Stand-Up or Die

ANDY DE LA TOUR

STAND-UP OR DIE

A journey through the underground New York comedy scene. From ‘Rubber Bullets’ in lower his stand-up. Will they laugh? Will New Yorkers like his outsider’s take on President Obama, the Tea Party and 9/11? Andy’s a long way from home and dying is not an option.

Andy is a writer, actor, director and a standup comedian. A founder member of the UK ‘alternative comedy’ scene, he spent many years on the comedy circuit from The Comedy Store to the Edinburgh Festival, performing with the likes of Rik Mayall, Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle and French and Saunders. After a twenty-year break from stand-up he went to New York to disinter his comedy roots in the underground comedy scene.

OBERON BOOKS www.oberonbooks.com

OBERON BOOKS

Cover photograph: Nobby Clark

ANDY DE LA TOUR STAND-UP OR DIE

Manhattan to ‘Hot Tub’ in Brooklyn, Andy does

‘There are only two human activities which regularly happen in front of a brick wall. Standing at a mic telling jokes or being shot by firing squad.’

Andy de la tour STAND-UP OR DIE

Contents 1. Tourists on a Visa-Waiver

9

2. ‘Are you ready for some comedy???’

13

3. Stand-up Comedy Is Not Fun

18

4. Nine Shows Over Three Nights

27

5. An Evening of Lesbian Stand-up

33

6. Downtown For My Inaugural Gig

43

7. Before I Morphed Into Jim Davidson

53

8. Too Many Shows Chasing Too Few Punters

64

9. 9/11 Was Off Limits

74

10. I Had Actually Done It

85

An Extra Bit

90

4. Nine Shows Over Three Nights

I

persuaded Susi to come with me on my third outing. But it was going to be a slightly different kind of evening. Our apartment happened to be only a ten-minute walk from The Comic Strip over on Second Avenue. The Comic Strip was one of the very first comedy clubs in New York, going back to the 1970s. Over the years every single successful US comic has performed there. Along with The Comedy Store in Los Angeles it is considered the spiritual home of American stand-up. If the names are familiar from the clubs of the same names in London, the UK versions are not subsidiaries of the US ones or even franchises in the MacDonald’s sense. The London clubs simply ‘borrowed’ the names from their US namesakes; in the case of the London Comedy Store even ‘borrowing’ the laughing mouth logo.

But the New York Comic Strip has for many years been an established entertainment venue, like The Comedy Store in London, and long since ceased to consider itself – indeed if it ever did – part of the ‘underground’ scene. The Comic Strip does two shows a night, three at the weekends. Twenty dollars to get in and a two drink minimum. As one comedian wittily remarked, eighty years ago it was illegal to drink in New York, now it’s illegal not to. The turnaround is quick, the audiences, perhaps 200 strong, ushered in and out with lightning efficiency by the charming young staff. And the show begins. An MC and six acts. The same performers will do both shows and at

27

weekends they’ll do all nine shows over three nights. A real camaraderie builds up under that kind of pressure.

The MC will be a comedian who’s been working the circuit for some time. He knows his stuff – and nine times out of ten it will be a ‘he’ – he ‘works’ the audience, doing all that ‘Where are you from?’ schtick, taking the gentle piss out of the out-of-towners, seeking out the newlyweds, teasing them with not so subtle innuendo.

It feels like a slightly smuttier version of a Bob Monkhouse show but it’s undeniably funny. And for the most part inoffensive. The humour may not be much to my taste but the audience is warmed up, the MC has done his job and gets on the first act. We struck lucky. A young black comic, Jermaine Fowler, maybe 23 but looks fifteen utterly charms us with stories of growing up in a poor family in Harlem. How when he was a kid he’d have a couple of friends round on a ‘sleepover’ and invented a game called ‘Eskimo’; the kids would pretend they were sleeping in cold igloos. Which they were of course because his parents couldn’t afford the heating bills in the arctic New York winters.

