Every Monday Zula Bar in Long Street has an open mic comedy show. It’s great because it gives aspiring comedians the opportunity to test their jokes on non-family members and suffer the realities of a pissed, often abusive audience.
Sometimes though, it’s a bit like getting your prostate checked. Not because, when an unfunny guy tanks and you’ve paid thirty bucks at the door, you feel like you’ve been fucked with a fat finger, but because when a nervous twenty-something fails to inspire even a titter, it churns an awkward discomfort in your gut.
It’s an embarrassing feeling – like walking out of a public toilet and realising there’s a tiny wet circle on the front of your shorts – and even though it’s not you up there dodging insults and beer bottles, that hole opens up in the pit of your stomach and you wish you could stuff yourself into it and disappear.
You can blame nerves or stage fright for things like this, but the real culprits are the creators of the TV show Friends.
Because Friends had a cast of characters that we could all relate to on some level, and because witty one-liners were fired fast, we all wanted to be like them.
Art imitated life, and improved on it to such an extent that we strived in our lives to imitate what could loosely be called art. And even though Friends is long gone, we still constantly and unconsciously grasp for snappy comebacks.
It’s as though we suddenly only had three options: Joey, Ross or Chandler for boys, and Rachel, Monica or Phoebe for girls. What we didn’t realise was that, in reality, the parts of them we wanted were all the same.
I wonder if our grandparents’ generation suffered something like this; or if people were just funny or not, and didn’t try to be what they weren’t. Without an oversaturation of sitcoms, I suspect they just made do with whatever personality their parents’ genes gave them.
A mate of mine has a quick acid test to tell if you’re hilarious or hopeless. He reckons that if you have to tell other people’s jokes to be funny, you’re not. Maybe if more people reflected on this we wouldn’t have to excuse ourselves to the balcony to avoid getting caught up in a lynching.
Lynchings are common on a Monday night at Zula. The crowd ruthlessly separates the Weet-Bix from the Cornflakes; recognises the comedy of substance and heckles the recycled, stolen jokes.
The regulars take their laughs seriously.
Reality TV has shown us that for anything to have worth, it must be documented on the goggle-box. So after packing in the beers and a couple puffs of spliff, one leaves vowing to write the SABC and demand a Pop Idols-style comedy show.
The idea inebriatedly snowballs down a mental hill: the judges could be the comedic pioneers of our South African age – Marc Lottering, Kurt Schoonrad, and Julius Malema; the money from the phone-in votes could be used to teach jokes to township children; the winner could bring out a Christmas DVD and star in the next Nandos advert; we’d call it Joke Idol and soon it would be syndicated and imitated worldwide!
But the next morning, with an alcoholic’s headache and a stoner’s hangover, you realise that watching lame stand-up isn’t as entertaining as witnessing an atrocious singer’s comeuppance. Your once globe-rocking idea is discarded on the same pile as laminated books for the bath, and ironing board covers with Jacob Zuma’s face on them.
You slouch back a week later to Zula Comedy Night with a pocketful of soft tomatoes, hoping for a rare gem in amongst the mud and donkey shit, wondering if this world has a place for the deluded comic.
Surely their bravery should be rewarded somehow, so they can move on with their head held high to something they’re good at?
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