Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [100]
As an aspiring comedian, you need to play the full variety of gigs up and down the land. Jongleurs should be included in the mix, certainly. The ability to make a few hundred pissed punters laugh is an indication that you’ve got a bulletproof act, but to develop and improve as a comedian you need more, much more. I played other clubs, but usually only one weekend a month.
Not only was I trapped in Jongleurs, but I was also making no progress within it. I was always going on first, deemed the weakest on the bill, and the other comedians in some cases were astonishingly poor. Many of the comedians who played Jongleurs were old hacks. They never made it, leaving them bitter and cynical. They had lost their ambition and being around them was making me lose mine.
Just remembering the dressing rooms at Jongleurs sends chills down my spine. A typical Jongleurs dressing room had a couple of old smelly sofas, maybe a TV that didn’t work, an iron and ironing board, untouched fruit and an A4 print-out of the line-up on the wall. It was depressing enough before you add a few jaded and bitchy comedians. If you met some of these comics, you’d be amazed that they were in the entertainment industry.
That’s not to say there weren’t some characters. One old-timer from the Midlands always struggled onstage but thought he was God’s gift to comedy. I once saw him say to an audience who weren’t laughing at him, ‘I’m good at this, you know. Google me.’ He was convinced that he was brilliant, but the only reason he wasn’t successful was that everyone kept stealing all his jokes.
‘Peter Kay’s at it again,’ he announced in the dressing room of Nottingham Jongleurs while ironing his shirt. I looked around the empty room in the hope he was talking to someone else.
‘At what?’ I asked.
‘Stealing my material,’ he revealed in his Brummie accent. ‘Yep, I was watching him the other night, just ticking off the jokes, mine, mine, mine, mine, it was unbelievable.’
‘Unbelievable’ was right. I hadn’t seen this guy write a joke in years, nobody had.
‘He’s not the only one, you know,’ he carried on, steam pluming from his iron and from his ears.
‘Oh really, who else?’ I enquired.
He stopped ironing and faced me for added drama.
‘Jay Leno,’ he revealed.
‘Jay Leno? The host of The Tonight Show on NBC in America has been stealing your jokes?’ I asked, trying not to laugh.
‘I know, incredible isn’t it?’ he said, thinking I was as baffled as him.
‘How did he do it? Do you think he comes to Jongleurs and sits at the back with a pad?’ I asked, looking forward to his explanation.
‘No. Don’t be silly. He’s a massive star. There’s no way Jay Leno would do that … He hires people, local people to do it for him. I’ve seen them, you know, in the audience, at the back, taking notes.’
‘I’m shocked!’ I said, already itching to share the hilarity of this conversation with Kitty.
‘Me too, but there’s no other explanation. And he’s not the first American talk show host to steal my material, either.’
‘This has happened before?’
‘A few years ago.’ He again put down his iron and dramatically turned to face me.
‘David Letterman,’ he revealed. ‘I sent him a tape of my stand-up set to try and get on his talk show and the next time I watched it, he’d stolen all my ideas.’
‘He can’t get away with that. What were the jokes?’
‘Topical stuff,’ he declared.
‘He told your jokes, word for word?’ I asked, loving his level of fantasy.
‘Not exactly, but