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I've spent the last few days expanding the Work section of my site and you can now find articles on my time at Bullfrog, my work on Cnex and my work on the O Na! Y Morgans Christmas Special if you click on the links in the menu. I'll be adding more images and media over the next few weeks so expect it to change! Thought I'd just share a story about New York that was perhaps my strangest experience while over there: While I was in a shop deciding whether to buy a particular shirt, Ben and Merida got talking to a street vendor, of which there were loads in the area around Time Square. When I finally joined them (having not bought the shirt due to the lack of stock in my size), I found they'd bought tickets to a live comedy event that evening in a bar around the corner from our hotel. Since it was our last night in the city and we'd exhausted the film-going opportunities, it sounded like an ideal thing to do. We arrived on time to find the place empty apart from four people sitting at a table near the front and the ticket collector emphasising that there was a two drink minimum per person that evening, something that certainly wasn't mentioned by the vendor. Alarm bells began to ring, but we'd arrived and had no real plans to do anything else. The waitress brought over some very large but rather expensive soft drinks that we all ignored for most of the evening. Just before they started, another man came in and sat near the front. Although we'd wanted to sit near the back, we'd been told to use the front seats, obviously because they knew their audience was going to be thin that evening. The evening began and we realised that their entire audience was eight people. The compere tried his best to rustle up some enthusiasm for the first act and we all clapped appropriately as the comic jumped onto the stage. And it went downhill from there. The first act quickly established that his audience consisted of two Dutch people (cue lots of rather desperate Amsterdam jokes from nearly all the comics, much to the irritation of the poor Dutch), two German girls who didn't laugh all evening, one guy from Brooklyn who seemed like a regular, and us three who brightly claimed to be from Wales. The Welsh thing completely threw them - they knew it was somewhere in Britain but only one had been anywhere near it and proceeded to claim that the language has lots of v's in in, which it doesn't and mispronouced Brynmawr, but who cares? Eventually, a couple from LA wandered in and proved to be far more entertaining than the comics, mainly because we discovered that they had got back together after being divorced, had children with previous spouses and had been introduced by the first wife of the man. And the man was a history teacher. I'd have rather talked to them. I think there were ten comics in all, each of whom struggled to divert from their scripted routines, certainly a problem when they had the word 'improv' printed on a board at the back of the stage. None of them had any clue of how to deal with a mainly international audience who had no idea what the various cultural references meant. Like rabbits in headlights, they just kept going with their scripts, despite the forced laughter. To be fair, we did laugh a lot and some were very funny, it's just they were clearly used to an American audience that laughs, claps, screams, shouts back and generally pushes them to new heights, and not this rather polite, reserved European crowd that's just paid $30 each to be entertained. Only one guy and one woman managed to produce a routine that didn't rely too much on American cultural observations and were more about people and character than anything else. The woman had a particularly funny story about people getting electric shocks from the street gratings in winter and therefore deciding to buy a dog as a kind of early warning system. You could tell when each comic was getting desperate because they resorted to crude humour about sex or periods or something. Always the reserve of the desperate - shock value that merely betrays a shallow understanding of comedy. In the end, the comics' time on stage was getting shorter and shorter. One woman who had a particularly rude routine that relied on knowing about the stereotypes of Kentucky swore at us when she left the stage early. Each comic kept repeating the 'where are you from' routine so by the end we were able to answer for everyone else. Once they'd tagged us as somewhat British, they asked us a few questions (giving the poor Dutch people a break for the moment) and proceeded to try some appauling British accents to get a laugh. One did a particularly effete attempt and asked me whether he'd get very far with that in Britain - I told him he'd probably get a punch. That didn't endear me. When we eventually left, after buying another round of drinks for the sake of the two drink minimum and not leaving a tip, we walked past some of the comics outside while they were taking a medicinal cigarette. We overheard one saying 'tough crowd'. To be honest, I don't think we were. We mostly all laughed at the right spots, no more so that a crowd in the Glee Club. I think the problem lay with their own expectations of their sometimes poor material and their inability to read and adapt to a crowd that, with one exception, were all from out of town or from an entirely different continent. We'd paid for an evening's entertainment and they seemed to expect the audience to be grateful for that fact. They were upset when we didn't respond as they wanted and rather than see it as a criticism of their own material felt that we were somehow deficient. It's a difficult task being a stand-up comic, I've no doubt of that, but if you're going to put yourself in that position, you've got be to able to deal with every eventuality, even an audience that wants to laugh but can't because they jokes don't work. Anyway, it was a fun experience and something I'd like to see again, albeit with a larger crowd of people! With regards to cinema, we saw Over The Hedge and Cars at two very large cinemas on 42nd Street. Over The Hedge was definitely the superior movie; quick, witty, ironic, had William Shatner in, was beautifully animated, textured and lit. Cars, however, was slow, stodgy, familiar and, frankly, too American. Who the hell cares about Nascar? It's a race for cars that can go fast and turn left! Where's the skill in that? Besides, they'd just ripped off Doc Hollywood which was a much better film. In all, I think that Dreamworks have finally stolen Pixar's thunder. That said, both had short animations in front of the main features and Pixar's One Man Band was definitely the better. Maybe that should take a few leaves out of their shorts production team's book. |
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Jon Rennie