Edinburgh festival

G2 goes to Edinburgh

'How can he show his face?'

Lots of stand-up isn't funny. Surely it can't be that difficult? To find out, Guardian journalist Paul MacInnes braved Edinburgh's most notorious venue - but could he raise a laugh?
G2 goes to Edinburgh: Paul Macinnes thinks he's funny
So he thought he was funny: Paul MacInnes goes Late and Live. Photo: David Levene

'You will die, there's no two ways about it," said Karen Koren. Dressed in black, with platinum highlights and a small bottle of mineral water, the technical director of the Gilded Balloon was businesslike in assessing my chances at her flagship comedy show, Late'n'Live. I wasn't paying all that much heed. I may never have done it myself, but I'd seen stand-ups before and most of them were rubbish.

As it turns out, few of them are as rubbish as me. Fired into the bearpit of Edinburgh's most notorious stand-up spot, I was to leave clawed, gouged and with a tenderised groin. I wasn't expecting the mauling I got. Indeed, I may never get over it.

It started out so well. Two phone calls to a cheery press office established that Late'n'Live was happy to have me on stage. All I needed to do was write enough material to last five minutes and, according to Koren, I didn't even have to make them laugh until minute three. "If you don't make them laugh in the first two minutes, you're fucked," was how she put it, but I was looking on the bright side. "Every well-known comic has done Late'n'Live," she said. "Some kill, others die a terrible death."

I was confident of being a killer. Using my position as a member of the media to my advantage, I would pretend to be part of the metropolitan elite that everyone loathes and, in so doing, satirically expose it. With six hours' preparation, a clipboard list of "survey questions" and a joke about orang-utans picking up the phone, Edinburgh, I was sure, was set for a comic revolution.

To finesse my technique, I turned to Logan Murray. Murray runs a rather successful crash course in stand-up at the end of every festival and claims to have taught more than 400 people how to be funny. He has been in the game for 20 years and has tapered sideburns.

Logan's tips were split into two camps: practical and ethical. The practical advice was just that: remember to yawn before going on, don't talk over any laughter, cut any loose words from my script and, most strikingly, don't drink a drop of alcohol before going on stage. There was also advice on dealing with hecklers: "For new comics, heckling is like parallel parking for new drivers, you need to know how to do it, but it doesn't happen very often." From that, I understood that it wasn't going to happen. My mistake.

Ethically speaking, Logan was all for being nice. The key to winning over a crowd, he believes, is to make them like you: "Comics are paid to be fools. It's not an ego thing, you're not a rock'n'roll star. What you've got to do is say, 'I'm your dancing monkey boy', both metaphorically and literally. One way to do it might be to play the insider. You know, something like: 'See that Julie Burchill ... I had her.'"

How was I supposed to satirise the modern media at the same time as shagging Julie Burchill? Actually, he may have had a point. But by then it was too late, my material was taking shape and I was confident of at least three laughs by minute two.

Koren launched the event that was to become Late'n'Live 18 years ago. It was a show called Fluffy Girlies Have Sex With Oblivion Boy. Soon the improvised antics of the cast and the in-house band, Rowland Rivron's Raw Sex, gained a reputation. A new band, whose leader had Ben Elton as a boyfriend, broadened the reputation further. Comics began to turn up to heckle other comics and the show got a new name. As the acts got bigger, the crowd became more rowdy - creating what would become known, at least among those who ran it, as Late'n'Live moments; when crowd and performers crash together, leaving only one side intact.

Nowadays, Late'n'Live takes place seven nights a week inside the debating hall of the Gilded Balloon in the Teviot building. I arrived at a quarter before one in the morning. After the producer, Ged, discovered I had never used a microphone before, he took me on stage to test one. I made a variety of different noises and bantered with the sound staff. "You're shit," they said with a smile. I laughed. Koren came in and walked straight up to the stage. 'You're not funny," she said, and turned around. I couldn't tell whether she was joking.

Twenty minutes later, the show was on. The compere was Adam Hills, a lanky, affable Australian who has been nominated for the Perrier award three times. He specialises in the kind of audience interaction that would please Logan: bantering with the audience without being nasty.

But Hills was faced with a problem - Late'n'Live, the crucible of comedic conflict, was less than half full. Hills described it as intimate; the first comic, Matt Kirshen, said it was "more like an afternoon gig". That, and the fact that most of Kirshen's jokes were floating into the rafters without a titter, pleased me. I waved to my friends in the audience.

Two minutes later I was wishing they weren't there. We had agreed beforehand that Hills would introduce me as a journalist. It would put my routine into some context and maybe stir some sympathy for the first-timer. By the time I got on I knew what Hills had said. It was quiet night, an afternoon of a night, and the best way to change all that was for the audience to get stuck into the hack.

I was halfway through my first sentence when somebody shouted the first "You're shit!". Koren's two-minute rule had been broken by one minute and 58 seconds. Somebody else asked what paper I worked for; I answered, only to occasion a round of boos and a cry of "You killed Diana!" Another group, some performers whose faces I'd seen on posters, used their wit to zoom in on my choice of clothing. Still more people stuck to a simple "Fuck off!". And all this was happening at once.

My response was simple: freeze, forget everything I had to say, and take the bait of every single heckler. I questioned whether the media had actually split up the Beckhams, told a particularly angry young man to unclench his jaw and called a corpulent comic, whose routine was based on his cancer, a "fat bastard". None of this was funny.

Very few people will ever have the experience of dozens of people doing their best to make them cry. I remained tear-free, didn't even get the shakes, but with each heckle, I could feel the confidence drain out of me. When one girl turned towards me and mimed slitting her throat, I took it as a judgment on my very character.

I decided to persevere with my list of questions, provoking a strange response. First off there were howls of anguish - "Not the list!" - then there was the ironic reversal: "No, we want the list! Give us the list!" Soon a chorus in praise of the list was across the hall, at exactly the same time as Ged was trying to get me off stage.

I stayed on, I don't know why. I read the list and things didn't get any better. At one point I thought I'd got a laugh by making bad animal noises, but they were only laughing at the idea that someone could consider such a thing funny. My ego was retreating into a small cave at the bottom of my stomach. Adam Hills came back on and I clambered down into the audience.

He started by mocking up a review, taking suggestions from the audience: "How can he show his face?" "The journalist went down like a Gilded Balloon!" "The only thing less funny than Paul's act would be ... ", Hills paused for a second. "Reading the list!" shouted the person sitting next to me.

Backstage, a little later, I got firm handshakes. "You did really well," said Hills. I told him I was in shock. "You've created a real Late'n'Live moment," he said, looking right into my eyes. "The night could have been dead, but now they're going to be talking about this for days!"

I retired to the bar for, at last, some alcoholic relief. As I stood drinking my pint, a large screen showed Hills back on stage. "I can't believe it, but MacInnes has gone," he chuckled. "You might have thought he'd stay around, learn from the pros, but no. I saw him backstage, he said he was in shock. Well done, you guys, you did great."

Later that morning, as the sun came up, I sat on the edge of my bed, unable to sleep. One-liners were bouncing around my head, ripostes to every single barb, especially those from the fat bloke. Just a shame they were three hours too late.

· Logan Murray's course, Stand Up and Deliver, runs at the end of the festival. To book a place, call: 07970 524234.

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