Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (10 page)

That
night, pissed and fuelled by righteous indignation, I picked up my phone about
two o’clock in the morning and called the room of the comic in question to
protest about his material. I’m afraid I only managed the two words, ‘You’re
shit,’ and then put the phone down. Yes, not exactly a well-reasoned academic argument,
I know, and much as I’d like to apologise for my appalling behaviour, I’m not
going to. He was a deeply unsavoury man and I hope Oprah appreciates all my
efforts on her behalf. I do realise I could have been more grown up about it,
but I’m not very grown up when I’ve had a few — or when I haven’t.

Incidentally
my material wasn’t going down all that well either. It was around the time of
the Gulf War and I was doing some stuff about Saddam Hussein. When the audience
looked blankly at me as if to say ‘Who the hell is Saddam Hussein?’ I gave up
and went back to the fat jokes, which they seemed to like.

During
this trip we attempted to do some sociable things to get to know our
surroundings, and apparently one of the must-dos was a trip on the rapids. We
all arrived down at the riverside one morning and were kitted out in
life-jackets and shepherded onto a big boat which seated about thirty people.
There then ensued what seemed like a combination of being shaken about so much
that your bones rattled whilst continuously having buckets of water thrown over
you. It was good fun. However, it was too much for one of our party who,
fuelled by extreme anxiety went into a sort of catatonic state of paralysis. A
little boat bustled over to our bigger boat and he was taken off, poor sod, as
stiff as a board.

I came
up against a few unlikeable comedians on that trip. Each Montreal Festival
flies in an elderly statesman of comedy and for my first trip there it was
Milton Berle. To be honest, I’d never heard of him, but people assured me he
was dead famous in the States. Also, as I am not at the nerdy end of the comedy
world, I haven’t assiduously studied the lives of all comics going back to the
Ice Age which certainly some of my peer group have done. Milton Berle looked
about 150 but he may only have been in his eighties. He was to compere the Gala
show I was doing. This involved bursting out of a big box at the back of the
stage, and as it’s not something we all do every day we had to go to the
3,200-seater theatre to rehearse it in case we walked out of the box backwards,
I suppose, or accidentally burst out of the side.

We were
all introduced to Milton Berle at this point and his interpersonal skills with
women seemed to be somewhat lacking. As someone gestured at me and said, ‘And
this is Jo Brand,’ he moved towards me, saying, ‘Well, come here then, girl,
I’m not going to touch your titties.’

First
of all, I hate that word ‘titties’ — it’s a word children and pervy old men use
— and he obviously fell into the latter category. I was in another country,
faced with a very famous American comic, and tongue-tied for those reasons. I
regret not giving the old fart as good as I got.

The
night of the Gala arrived and terrifying it was too. I had never performed in
front of such a big audience before and was nervous as hell. However, I managed
to come out of the front of the box and deliver my words all in the right
order, to some nice laughs and applause.

Unfortunately
Jerry Sadowitz didn’t fare quite so well. This may be to do with the fact that
he opened his set by saying, ‘Good evening, moose fuckers.’ I’m not sure the
Canadians were particularly enamoured with that title, since a man right at the
back got out of his seat, strolled nonchalantly down the steps, got up on stage
and lamped Jerry right in the face. Jerry got up and was hit again before a
security man ambled across the stage and removed the offender in as
congratulatory a way as he could possibly have managed. It was the talk of the
festival, of course, and most of us felt relieved that it wasn’t us.

I was
on my way to the after-show party when an audience member cornered me in the
corridor.

‘Well
done,’ he enthused, ‘and I thought it was particularly funny that you have two
balloons down your front. They looked so natural.’ Well, I didn’t have any
balloons down my front and, worried he was going to do a Milton Berle and
check, I legged it.