The ninety-minute show was slick and all the other acts were good, including an Anglo-Colombian raised in the US called Andrew Kennedy. His dual heritage worries him whenever he walks into a bank; he’s not sure if his English side will come to the fore and he’ll be haughty but polite or his Colombian side and he’ll try to rob the place. (If you just smiled you are guilty of course of pandering to racial stereotyping of Latin American people and we’ll be discussing that later). Comedians like these are on their mettle.

They’re not working out their material or trying out new bits.

They’re doing their fifteen-minute spots that have been honed over dozens of gigs. They’re all funny though none is quite as interesting as Jermaine.

Actually, I had no real desire to do stand-up at The Comic Strip, not that I was likely to be asked. I instinctively felt that if it was going to happen it would happen at one of the downtown ‘dives’ 28

STAND-UP OR DIE

and I soon discovered what was to become my favourite ‘hanging out’ comedy venue, Lolita’s bar on the Lower East Side.

Liam McEneaney is a shambolic thirty-five year old Brooklynite who’s been working the comedy circuit since he was nineteen. He’s also made a couple of visits to Europe, taking in an Edinburgh festival, Dublin and Berlin gigs en route. His labour of love for the past five years has been his weekly comedy night, ‘Tell Your Friends’, in the basement room of ‘Lolita’s’ on Broome Street. The room seats about fifty (at a push), is sweltering hot in the summer, one barred window at the back and a lethally steep staircase to get in and out. Not a place to be trapped in a fire. Liam hosts most of the evenings himself, armed with a few scraps of paper, scribbled with half-formed ‘bits’ which we’re invited to laugh at or not, entirely up to us. Liam books half a dozen comedians to join him each week, to work on their acts, to hang out in the bar after.

Via his Facebook page, Liam tells his loyal followers who is likely to appear the following Monday but just how good the show will be is really a matter of chance. Sometimes the acts are just okay, sometimes they’re – to use the vastly overworked New York epithet – ‘awesome’.

On my first visit to ‘Tell Your Friends’ I was fortunate to catch Jim Gaffigan. I’d never heard of him but he’s ‘very big on the outof-town circuit’ apparently. He fills concert halls. He’s a successful mainstream comedian who grew up on the ‘underground’ circuit.

He never swears on stage, rarely ventures into politics and stays well clear of the hardcore smut so beloved of at least two-thirds of the comedians I saw. Especially the women. Jim is utterly charming and extremely funny. He had his little bits of paper too but from these scraps he’d develop a train of thought which might end up more or less anywhere. Jim is a regular at Lolita’s precisely because Liam’s gig gives him the chance to work on these ideas which might or might not evolve into seriously funny routines for the paying crowds in Maine or Montana.

ANDY DE LA TOUR

29

The downside for Liam with a comedian like Jim Gaffigan is that he can’t put it on Facebook (or Twitter or Myspace or…I lose count of these things) that Jim will be appearing. Jim is like what they call a ‘drop-in’; he doesn’t actually drop in unbeknownst to the host but he can’t be billed in advance because he’s too famous.

If he’s billed, there’d be a queue around the block, it becomes an ‘official’ gig, his management would have to get involved and all the rest. Most importantly, at a billed gig Jim couldn’t wander on stage with nothing planned and just a scrap of paper with some daft ideas scribbled down. So for Liam there’s the danger – and it happened on my first visit to ‘Tell Your Friends’ – that someone of Jim Gaffigan’s status appears and there’s only fourteen of us to appreciate him.

Sometimes, ‘drop-ins’ can be a pain in the arse quite frankly.

There are a couple of comedians with something of a television profile who like nothing better than to drop in on a stand-up show completely uninvited and assume they’ll be given thirty minutes to ‘headline’ the evening. And spoil it as often as not. I saw a comedian well known to viewers of a successful TV sitcom drop in, uninvited, on two shows on two consecutive nights in two different venues.

