laughing at a presidential speech, the 'literals' because the words actually didn't make any sense, and the 'tonals' because they could tell that whatever he was saying it was bullshit.

Well, I'd be mad (ho, ho) to waste any more time on this today.

Chilli Launch Night!! Thursday 5th of April.

Anyone reading this will probably also read the LLC site and know about this already, but here's the lowdown on our new monthly gig. We return to the Chillingham Arms, where me Al and Cal had some of our first gigs. It's more of a standard professional gig than the Dog and Parrot, but we're still leaving the middle section open for the best of the newcomers. Here's the blurb...

Long Live Comedy started a year ago as an open mic night for new comics. But the night was often also attended by established acts, keen to try out new material in the relaxed atmosphere. Long Live Comedy soon gained a reputation as a great comedy gig. Now the venue has been rewarded by being selected as the best comedy night in the North by Chortle - the comedy news website.

To celebrate our success we're expanding to showcase some of the finest talent that has appeared at the Long Live Comedy open mic night. But now they are guaranteed to appear alongside professional comics from all over the country.

Every month we will be bringing you professional comedians and some of the mad funny people who come to the Dog and Parrot every week.

April 5th
Compere Al Dawes
Steffen Peddie
Carl Hutchinson
Ric Wharton
Vladimir McTavish

May 3rd
Compere Callum Cramb
Susan Calman
Nolbert Stump
Selsdon Crupp
Daliso Chaponda

Gig 63. Beyond Compere.

Gig 63 was my second go at compereing solo at the LLC, and I think it worked. As the review said...

Pete was compere for the rest of the night, and soon abandonned his 'this week in history' themed material- it turned out to be informative but not funny, which is why no one else had bothered with it. Instead he got stuck in the logical problems of 'ripping the piss' put of someone for going to the toilet - are you actually helping them? The plucky recipient was Seb Proudfoot, and came in for more abuse when we pondered how he got his name. 'Well, I'm a baker, so I'll be Joe Baker. What about Seb?' 'Well, he's very proud of his feet.'

I think it was the lack of prepared material (or at least my willingness to dump it in favour of spontaneous stuff) that made the night. I'd researched a few facts on 'this week in history' but as it ws Al's turn to compere I didn't convert them into real jokes. And a week watching Cal's Ross Noble DVDs had me in a 'wing it and see what happens mode' and there were some nice moments. Particularly the 'proudfoot' thing where I milked a laugh of (what seemed like) 10 seconds, out of looking at my ow feet. Hopefully this is one of those important 'turning points' and gigs where I die because I've failed to engage with the audience are a thing of the past. On the other hand I can't survive for much longer with that hair. A man either has long hair, or he doesn't - there can be no middle course.

Gig 62- experimental theatre.

God, I'm getting bad at blogging. I'm now doing this in spare momets at work. I did add a picture, but it's in such a rush it has nowt to do with this bolg. Well, I'm in such a rush I don't know what I'm writing, so it might be about elderly men organising a bike race round the town centre. But no, instead, very briefly I'll do all the stuff I would have done if I'd been blogging daily.

The theatre gig was a bit wierd. Experimental performance art and one of those badly written plays where people in the middle of heated arguments still manage to list obscure facts that show the writer did some research. 'I'm going to kill you! Because your company's building projects have caused an 83% decline in curlew numbers in this area.' 'You crazy fool, the police will be here any second- and the curlew was already in decline, 19th century hunting meant breeding pair numbers had been unsustainable since the turn of the century.'

And me and Cal reading bits from a sitcom that needs a lot of re-writes. I don't think the audience knew if they were supposed to laugh - I'd been biting my fist for most of the evening.

We won the best Northern Venue in the Chortle comedy awards. HA HA HA HA HA!

What's my motivation?

The first post in a long time, but I haven't done any gigs apart from the LLC nights, and I can't remember doing anything so spectacular that it deserves to be called gig no. 62. But I do have a weird one coming up. John Scott put me forward for a gig at Northern stage. A couple of weeks later I had an e-mail through which explained it as an opportunity to see theatrical works in progress, meet with the creators and offer feedback to help hone these dramatic first steps. So 10 minutes of me telling jokes about starwars didn't seem appropriate.

So, I dug out an old script - 'The Garret' a tale of struggling Victorian artists. I wrote this with the help of a mate a few years ago, sent it to 2 companies, had 2 rejection letters and forgot about it. But now it's back. Given the lack of time, I didn't think I'd be able to learn it, let alone anyone else, so the show will have to be represented by me reading out 3 scenes. One featured a showbiz producer turning a serious play about Darwin into Indiana Jones. This bit at least seems to work. The conversation was so onesided that I was able to cut all the lines by the play's writer and do the producer' part as a monologue. So even if 'The Garret' never resurfaces, I may have another 8 minute routine I can use somewhere. Due to the increasing popularity of the LLC nights (for performers- we're not exactly turning away punters yet.) I've not been able to get on to try it out, but I'm hoping for a cancellation tomorrow, so I can at least try out this bit before Friday.