When The Truth Lies

I've seen Reginald D Hunter 5 or 6 times before.

His latest show was a worry as reviews were bizarrely polarised. 

In the Midst of Crackers received either 5 stars or 1 star in reviews and not much in between. A bit strange I thought..

Well, I can reassure you (a little bit), it is a 3 star show, and the first hour is 4 stars, before one of the most extraordinary things you will ever see on a stage occurs. Reginald D Hunter capsizes his own boat.

So what went wrong?

Well, in short, he betrays the trust of his public , alienates the audience, and never gets them back. Entertainment is about creating "state" but Reginald D Hunter's mojo for this, well... it must be lying in state.

Specifically though, what went wrong?

After a very good first hour, Reg's seppuku was set in motion by, but crucially was not ultimately caused by, a  joke about rape. Shocking? Not at all...this is the UK in 2013. We've heard all this before.  Rape jokes were very popular about three or four years ago. It's quaint that Reg is still doing this material.

The joke was fine but well... familiar, even a little old.

Of course,  being Reg he didn't so much tell a joke as perform a story piece about rape. Perform it so compellingly, that in convincing himself, he convinced his audience. (Is that what they call method acting?)  And this was a perfectly serviceable joke. SPOILER ALERT I'm going to tell you what it is.

This will not be the word perfect but it will build a bit of the atmosphere the audience experienced. He quietly tells a story of a friend of his who was having a lot of difficulty in personal relationships and her life in general was decaying  with depression and mistrust.

He takes extra painstaking efforts to deliver this in his most honest, truest delivery. He stands stiller. He speaks quieter. It's deliberate.

She opens up to Reg and tells them that she was raped by someone she trusted when she was a lot younger and since then she has had difficulty trusting men. She had never been able to call the police as she felt humiliated and embarrassed.  (Are you laughing yet?). These feelings and decisions were projected into the rest of her life. She draws a distinction with her friend Reg, noting that he'd never thrust himself upon her physically. To which Reg quips."Well, I never knew you wouldn't call the police"

Fine, a perfectly serviceable, edgy, well-constructed joke for open-minded people. So what's the problem? We are at a live comedy gig. We like Reg...so what?

Well, so what ... is that he lost the audience for the rest of the show. His practised,  deliberate performance , delivered such malice. It could've been quickly brushed away , with his undoubted skill. But he didn't bother. He left it leaking, hanging, growing. The next half an hour was painful. He found a few laughs in the end, but he thought he would treat himself to several double vodkas along the way. My guess is he had a few more afterwards. I would have.

He seemed vaguely aware that something had gone wrong, but didn't seem to know what it was. He was lost, searching for someone or something to blame.  He didn't know how to get out.

It's reasonable to believe that an audience approaching 2000 people, that several people in the audience had endured a sexual attack at some point. How much deference we are supposed to paid to this in such a performance, I don't know. I'm not a professional comedian. But a cold sadness went through that room, of which Yvette Fielding and Derek Acorah would have been thrilled.

Cue an unprovoked attack on a couple of people at the front who had not heckled him. He was a couple of large vodkas in at this point and presumably didn't like the look of them. His attack "I'd like to see you two fuck" . Big laugh! Bit weird. The people he was attacking looked unhappy for a prolonged time. He wanted to chat with them, but this is an experienced audience. He had a microphone and had already used it as a tool to rape one presumably fictional family friend, the majority of the audience and now was looking for further victims.

Three vodkas in, judgement was waning. And  there was a fourth  to come.

He found the time to have a dig at Bernard Manning whom he defined as a "racist". I'm afraid I'm with Stephen Fry on this one when he referred to the late Bernard Manning as the greatest joke teller of his time.   Reg has some work to do to achieve this standard. Perhaps he might focus on this instead of talking ill of the dead.

The reason I remembered this moment was that Reg made an interesting distinction between his own "racial" humour, and the "racist" humour that Bernard performed. What an elegantly convenient, conceit. No, I mean it. Really, really, elegant.

But when Bernard Manning told us that an Englishman, an Irishman and a Pakistani went into a pub, we knew it was a joke.

Several reviewers noted people leaving the theatre with looks of dejection, anxiety in their faces rather than smiles. A friend who went  to the show told me they woke up feeling sad over the following days. I believe Reg did harm that night. More than Bernard Manning did in his entire career.  Comedy has to reflect the times, it has to play to the people, not to the ego. Bernard never lost sight of that.

Reg may console himself with some sycophantic tweets.

But he doesn't need to panic, he has a further ready-made excuse backed up by his entourage. He blames a secret mysterious character he knows as .... LIVE Reg.

In fact, let's get rid of that one once and for all.

"People think I'm the Reg that you see on Have I Got News For You. Live Reg ain't like that".

I don't know how you write a YAWN in text. But consider it done.

It's a silly conceit. Britain was at the forefront of edgy comedy when Reg was in diapers.

Why would an experienced comedian choose to commit suicide on stage The only possible excuse, other than contempt for his audience (which cannot be the case) would perhaps be the challenge of getting the audience back on board and the show back on track, in the quickest possible time. Reg is more than capable of doing this. I would have bet real money he'd have achieved this within 30 seconds.

But in Newcastle the Reg  I saw didn't even know the crowd was lost. The black feeling oozed through the auditorium like an slick, dragging us tiringly through 50 more painful minutes. Minutes which contained some good material. But when you throw the towel in so compellingly, you don't get to take it back.

And sadly, Reg doesn't do 45 minutes halves. Nooooooooo! He thinks is playing an arena every night. He wanders on the time that suits him after the interval (having forced on us a comedian we never choose, like we don't have better things to do...usually someone fairly shaggy and frequently Australian), leaves when he feels like it, and last week (which is how long I've waited to write this in the hope I would feel differently) seeming not to care about the mood he left behind in others.

Intervals aren't only for audiences who kindly lubricated themselves for him to make his show go well. They are also an opportunity for the comedian too. One he sorely needed.

I could equally have titled this reflection "When The Truth Dies".

I'm not sure the  artist currently known as Reginald D Hunter, always knows where the truth lies but I don't think it's the end of the fourth double vodka.

He needs to reframe "Live Reg" into "Lairy Reg", something that is a little more honest, a little less grand, that plays a little less to its own sense of self. Because currently his sense of self is misfiled.

Reg considers himself a thinker, more so perhaps than a comedian,  but if he takes only his own advice or that of Twitter, he could stay lost  for a while.

I love a bit of psychology with my comedy. Perhaps if he wants to see it done really well, he should go and watch Daniel Kitson.

When you are a true therapist or psychologist or clinician, there are responsibilities, ethics, a code of practice. And even as a comedian, perhaps even more so, you have to respect the same principles.

There is one overriding true principle.

And it is this.

Do. No. Harm.

Too many years ago, I saw a comedian in my local comedy club who signed off with these words which I have always loved and  remembered.

"Support your local comedy club. It's the only place you can go to hear the truth".

Do you remember that, Reg?

Now ask yourself the same question.

Without the comma.