de Kargadoor

comedy is a maximalist form of art. I hardly ever use words like "maximalist" appropriately, and I had to look this one up to make sure I wouldn't commit an embarrassing mistake. But I'm all the more convinced of it now. Nowhere else can you have such a strict demarcation between victory and defeat. You're fantastic or you suck. And that calls for a very particular kind of setting, usually. Many comedy clubs have red brick walls as a backdrop, a double-edged sword both to suggest a sort of spontaneity and the fact that in the comedy scene there's no charitability as in other artistic circles - comedy is as harsh as real life. (or perhaps to suggest that another kind of wall - the fourth wall - is about to be broken). But I digress. The Kargadoor, where I performed last saturday, is a weird place. In that venue they usually hold " poetry slams", which is a sort of fixture that's extremely popular among dutch people, something that I can't begin to fathom except with some sweeping generalizations about Holland being a feminine society (some guy planted that seed in my head and it's there now. I don't even know who that dude is). It is not a place fit for comedy: the stage is at the same level as where the audience sit. That sends out a sort of message of intimacy that I find disturbing. The MC was not a standup comedian by any stretch of the imagination - his introductory routine was a musical number set to the audience's prompted handclap à la We Will Rock You. Is that - is that what a regular comedy audience wants here - this sort of closeness and intimacy and interaction between audience and performer? My act isn't interactive, or very active. If you cross your legs in your seat once you will have done more movement than I have for my whole set. On top of that to my knowledge I have never written any jokes that sound like it's-so-truisms. I wonder if idleness is my metaphysical idea of comedy or if it's just due to my limitation as an actor (I wish I could do impressions). That said, my act went reasonably well. My lack of understanding of the crowd reflected itself in the failures and the successes: at some point I got a laugh that I didn't expect at all. My sets never gather pace, they never climax: I ended on the same note as I started, as if it were a fragment of a conversation with a guy who couldn't be bothered to act convinced of what he's saying. I had a feeling that the crowd was left unsatisfied. What was fun, I think, for the audience was that all the comedians represented ' types', very much unlike each other. There was the politically incorrect dude with jokes about charity organizations and black people, the Mitch Hedberg clone (a dude who wears sunglasses on stage out of stage fright and whose act consists entirely of zany one-liners) and, as I see invariably, an exotic-looking dude who jokes solely about his ethnic background. He was the only comedian whose punchlines I could guess despite my weak grasp of dutch, which can't be a good sign. I didn't win this round: Dries Declercq (the Mitch Hedberg lookalike) did, and surely it was deserved for him. Still I hope this sort of event will spark something in the basically non-existent scene of Utrecht, a city where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a poet or another sort of artist whose fear of performing on stage I can't sympathize with for the life of me. Poetry..