Someone on Twitter recently mentioned that the comedian Stewart Lee once took umbrage with someone at one of his shows who laughed too much. ‘How could such a thing be possible?’ I asked myself as I read this. ‘How can someone laugh TOO MUCH? Why wasn’t he flattered that someone was enjoying his show so much?’
Oh, how I miss those naive days of just last week before the revelation, thanks to Stewart Lee, that it IS in fact possible to have too much laughter.
We went to see him, you see, in Cardiff on Friday night, doing his Vegetable Stew show. It was actually a really good show – Kevin Eldon who has been in lots of things (um Black Books, Spaced and other stuff) was the the support in his Fist of Fun guise of Islington poet Paul Hamilton. This was very warmly received.
Stewart Lee himself was very funny – with both halves of the evening veering between self deprecation, bitterness, self loathing, ranting and er other stuff too. I feel that, like Ghost Stories, the contents of a comedy show should remain between the audience and the comedian so as not to ruin the jokes, such as they are, for future audiences so I won’t go on about the actual content other than to say that the first act involved discussion of charity, crisps, Japanese things, Godzilla, Russell Howard, some man who earns £4 million a year but whose name I can’t recall but he was described as a ‘talking toby jug full of piss’.
I have just Googled ‘a talking toby jug full of piss’ and it revealed to me that the person in question is called Adrian Chiles. I don’t know who he IS or what he DOES but at least I now have a fair idea what he looks like.
The second part was about politics and we were warned that there would be very few jokes. The main crux of this part was a story about a blossoming friendship between Stewart Lee and David Cameron when they were at Oxford at the same time. Note that I say ‘at the same time’ as oppposed to ‘together’. The blossoming friendship was not the sort that Uncle Monty would wax lyrical about. There were no tender moments in punts or butter stains from crumpets on pages of Greek poetry – or if there was, we were not told about it.
Bear with me, I have not yet got to the THRUST of this blog post but we’ll get there eventually if I have to drag you kicking and screaming with me.
Anyway, the whole show ended with a song about the Bullingdon Club and then, after the shortest call for an encore ever, another about Russell Brand’s wedding. After which we went out and met Stewart Lee, who turned out to be very lovely indeed – as long term readers of my blog will know, my first ever interview on here was with his wife, the also lovely Bridget Christie and I asked him to pass on my thanks to her as she is fab. I nicked Dave’s handshake from him (I’ve never shaken hands with David Cameron so can’t really compare unfortunately) which was nice and then off we went.
Apparently the singer from the Manic Street Preachers was there too. We didn’t see him. Or at least, we don’t know if we saw him because we have no idea what he looks like. I mean, I could have fallen over him in the aisle and I would be NONE THE WISER so there you go.
Anyway, what has all this got to do with too much laughter?! Well, I’ll tell you what it has to do with too much laughter shall I? As noted previously, the show was actually really funny and I enjoyed it enormously BUT evidently, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the woman sitting behind me who SCREAMED with laughter throughout the whole thing – even when something not very funny was being said. I’m not exaggerating.
To make matters worse, the man that she was with, was also laughing too loudly at everything but not in a screamy way. His laugh was a wheezy smokers laugh, punctuated with, Oh God, I can’t bear it, REPEATING OF THE LINES. ‘The past tense of tweeting is twatting’, Stewart Lee would say. ‘Tweeting is twatting! He said tweeting is twatting! WHEEZE SCREAM WHEEZE SCREAM!’
Reader, gentle reader. I wanted to kill them both. This went on throughout the whole show – the screaming with laughter, the wheezing, the repeating, her saying ‘oh God, oh GOD, OH GOD’ in a climactic way whenever it looked like Stewart Lee was about to say something funny. It was faintly obscene, miserable as hell and also oddly inhibiting because the more they laughed and screamed and repeated, the more po faced and wooden of expression I became. In short – the more they laughed, the less I wanted to or felt myself able to.
To make matters worse, when the interval came, I decided to update Twitter as you do and she cast a gimlet eye over me and said: ‘TWEETING IS TWATTING. YUP, HE GOT THAT RIGHT. IT’S TWATTING’. Now, I don’t really bear Stewart Lee any ill will for putting words into the mouths of idiots, in fact I like him excessively, but I did feel slightly irked by this because he had, in effect, put words into the mouth of an idiot who was now spewing them in my general direction.
