legends · 4 min read ·
Pre-Show Laughter
A stand-up comedian hears the big laugh from the corridor, before he says the line, from an audience he cannot see.
You learn to hear a room before you walk into it. Through the curtain, in the dark, you hear it settle: the scrape of chairs, the till, the hiss of the lager line. A good room has a hum. A dead room is like a fridge.
The Fox & Lantern, upstairs, a Friday. Sixty seats, forty sold, a compere I'd worked with before, a man named Nev who does a bit about his divorce that gets worse every year. I was on second, a twenty-minute spot, my first new material since March.
I want to say what happened in order, because comedians are unreliable about it and I would like to be an exception.
At 23:58, I was in the corridor behind the stage, waiting for Nev to finish. I was wearing the black shirt, the lucky one, and I was running the opening line under my breath. The opening line is a joke about my father's funeral. It's a good joke. It lands every time. I had told it four hundred times.
From the other side of the curtain, I heard the laugh.
It was a big laugh. A full-room laugh, the kind that starts as a single bark and swells. It came on the beat where my punchline goes. Not the end of Nev's set. Mine. It came, the whole room together, in the right place, a second after the word *casserole*, and I had not said the word. I was in the corridor. I had said nothing. I was mouthing it.
I thought Nev had gone off script. I leaned to the curtain and looked. He was on the stage with his back to me, mid-bit, about his ex-wife's solicitor. The audience was quiet. A few polite smiles. The laugh I had heard was not in the room.
Fine, I thought. Nerves. I rubbed my face and went on, and did my opening, and the line went out in the room, and the silence after it was as total as I have ever had.
I did not die, exactly. I was never booed. It was something stranger. The room sat there and watched me with a kind of intent, listening face, as though they were waiting for something that was not what I was saying. I got through four minutes. I could hear, now that I was out there, the laugh I had heard in the corridor, going on somewhere behind me, offstage. I could hear exactly where it came from. Not the audience. The corridor. The place where I had stood.
I finished. They clapped, thinly. I went off.
Nev patted my arm. "Tough room."
I said, "Did you hear it? From the corridor? The big laugh?"
"What big laugh?"
I went to the dressing room. It is a cupboard with a mirror and a chair and a rail, and in the mirror, on the bulb frame, someone had stuck a strip of paper. A small, torn-off strip, ruled with blue lines, the kind from a spiral pad. In handwriting very like mine, it said: *Don't do the casserole line tomorrow. It's gone.*
I looked at the time on my phone. 00:31. I stood there with my coat on and the paper in my hand and thought: I am a man in a cupboard being warned off a joke.
Of course I did it. You don't drop a closer on the strength of a note. I did the Saturday set in Leeds and I did the casserole line and the whole room sat in silence, and in the silence, at the back, the big laugh came. The clean one, the one I have been waiting for, the one I'd give a limb for. A hundred people looking at me in confusion while some invisible audience, further off and better than them, fell about.
It is like that now. Everything I write gets the laugh before I say it, from a room I can't see, and the real rooms go quiet. I have tried to stop. I have tried new material, from nothing, from the last thing I thought of in the shower. The big laugh gets there first. It knows the lines. It laughs at the shape of what's coming, an eighth of a second before, and the people in front of me hear me stop dead, and I can feel their embarrassment like heat.
I do not have a conclusion. I do not think there is a punchline. I have a gig on Thursday at a small club in Bristol. The compere's the same. The corridor is the same. I will stand there at five to midnight with my hand on the curtain, and I will listen to the laugh, and I will try, just once, to learn what it is laughing at.