Yes, they looked a bit like goths

On the tube back from a gig in Camden. I was sharing a carriage with a man and a woman having quite a heated discussion. The man seemed bored of the conversation when I sat down, and said with a sigh:

"The thing about brain death is that you can't recover from it." The woman tried to interrupt, but he ploughed on: "Once the higher brain functions have gone, that's it."

Impressive, I thought. An unconventional topic of conversation, but anyone who can use the phrase "higher brain functions" at 11pm, and sound like they know what it means, deserves some respect.

Then it became clear that the woman was arguing that she had once been brain dead. Quite recently in fact.

"I was definitely brain dead. I couldn't see or move!" she said. But when pressed by the man she admitted that she could see a bit, although it was all blurry. And she could also move, just not very easily.

I think she might have confused "being brain dead" with "having a hangover".

When I got off the tube a few stops later, the discussion was still in full flow, and I was beginning to feel a little brain dead myself.

Making friends through comedy

Heckling is an occupational hazard as a stand up. It's actually quite rare, particularly at small gigs, but you have to be ready for it at all times. However, that readiness can sometimes lead to problems when you take it off stage...

A few weeks ago I was compèring a small gig and it was going well. I was doing the usual chat to the audience to warm the room up a bit before bringing on the first act. I noticed that a couple of women in the middle of the audience were ignoring me and chatting to each other and I said hello to them and asked them what their names were. One of them replied: “I'm not telling you. We’ve been working all week and have come here for you to make us laugh. So tell us some jokes.” Fair point, perhaps, but it was a very aggressive way to react considering the fact that it was a friendly room and I'd already got a few laughs from banter.

I reacted in mock horror and said something like “God, you remind me of my mother!” Not exactly comedy gold, but it worked in the circumstances. However, the woman seemed really offended by that and continued to heckle. I managed to shut her up eventually, but I felt like I'd lost my authority with the audience and the atmosphere had been soured. It slowly turned into a difficult gig and for the rest of the night I didn’t really enjoy it.

Unfortunately the two women hung around at the end of the show. The one I had spoken to came over to me as I was packing away the stage equipment and started complaining about what I'd said to her at the beginning. By now I was tired and just wanted to go home, but she was quite drunk and aggressive and wouldn't stop berating me. Then she said the following sentence:

“You were lucky how I reacted! You were lucky I took it on the chin!”

And I couldn’t resist. I just shot back:

“Which one?”

Now. She wasn’t fat. I don't think I'd have said that if she had been. I’m not sure if that makes me better or worse. But she was obviously not happy.

That was the moment I remembered that I wasn’t a comedian on stage any more, but just a man standing in front of a woman being rude about her appearance.

If I'm honest, the main thing I regret is that she didn’t say that to me during the gig, because then my response would almost certainly have got a big laugh and I would have regained my authority. As it was, she was slightly stunned, and I was slightly embarrassed, although pleased that I'd finally managed to get her back for ruining the gig for me.

I also got away without being attacked, which I thought was quite a result.

The Happyslap Hypothesis

I find myself increasingly irritated by some of the terminology used in the media. One example is the phrase "friendly fire". It's a horrible mix of euphemism and oxymoron; we wouldn't say "lovely murder" or "chummy rape", at least not in mixed company.

It's strange how these phrases get lodged in the national consciousness. Even when most people would agree that they are offensive or even nonsensical, they survive. Do we secretly enjoy the tension created by using them? Is there a clever irony at work? Or is it, more likely, because newspaper editors prefer alliteration and assonance to accuracy?

I also saw a sign saying "Slow Children" but I can't think of anything funny about that.

I'm always on the look out for odd things to put in my stand up routine. I think that in some ways I'm an observational comedian, but only in a very specific and personal sense. Instead of saying "have you ever noticed that..." I tend to say something like "I noticed something weird..." or "something weird happened to me". I like to tell a little story instead of referring to a general truth. Some audiences, particularly in big clubs, prefer to be told about things they already know - hence the tendency towards "hack" or cliched subjects. These can be boring and repetitive if you go to lots of comedy but seem completely original if it's your first time. Many times I've heard the same joke from several comedians, and I don't think any of them stole it - it's just a pretty obvious idea based on a common observation.

