Brenda Monk Is Funny (28 page)

‘I was in CARE.’

‘Good, then you’ll have plenty to talk about on stage. Spare a thought for the rest of us who don’t have great lakes of self-important teenage pain to draw on.’

Brenda wasn’t sure where all this was coming from but she had a sense that it had been building up for a long time. She was suddenly shaking with rage and before her eyes Cody became every comedian, every
person
who had ever undermined her, insulted her, belittled or just plain ignored her since the day she first met Jonathan. She tried to get herself back under control. She would be on stage in less than twenty minutes and this was not the vibe she had been hoping for.

‘Look, I’m sorry I said that. Have a good gig, OK?’ Brenda said with immense will power.

‘Fuck you, Gag Hag,’ Cody replied and turned her back on Brenda, who fought every single fibre in her being to not shove her very hard against the table. If this little bitch didn’t get thrown out of the competition tonight she would give up comedy on the spot, Brenda thought, knowing full well she wouldn’t.

The show began. The compere did fifteen minutes but he was not on form and his warm-up was lacklustre. For this reason it was impossible for Brenda to get a true feel for the crowd before she walked on. It took every single ounce of mental strength, skill, determination and suppression of a natural instinct to panic and run away that Brenda had to give a performance that vaguely represented her ability. At one stage, as she let a medium-sized laugh roll back through the room, she had glanced at her feet and entertained herself with the idea of clicking her red shoes together and instantly being at home. And then remembered with a sickening jolt that she was on stage, competing for her livelihood, and she really needed to fucking concentrate.

In the end, she had been good, well, competent, but she knew she could have been better and that really pissed her off. To add torture to terror she would also now have to sit and watch all the remaining acts whilst trying to figure out if she stood a chance of going through. She had gone down well, but someone could easily top her – it wouldn’t take much.

Cody stomped out fourth and did exactly the kind of material Brenda had known she would, full of achingly self-conscious anecdotes about how she didn’t fit in with anyone in her bleak home town, twisted fantasies about killing people designed to appeal to the kind of men she was desperate to be attractive to, and liberal use of the phrase, ‘I guess I’m just wrong in the head’. She got some laughs though, and had one joke that Brenda had grudgingly enjoyed. But she was nowhere near as good as at least three of the other comics. Four if Brenda included herself, which she daren’t at this stage. Given that only two could go through to the semi-final it seemed obvious that Cody would be going home disappointed, which was of some comfort to Brenda.

The format of the competition allowed the judges to eliminate three comedians, then choose one from the three remaining for a guaranteed place in the semi-final. As the six stood along the front of the stage to face the judges and the audience for a second time that night, three names were called. Brenda’s was not one of them.

Cody’s was though, and she clumped off the stage with a scowl and a middle finger upturned to the judges, clearly feeling that this was just another in a long line of injustices and that these tossers would live to regret their decision when she was famous and they were in need of a job. A fantasy she would surely nurture in her bedroom that night until it was as real to her as anything else was. Brenda did not change her facial expression, but inside her a plank fell. First hurdle just about cleared, but she wasn’t home and dry yet. She was glad to see Cody go, but still couldn’t help but empathise – it could, she felt, so easily have been her.

The head judge, having been schooled by TV talent shows, left as long a pause as he dared before naming the person who would definitely go through: an extraordinarily eccentric twenty-two-year-old art college graduate who dressed like an Edwardian dandy but did truly hilarious material about the contents of all the various gossip magazines, in triumphant vindication of never judging a book by its cover.

Brenda’s guts sank to her shiny red shoes – click, click, click.

She stood next to the man in his fifties who had retired from his day job as a county council admin assistant in order to pursue his dream to be a comedian and waited to see what the result of the very unscientific public vote would be.

For the only remaining place in the semi-final would be decided by audience cheers. The compere stood by the plastic ‘Laugh-o-meter’, a garish construction with a manually operated dial in the middle. As Brenda’s name was called, the compere mimed listening to the crowd as they screamed and applauded and whooped and pretended the arrow was quivering under his touch. The audience responded by increasing the volume and two very loud shouts of support from a group of rugby players allowed the compere to push the arrow up to the line that divided ‘Side-splitting’ and ‘Gut-busting’. That was as much as she was going to get.

