Choose Life

When it goes well it’s the most unbelievable rush. It’s pure euphoria. It takes you out of the curmudgeonly shit-hole where you keep your thoughts, away from the stomach cramping nerves and from the exhausting self-doubt that occupies your mind daily. Doing stand-up when it works, when you fucking nail it, is amazing, I assume. So far I’ve done eight open-mic spots, and had tasters of the feeling. I can only compare it to taking ecstasy at university. I’d never felt like that before, nor had I ever had a full-blown panic-attack before. I’d felt like the world could be so full of vibrant wonder and the comforting warmth of all the love within it rush through me so slowly and strongly, and a couple of hours later think, but ‘you’re going to die, you’re going to fucking die.’ The latter sentiment is actually provable, so I stopped taking ecstasy. I chose life. 

And I’ve died. I’ve died spectacularly, naked with an orange in my mouth and a fist clenched tight with Rigamortis around my penis as I swing from a hanger rail, to take that particular analogy to its ultimate conclusion. It was my first gig and, there’s no use denying it, it really was awful. I was tight with nerves for days on end and then went up their shaking until my entire routine fell out of my head. When the mercy of time intervened and my five minutes were up - I had no energy left. I was shattered and felt draped in shit. I know I’m not particularly handsome or intelligent or fast or strong or anything else, but I believed I was funny, I knew I had a sense of humour. The same night a comedian offered someone out because a heckler suggested he sounded like Dennis Norden. And he really did, it was uncanny - even when he was threatening to fuck the prick up. All my energy was gone; I didn’t even smile. The whole fucking thing was absurd and unreal. If I’d been on the safe side of the line with the rest of the audience, I’d have been able to laugh at the delusional Dennis on stage. But I’d crossed it. He was I and I was him (slim with the tilted brim on 20 inch rims.)

The whole idea of doing stand-up comedy is absurd, and there’s very little point acting any other way. Already in the small little world of open-mic nights I’ve noticed cliques, factions and superiority complexes. There’s no denying I think I’m better than everybody else; I’m not really a confident man or a show-off in the crudest sense. I clearly think I’m good otherwise I wouldn’t keep on but equally, and maybe more importantly, everyone probably feels the same. 

From now on this blog will document my career in stand-up to give me perspective and posterity. Hopefully one day someone will find it interesting enough to read but, at the moment, that’s just me. 

That said, I’ve no plans to actually advertise this as yet, as I’m not that keen on everyone knowing what I’m doing, so if there’s no fucking comments then that’s why. I also have no idea about how to use the internet beyond playing a really rather good version of pong…
www.jeffwofford.com/rong.html

That’s perhaps a far more embarrassing insight in to my life than anything I can write here. I’m unemployed and seriously addicted to that game – I can’t remember which happened first.