millionreasons: (Default)

Last Tuesday we went to a free comedy nite at the UCL theatre which featured Al Murray as compère and 9 stand-ups in the meantime. I noticed two things – no, I noticed 3 things: 1) Al Murray is extremely good at ad-libbing and picking on posh boys in the front row (we hurriedly changed to second row in the interval), 2) In the olden days, comics made wife, mother-in-law and racially suspect jokes, but in the 80s the likes of the Comic Strip changed all that with their left wing comedies about the GLC. In the 90s, Lee and Herring took the piss out of this by skitting those comedians with their SDP mugs. But in the post-ironic naughties, it seems it’s OK to be offensive again. One Australian comedian did a joke about how robbers had broken into his house with a machete and wanted to steal his CD collection: “But there was no hip-hop, which is what I think they’d have preferred” (I suppose Aussies aren’t really known for their racial harmony) and two other comics did jokes about not being rapists. Hmm, rape; always hilarious. The other thing I observed was that all but two of the comedians did piss and shit jokes; the two that didn’t being a Canadian feller who made mullet jokes and the other was the sole woman, Jo Enright whom we saw with Chris Addison earlier this year (she was also the dole inspector/love interest for Brian Potter in the first series of Phoenix Nights). Instead of bodily fluids, she did situational humour, the times when you find you've moved to a posh bit of London and can no longer go to Threshers in your slippers. Or that the women in Birmingham call their children names like Bonjela and have a screwed-up child-lambasting face that they only use when shopping in Lidl.

I decide to keep an eye on this as I meet Jo, Talya, Laurence and Annabelle to travel up to Birmingham for Alice’s hen party. The boys are going to Liverpool whose football team, coincidentally enough, are playing Birmingham City this very afternoon. I haven’t been in Brum since I failed to get a job there in 1995 and the place has changed beyond anything I can recognise. It used to look scruffy, dilapidated, recessional; now the Victorian buildings look cleaned up, there is public art and a big wheel, there are civic squares with big screens and Brummie pride posters and the Bullring just gleams. We meet Alice, Tanya and the rest of the “hens” at the station and faff about to a Fullers pub for lunch, where Alice receives the inaugural pre-wedding pink boa and then meander down Gas Street and the canal to another pub where fruit wine is quaffed and then back over the river to a giant but empty pub where we drink champagne and Pimms until 10 o’clock, when we wobbly wander through the exceptionally quiet and polite city to the bus stop to go back to Alice’s dad’s rambling house in the suburbs for vodka and ginger ale, Ann Summers hen party favours, pizza, tinsel garlands, a Jenga game of truth or dare (I somehow end up with my jeans inside out), drinking wine through chocolate finger straws, a gargantuan 18th century Bible that I suspect was used to smite people, pink balloons, Pascale the penis hoopla, champagne bubbles and a very nervous cat. We retire at a respectable 1 a.m….the boys are still clubbing.
Birmingham 2 - Liverpool 2.

  


 

millionreasons: (Default)

Last Tuesday we went to a free comedy nite at the UCL theatre which featured Al Murray as compère and 9 stand-ups in the meantime. I noticed two things – no, I noticed 3 things: 1) Al Murray is extremely good at ad-libbing and picking on posh boys in the front row (we hurriedly changed to second row in the interval), 2) In the olden days, comics made wife, mother-in-law and racially suspect jokes, but in the 80s the likes of the Comic Strip changed all that with their left wing comedies about the GLC. In the 90s, Lee and Herring took the piss out of this by skitting those comedians with their SDP mugs. But in the post-ironic naughties, it seems it’s OK to be offensive again. One Australian comedian did a joke about how robbers had broken into his house with a machete and wanted to steal his CD collection: “But there was no hip-hop, which is what I think they’d have preferred” (I suppose Aussies aren’t really known for their racial harmony) and two other comics did jokes about not being rapists. Hmm, rape; always hilarious. The other thing I observed was that all but two of the comedians did piss and shit jokes; the two that didn’t being a Canadian feller who made mullet jokes and the other was the sole woman, Jo Enright whom we saw with Chris Addison earlier this year (she was also the dole inspector/love interest for Brian Potter in the first series of Phoenix Nights). Instead of bodily fluids, she did situational humour, the times when you find you've moved to a posh bit of London and can no longer go to Threshers in your slippers. Or that the women in Birmingham call their children names like Bonjela and have a screwed-up child-lambasting face that they only use when shopping in Lidl.

I decide to keep an eye on this as I meet Jo, Talya, Laurence and Annabelle to travel up to Birmingham for Alice’s hen party. The boys are going to Liverpool whose football team, coincidentally enough, are playing Birmingham City this very afternoon. I haven’t been in Brum since I failed to get a job there in 1995 and the place has changed beyond anything I can recognise. It used to look scruffy, dilapidated, recessional; now the Victorian buildings look cleaned up, there is public art and a big wheel, there are civic squares with big screens and Brummie pride posters and the Bullring just gleams. We meet Alice, Tanya and the rest of the “hens” at the station and faff about to a Fullers pub for lunch, where Alice receives the inaugural pre-wedding pink boa and then meander down Gas Street and the canal to another pub where fruit wine is quaffed and then back over the river to a giant but empty pub where we drink champagne and Pimms until 10 o’clock, when we wobbly wander through the exceptionally quiet and polite city to the bus stop to go back to Alice’s dad’s rambling house in the suburbs for vodka and ginger ale, Ann Summers hen party favours, pizza, tinsel garlands, a Jenga game of truth or dare (I somehow end up with my jeans inside out), drinking wine through chocolate finger straws, a gargantuan 18th century Bible that I suspect was used to smite people, pink balloons, Pascale the penis hoopla, champagne bubbles and a very nervous cat. We retire at a respectable 1 a.m….the boys are still clubbing.
Birmingham 2 - Liverpool 2.

  


 

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