Anyway. Here are three signs I saw recently which I thought were quite funny:

1. "AAA Balloons - For All Your Decorating Needs!"

Presumably as long as those needs only involve balloons. I saw this on a billboard next to the pitch at Wivenhoe Football Club, when I was there for the lovely Wivenhoe Funny Farm gig. Brilliantly, I also saw two other adverts for local balloon companies whilst I was there. There's obviously not a lot else to do in Essex.

2. "Please don't open windows too far as birds may fly into toilets."

This sign is in the toilets at the offices of The Spotlight, where I was for an casting. It really made me want to open the window just to see what happened. I imagined the conversation later in the office: "Another bird got in the toilet! That's the third this week! Perhaps the sign is being counter-productive?"

3. This one needs a bit of context - I was filming some scenes for a TV show in the reception of a magistrates court when I noticed several big notices saying:

"ARE YOU GUILTY? If so, tell us now!"

Is it just an attempt to trick stupid criminals into admitting it? If so, it's a bit lacking in subtlety, along the lines of Baldrick's "Are you a German spy?" interrogation technique, or the US Immigration forms that ask "Are you a terrorist?" I flew to America for the first time earlier this year, and, although I'd heard many jokes on the subject, I still found the forms hilarious. However, I wasn't tempted to express this hilarity to the Immigration officers. My quest for comedic originality doesn't extend that far.

Next week: fluffy bunnies must die!

Good to see that Germaine Greer has finally found a target truly worthy of attack. What has she gone after this time? Muslim fundamentalism? Nah. American imperialism? Nope. Men in general? Not this time. No, Germaine has focussed all of her considerable powers of invective on...cuddly toys.

Now, I know that newspaper columnists have to earn a living too, but I can't help thinking that this piece might be a little counter-productive. I can just imagine the Daily Mail headline: "Fanatical feminist trashes toys". But then again, Germaine lost any intellectual credibility she once had when she flounced out of the Celebrity Big Brother house a couple of years ago, complaining that house mates were "bullied" and had "an agenda", two revelations that were hardly a surprise. I mean, even my teddy bear could have told her that.

'king apologies

I read recently that the Danish minister of culture has apologised for the Viking raids that occurred 1200 years ago. At last! Better late than never, eh? I bet he's glad he got that off his chest. 1200 years is a long time to feel guilty about something. It's the latest in a long line of recent bizarre apologies, from the Fijian tribe who have apologised for their ancestors' amusingly direct form of theological argument with missionaries (eating them) to Tony Blair's apology for slavery. The one thing that links all of these apologies is that the apologiser had nothing personally to do with what he is apologising for. It's at best a cynical political statement and at worst a pointless PR exercise. I'm just waiting for Jonathan Sacks to go on Thought for the Day next week and say "Ok, yes, I admit it, we did kill Jesus. Sorry!"

The mention of Viking raids takes me back to my school days, when I was a huge fan of history and Vikings in particular. My family regularly visited the Yorvik Viking Centre, distinguished from all other local museums by the "authentic" smell of shit that pervaded all of the exhibits. At the time I found this delightful. With the benefit of hindsight I wonder if they just built it next to a sewage treatment works. The exhibits I remember include some slightly shoddy waxworks, some bored actors pretending to be Scandinavian but sounding suspiciously Yorkshire, and a machine that could convert modern currency into Viking currency, essentially by flattening it and making it smell slightly of shit.

I also read a lot of books about Vikings, and remember clearly a children's history book that contained the sentence: "The Vikings raped and pillaged their way across Northern Europe". However, being a children's book, it failed to explain what those key words meant, so I had to try to work it out from the context. As a naive ten year old I assumed they meant something like "hiked and explored". That was fine, until the following year when my school went on a trip to the Yorkshire Dales and I inadvertently made some pretty inappropriate suggestions for what we could do whilst we were there...