Then, as we get older, we remember such things as our first kiss. I genuinely can't remember my first kiss, when, or who it was with (I'm such a slut!). I married my first love. She wasn't my first in any other respect, but she was my first love.
We also have other firsts that stay with us through out our lives, The first record you ever bought?
Now, when I have asked this on my radio show, nearly everyone phones in to say it was a David Bowie track, or the Beatles! If your first record, CD, or download is a cool track by a cool artist/artists, you are either lying or you were thirty when you bought your first piece of music. My first record that I ever bought was 'Mouldy Old Dough' by Lieutenant Pigeon! If you want to know just what a hard rocking piece of work I am, look this song up, it will blow your mind. (Sorry, what I mean is, you will want to blow out your brains after a minute of listening to it). You know you are not cool when the piece of music that first stirs some emotion in you has one of the band members' mother in the band, playing piano! The first album that I bought, though, was cool and still is cool - 'Tubular Bells' Mike Oldfield.
The reason that I'm telling you this is because I have been recently working with some young people who want to be comedy writers. They are young and full of enthusiasm for life and comedy. I love being around such people, as I'm one of life's cynics who has seen it, won it, done it, lost it, spun it all. To see things through a fresh pair of eyes makes me smile through gritted teeth! The question that I get asked by these guys all the time is, “How do you become funny?” As the great Harry Muntz once said to me, “When you know what funny is kid, sell it, and you'll never have to work again!” He was right, there is no such thing. I could tell a joke (something I never do) to one person who might laugh for a week having heard it. I could tell the same joke in the same way to another person and they might look at me as if I had just pissed on their chips! All comedians will tell you that their sure fire routine went down a storm in one venue, only to have the same routine heckled and ignored the night after at the same venue. What is funny in one town, country, continent is usually offensive in others: trust me, I know.
The young people that I'm working with, all except one, have the correct mind set. They know that to succeed as a comedian you have to have skin as thick as a rhino. One of the group takes criticism to heart and is crushed by a bad response to his material. No one can teach you to be funny, no workshop, no book, nothing! You can get advice about performing, about the business and about how to alter your act when you are out there dying on your arse. But I believe that you are either funny, or you're not. The young guy who I have just mentioned dies because he doesn't understand comedy, and he lacks confidence, which is the main weapon of the comedian. He's a good screen/play writer, but he doesn't understand what it is to be a comedian. Comedians are the ultimate story tellers, We have to be able to read a crowd, and to know when to cut it short.
I was thinking about my first attempt at comedy. I think I was eight years old. My teacher asked us to get together in groups and write a little piece that we could perform. I wrote a piece about a priest coming to my house. What can I say, it was the sixties, and I was at a catholic school! I don't remember anything of what the plot was about, but I put these lines into the play.
Priest Arrives at a house.
Mother. Oh hello Father.
Child. He's not my father?!
(That's it? Thank you folks, I'm here all week, bring the kids.)
This little scenario reduced my whole class to fits of hysterics. Honest, you have to remember was the sixties, with only two TV channels, when Max Bygraves was regarded as the godfather of light entertainment, This was satire from an eight year old at the time. I was hooked! This was my first fix, and I had been seduced by the sound of laughter of my peers. There was no turning back.
Over the next few days, I worked away at home writing a script that would blow the whole class away. I had found my calling: there was no stopping me. I was only eight, so the play I wrote was in effect just a joke, of sorts. They say write about what you know. The priest joke had worked before, so now I had worked out a killer priest joke. This joke was surely going to get me on to the royal command performance. In fact I was sure that I was going to be the first eight year old to be knighted for services to comedy for this gag.
I eagerly worked out how the gag went, practised it, and laughed every time I said it out loud. I begged my teacher to let me perform this to the class. Having realised that she had finally found a way to engage me into producing some form of work, she was happy to let me have my thirty seconds of fame. On the morning of my big performance, I felt physically sick with both fear and excitement. Ask anyone who goes on stage for a living/fun and they will tell you the same. Finally my big moment arrived, I took deep breaths and stepped out into the abyss. This was the joke.
The mother had been up all night baking bread waiting for the priest to arrive the next day. Because he was a priest she used holy water and blessed the bread as she made it. That day when the priest arrived to have words with her wayward son she offered the priest some of her bread. The priest refused but said that he wouldn't mind a cup of tea and a slice of toast. The mother made the tea and made the toast from her holy bread then sat in with her son and the priest in the front parlour (Very wise move, not to leave a priest and a young boy alone). Moments later, the mother's friend called to the house to see her and asked her husband what she was doing, to which her husband replied, “She's in the parlour with the father, son and the holy toast!”
There are two kinds of silence, normal silence and the type of silence that gnaws at your bones, the type I was suffering just after telling this joke. There was nothing, until the teacher spoke, saying, “Very good , now come on class, get your writing books out, we have work to do". I was by now repeating the punch line over and over, thinking that they might not have heard me the first time. But nothing: the people had spoken, and it was crap!
I think I'm over it now, but it still makes me cringe, nearly fifty years later. I still think this is a much better gag than the “He's not my father!” line, and I still think that for an eight year old that is quite a sophisticated gag to write. I have in the past been tempted to use it again in something that I have been trying to write, but the fear of it failing twice has always put me off trying it out again, until now.
So those were my two of my firsts, The first time I experienced the seduction of laughter, and the first time I died on stage. Well standing in front of my class. The strange thing is that out of all my firsts, these two are the ones that are still the most vivid in my mind.
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