It was now the turn of the fifty-year-old. Though he had been good, the audience liked Brenda better, and the cheering was markedly quieter. This was obvious to everyone and though the compere tried to introduce tension by making the arrow rise high, then fall, then rise, then fall, it eventually settled in the part of the Laugh-o-meter called ‘Stomach-clutching’ and so Brenda had won. She had won. Well, not won exactly, but scraped herself a place in the semi-final, and tonight that felt like winning. It took a moment for it to sink in. The light fractured and the sound distorted. She was through to the semi-final by a whisker. Or a side-split, depending how you chose to quantify it.

Brenda was subdued and Pete could see that she wasn’t happy. They left the venue fairly rapidly after the result was called, but not before Brenda had smiled with entirely faked sincerity at Cody who stuck up her middle finger again and carried on drinking.

Brenda was quiet in the taxi back to their hotel. She was quiet in the lift on the way up to their floor, and she was quiet as they walked down the corridor to their room. Pete swiped the key card several times before he got a green light. ‘Do it more slowly,’ were the only words Brenda uttered during this time and they walked in to a turned down bed and a chocolate on each pillow.

‘I shouldn’t have had sex,’ Brenda murmured to herself.

‘Sorry?’

‘Um… I… I think maybe, maybe it’s not good to have sex just before a gig.’

Pete looked hard at Brenda and went wordlessly into the bathroom. She sat on the bed in a daze until Pete came out.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I think having sex just before I go on stage is a bad idea.’ Pete let out a laugh that was not especially filled with mirth.

‘What, like Rocky? Or Frankel?’

‘Yes, yes, maybe a bit like that. It is a bit like being a boxer or a racehorse. You know, you have to keep all the energy inside, so it just comes out on stage.’

Pete blinked and did not conceal the fact that he considered this pronouncement to be horse shit of the highest order. Brenda continued sitting on the edge of bed, her hands in her lap like a Buddha.

‘I know you think it sounds stupid.’

Pete did not respond immediately. Brenda continued:

‘The trouble is if I have sex before a gig I’m too… content, or, I don’t know exactly, all I know is that I was soft when I went into that green room and so I wasn’t prepared for that little bitch and it threw me off and I didn’t do enough on stage.’

‘You got through!’

‘Yes, but not safely, it wasn’t a done deal.’

‘So when can I have sex with you, Brenda? When?’

Pete’s irritation popped its cap.

‘You know, this never used to bother you. We used to have sex all the time whether you had a gig or not. But now… now, when can I see you? Or talk to you? Or introduce you to my friends? Or eat dinner with you at a normal human time? I can’t on a gig day, I can’t after a gig, I can’t on an off day… when? When’s the magical time when you can take a short break from this great and noble pursuit of comedy? This vocation of yours, this
wonderful vocation?
’

A distant echo of a conversation long forgotten filled Brenda’s head.

A voice… Her voice… Saying this thing, this exact same thing, to Jonathan.

She smiled to herself.

‘Why are you smiling? What’s funny?’

‘Everything’, Brenda said softly, ‘everything’s funny.’

Pete looked defeated. He sat down next to her on the bed they had been physically joined together on four hours earlier. Brenda looked at her hands, her ears now deaf with realisation. When she spoke her voice was muffled in her own head. But still the words came out, though she wasn’t sure exactly who was forming them.

‘I can’t do this any more, Pete. I’m sorry.’

‘Can’t do what?’ he said remotely, though he knew perfectly well.

‘I can’t do comedy and us. I can’t do both. I can’t make you happy like this and I can’t make myself happy either. I want to be the sort of person who goes out with the sort of person you are, but I can’t. I’m not. You’re miserable and I don’t want that.’

‘I’m not,’ said Pete in a broken voice, ‘I’m not miserable.’

‘But you are though. You are.’

He couldn’t contradict her.

‘If I’m going to be a comedian, like properly a comedian, I can’t be in a relationship at the same time.’