After
we’d had a few drinks, we went for a meal at a restaurant nearby where lots of
the comics and agents hung out. As I was heading back from the toilet to join
my friends, I passed a table that appeared to be populated by the Italian
Mafia: lots of guys in sharp suits doing the wearing-sunglasses-inside thing.
No women. As I passed, one of them stared straight at me. Well, I think he was
looking at me; his face was turned in my direction. He initially pointed at me
without a word and then curled his finger in a supercilious, beckoning motion.

Maybe
he thinks I’m a waitress, I thought, but instead of politely informing him I wasn’t,
and fuelled by a couple of sherries, I looked at him and said, ‘Piss off, you
twat.’

On
arrival back at my table I asked a Canadian comic who the group of Mafia
lookey-likeys were that had attempted to detain me.

‘Oh,
they’re all really important American agents,’ he replied.

Goodbye,
Hollywood.

Montreal 2

Weirdly, I can’t recall
much about my second Montreal trip. I took my friend Waggly with me that time
and it is only a very stressful epic journey I remember — a trip to the Niagara
Falls, which I decided I really wanted to see in person, as it were.

We
intended to hire a car and drive there and back in a day on my day off. We had
failed to take into account a few very important things. Firstly we didn’t
really know where the fuck we were going, secondly I’d never driven an
automatic car on the wrong side of the road, and thirdly it was roughly a
900-mile round trip.

Getting
out of Montreal itself was like some sort of nightmare odyssey I made several
wrong turns, entries down one-way streets and at one point we ended up on what
appeared to be a massive building site. A bloke in a fluorescent jacket
approached and I thought with some relief that he was going to redirect us. So
I wound down the window to apologise and ask directions. His words:

‘Move,
bitch.’ I did.

After
roughly six hours of driving we neared our destination. The Niagara Falls is
set in a big park and we could hear the roar of the water as we entered.

‘Look,’
cried Waggly, all excited. ‘There it is!’

‘It’
turned out to be a fountain, and after some gentle piss-taking from me, we
parked opposite the great whooshing waterfall itself. Unfortunately by this
time it was getting dark and I was already worried about how long it was going
to take us to get back. So we must have done the quickest surveillance of the
Falls anyone has ever done, before we got back in the car and drove for another
six/seven hours, arriving back in Montreal exhausted and very slightly tearful.

Waggly
and I had a lovely time in Montreal, mainly staying in bed very late, mooching
round town admiring the architecture, sitting in cafés doing bog-all for hours
on end, and recovering from our odyssey to Niagara Falls. Waggly was the
perfect companion, happy to go with the flow, pleased to be there, endlessly
entertaining and cheerful.

One
evening when I had a night off we trawled the bars and clubs together, getting
more pissed as we went. We ended up in a sort of wine bar-type place and sat
down at a table and ordered a bottle of wine. Two guys moved in and started
trying to chat us up. This was most unusual for me, not so much for Waggly who
is lovely-looking and slim. But as a fat person you soon learn that your role
is to be that of the quirky joke-cracking friend and that you are going to get
the flawed friend or God forbid what they call ‘a chubby chaser’, and down that
road lie untold horrors for me. Even to this day I so resent being judged by my
appearance on first meeting, that it makes my blood boil when on-sight
assessments are made of me and I cannot help but turn into a piss-taking,
offhand old harridan.

One of
the blokes was a reasonably attractive tall thin thing, and the friend was OK,
but not in the slightest my cup of tea as he appeared to be slightly to the
right of Mussolini and was steadfastly making cracks about Native Americans for
our entertainment. Waggly was missing all this as she was engaged in flirty
banter with the mate who, for some reason, was not a psycho and maybe was doing
his bit for the community by accompanying his friend round.

