In Cardiff tonight to do a stand up set at the
British Humanist Association Annual Conference. Personally I am not convinced that human beings are all that great and ultimately I intend to do all I can to eradicate them from the planet, but for the moment humanism is the for me, the best philosophy to live my life by. In all things I put reason and rationality above superstition and fanciful ideas about the supernatural. As anyone reading my blog this week will be able to attest to.
It didn't look like being the easiest gig in the world though. It was being held in the lobby of Cardiff's National Museum, a high room, with a domed roof, where every noise echoed on for what seemed like minutes. The audience were seated on tables and were all totally visible from the stage and they were mainly older than me, some much older than me and hardly any of them younger than me. The chances were that most of them had no idea who I was. When people have paid to see me I can be fairly sure they know what they're up for, but with an audience who have really come to see something else, I can't really give them my full on, disgusting, sweary set, as they probably won't like it. But I don't have that much material that doesn't fall into the categorisation. I was very tired from the long drive and hadn't even thought about what I was going to do. The comic element of the night was also sandwiched between a pub quiz (I had distinct memories of
the last time I'd had to do that - though at least I got a routine out of it that time). Everything about this said, not suitable for comedy. I steeled myself for 30 minutes of silence and staring - I doubted these kind and liberal people would heckle me, but in some ways that would only make the set last longer. At least if they engaged with me I could ditch the material and just chat.
To add to the atmosphere of doom when the pub quiz started and the questions echoed around the atrium of this fine old building, many of the more elderly people on the periphery of the room started complaining that they couldn't hear the questions. Worst gig ever?
I was struggling to think of what material I could do. I didn't think my cock stuff or my homosexual hand signs bit was going to go down very well with this venerable company, though I suppose the deafer members would enjoy the mime aspect of that latter routine.
Luckily for me I wasn't going to be the first to test the water as the excellent and funny Iszi Lawrence was going on before me. Perhaps a bit more practised at mic technique she did admirably well at enunciating and making herself heard and got lots of laughs and no shouts of "I can't hear what you're saying". And she was a little bit rude and they didn't seem to object so I relaxed a little bit.
I had had a couple of beers by this stage, which was probably a bad idea, but got off to an OK start by saying "I want to talk to you about Jesus" and then suggesting how funny it would be if I was a Christian who had managed to sneak my way into this event. I messed up an early joke, as I struggled to dredge up some of the lines from Christ on a Bike, but won them back by reading my
Pope application letter, which I had managed to find on my phone (had I prepared more than twenty minutes before going on I might have searched out the funny complaint letters I got from Christians when I was doing Christ on a Bike, but these were not on my phone). Having given them what they wanted, preaching to the choir, I was able to challenge them a little bit by then doing some stuff from the love show and suggesting to them that we all believe in crazy made up shit, so maybe we shouldn't be too critical of religion. I ad-libbed a bit about destroying love, but only after we'd destroyed religion, taking out one thing at a time, getting rid of all the inspirational, yet fanciful things that have been responsible for the greatest art in human history. Then we could sit there, miserable and alone with nothing in our lives saying "At least we're definitely right." It was fun to mock them and myself as well as religion.
It was odd being able to see the audience and some of the older people were clearly not that interested, or couldn't keep up with the speed of delivery and the echoing rants. But mostly it went down well and I got laughs and applause and they even put up with my ruder ideas about sexcrement and so on.
And once that was over it was rather fun to have a drink and a chat with some of the unusual people who are drawn to humanism. Though the pub quiz was a little bit hard for me I did impress my team by solving an anagram question in about 3 seconds. The anagram was, I think, a three word phrase from the words "soporific genies".
You have three seconds starting now. Answer tomorrow.
