Just because you’re wearing an eye-patch, it doesn’t mean you’re a pirate
Failure, embarrassment, and other stories
Hello! I’ll get the plugging over with first: I’ve booked Mark Silcox as special guest for Next Level Sketch at Hoopla Impro on 24th April. Come along, we’ve written lots of good sketches and I’m in at least three of them.
I’ve spent approximately 1/3rd of my life on trains. If I’m sad, or anxious, or disassociating, a train is a good space for looking out the window and feeling the artificial purpose of motion.1
It’s where I get a lot of writing done, especially if the people around me are saying everyday, terrible things, because then I have the compulsion to write them down.
For example two twenty-somethings next to me are, as I write, bitching about a mutual friend, claiming she “pronounces her own name wrong”.
And now they’re laughing at her TikToks.
“Oh my god, she’s doing an accent”, says baldy beardy.
“I think she’s in the wrong century”, agrees horsey lady.
I think Katrina should pronounce her name however she likes.
I’m now on a different train, and a middle class parent is trying to convince her son, Earnest, to behave because “they can see how naughty you’re being on CCTV.”
But Earnest, his eyes full of tricks, does not fear the panopticon.
I sometimes wonder what I’d think about in the last moments of my life.
I mean, if it were a particularly comical death, with a set amount of pre-oblivion certainty. Like tripping over a rabbit and falling headlong over an unlikely ravine.
Maybe I’ll think of the time I shouted “yarrrr” at a friend’s housemate in Sheffield, only to learn he had recently suffered a serious eye injury.
Or, as I’m plunging down, I will recall being forced to dance with a belly dancer on a boat in the Bosphorus.2
Or, in those final seconds, I’ll fixate on when I met my then girlfriend’s mother in Yokohama for the first time, and mistook the dog biscuit she offered me for a human biscuit.3
The point I’m trying to make here is I’ve been embarrassing myself for decades and I don’t intend to stop any time soon, ravines notwithstanding.
I’ve not been finding writing easy of late. This is a problem, because writing is the one thing I feel I’m good at. Tennis, rapping, changing duvet covers: at these I’m average at best, but putting mildly diverting words down on a page, sure. I can do that.
I was reading Susan Harrison’s newsletter this morning, in which she opens up about the inner critic, which - for a lot of us - is always there, at your shoulder, telling you everything you’ve done is shit, like a Disney cricket who didn’t get the positivity memo.
Susan is a fabulous writer, performer, and improviser, and so it’s reassuring to read that even she gets her mojo stuck behind the sofa on occasion.
Review - Alvin Liu: Rice, The Glitch, Waterloo
This review initially appeared in the Morning Star
Alvin Liu is from China, where even milquetoast liberals [1] are brutally censored. Still, a thriving standup scene has developed in the past few years in Shanghai and Beijing – though your entire venue might get shut down if someone makes a joke that could even vaguely be construed as a slight against the motherland.
No such problems in Britain – yet – and there are some very funny Chinese comics up-and-coming on the London scene, including Chin Wang and the brilliant Blank Peng.
Liu definitely has the chops to join them, with his by turns universal and deeply personal observations building up to an excellent debut hour.
The set begins as all comedy shows should: with the performer’s mother singing a karaoke song in Mandarin.
And it’s Liu’s relationship with his mother, across decades, continents, viewpoints, and languages, that form the backbone to his material.
He is charm personified, putting this multinational and multilingual crowd immediately at ease – even the people who weren’t expecting it to be in English.
We’re hooked into his world with a barrage of well-honed gags interspersed with quieter, more reflective, but still subversive material – some of which flies over the head of the audience, who seem occasionally unsure of how they are supposed to react.
Particularly brilliant are sections on depression – knowingly presented as a decadent Western indulgence – and Chinese schooling, in which one learns one plus one equals China has a thriving agricultural sector.
Crowd-pleasing dunks on Japan – his perspective on Oppenheimer is worth the price of admission alone – are leavened with clever, unexpected observations on cultural differences over body image, sex, and sexuality.
Liu’s thoughts on oppression, and how self-identity is policed even in the very young, are important in any language.
The conclusion to this hour is strong, but could perhaps be better seeded early in the narrative. The bits on racism is beautifully observed but could do with being further unpacked; Liu’s relationship with the West, via English teachers and American hip hop, is a rich seam worthy of further exploration.
And so, too, is the material about the country Liu and his mother find themselves in.
“Sure we can’t buy freedom, but you can’t buy eggs”, points out Liu in a gleeful reversal of orientalist assumptions. Britain’s economic, cultural and political decline is skewered brilliantly here, and I’m curious to see how it goes down in, say, Dunstable, or Doncaster.
Liu punches up and exposes the ludicrous nature of our own parliament, and of our “two party” system – jokes that seem beyond our current, home-grown comedy establishment, but in a way that is inclusive, easy to access, and very, very funny.
He’s definitely one to watch, and I don’t mean in a surveillance-state kind of way.
That’s it for this week! Do get in touch if there’s anything you’d like to say. There is also a comment section, which feels pretty retro.
It’s also expensive. Thank crivens for the network railcard.
It was during a wedding reception, as part of the “humiliate the groom’s friends” section of proceedings, and didn’t realise I was supposed to give her money to move on to the next English person. I thought she just liked my dancing.
Arigato Gozaimasu, I said, with confidence, as the biscuit went in my mouth and her eyes widened in shock and panic.