A new material night tonight. A chance to develop some more stuff for the Edinburgh show (which starts in just six weeks! Six blink-and-you’ll-miss-them-why-didn’t-I-write this-stuff-in-February weeks! Why do I do this to myself?)
Anyway.
There is something especially daunting about performing untried material. You have no idea – despite your best efforts – if you are about to waste an audience’s time with stuff that seemed ingenious to you a few hours before, but is, in fact, cobblers.
What makes this worse is that, apparently, you can be a comedian for 20-odd years and still, when it comes to new material, despite all your experience, despite all your skills, you just never know – is this going to be shit?
But, like so much else in life, the higher the stakes, the greater the reward. I might end up looking like a fool. (In a bad way, you understand. The wrong kind of fool.) Or I’ll come away beaming, some good new material in my notebook, ready to be polished up into something I’ll still be telling in six months time. Few things make a comedian happier than that.
Wish me luck…