Answering Back

About six weeks ago I went to a one-man comedy show. Accidentally.

In fact I just turned up by accident an hour  early for a show that I really wanted to see called 'Butt Kapinski'. The venue was a little hard to find (The Liquid Rooms annex... The clue was in the "annex"... should it have an 'e', should it not have an 'e'.. does anybody really know?). I spoke to the chap flyering at the door for a while. I wasn't quite clear on the message which was essentially that his show was about to start in same venue so I was early.

There was a bit of confusion so I walked in.

I entered the darkened room to see one obvious father on the front row with perhaps his 12-year-old son.

I walked out, feeling bad that I was leaving the two of them in there and even more guilty that I had to walk past the perfectly pleasant fellow was doing the show, but I had engaged at some length, now to my regret.

It was a beautiful day so I didn't really wants to spend all afternoon in the same dark dingy room.

But I felt a bit guilty.

So I went back in to support, well frankly... The audience.

He gave a perfectly amiable 50 min of his life so far. 

I liked his show. It was mildly amusing, highly real, and they had one or two props (a flipchart and a tape recorder) that made the time go faster.

None this is relevant to why I'm writing this.

There was a moment in the middle where he decided to involve the audience.

That's what you do at this type of thing.

So he asked us a question.

All three of us.

And it was this.

What sort of things make up a "real man"?...Anybody?.. He looked out hopefully at the front row... well, there weren't any other rows to look out on.

I gave him a fairly quick answer, partly because it was a fairly cosy arrangement and it didn't seem like the one and a half other members of the audience were going to offer anything any time soon.

He had told that he had asked this question 28 times for his 28 previous "preview " shows all around the country.

And it became apparent there was a standard response.

What makes a "man"?

We weren't going meta, here it was a simple question.

In retrospect the answers were known to be the likes of muscles, DIY, beer, football and fucking. You know... things like that.

However..

"Compassion", I had already instinctively responded.

He looked a little stunned.

It wasn't a faraway look in his eyes because he was only two feet in front of me.

But he took a moment.

He reminded me of the number of times he's done the show. And then infrequency of a similar response.

Because the audience was small and he wasn't in the state of well... Let's call it "microphone malicious" he didn't call me a twat. He didn't score a point against me with a comment like "that's so gay" because there were 14 hen nights in.

"That's beautiful" he said. "I am going to include that in my show tomorrow".