Life and Laughing: My Story Read Online Free PDF

picked one girl and called her the winner, actually she wasn’t that bad … She had a beautiful bone structure in her face … Those eyes … Those lips … That tooth … She had this one tooth right in the front and it was three inches long … The first time I saw her I thought it was a cigarette and tried to light it … To see her eating spaghetti was really something … She used to put her tooth right in it and spin the plate … But I married her anyway …
I got married because I wanted to have a family and it wasn’t long before we had the pitter-patter of tiny feet around the house … My mother-in-law’s a midget … I told her to treat the house as if it were her own … And she did. She sold it …
    I hope you found that as funny as I did. I particularly like the ‘I thought it was a cigarette and tried to light it’ bit. This is proper old-school stuff, wives and mother-in-laws being the butt of the joke. I don’t know if he wrote all of it, some of it or none of it. I know that comedians back in those days used to share jokes around a lot, but nevertheless it’s still funny. I have gags, I couldn’t really survive without punchlines, but a lot of my material is observational or mimicry. It’s a different approach to making people laugh – it makes me laugh, which is why I say it. But you can understand how ‘old-school’ comedians can be baffled by ‘alternative’ comedy, because there are so few proper ‘gags’. ‘Where are the jokes?’ they’ll say, normally in a northern accent. For me, it’s quite simple: if people are laughing, it’s comedy … or tickling.
    Browsing my dad’s notes, I’m not sure he was the most confident performer. There are two pages entitled ‘No Laughs’, back-up in case the jokes weren’t working. Here are some of them:
Well, I wasn’t born here, but I’m certainly dying here.
That gag is twenty years ahead of its time. It’s just your bad luck that you had to hear it tonight.
Well, from now on, it’s a comeback.
I don’t mind you going to sleep, but you could at least say goodnight.
    Ouch. I certainly never had a plan for dying onstage. I’ve always found that once you’ve lost an audience, there’s nothing you can do to win them back.
    Comedians talk about stand-up in very hostile terms. If you have a good gig, you ‘killed’, and if you have a bad gig, you ‘died’. It’s kill or be killed. Witnessing a death onstage is excruciating. Experiencing it is indescribable. The worst death I ever saw was during my brief stint at Edinburgh University, years before I took to the stage myself. I never knew the comic’s name and haven’t seen him since. This career path was certainly evident that night, as he performed to near silence. It was a packed audience of about 400, including a gallery. The comedian was fighting for his life, sweating, dry mouth, throwing every joke he could think of at it. No response. People were turning away, chatting among themselves.
    Now, I don’t know if it was thrown or dropped, but somehow a lit cigarette originating from the gallery landed on the comedian’s head. As it burned away atop his full head of hair, the audience started noticing the cigarette and giggling. Unaware of the lit cigarette, the comedian’s eyes lit up, too. ‘I’ve cracked them!’ he was thinking. He then started to loosen up, moisture flooded back into his throat, the sweat on his brow began to clear, and he confidently launched into more material. Flames started to plume from his head. The giggles now escalated into fully blown laughter. He thought he was Richard Pryor, but looked more like Michael Jackson making a Pepsi commercial.
    ‘You’re on fire, mate!’ someone shouted from the crowd.
    He took this as a compliment.
    ‘Do you like impressions?’ he said, feeling like a star.
    The audience were now weak from laughter, tears rolling down their student faces as he broke into his ‘Michael Crawford’, not