Pete nodded, he’d given up, all the energy he’d expended ‘not minding’ suddenly deserted him and he crumpled inside.

‘I’m really sorry. I really am… I wish it was different.’

‘Maybe one day it will be,’ said Pete.

‘Maybe,’ said Brenda, and they lay down together quietly and went to sleep.

Brenda now realised with horrifying clarity how crazy she’d been to think she would be making a living out of stand-up comedy within a year of her first gig, which made it all the more important that she win this competition. Money was ever-dwindling with little prospect of a radical turn-around any time soon. If she won the competition, she would be guaranteed paid gigs pretty much overnight. She knew now she was not going to stop doing this, so she had to make it work somehow. She had no time for the self-doubt fluttering round the windows and perching on the sills. She must simply press on, girded within, blind and deaf to the crushing arm of reason and rationale.

The semi-final was around the corner, and by coincidence fell on her thirtieth birthday – time was marching on. Brenda was looking forward to being thirty, or rather, ‘entering her thirties’. She had never felt right as a twenty-something, she was not light-hearted enough by nature to do that traditionally hedonistic decade justice and though she’d had some very debauched nights, she had always felt she ought to be getting on with something else. And the thirties were now considered to be the period in a person’s life when they really started working hard, making something, building something that would last a lifetime. In many cases this would be a family, but for Brenda that was so far on the horizon it might as well be off the chart. What Brenda was building was a career. She was raising a brood of jokes that would serve her for many years to come, and it was a full-time occupation.

With Pete out of the picture Brenda could devote all her time and energy to comedy. As May began, the month of both seminal birthday and semi-final, she was riding a wave of good gigs and feeling high. She felt the need for stage time all the time and was scratchy and restless on nights where she had no booking. On these evenings she would often go down to a stand-up club just to hang out and watch the show and she now counted several dozen working circuit comedians as friends. So she was always welcomed and hours were spent after gigs just sitting in green rooms shooting the shit, obsessing about jokes and trying to say the most fucked up things they could think of in order to amuse one another. These were jokes that would never see the light of stage – they would likely offend the most broad-minded of punters – but were a way to let off steam and explore boundaries of taste, or lack thereof. Nights like these felt like home to Brenda. They had when she had been Jonathan’s girlfriend, but then she had always been behind a piece of invisible glass, not really one of them. Now she was firmly in place, one more cousin in the extended family.

Brenda was thinking about the semi-final constantly now. She still had horrified flashbacks to the second heat, and how close she felt she had come to missing out. She was grateful to the audience for putting her through, but she distrusted it too. Audiences could be fickle, and she had a suspicion that the loud cheer from the table of rugby players that had pushed her to victory had been more mocking than genuinely supportive. It could so easily have gone the other way. She needed to be the best, incontrovertibly the best, and leave nothing to chance. She was now consistently gigging four or even five times a week and would happily do more if she could get them. She had at last played some weekend gigs in smaller clubs for small amounts of money, box office splits (the most she had made like this was £12.50, which felt like a fortune) and sausage rolls. One promoter had even attempted to pay her with a bag of raw chicken wings, which she had declined on basic health and safety grounds – they had felt warm to the touch.

Brenda woke one afternoon to a text from Jonathan who seemed hilariously unable to comprehend that she, or indeed anyone, was in a different time zone to him. Although to be fair she now had her own personal time zone that bore little resemblance to anything a normal working person would recognise.

‘Call me now. I mean it. Call me.’

It had been sent nine hours earlier, around the time Brenda was going to bed. She must have just missed him. She made a cup of coffee, ate a slice of toast, had a quick perusal of the papers and various websites she regularly checked and then picked up her phone and dialled his number. He answered straight away – possibly a life-time first.

‘Brenda, where the fuck have you been?’

‘I’ve been asleep?’

‘Asleep? It’s the middle of the afternoon.’

‘Well, yes fair enough, it is now, but you actually texted me at 5am my time. I assume you weren’t expecting an immediate response then.’

‘Whatever, look, you have to come out here as soon as possible.’ ‘To LA?’