Does this man not have a life? He wasn’t funny on either occasion.

I’ll come clean, I have a small confession to make about ‘dropins’. I’m still smarting from an experience of thirty years ago. I was a regular at The Comedy Store in London within a few months of its opening. If I could, I liked to go on first or second after the interval, the audience would be well warmed up without being too pissed to care. One Saturday night, during the interval, Alexei Sayle, the regular host, asked if I wouldn’t mind if he put on another act just before me – a visiting American actor who wanted to do a brief tenminute set. As I’d never heard of the guy, who was in some obscure US children’s TV series apparently, I generously agreed. Privately of course I’m thinking, ‘Well how funny can a guy in a kids’ TV series be in any case?’ So Alexei goes onstage and asks the audience to put their hands together for the next act, a visiting American actor 30

STAND-UP OR DIE

who he’s sure we’re all going to enjoy, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Robin Williams.

Forty minutes later Robin Williams walked off the stage. The audience was a spent force. They were laughed out. They weren’t going to laugh at anyone else probably for a year. They were draped over the chairs in a state of total exhaustion. Williams had given us a comic exhibition of such energy and imagination that ‘tour de force’ doesn’t come close. Alexei and I and the other comedians had stood in the wings, slack-jawed, struggling to absorb the realisation that stand-up comedy could reach such heights. I have never seen before or since an act that so totally overwhelmed the senses that you prayed for mercy as you screamed with laughter.

When Robin – I feel I can refer to him as Robin – came off stage, he said to me ‘Thanks, man, I appreciate that.’ I can’t remember if I replied. I probably just opened my mouth and gawked. But the story doesn’t have a happy ending. Alexei goes up on stage immediately afterwards and with barely a pause for breath says, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the next act, Comedy Store regular, Andy de la Tour.’ And I went on stage. I walked to the mic and started on my rehearsed routine. Silence. Total and utter silence. But I didn’t stop. I carried on for five whole minutes. I was in a kind of trance, I didn’t know how to stop, there was a sea of faces before me, each with a slightly confused look as if to say ‘I think there’s someone on stage talking to us’. I remember a few years later going to see Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam the film that made him famous. His character, a foul-mouthed fast-talking army radio DJ, was the polite, slow version of what he gave us that Saturday night. Licking my wounds the next day, I had to admit it was a privilege to have been there.

At the end of the show at ‘Tell Your Friends’ I did some more hovering. Jim Gaffigan had disappeared quickly, on to another local gig probably. Liam was chatting with a couple of the remaining comedians as he turned off the lights. A slight hiatus in the conversation and I dived in with my one-minute self-promoting ANDY DE LA TOUR

31

spiel. He was utterly charming. We adjourned to the bar and he gave me ten minutes of his time. He was intrigued by a couple of things I’d mentioned, like my appearances in various episodes of ‘The Young Ones’. Liam was probably six years old when that series came out but he knew it of course, it has cult status, which gave me some instant street cred. He didn’t promise me a spot at ‘Tell Your Friends’ there and then but was optimistic about fitting me in before I returned to the UK. I was definitely learning how to promote myself. I discovered quickly that in New York nobody thinks you’re bragging when you talk about yourself. They’re not impressed by English diffidence, ironic self-deprecation or just plain shyness. If I didn’t tell people I was a veteran of the UK ‘alternative comedy’ circuit, a comedian of huge experience with something very special to offer New Yorkers sure as eggs is eggs nobody else was going to.

32

STAND-UP OR DIE

ANDY DE LA TOUR STAND-UP OR DIE AVAILABLE AT THE KINDLE STORE http://amzn.to/Y6ZAJz

VISIT THE YOUTUBE CHANNEL http://bit.ly/XCIIob

OBERONBOOKS.COM/STAND-UP-OR-DIE

WWW.OBERONBOOKS.COM Follow us on www.twitter.com/@oberonbooks www.facebook.com/oberonbook