Day 241 - Comedy Club

 COMEDY CLUB 

Prompt - Comedy Club : Write something inspired by a comedian

Taken from a routine performed by Andrew Maxwell.

Eighteen months.  Eighteen months and three days to be precise.  Or four hundred and ninety one days if you want to make it sound like a really long fucking time.  Which is how it's felt.  Like it would never end.  Like he'd never stand in front of a noisy, breathing, breathless carpet of happy faces ever again.  

There had been Zoom gigs.  If ever there was a route to suck the soul from comedy this was the one to follow.  A road into an ever changing kaleidoscope of peering faces, of weirdly decorated living rooms and worse.  Of nose pickers and ball scratchers and apparent indifference.  Of realising that just because someone is one of your fans it doesn't follow that their partner is too.  So many couples where one is laughing while the other disdainfully flicks through their phone screen.  A lesson to the ego.

And there had been, once, because once was one time too many, a car park gig.  In the rain.  On a tall stage under a leaky cover, staring out into a muddy field of glass and metal boxes.  He'd asked how he'd know if they were laughing.  Was told they would honk their horns in approval.  He wasn't sure he'd enjoy being honked at.

He never found out.  Fifteen minutes before he went on came the message - there had been complaints about the potential noise so horns were banned.  Maybe they'd flash their lights in appreciation?  A few did, but soon decided that their batteries were more important, especially as they had to keep flicking the wipers to see hom.  Wands of rubber scraping over screens became his only sign that there were were people out there.  Who may or may not be laughing.  That wasn't a comedy gig, that was a man howling into a soggy sponge of despair.

So here he was.  On a stage, in a room, with a front row, and more, where he could make out individual faces, feel their anticipation, their own sense of release.  At first he could barely speak, stood hunched and shaking, trying to stop the tears.  He shouted out.  Realised it had been so long that he'd forgotten that he needed the microphone.  Laughed at himself.  They laughed with him.  They laughed and cheered and whooped, and that was all he needed.  His words took off and circled round the room, swooping and gliding and raising hope.  He was back.