On Sunday nights the King's Head pub in Crouch End hosts a comedy cabaret. There are usually four or five acts with a 'name' headliner rounding off proceedings. I've lived in Coruch End for four years now, and had never been down, but the prospect of Stewart Lee was too much to resist.
It turned out that Stewart Lee had fallen ill, but we somehow doubled our money with Dave Gorman and Reginald D. Hunter taking the second half slots. The night takes place in the pub's basement, which can hold about 100 people comfortably. It filled up from the dark recesses of the back, those unlucky to be late or simply brazen enough to sit at the front were subjected to lots of banter and ridicule as the night went on. At a small night like this where some of the acts are rough around the edges, that's to be expected. And it's easy to mock a Crouch End audience, 'posh' liberals that we are.
But something happened during Reg Hunter's set that I've never seen before. I'm no comedy veteran, but even the night's compere seemed stunned, as did Johnny Vegas and Adam Woods who were spectating at the door with pints in hand. Hunter was recounting how a couple of years ago at the Edinburgh Festival he was accused of anti-Semitism. He had made a joke about denying the Holocaust in Austria. Imagine if you went to Austria, he said, started loudly denying the Holocaust to the extent you were pulled up in front of a judge, who laid his gavel down with the charge, but then you explained you'd actually been denying the Rwandan Holocaust. This got a murmur on the night, and Hunter condeded it was a cleverer joke than it was a funny one. It reads like shit here, I must say.
But then he began to explain that the Jewish Chronicle had sent someone to review his show in search of controversy. He had never heard of the paper, and was surprised to learn it had a comedy section. He told us a friend went on the paper's website to check out the review online the next day, but she called back saying, 'Those Jews! I can't read the review because you've got to pay to subscribe to their site.' This got a big laugh on the night (it's all in the delivery), but then a woman in the front row stood up at the side of the stage and stormed out calling Hunter an 'anti-Semitic c**t'.
Everyone was surprised. Her friend gathered their things and also left, apologising that her mate 'was very drunk'. Hunter was really put off, but he recovered with some very strong material about how women tend to storm out of arguments having the last word. It clearly bothered him that he had been denied the right to reply to quite a serious slander, and he went on to deplore people who deign to be offended on behalf of others. I don't agree with this, I think you can be offended by anti-Semitic comments when you aren't Jewish, simply because the sentiment offends you. But I understand what he meant. The Sachsgate 'scandal' showed that many people are happy to be offended when they get the chance. This audience member was content to sit there through the other acts which took the piss out of (in no particular order) black people, white chavs, white posh people, knife crime, Josef Fritzl and child abuse, Indian call centres, how crap the 7/7 bombings were compared to 9/11, Hungarians etc.
I actually think that Hunter would have slain her if she'd stayed so it's probably best she left. But it made me think that if you're going to a comedy night it has to be on the understanding of witnessing and perhaps suffering equal opportunity abuse that isn't for the easily offended.
At least Hunter has a friend in Steve Coogan, who ended his show at the Hammersmith Apollo on Tuesday with the song 'Everybody's a bit of a c**t', in reference to his portrayal as a cocaine-snorting, stripper-friendly wild man. Coogan's performance featuring Alan Patridge 'and other less successful characters' had received some horrorshow reviews, when Coogan started the tour still using a script. I'm happy to say it's been polished up and it's hilarious. Saxondale is the only character that suffers being removed from his sitcom context. But the second half which is focused on Alan Partidge's Forward Solutions course is absolutely superb and arguably the strongest Partridge material ever. Ross Kemp takes a battering but it's great to see Partridge confirm his place in the comedy pantheon. Greatest comedy character ever? Kiss my face...