So there. It is possible to laugh too much. I’d never have believed it if I hadn’t experienced it for myself but there it is. Has someone done a scientific study of this phenomenon? You’d think, wouldn’t you that the more people around you laugh, the more likely you are to join in too but no. Or maybe it is just me?
We’re going to see him in a week or two – I’m very excited as I saw this show last time round and it was very good indeed, but alas Mr Pops couldn’t make it due to being poorly hence us booking again :-)
I bought his book afterwards – v funny indeed, I was literally laughing out loud whilst reading it and I asked him to dedicate to mr Pops as he was too poorly to attend and he gave me a free cd and signed it ‘get well soon, love Stewart Lee’ – what a fabulously funny and lovely man :-)
I couldn’t go last time as we had no baby sitter so this was my first time! It was great – or would have been if we hadn’t had such ghastly people behind us. I don’t mind laughter – it is supposed to be a social thing after all and nice laughter is really encouraging. However, this was really really bad.
That is SO sweet. He came across as such a nice, warm hearted, affable person. I think he’s ace. :)
Oh I’m quite the same, the more the laughter is intrusive the more I feel myself removed from what I’m watching, I don’t often see stand up comedians for that reason….
I remember having a bad experience whilst at uni. I was stewarding an Al Murray show – the pub landlord, and he ripped apart a student making points about education cost the taxpayer too much and I watched this very large audience, about 1000 people, all rippling with laughter in agreement at what he’d said was extremely chilling and depressing…. I’ve been told since that they were probably laughing at the character he was playing, but it certainly didn’t feel that way…
Oh I’m so glad that it isn’t just me! Muted laughter is a good thing as it does encourage you to laugh too but this was just excessive and really intrusive even.
Oh that sounds like a horrid show. I don’t really like persona type comedians – you know, the ones where they pretend to be someone that they aren’t. It makes me feel really uncomfortable.
Stewart Lee is brilliant, lucky you! But not lucky you being in front of the most odious audience members ever, by the sounds of it! Great post, I laughed (just the right amount!).
Thank you! Laughter is good! But not too much of it!
I can see just how laughter like that could be described as “too much” – it’s almost as if they weren’t getting any of the jokes so just decided to laugh blindly at everything to hide this fact. Someone with an actual sense of humour isn’t going to find every single word the comedian utters hilarious, no matter how much they like them. I only know about the faking thing because a certain person used to do this ALL THE TIME and it drove me insane. How insulting it must be though.
Yes, it was a bit like that. They did actually both look and talk in an um ‘local’ sort of way, if you know what I mean so I was quite surprised that they seemed to ‘get’ so much of it as um well. Not that only university graduates or whatever should be able to get it but er I would have been less surprised to see them both ending themselves laughing at Peter Kaye reminiscing about garlic bread…
The faking laughter thing can be amusing to watch – like when you watch Bill Bailey with someone who you know doesn’t speak or understand any French and they are howling with laughter at that song he does in French…
This blog post made me laugh too much. I woke an asleep at the breast baby!!
Glad you had a good time, Rich seethes with envy xx
Oops! I’m sorry! Did you repeat the lines too? :)
Aww, I hope Rich gets to see him soon! It’s really good! :)
xxx
This comment should be seena s a get out of jail free card. If you get anyone that obnoxious near you again you may kill them, or at least tell them to shut the F*ck up if they want to live!
Great post BTW :-)
Thanks! I’m not very good at doing reviews but I think this one, which is essentially a review of the audience, rather than the show went okay! :)
And thank you – next time I will headbutt them and say that you told me it was okay. :)
You sound like a bit of a snide cunt from that blog post.
I think you will find that the dictionary definition of ‘snide’ pertains to someone who mocks or is derogatory in an indirect or underhand manner.
I have been openly cuntish in this post.
hahahahahhahahahahah you rock!!
No, I didn’t tell them at the time. They looked and sounded really aggressive (you know, like the sort of people who think there’s nothing wrong with calling a total stranger a ‘cunt’) so I quietly seethed in my seat in a tiresomely middle class manner then came home and vented in a lighthearted manner on my very own blog, where I can write about whatever I like, safe in the almost certain knowledge that they will never see it or even recognise themselves.
Next time, I will follow your example and say something at the time. Then blog about what happens next in all its most gory detail.