Three cheers for ten years

It’s ten years since I became a stand-up comedian. Or maybe it isn’t. It depends how you measure it. For most people, the gap between deciding to do stand-up and doing stand-up is fairly short. If they wait too long, they come to their senses and find a less obnoxious hobby like screaming in the night.

For many of the world’s comedians, the origin story is some variation of “I got drunk one night and decided to just go for it”, sometimes with a hilarious postscript like “It really upset the other mourners.”

My story is a bit different. I decided to become a comedian right at the tail end of my first year of university, conveniently choosing a time when I was about to leave the buzzing metropolis of Exeter, the Plymouth of East Devon, and spend three months in a tiny Dorset village with nothing in the way of live entertainment.

There was a piano in the village hall but I’d only ever seen it used as a makeshift table for bread rolls after a sponsored tractor ride. Nothing in that story is made up.

This meant that I had a full three months to obsess over every aspect of my first performance. I was turning over piles and piles of new material and then ditching it because it hadn’t played well to the audience in my head. I must have done 50 gigs in my bedroom before I got anywhere near a microphone.

I often wonder if starting in such a methodical way has affected my comedy style. I’m still pretty big on preparation. I script everything I do to the point that my gigs are more like recitals than performances. I mistrust improv in the same way that the elderly mistrust £2 coins. I’m sure it works just fine but I’d rather have nothing to do with it.

I also took to You Tube and studied the art-form with the tenacity of Batman in a monastery. I discovered to my dismay that there were already quite a few stand-up comedians. The only ones I’d been aware of up to that point were Victoria Wood because she’s my Mum’s hero, and Bill Hicks because the singer in my teenage ska-punk band used to play his albums in the car on the way to gigs. (Again, nothing in that story is made up.)

I almost wish that these two had remained my only influences. I think there could be a real gap in the market for droll northern conspiracy theories. It’s just a ride, man. A ride on the number 17 bus to Ormskirk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8A8hC_7oJ0

My self-imposed stand-up boot-camp (so many hyphens!) ended up being the best summer of my life, and one of the highlights of my comedy career. Not doing any gigs might be the key to being a happy comedian. I even managed to write a fairly good joke about my birthday that I still make a point of including in every one of my shows.

This technically makes me ineligible for The Edinburgh Award as I never do a fully original hour. (I don’t know if that’s actually true. It’s just what I tell myself to feel better when the nominations come out. I also wrote a homophobic joke about Tamagotchis and something really mean about Swansea, but there’s no need to dwell too much on my early material.)

Eventually the summer of 2009 drew to a close in a blaze of barn dances and Jason Mraz and I realised that it was time to see if my preparation had paid off. I returned to university and booked a spot at the first student union open mic of the term.

The show was unexpectedly packed, mostly because the freshers had just had their fire safety lecture and hadn’t found their way out of the building yet.

I was really nervous. I wore my best Mad Caddies t-shirt and combed my big hair up real nice. I went on third after a beatboxer and a samba dancer, both of whom are now bankers. I opened with my birthday joke and a joke about ghosts, both of which went down fairly well. I then got a bit bogged down in Tamagotchis and Swansea but I pulled it back with something truly disgusting about McDonald’s.

I got off stage, my hands shaking noticeably as they gripped the Nokia 3310 that I’d taken up with me as a memory prompt. The audience seemed to think that I had done well, although this could be because I was the only comedian of the night and it’s not hard to be funnier than an earnest 19 year old doing a Radiohead cover with his eyes closed. Either way, I was hooked.

I was a few weeks shy of 20 when I did my first gig. Now, several hundred gigs later, I am nearly 30. I’ve done a lot of things that I regret in my 20s. I’ve been an insufferable snob. I haven’t eaten any vegetables. I’ve only brushed my teeth intermittently. I’ve lived with hair dressers, arsonists and drug dealers, all of whom were the same person.

But stand-up comedy is not something I regret for a moment. I’ve traveled the country and performed in car parks, bowling alleys and building sites. I’ve set foot in pubs so frightening that they still haunt my dreams. I’ve shared car journeys and takeaways with some of the most absurdly talented people in the world, and I once stole Russell Howard’s Fanta by accident.

I sometimes wonder where I would be now if I’d never given comedy a go. Maybe I’d have a day job that pays more than minimum wage where I wouldn’t have to chase toddlers who are trying to steal yo-yos. Maybe I’d be a homeowner with a wife and kids instead of sharing a house with four other comedians where we keep running out of mayonnaise. I’ll never know.

But what I do know is that, if I hadn’t become a stand up, I wouldn’t be able to say that I once did a gig in Stroud where there was a hedgehog in the front row called ‘Eric Prickles’ and I got driven home afterwards by the man who played Tinky-Winky in Teletubbies. That has to be better than a mortgage.

See Martin Pilgrim perform his Edinburgh Preview at The Room Above on Friday, June 14.

Read more: Post script: The end of an era