I think pretty much the last time I performed on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh was in 1987 when we tried to publicise our first sketch show "The Seven Raymonds present KMnO4" by pretending we were a group of right wing Christians who were offended by the show and wanted it banned. Mike Cosgrave was placed in a cage on wheels and we pushed him around saying that he was on hunger strike until the awful revue was pulled from the Fringe (though he would surreptitiously help himself to crisps when we weren't looking) and we gave out leaflets telling people "Do Not Go To See The Seven Raymonds!"
It was a staggeringly successful campaign. No one did come to see us.
Today I was back at the scene of a funny but fruitless stunt, doing stand up on a make shift stage as part of a Radio 4 promotion, to a small crowd of smiling people. There were several young children sitting in the front and so I couldn't do my usual set and had been working hard to think of 15 minutes of clean material. My hubris gag went a bit over the head of the 8 year old I talked to, so I told her my one kids' joke "What's brown and taps at the window? A poo on stilts!" which to be fair she didn't really go for either.
But the whole occasion went a lot better than I had anticipated and I went down to the Collings and Herrin podcast afterwards in quite a good mood and we did our best afternoon show yet,
in which I mainly abused a nice Australian couple who were over from Perth and misidentified the gender and accents of the audience. Aside from one drunk man shouting out a bit (and even he was all right really) the crowd were lovely.
I was conscious of getting some work done for AIOTM so headed home, but managed to distract myself from the task in hand and thought I saw a mouse running along the skirting board, though may have been imagining it and soon it was time to do my solo show. I had worried that numbers would be low, but in the end the venue looked fairly full and there were at least 270 people in, which is just awesome. And they were another quality audience. I did my best performance of this show too.
I thought I should head straight home to work, but again the mouse, whether real, or a spectre seemed to dart under a chair in my peripheral vision and I decided I should put the bins that were waiting in the hallway out in the corridor outside in case they were attracting vermin. Unfortunately I managed to lock myself out. Just when I should have been working. I had to wait for Justin Moorhouse to return to let me in, all the time tweeting to a troll who had decided to call me a cunt and who I decided (in order to avoid working) to troll back to see what would happen. Rather than getting angry I was telling him he was right about me and that he was much funnier than me, but he was of very low intelligence and wit and just kept coming back with the same boring schtick. At one point he told me he had shat funnier turds than me, and I told him that that wasn't much of an insult as turds are the funniest thing in the world. He then said something like more people knew about turds than knew about me, which again wasn't much of an insult as everyone knows about turds. It was fun to converse with him for a while, but I was hoping I could get him to block me before I blocked him, but I tired first in this war of attrition. It was an interesting experiment and I think entertaining for the people observing, though of course the troll had no idea that I had made him look silly. But maybe he had just made me look silly. Maybe it was pathetic to get involved, but that's what I quite liked about it. It was like when Stephen Ford (or Nixon as he's called in my book) spent ten minutes karate kicking me in the back on the school field when I was 9 and I didn't respond in the way he expected. It takes away a lot of the power. But of course the kind of person who wants to show unimpressive celebrities that they are unimpressive (even though they don't think they are) but by doing so clearly reveals that in his stupid mind they are impressive enough to waste his time on, is generally too stupid to understand these distinctions. And will just end up wanking off to himself about what he's done, not conscious of his own place in the scheme of things to realise what he is saying about himself.
I have no problem with people calling me a cunt or telling me I am not funny. They are right from their own perspective and I am confident enough in my own abilities to know there are enough people out there who disagree. It was an interesting dialogue, but fearful perhaps that I would use it in my podcast as I told him I would be deleted his half of the conversation so it's gone forever.
He wasn't going to ruin an enjoyable day for me. But AIOTM remained unwritten and that will probably make tomorrow extremely unpleasant. I have no idea why I thought doing this at this stage of a difficult enough Fringe would be a good idea. I hope I can get something worth listening down on paper. But I am struggling to think of what that might be.
