sit down jimmy, stand up comedy

Sunday 11th April 2010 10:13 PM

Huddersfield's main claim to glory lies in the fact that Jean Luc Picard, captain of the Starship Enterprise, was born there. This oddly normal-eared captain gives hints of his West Riding provenance by being occasionally taciturn and having an allotment on the holodeck. As a fellow native of Huddersfield I can only admire his early childhood attempts at boldly going, seeking out new life-forms in Marsden, especially in face of the then widespread belief that Slaithwaite was the final frontier.

What is less known about Huddersfield, and indeed less celebrated, is that it is also the birthplace of many Klingons, and reputedly has the largest population of them outside the capital planet of the Klingon empire, Qo'noS, (pronounced 'Kircudbright')

For a while it was thought that Greater Manchester Council, in conjunction with Galactic Federation, had an anti-klingon warship, disguised as a Toyota Carolla, parked up in Stalybridge, but it turned out to be another one of those dodgy expenses claims.

On Thursday I had a very trying stand-up gig in Sheffield, was found guilty by a jury of eighty, and sentenced to twenty-five minutes hard labour, only avoiding the death sentence by dint of a late testimony from Dylan's 'Hunters Bar Woman'. When I got home, after my release, I found this in the comment box from Sean.

'Hi Rory, it was me who clapped the 'Flamingoland' gag tonight. I went especially to see you and was very pleased. You're so Radio 4, the audience was a bit 'Viking FM'.'

(Thank you very much for that, Sean the not-sheep from Sheffield, it was a really welcome and reassuring read…..for specific replies on stuff, please send me an e-mail).

The gag that Sean refers to is this one; 'Last week I met a woman who lives just the other side of Flamingoland…. there's a strange animal attraction between us…'

Three weeks ago, at the battle of Motley Club in Otley, this barbed and deadly-sharp, lethal line was one of the most effective weapons in my armoury, both disarming and killing the audience at the same time. This Thursday, however, except for grazing Sean the non-sheep, it wafted harmlessly over everybody's heads and floated out through an open window into the soft fizzing sulphur of the Sheffield night sky. Alone, abandoned and ashamed, and too loyal to catch a bus to Glossop and take up with another comedian, this sweet child of Mercury bravely threw itself in front of a taxi on the Eccleshall Road. I loved that gag, and I'll never forget it.

I suspect the difference was that the Otley gig was a lovely, wonky cabaret, while the Sheffield one was straight stand-up. When I was a regular on the stand-up circuit in the nineties it was called 'alternative comedy', and it attracted audiences that preferred non-racist, non-sexist material. I've got loads of that stuff. Nowadays it attracts people who apparently laugh when Jimmy Carr says 'What's the difference between football and rape? Women don't like football'.

There might be hope for me out there, because I'm sure I've got much better football gags than that.

Posted 10:13 PM | 166 Comments | Permalink

praying to or praying for?

Wednesday 7th April 2010 8:38 PM

Subsequent to Wayne Rooney's ankle injury, incurred against Bayern Munich last week, I was relieved to hear Alex Ferguson declare on the Friday that the nation could stop praying because the injury wasn't too serious. I'm quite intimidated by Ferguson and wouldn't dream of disobeying him, so from Friday onwards I've stopped offering up this prayer that I wrote in those dark, uncertain days between injury and scan.

Our Wayne,

Who art in agony,

Healed be thy ankle,

Thy England come, thy will be done,

In Africa, as it is in Manchester.

Give us this July our World Cup,

And try and save your best passes

For those who best pass against us,

And lead us not into elimination,

But deliver us from the group stages,

For it's ages since this kingdom

Has had any sort of glory,

Because Johnny Foreigner is always beating,

Forever and ever,

Our men.

Regarding the noisy rooster problem, Lesley writes from Hampshire;

'Can we borrow the cockerel? I think that our 6 ex-battery hen hens are available for sex and every other bit of fun that life has to offer out of a cage!'

Thanks for that generous offer of pimping your hens, Lesley, I'll check out the price of a saver-return between York and Portsmouth for a cockerel, and get back to you. You'll have to meet it off the train, obviously, but I promise you'll have no problem recognizing it. It'll be wearing a red marigold washing-up glove on its head and be cock-a-doodle-doing with a marked Yorkshire accent.

Posted 8:38 PM | 232 Comments | Permalink