I first performed on stage at the age of thirty-two in a comedy sketch group called Mountbatten’s Plimsoll.
A plimsoll is like a tennis shoe, and the following joke was going around about Lord Mountbatten who had been blown up on his boat by the IRA:
“What’s white and flies across the water at a thousand miles an hour? Mountbatten’s plimsoll.”
At the same time I got involved in the ranting poetry scene which was taking off in the UK. It was similar to the modern slam poetry stuff with its performance-based polemical language bombs, and in 1982 I appeared at the Poetry Olympics at the Young Vic Theatre in London.
I'm the one on the left.
This led to Time Out magazine hiring me to write a weekly topical poem, which I did for about six months until the novelty wore off.
Here I am putting the world to rights in 1983.
I did my first stand-up gig in 1985. The Comedy Store’s popularity had encouraged more clubs to open, so I bought a suit in a charity shop and booked myself some gigs as Eddie Zibin. Don’t ask me why. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Here I am getting the idea.
Back then things weren’t as professional as they are now and you could get away with stuff that wouldn’t be tolerated today. I particularly enjoyed baiting audiences, especially at the rowdier clubs, and the gigs often ended in chaos.
My old pal Ian Cognito recalls a typical incident in Chapter 5 of his excellent book, A Comedian’s Tale, which is well worth reading if you want an honest and entertaining account of what it’s like to be a working English comic.
Eventually I grew out of the confrontational stuff and started taking stand-up a bit more seriously. Here I am giving it my best shot at Brunel University in 1989. (No, it’s not a wig.)
For the next few years I worked the circuit full time, performing most nights, and often two or three times a night on weekends, including some forgettable radio and TV, until the mid nineties when I started writing for others.
Since then I’ve written jokes for some excellent stand-ups and some truly awful TV shows, none of which I want to own up to here.
Recently I had an e-mail from a
Christian saying he understands why, as a comedian, I feel
the need to offend people. “I get it,” he said, “it’s just
business.”
No. For me it has never been just business. If it was, I’d
be a lot richer than I am now.
Causing offence is an
occupational hazard in stand-up. I used to tell a joke
about an earthquake being a great leveller, until I was
approached after a show by a man who had lost his sister in
an earthquake and didn’t think it at all funny.
When paedophiles first became headline news I told
audiences I thought we were supposed to be a nation of dog
lovers, and it always got a laugh. But after a show in
Bradford I was confronted with great hostility by three
young women from the local rape crisis group about my
cavalier use of their personal tragedy to make a sick joke.
Another time at the Comedy Store I responded to a typical
piece of church bigotry by telling the audience I’d like to
give the pope a few inches of cockmeat up the anus – not in
a sexual way, but purely in the spirit of unconditional
Christian love – and a drunk Irish woman had to be
prevented by one of the bouncers from attacking me on
stage.
At a gig in Liverpool, I was keen to try out a new joke I’d
written about an Islamic petty criminal who had to change
his name from Fingers to Lefty to Hoppy to Stumpy. I knew
it would get a big laugh, and it did whenever I told it
thereafter, but on this occasion I failed to notice an
amputee in a wheelchair at the side of the stage, and the
joke went through the trapdoor, Saddam-like, in a dead
drop, plainly making everyone in the room very
uncomfortable. I felt like stopping the show to explain
that it was a joke about Sharia barbarism, not amputees,
but I have to admit if I’d been in the audience I’d
probably have been embarrassed as well.
Nowadays I’m pretty relaxed
about people being offended. It’s never intended, but what
the hell, I make videos to talk about some of the things
that offend me, so if push comes to shove we can all be
offended together.
I like comedians who are offended. They’re more
interesting. I like silly jokes as well, but when I hear
intelligent humour expressed with attitude I’m all ears.
On one occasion, though, I got it badly wrong. In 1991 I
found myself on the same bill as the doyen of edgy
stand-up, Bill Hicks, at a little club called Oranje Boom
Boom in London’s Chinatown. He had just arrived from
America and was warming up for the Edinburgh Fringe, but
this particular evening it didn’t happen for him and he
totally died. Not because he was offensive or anything like
that. The audience were just in the mood for something
else, or perhaps they had seen Denis Leary do his material
the previous week, who knows?
Anyway, he went down about as well as a Bible salesman in
Mecca and walked off after ten minutes to the sound of his
own footsteps.
A few weeks later in Edinburgh, Mark Thomas
grabbed me with his
usual enthusiasm: “Pat, you’ve got to go and see this
American guy, Bill Hicks. He’s fantastic.”
And I said: “No thanks, Mark. I’ve seen him. He’s
shit.”