Hope you had a good Christmas break. Sorry about not writing for a while. I've been quite busy rehearsing for the Adelaide Fringe show my wife and I are doing. I've mentioned it before, it's called Mr&Mrs and you should totally come... or at least read about how it's going (when I get around to writing about it).
The rehearsals are going well. We've pretty much written it all now, although some minor editing is going on with every rehearsal. I'm not sure I'll remember all of the changes so there will be bits that we just have to wing. You don't get to do that when you're an actor performing someone else's work. But since we wrote it in the first place I guess we can screw it up as much as we like on stage and just pretend like we originally wrote it that way.
I find rehearsing so mind numbingly tedious. Given that we've got another month and a half of rehearsals ahead of us I'm super excited for all the fun I'm going to be having in February. It's a weird thing, you write it and you're proud of it, but the learning sucks. After you've actually performed it you get this sense that it was all worthwhile and you can't wait to start working on the next show... that's why I'm writing about it now - I want to remember what it's really like.
So, on a different topic, I was pretty surprised when I found out that the comedy industry pretty much shuts down over Christmas in Australia. I'm used to the UK when comedians make half of their yearly earnings in the month of December. So when I found out that for a month from the middle of December I wouldn't be working, I was understandably quite confused.
You see, the British love to drink. Christmas is a time to celebrate and a fantastic excuse for a drink. So since comedy clubs serve alcohol, the British love going to comedy clubs in December. Comedians, of course, hate doing gigs in December because the audiences are drunk twats. But the money goes up in December and there are more gigs so we do as many of them as we can in the hope that we can pay off the debt we accrued in August at the Edinburgh Festival.
This December I hardly did any gigs. It seems that in Australia Christmas is a time to spend with your family. I can only assume that this forced time with your family causes many to drink. They could be doing that drinking in a comedy club and I could be earning some actual money.
Now we're approaching the middle of January and the comedy clubs are starting to open back up again. I'm doing a gig this week, I'm MCing actually, and the audience will expect us to be at the top of our game. Lofty expectations given that the entire bill won't have gigged for at least 3 weeks. It'll be a gig of mistakes and missed punchlines. That's not to say it won't be a lot of fun, but it certainly won't be slick.
I spent half an hour this evening trying to relearn my own jokes. That's a weird time for a comic. Once you learn a joke you kind of take it for granted that you know it. But after a bit of a break it becomes something you need to think about. I get jittery when I haven't done a gig for a week, having not done a gig for a month is a very strange sensation indeed.
The other option of course would be to just assume you know the jokes and then work out you actually don't know it when you're on stage and halfway through the joke you can't remember the punchline to... I've done that before.
To recap, I'm currently learning jokes that I should already know and, simultaneously, I'm learning jokes that I wrote with my wife about our marriage. But tonight I'm writing about learning stuff that I should really be spending time learning. When will I ever learn...
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