Ultra Slo-mo Knee Graze.

Location: Costa, Teeside Retail Park.

1. More people drinking Hot Chocolate than there are people drinking coffee.
2. Toddler with a bald patch using his wrist-restraint-rope to have a tug of war with his mum. Mum losing.
3. Businessman showing off by drinking a large coffee in a two-handled mug using only   one hand.
4. Two twin teenage boys wearing different clothes but with identical haircuts.

There’s a playground outside – suitable for ages 12 and under. That’s incredibly unfair, I’m much more able to tackle the monkey bars now than I was when I was young/old enough to play on them. I could never do monkey bars – it felt like my sternum was splitting in two, my arms the two wishbone prongs and the little chicken-sharkfin at the top my lovely breastbone, ready to crack under the weight of my ribby abdomen and gangly, flailing limbs.

Growing up, I recall various playgrounds, with various playground surfaces – the one at primary school with a rich, rotting humus of bark chippings; the one at Center Parcs Sherwood with red rubber tarmac that cut down on split skulls but increased the frequency  of friction burns five-fold; the one at the village hall with lush grass and an occasional sprinkling of sheep shit.

It’s rare to find a play area now that has a knee-tearing, razor sharp covering of gritty asphalt, which I imagine was all the rage ‘back in the day’, when men were men, women were subordinated and children were screaming animals that played football in the road, chased rag and bone carts and were regularly abducted. Coming home from a hard day’s play with bleeding shins and half a nose, the septum scraped off on a pebble-dashed wall, was a rite of passage, an everyweek occurrence that shaped generations past, and their aesthetically dubious monostrils.

Total Wipeout : Extreme Playground would be a welcome shot in the arm to a tired format. Children (12 and under) dashing through a nail nettle-strewn course in bare feet, tumbling down greased slides, navigating crawl-tunnels of ever decreasing headroom, funnelled out into the final obstacle – a barbed-wire abseil down a 40-foot wall with a 30-foot rope. Obviously we’d hold it in Argentina, to circumvent health and safety, and let the local Argentinian children watch, but never play. They can go back to their slums of corrugated metal, tiptoeing through streets littered with glass and shit, rusty nails tearing at their skin, gouging out flesh and grinding in TB, before collapsing into a bed of tattered hand-me-down rags that their brother used to wear before he was introduced to the second dimension by the child-hungry wheel of a bus.

Those kids on the play area outside – they’ve got it cushy.

Me, inside, with my ice latté – originally a hot latté, but I am sat by an inexplicably open door – I’m in pain. I want to be out there, playing. So what if I’m far too big for the swings? I could get way higher than them, probably even over the top like I always tried, and always failed, blissfully unaware of the laws of physics and the damage such an achievement would have caused.

At Sherwood Center Parcs, I tried riding my bike on gravel, and quickly discovered how the patella is sort of a ‘stone magnet’, with the tiny bits of rock nestling nicely in my kneeflesh, bedding down, and leaving a small, irregular patch of pale scar tissue when they’d been evicted from my sheltered housing, my skin looking as if it had been shot from close range with a miniature shotgun/blunderbuss hybrid.

Everyone’s got scars on their knees – that’s why psychics often mention it when cold reading – and they show that we did stuff, got it wrong, but it fixed itself. That’s not true of everything, there’s plenty of things that are way beyond fucked, but your knees tend to mend. Although, if they don’t, I recommend titanium. And get the surgeons to put them in back to front so you can walk like a duck. Ducks are cool.

Entertaining children

In July, I’m doing a couple of shows at a childrens’ festival in Wales.

It’s a slight departure from gigging to unruly crowds who are prone to shouting; to unruly crowds who are prone to shouting but aren’t incapacitated with booze, and instead hyped up with sugar. I imagine that the regulation of certain E numbers has made dealing with kids easier, but the stage times of 10am and noon certainly make these shows interesting – who’s even up and about that early, and moreover, who wants to laugh at that time? Kids, clearly (or at least their parents, who use it as excuse to take an eye off the children for 40 minutes [who can blame them?]).

I’ve done a few shows for kids, and they’re good fun, but also distinct from regular shows that have kids in the audience.

While at kids’ shows I’m focusing on entertaining the children, doing things that they can laugh at – a list of which would read:

1. Poo.
2. Wee.
3. Any combination of the above in solid, liquid or gaseous form.

I’m not far off being a kid myself, and I can vaguely remember what else was funny – defiance of authority, talking animals and general rudeness. Hence my onstage companion of a shoe-stealing seal who doesn’t do as he’s told, blows raspberries, and makes up songs about things that the kids shout out (see above list).

He’s called Vyrnwy and that’s him on the left (bottom right is his brother).

While it’s always good to lob in a few jokes for the parents (Vyrnwy’s friend Alfred the well-read red squirrell is constantly “Looking for somewhere to bury his nuts”), the emphasis is always on the kids, and making them laugh. Hence, parents might sit there wondering how a seal in a Wellington boot hopping around the stage, is funny, but as long as the children are giggling and throwing more shoes at him, they’re happy.

Shows with kids in the audience are quite different – shows such as The Oxford Imps‘ Edinburgh runs; Racing Minds’ ‘Aaaand Now For Something Completely Improvised’; and last year’s AAA Batteries (Not Included) with Adam and Liam, were all family friendly, and advertised as such. The Imps’ general audience would be families, a straggle of students, a handful couples, and a bunch of grandparents and children, while the other two shows were quite similar (all these shows were between noon and five o’clock) in their make-up. As such, there’d usually be a few children between around 5 and 8 years old who were probably a bit too young to fully understand a comedy show, but we found that they’d be enjoying it anyway. Laughter is infectious, and while performing a routine based on Roman numerals might not fly with a solely kids’ audience, when performed to a room of adults with a couple of children amongst them, you’d catch the kids chuckling – while some may have been old enough to have learnt all the information needed to get the jokes, they joined in, and found something funny in the tones of voice, expressions, movements or similar – pretty much like a lot of the adults.

This isn’t to say that we ignored children at our non-kids’ shows – we made efforts to involve them, occasionally getting them on stage in the shows (often uninvited, with great fourth-wall-breaking consequences in the improv), and chatting with them in the stand-up. One five year old was most likely the reason for a nice review that we got for AAA Batteries…, as she sat on the stage eating raisins, while cuddling a dinosaur and waving a glowstick, politely answering questions in a bluntly sweet manner, and eventually lending us her toy pterodactyl to rap with, providing a lovely finale. Other notable events were a discussion with a bright young girl called Freya about Norse mythology and the roots of her name, and a particularly precocious boy commandeering the stage to publicise his YouTube channel and describe in great detail his best videos.

Having children in the audience provides something a bit different, a departure from normal stand-up shows, and in my experience, can make them a little more special. Plus, if it weren’t for kids in audiences, we wouldn’t have this:

It’d be interesting to hear of any other comics’ experiences with kids in the audience – in the meantime, I’m going to get ready for my next one.

How not to do a kids’ show.