I am a writer, but for the last two years I’ve also been a stand-up comedian.
At the age of fifty my first novel ‘The Comedienne’ was published, ten years later in my sixtieth year a friend enrolled me on a comedy course.
“You’re hilarious,” she said.
Eight weeks on, our friendship faltering it was a case of “But surely you used to be hilarious.” And me snapping back, “Well maybe I did, but I’m not now!”
However at the end-of-course-show I gave myself options, a) walk into the sea never to be heard of again, b) go home and admit to everyone who’d told me how brave I was being, that I was in fact a snivelling coward, or c) do my best. The show went well. I lampooned my friend sitting in the third row back who fortunately rather enjoyed the limelight.
After that I set myself a target of sixty comedy gigs to complete in my birthday year - by the end of the year had done nearer ninety, travelling all over the south coast, plus Oxford and to the Edinburgh Festival with my friend Karl, the two of us performing in front of very drunken people who daily took shelter from the almost continuous rain.
During that first year I put on a stone, (foraging for food at 11pm after a gig, when all that’s open is Burger King), my friends grew to dislike me because I was constantly tired and complaining about putting on a stone, also I stopped working on my novel.
Writing stand-up comedy is very different from writing prose. With stand-up if you can’t make the audience at least relax their features within the first three seconds of your material, you’re done for. Returning to my manuscript I found that paragraphs now eluded me. What was the point of all this description stuff? Who cared if the sky was blue and the sea was green? Sentences seemed far too long, and where was the punch-line? From recounting the poignant yet gently humorous tale of a ten-year old child and her curmudgeonly grandmother, every bit of dialogue was now reduced to a sub-standard Wood & Walters routine.
Fortunately after that first year I adjusted. I stopped accepting any and every gig and got back into writing. My publisher Tollington Press suggested they re-issue ‘The Comedienne’, to celebrate its tenth anniversary but also with an ‘Afterword’ linking it to my new stand-up career.
I wouldn’t say the last two years have been happy ones, they haven’t! But I wouldn’t change them, because they’ve changed me. My confidence has improved; I’ve broadened my horizons at a time when I was in danger of perhaps reigning them in. I’ve done the Edinburgh Festival two years in a row. Who would have imagined that girl with very few ‘O’ levels and no immediate talent for anything would - ?
The friend I lampooned two years ago at my very first gig, (see below in top hat) is looking over my shoulder.
She says, “Steady on. Don’t go getting above yourself, you’re still a misery and actually Val, you put on a stone and a half.”
When VG Lee is not doing stand up comedy, she is the author of such books as The Woman in Beige, The Comedienne, both published by Millivres-Prowler Group, and As You Step Outside, published by Tollington Press.
Many thanks to VG for a wonderful post.
