Aus|buhen - To Boo

To be booed for doing a shoddy job at making people laugh, especially if they’ve paid for the non-privilege, is an expected part of the whole stand-up comedy thing. While most people will just sit quietly, feeling the classic expressionless stare will do enough to register their lack of amusement, if some weren’t willing to vocalise their distaste, stand-ups would quickly get comedically complacent. Given, my experience is limited to two gigs thus far - admittedly a pitiful amount - but the fear of someone finding me so unfunny they’d be prepared to stand up, mid-set to boo or shout out an insult, is enough to make me work a zillion times harder on my material. Actually, the fear of those expressionless stares contributes to those zillion times only marginally less. Even more actually, the fear of silence for even a single punch line contributes to those zillions times only a bit more marginally less. Which is silly, because clearly not everyone is going to find everything funny. Still, if you know the venue, you should be able to have some idea of what to expect in the crowd. Common sense dictates you’d avoid clever jokes in the company of thick people, cancer-based quips at Jade Goody’s funeral, and of course dead, spazzed-up kid jokes at the Conservative Party conference. I’ve mentioned to several friends that during my unplanned fortnight in North America (that should be poorly documented on my blog, improvisednorthamerica.blogspot.com as of next week) I’d love to perform at least one open-mike gig in front of a foreign audience. I’ve got at least ten minutes of mildly humorous crap that could potentially be tailored to work in the US, but I’m not sure. One joke I was going to try out at my next local performance was about me being poor and my mates bragging that they’re more well off. A friend smugly says to me, “I’ve just come into some money.” I say “Man, that’s just ostentatious. I have to come into value bog roll and Nuts magazine,” Working backwards, ‘Nuts’ could be exchanged for any local low-grade tit mag, and ‘value bog roll’ to a cruddy American toilet tissue brand. The main question would be whether they’d use the expression ‘come into some money’ - if not, the joke would die completely, leaving me open to heckle and/or handgun attack. Were the whole gig to go totally balls-up, it’d still definitely be an experience! A ton of rappers make getting shot look well cool, and even when they don’t survive usually end up having distinguished posthumous careers anyway. Which would be nice. But this ought to end soon, and I just wanted to say apologies for turning this into another one of those dull talk-about-me pieces. I’ll try better next time. After all, the thought of you - one of my four readers - booing into your computer screen makes me want to cry tears of salty eye-liquid. That’s basically your standard stuff. For tears of blood you‘d need to be enraged enough to send me a strongly-worded letter bomb packed with sharp, peeper-piercing goodness. That’d certainly teach me good. Or well. Whatever.

Gameboy - Gameboy

Well haven’t I have been awfully lazy recently? It’s been over a week since last tapping out any random German dictionary-based idiocy, which makes me feel as impotent, in textual terms, as a wrinkled, eighty-nine year old set of cock and balls. Whenever there’s been a gap in my writings this long, I’ve had the excuse of being away - either making that obligatory twice-yearly trek up north to slake my family’s relentless attention-hunger, or exploring foreign lands, mostly while drinking my face off. Even then, I usually wrote a large amount of introspective bollocks on a napkin, beer mat or spare limb. This week, however, there’s nothing. Besides watching my usual can’t-be-arsed-to-get-out-of-bed hour or three of the BBC News channel, eating cake, and sticking on the occasional film, I’ve not done much else. Oh, unless you count the several hours of XBox 360 that seems to have, with cold efficiency, stolen every other waking minute. (Not counting heading downstairs for a cakey-refill.) The bastard. (The Xbox, not the coconut sponge.) It‘s just mad how much gaming has evolved since I was a kid. The opiate, the element making today’s games so horrendously addictive is the incorporation of the internet, allowing you to have ‘friends’ who, with XBox Live! become instant piss-taking voyeurs. When you log on, it tells you what game they’re playing and precisely what it is they‘re doing. Microsoft’s villainous masterstroke was the adding of Achievements that give you points toward your Gamerscore - a number that lets everyone know how utterly shit you are at computer games. Say you kill Mr X on game Y, you’ll get an achievement. All your friends can see instantly which ones you have or don‘t have, and therefore poke fun accordingly. This means if you’ve got any shred of misplaced pride, you’ll spend fifty billion hours in a futile bid to get that bigger score, not caring that you’re drying out your contact lenses, giving yourself a painful, George Best-esque bloodshot-eye makeover. Eons ago you could make up all sorts of boastful crap about what crazy Mario or Tetris levels you’d got to on your (I sense you’ve been craving tenuous, so….taaa-daaa!) Gameboy, but now you have to put your control pad where your mouth is and actually do it. With the accompanying microphony-headset, XBox Live! players can also enjoy masses of shit-talking with thousands of more than willing opponents. “Get the fuck off my team you loser, you suck!” These people are not only displaying their base-level anti social prowess by staying indoors playing video games all day, but they’re ramping it up to new heights by being absolute wankers to everyone in a virtual world too! They should have their fingers broken, then sawn off. Then reattached in the wrong places. Fancy your smashed-up thumb as your middle finger? No? Or all ten crunched-to-fuck digits on a single hand? Well stop being such a belligerent bell-end, Mr ILoveKittens93, and maybe you’ll avoid a violent - but in no way sexual - re-fingering. Well, maybe a little bit sexual. Ten on one hand? And this has just got horrible, but thankfully my Gamerscore urgently needs raising, so that’s it.