Pissed as
I was, I knew I had to get out of there before I either tipped my drink down
the Canadian fascist’s front or worse. This is a constant dilemma for friends,
I think, when one of them has met someone they’re quite keen on and their mate
has just met the social equivalent of Jack the Ripper. Given that we were thousands
of miles from home, I didn’t really want to leave Waggly on her own with her
one, as for all I knew they were a double act of perviness hoovering up naive
foreign ladies to lock in their cellar. I could not find the opportunity to
have a word in Waggly’s ear without being heard, so I had to think fast. I
decided fainting was probably the best thing to do, and then once we got
outside I could give her the option of going back if she really wanted to.

So
faint I did. Usually when you faint, your body goes floppy so you sink to the
ground and tend not to get injured. This was not the case with me. So worried
was I about it looking convincing that I stood up first and said something
like, ‘I don’t feel well,’ and then did my best to plunge to the ground in true
drama-school-end-of-term-play fashion. On the way down I hit my head on the
side of the marble table and nearly went, ‘Fuck, that
hurt,’
but managed
to stop myself. Waggly panicked slightly whilst I, with my instant migraine,
attempted not to laugh.

I
reckon I did a pretty good impression of coming round in a woozy fashion and
Waggly helped me up and took me outside for some fresh air, promising Mr
Chatter Upper she’d be back in a minute. Mr Pervo looked completely
disinterested and out of one slightly open eye I noticed him scanning the bar
for fresh stoutness.

Waggly
supported me outside, and as soon as we were out of earshot I told her that my
‘partner’ was a complete tosspot and I had to escape. I immediately apologised
to her and said I knew she liked hers and if she really wanted to stay she
could, but I felt worried about leaving her. Her reply, ‘What are you talking
about? He’s a complete wanker — I was only staying because I thought you wanted
to.’ Oh how we laughed, oh how we legged it, oh how we didn’t look back.

If our
‘friends’ are reading this, I apologise for our unannounced exit and I hope you
are both happily married with patient wives (one quite fat) and lovely
children.

To be
perfectly honest and no offence to the people of Canada, but it just wasn’t in
my plans to marry a Canadian chubby chaser.

Australia

I toured Australia in the
early nineties and found it strange travelling to the other side of the world
and staying there for six weeks. I am not a natural traveller as I tend to
prefer journeys in my head which are so much easier, and I missed home, friends
and family hugely.

We were
lucky that the Australian tour company paid for a first-class air ticket for
myself, my friend and support act, Jeff Green, and John, our tour manager. We
didn’t have to sit squashed for hours in tiny seats shoulder to shoulder with
each other but could stretch out, watch a film and see ourselves fly over the
edge of the world as the sun came up.

I had
known Jeff for a long time and we were good friends. He is from Chester and has
a cheekiness that is associated with nearby Liverpool. His material is great; it
has a familiarity to it and an easy rhythm, as well as being enormously funny
Jeff is a prime example of someone who, in my opinion, should most definitely
be a household name by now.

Right,
back to Australia. I was slightly surprised when we landed and someone got on
the plane and processed down the aisle spraying us with some sort of disinfectant
as if we were lepers.

Our
first port of call was Sydney said to be one of the more sophisticated of the
Australian cities. We were bunged in a very nice hotel and had a couple of days
to chill out before the first gig. The time of year was May so I suppose we
were heading towards their winter, but it felt pretty damn warm to me.

To some
extent, once you are in a city there is not a huge amount of difference where
you are in the world. Hotel rooms all look the same and you find the same
products, especially the posh ones, pretty much wherever you are. Likewise,
again to some extent, the audiences.

I did
quite a bit of telly to promote the tour. Firstly a talent show with a very
camp American comic, Scott Capurro. Between us we agreed that for a laugh we
would give really shit marks. Anyway the first act up was a very cute little
girl who sang a very cute song and did a very cute dance. Scott went first on
the judging panel and gave her one out of ten. There was uproar and it looked
like he might be lynched. They moved on to me and I declared, ‘Ten out of ten
… she’s so cute.’ Well, I was nearly hoisted onto their shoulders and cheered
to the rafters. I don’t think Scott was too happy with me for a bit though.