Comic turns, Camden

Jokes about dating, ethnicity and meditation and one routine that went too far

An autumn night in Camden Town, where, long ago, Kilburn and The High Roads played Dingwalls and a famous pet shop sold enormous snakes. The market was full of bongs back then. Maybe it still is. They say the place has lost its soul. Well, name a time when they weren’t. Come on. Camden’s fringe festival gets compared with Edinburgh’s. The place heaves with pubs and clubs. And everywhere you look, people are standing up and making you laugh.

There was a crowd of 50-odd in the little bar, keen young cosmopolitans preoccupied – if the material set before them was any guide – with dating and ethnic identity. The compere, a smiley black American, teased the mostly white audience with news that this was the “blackest comedy night in north London” (or somesuch), and relaxed us between acts with mellow lines about baby fathers and eating dogs.

We laughed: maybe at him, maybe at ourselves, maybe at him laughing at us, maybe – and maybe mirthlessly – at how stuck we all seem to be with certain ways of seeing and being. Performers got five minutes each. I, in the front row of the ranks of folding chairs, got my line prepared for when one of them asked me what I do for a living (“I review comedians for the Telegraph.”).

Women told jokes about being East Asian, being single, being insulted by children, being single, being worried about their weight and being single. Men told jokes about being Indian and being single, their jumpers and being single, being short and being single. Everyone said “shit” frequently. One woman ventured into clown country, donning a sheep novelty hat and, by inflating an exercise ball using a pump squeezed between her knees, fashioned a symbolic representation of a ewe being penetrated by a ram.

The next comic turn was a guy who got off to a good follow-that start (“I hate it when people steal my material”), then instantly crashed and burned by going into a routine about Gaza and Jews. The stoney silence prompted him to improvise in a manner he had not anticipated (“Uh, oh, I thought it would land well with this audience…”).

Did someone deep once observe that you can get away with making a joke about a tragedy as long as you take the tragedy seriously? Perhaps he would have obeyed that rule, but he had overstepped the limits of edginess so quickly that we would never know. The sheep woman, sitting next to me, suggested he might need to wait 50 years before such material could be acceptable.

The evening’s only other discordant moment was when a couple of young women, tiresomely drunk, gatecrashed and tried a bit of heckling. Our compere suavely suggested that their parents might be called. They were quickly gone.

That tiny incident threw into relief the generosity of those who’d paid their money. What used to be called “alternative comedy”, back in the days of pet shop pythons and pub rock, was inseparable from pisshead counter-performances from the floor. But this audience was rather sweet. My eye was caught by two lads from Ireland, who looked as if they’d broken out of seminary. I felt a fleeting urge to get up at the end and tell everyone I hoped their rents would soon come down and to call me if they got frightened travelling home.

To end, my evening’s favourite lines :

“Hi. I’m Frank. I travelled here this evening on the Tube. You can imagine what it was like – busy, overcrowded, people under pressure, hard to relax. I found a seat and decided it would be more mindful if I meditated. So I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. It was amazing. So powerful. I was able to completely block out a pregnant woman standing next to me who needed to sit down.”

Thank you, Camden, and good night.

John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to the Dave Hill London journalism Substack too.