Today felt like the longest day of my life.
I had gone to bed about midnight in the hope of sleeping well before my 6am alarm call and trip to Heathrow. I had been aware that there was a party going on somewhere nearby, but hadn't worked out where as it could have been in any of the gardens behind my house, but once in bed I was finding it hard to sleep as there were people outside the front of the house, chatting in the street. But I drifted in and out of sleep before realising that the party was next door and the chatty people almost immediately below my bedroom window. They were still talking at 3am and I hadn't properly been to sleep and was already fidgety knowing that I had to get up early. I could have opened the window and asked them to go inside, but was worried about confronting them in case they turned nasty and in the end just grumpily banged on the window and they seemed to get the idea. But now I was awake and almost thinking it wasn't worth going to sleep. But I got a couple of hours before it was time to go.
There were a lot of comedians on the plane on the way to Montreal, including Frank Skinner and Ardal O Hanlon. I hoped we wouldn't crash to avoid the inevitable "The Day The Laughter Died" headlines and also because with those more famous comics being blown to pieces, I wouldn't get more than a footnote. And also because then I would be dead.
The flight passed quickly. I managed to sleep quite well, due to being so tired and was actual quite thankful for the thoughtless idiots keeping me awake earlier. Maybe they should hire themselves out. I watched a couple of films, surprised how funny "Blades of Glory" (I think that's what it's called) turned out to be.
I had admitted on my immigration form that I had an apple and a potato in my luggage (I was planning to use them in the act and as I had a gig this evening had not wanted to risk not having time to find them here) and was taken into a special room where I had to give up my apple, though not my potato, because you can't bring any product that is produced in Canada (they must have potatoes though surely). Anyway, it felt strange to be busted for bringing in fruit, but luckily they didn't find the bananas I had hidden in my rectum.
Then all the comedians were crushed into a minibus and taken to our hotel. Once checked in I met a few of them in the bar and had a beer, before going for a little walk around. I went in search of a replacement apple, but could only find sex shops, but after an hour of looking I came back to the mall below the hotel and saw there was a supermarket there that I hadn't noticed.
I was now pretty tired - it was about four o clock local time and decided I would try and have a quick sleep before my gig. This was, I knew, probably foolish, but I was pretty exhausted. But I felt pretty sluggish and weird when I woke up. And because it was about the third time that I was waking up today it was hard to believe this was all the same day.
It wasn't ideal mental conditions for a gig, but I went over to the Works comedy club to try out ten. This is a venue that Stew and me had played back in about 1997, where we had been heckled and I had launched insults at the man heckling, who was then taken out of the gig for being disruptive and who pulled a gun on the person who had removed him. I had called a bloke with a gun a twat. He might have shot me in the face. That's a hard heckle to come back from.
Anyway, tonight I opened with "To be or not to be" and even though there had been little to no heckling so far in the evening, a woman immediately shouted out "Not to be!" quite loudly and cheerfully. This has never happened to me before and I wish I had been in a bit of a sharper state as this is an incredibly funny response. Not only in attempting to answer this existential question with such certainty, (as Frank Skinner later said, "If any question is rhetorical then surely that is the one") but also to plump so surely for suicidal option. If only that woman had been there in Denmark then Hamlet would have been a much shorter play. I made a stab at pointing out the funniness of this remark, but if I had been sharper and not jet lagged and not concerned by the strict ten minute time limit I might have had some fun with this.
But it was a bit of a shaky start, but I think I won them round eventually. I didn't get time to do the potato/potarto bit, so my apple purchase was all in vain.
It was good to try a little stuff out though and start to get a handle on what references the Canadians might and might not understand. I used the term "airing cupboard" before immediately realising it was unlikely that they'd know what this was. But that in itself was quite amusing.
We headed back to the hotel and I sensibly elected to go to bed. Hopefully tomorrow my mind and body clock will be back on track. It's a light work schedule and I am looking forward to relaxing, in between trying to work out which jokes to do, both for the Montreal citizens and also for those of you coming to see me in Edinburgh.
