Last
summer I graduated from Cambridge with a useless social science degree and 100
gigs’ worth of stand-up experience. This Thursday I will return to Cambridge to
perform a preview of my Edinburgh show ‘The 007 Conspiracy’. I’m excited, as it’s
a chance to see whether I made any sort of impact during my time here. As I
write this I’ve sold 13 tickets.
That
sounds bad, but 13 keen, attentive and non-malicious audience members is something
London circuit comics can only dream of. To give you an idea of what the open
mic circuit is like, having floundered on it for some months: an audience
member recently called me a twat at a cancer charity gig. Now, if I’d had the
nous to point out that it was indeed a cancer charity gig I would have probably
won the exchange, but instead I sort of just mumbled and moved on, which I
guess is a bit of a twat-move really.
To be fair
to the circuit, though, that gig was in Kingston upon Thames, where heckling new
acts at cancer charity gigs is one of the more moral past-times. I was
attempting a piece of pro-Labour satire which included the sentence ‘Jeremy
Corbyn enters on a horse-drawn paedophile and calls war veterans pussies’.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t count for satire in Kingston because it’s what they
think actually happens. They must have assumed I was a good, honest Tory, but
with no jokes. Just facts. A twat with facts.
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Admit the poster is quite good |
Is
performing with Footlights good preparation for comedy in the real world? Only
in the same way playing Call of Duty is good preparation for fighting a war in
the Middle-East. If you die on stage in Cambridge you can kind of just respawn,
usually in the ADC bar, and surrounded by sycophants. If you hear about someone
dying on stage in London you have to ask what pub it was in to know if the
death was figurative or literal.
As you can
imagine, I’m looking forward to performing to drunk students again. The show’s
work-in-progress, but so are their lives, so I hope they’ll just accept it. If you’d
like to be one of these drunk students, that would make me very happy. The show
is a surreal character comedy, serving as a bloated ego-trip for me. Unless
someone heckles, obviously, in which case I’ll make it all for charity just so
I’ve got a decent put-down.
‘Adrian Gray: The 007 Conspiracy’
was at the ADC Theatre, Thursday 21st April, 11pm. Adrian's mum loved it.
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