‘Yes! Where else?’

‘Well, I don’t know where you are at any given moment.’

‘When can you come?’

‘I can’t come.’

‘You have to. Seriously, Brenda, I need you here. If what we had means anything to you, you have to come.’

‘Why? What for?’

‘It’s Lloyd, he’s totally fucked me… us over.’

‘How?’

‘The double-gig thing, he’s just… look, I’ll explain it when you get here.’

‘When I
get there
? What’s the matter with you? It’s not a quick ride down the Northern Line.’

‘So how soon can you come? You might be able to get on a flight this evening. There’s usually one around eleven.’

Brenda amused herself with the thought that there was a time when she might have actually considered flying to LA with this amount of notice, just because Jonathan asked her to.

‘Jonathan, listen to me. I’m not coming, I’ve got things to do.’

‘What things?’

‘Gigs, writing.’

‘Yeah but not real gigs.’

‘They’re real to me.’

‘Brenda, I need you. For god’s sake, I don’t ask for much.’

‘You don’t ask for anything and neither do I. What the hell is the matter anyway?’

‘Lloyd… I mean, that fucker, I literally can’t believe, him… Lloyd has sold the fucking double gig format to some big TV company.’

‘But I thought that was the whole point?’

‘Yes, it was. But it was supposed to fucking well have me in it, the slippery little bastard.’

Brenda was struggling to comprehend what Jonathan was saying, but if she was right in her first guess a wide, rich seam of uncontrollable laughter was opening up inside her.

‘Jonathan, are you… are you telling me he’s sold the show and
recast you
?’

‘YES! At last she gets it, yes, that’s what the slimy cunt’s done. Can you fucking believe it?’

Brenda was now fizzing with mirth and she struggled to keep her voice even.

‘But… But how? I thought you co-owned it.’

‘I thought so too, but apparently there’s some fucking “key man clause”. Some LA lawyer type bullshit I didn’t know about that gives him the right to override me in the event of a deal. And apparently the fucking shit-hole TV execs want a “name” in it for ratings purposes, or ad revenue or whatever. It’s all fucking bullshit.’

‘I don’t see what I can do about it. My contract signed everything over to you and Lloyd. Well, Lloyd, as it turns out.’

‘You need to come out here and we can present a united front. If we go in there, and Joan’s totally on board with this, she says she’ll even consider repping you if she sees you gig over here. Don’t worry, I can set that up. Anyway, if we go in there together and say we’re going to sue, you know, or that Lloyd has stitched us up, then they might get cold feet about it all and drop it. It’s got to be both of us though they won’t care if it’s just me. And you should see who they’ve got to play you, Bren. Honestly, it’s like some LA actress who’s about as funny as lung cancer. And they’re even giving us different names, for GOD’S SAKE. I mean, it’s not right, Brenda. We’re the artists, we’re the ones writing the material. It’s just totally against everything for them to just steal it like this. You have to come out here and defend your right to your own material. It’s a matter of principle.’

Brenda stopped laughing. She regained control of herself and spoke firmly.

‘Listen, Jonathan, you didn’t give a shit about me and my rights when you knew I’d signed that contract giving you and Lloyd ownership over everything I said that night. Do you have any idea how badly that fucked me up?’

‘But that’s exactly what I’m talking about, Bren. You can come out here now and reclaim your rights. You can reclaim your material.’

Brenda thought back to all the stuff she’d said on stage that night and shuddered.

‘Jonathan, let me explain something to you. I don’t want any of that material back. I don’t care what you do with it. As soon as I realised what you and Lloyd had done to me with that contract I wrote a whole book of burner jokes to use once, and once only. My style’s completely different now. None of that stuff is of any use to me. As far as I’m concerned, they can have it. And if they’ve called her something else then so much the better. It’s nothing to do with me. It’s not my problem.’

Jonathan was very quiet before he spoke.

‘So you’re just going to leave me to sort all this out?’

‘Yes.’

When he spoke again, his voice was full of reproach.

‘You’ve really let me down, Bren. I never… I never thought this of you. I thought we were tight, I thought we were simpatico. I thought you were on the team.’

