A few years ago, I abandoned a five-year counselling course after just 40 minutes. Apparently, I couldn’t have a refund from the community college but could transfer to another course. I may have a writer’s fascination with finding things out but I have a strange aversion to being taught. Looking at the long list of courses available to me, all I could see were things I didn’t want to be taught.
Computerised Accounts and Book Keeping, Burlesque Dancing and The Art of the Burgundian Netherlands. I wasn’t looking for a hobby and there was barely anything on that list that came close to piquing my interest.
A more unprepossessing bunch of human specimens would be hard to imagine
There was, however, one course that caught my attention: Stand-Up Comedy. I’ve never had the slightest desire to be a stand-up. Having been to hundreds of comedy gigs, I absolutely know that it’s something I could never do; just like watching hundreds of football matches means I absolutely know I could never be a Premier League striker.
Still, given my lifelong interest in the subject, I thought this might be OK. Spoiler alert: it was very far from OK.
Now I’m loath to be too critical of this bunch of aspirant japesters – but a more unprepossessing bunch of human specimens would be hard to imagine. Dreary, dowdy and deadly serious – not one of them would be mistaken for a ray of sunshine. Though they all seemed to believe that this course would magically endow them with charisma and a talent for making people laugh.
One look at the tutor should have suggested otherwise. Here was the embodiment of bitterness and failure who kept reminding us that he’d been ‘on the circuit now’ for 23 years. This obviously made me wonder why I’d never heard of him but his constant ‘hilarious’ references to Trump and Thatcher quickly answered that question. Maybe the news hadn’t reached him that Trump was no longer in power and Thatcher was no longer alive.
There’s an old maxim that you forget what you don’t want to remember so I’ve expunged most of my classmates’ ‘routines’ from my memory. Though I still squirm involuntarily when forced to recall one dismal creature who thought she’d written an absolute zinger:
‘My husband’, she said, ‘wants to have a baby’. Pause for the punchline. ‘But then he found out you have to have a vagina!!’
I couldn’t bear the ensuing silence so I attempted to lighten the mood. ‘Men, eh?’ I smiled ‘What are they like?’ ‘Exactly!’ she declared, clearly without a GCSE in irony, ‘Exactly!’
I was now in actual physical pain. Next up was a piece of social commentary from an insecure young man in a hat. ‘You know when your nan says something really racist…’ I was about to agree, saying that I’m sure my nan had made racist remarks but hers were probably about Kaiser Wilhelm II. And so it continued, with our sour-faced tutor only cracking a smile at mentions of the stupidity of Brexit, the libido of Boris Johnson and of course, the general horridness of the Tories.
Surely this schtick was now as old-fashioned as Bernard Manning in a frilly shirt making jokes about ethnic minorities and at one point I found that my head was in my hands. I was almost audibly groaning.
None of them had a sense of humour. I don’t mean being funny, I mean having a sense of what’s funny – this basic faculty was strangely and horribly missing.
My mum, mother of five, grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother to a further 9, always said that you could tell how bright babies were by how readily they laughed. I looked at the people around me and imagined them decades earlier, gazing blankly and sullenly from their high chairs. This actually made me laugh.
What didn’t make me laugh was the arrogance of people believing that the rare skills of a seasoned stand-up could simply be learned like a post-grad humanities course. Writing TV and radio commercials, I’ve worked with a lot of famous comedians and I don’t recall any of them attributing their fame to evening classes in ‘being funny’.
Instead, they braved the boos and brickbats of hostile audiences but with the experience gained through years of gigging, they eventually attained the success they deserved. It’s the only way and yet it was quite clear that no one in that room would have ever the courage and resolve to do that. They were all looking for an easy shortcut.
So when the tutor almost dropped his coffee and quipped, ‘Safe in my hands. As Thatcher once said about the Health Service,’ I realised it was time to go. Maybe that course on the Art of the Burgundian Netherlands wouldn’t be so bad after all.
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