‘I’m my own team now, Jonathan. I don’t have time to be on yours. And to be honest I never felt terribly valued even when I was, except as some kind of vaginal joke generator.’

‘You’ve changed,’ was Jonathan’s final gambit.

‘Yes. I have,’ was Brenda’s response.

And she hung up.

Semi-final day. Birthday. D-Day, as in Do or Die Day. The semi-final was in London, so no need to travel. This was good. It meant Brenda could devote all her energies to preparing herself. There was a school of thought that said the less preparation you do, the better you’ll be on the night, but Brenda’s temperament did not bear this out. She liked to be as prepared as possible so that if anything went wrong she had a well-constructed, reliable launch pad to take off from. If she had to go in another direction spontaneously, she could but only, she had found, if she was settled and sorted mentally beforehand. She woke around noon and made herself some breakfast: one hard-boiled egg sliced onto a piece of toast, economical and delicious. She then allowed herself an hour or so of messing about online, replying to a couple of Facebook messages and even responding on Twitter to three people who had taken the trouble to tweet her positive feedback from gigs they had seen her at.

Then she had a shower, put on a pair of yoga pants that had never seen any actual yoga and a T-shirt and around 3pm she sat down with her notebook to go through her set list. She broadly knew what she wanted to do but it never hurt to go over it again. Around 5pm she got changed into her show outfit, put on her make-up and left the house.

She arrived at the venue just before 6pm, but instead of going in she went to a pub nearby and killed another forty-five minutes with a small glass of wine and a last check of her material. She then took out a pen and wrote a list of words on the back of her hand. She had experimented with performing with no prompts and ideally wanted to wean herself off this habit in due course but tonight was no time to start changing the routine. At 6.45pm she left her table and went two doors down to the club that would decide her destiny.

Inside were three other comedians. Two would go through to the final. There was another semi-final taking place tonight in Manchester and so a total of four would become finalists that night. The final itself would be held at the Edinburgh Festival in August and for one person it would change everything, every single thing. The three comics sat in the green room were clearly sick with nerves and Brenda felt glad she didn’t look like them, until she caught sight of herself in a mirror and realised she did. This being London, it was likely that more established comedians who were not gigging that night would pop in to see how the evening went and to cast judgement on each act, reporting back to others in the days to come. Brenda had performed here before and that gave her a small advantage. She knew how this room absorbed laughter rather than amplified it and so she wouldn’t be put off when the crowd’s reaction sounded more muted than it did in other places. For anyone else who had not had the benefit of this experience they could easily lose their stride a little while they worked out that it was the acoustics and not necessarily their material that was at fault.

Brenda nodded and smiled to the others and they all exchanged some light pleasantries. Apart from the odd self-appointed combatant like Cody, these competitions were softer backstage than most normal gigs. No-one had much spare energy to put into impressing each other, it must all be ploughed into the stage time. The MC was a well-liked, youngish circuit comedian and former runner-up of this very competition who was just beginning to get the odd spot on a TV panel show. This had instantly given him more money, and more hunger for success – he had now seen what could be done if television came knocking for real and he also enjoyed a very minor amount of celebrity that he wore with a self-conscious shrug, trying to seem weary of it though he was secretly giddy with this new-found recognition. He was excited to be here with these novices, able to dispense words of wisdom and comfort from the relative lofty heights of his mid-range status. He assured them all that he would give them the best introductions he could and prepare the crowd so they wouldn’t walk on cold.

Brenda was on third. She was the only woman in this semi-final and so third on was the expected spot in order to break it up, in terms of gender. She didn’t mind. Third was fine by her, though she felt a flare of ego at not being last – was this the beginnings of a desire to headline, she wondered? If so, she was pleased: ambition was to be encouraged at all times. Brenda had no intention of being one of those who were considered great by their peers but never troubled the wider public consciousness. Not for Brenda that dread moniker the ‘comedians’ comedian’ – no thanks. There were ways of remaining true to yourself and having some degree of success, Brenda felt sure of that. She wanted to be a working comedian, not some kind of life-long human art experiment.