Steven Jacobi

How to be (or not to be) a good stand up

Steven Jacobi flung himself headfirst into the world of stand-up comedy to discover what makes us chuckle. Ivor Dembina sees how he fared

LAUGHING MATTERS by Steven Jacobi
Arrow Books, £10.99 order this book

IF you’ve ever travelled home after an enjoyable night at a comedy club and wondered why you can’t remember the names of the acts, Steven Jacobi’s latest book will help explain your forgetfulness.
In a pleasingly honest account of his brief foray into the world of live stand-up, he confronts the dilemma of being a funny person who is unable to summon up his talent when it’s needed.
Jacobi’s solution is to undertake a practical experiment with himself as guinea pig.
The live comedy circuit will be the laboratory and the record of its findings his book, Laughing Matters.
The report, a mixture of self-deprecating anecdotes and neatly observed ruminations, lays bare the new comedian’s anxieties about how to prepare, write material, relate to an audience and ultimately accept his own mediocrity.
If you want to be remembered on the way home, you need to be disciplined and relaxed.
Jacobi has both qualities but he is fatally unable to harness them simultaneously. When he sticks to his script his performance lacks believability yet when he tries to loosen up he has nothing to say.
He ponders, is it his genes or his German ancestry? Is it his childhood and his difficult relationship with his parents? Or is it simply his admission that he’s always been crap on stage?
Deciding he needs professional help, he’s persuaded to fork out over £200 for a stand-up comedy course in Camden.
Struggling to absorb the value of group exercises to “get him into the zone” he graduates with a three-page comedy routine: ground-breaking stuff about Ant and Dec, lederhosen, toilet habits and James Bond.
For £200 they could have at least told him how dull it was. And, as for the obligatory quick session on microphone technique, I swear I could have told him for nothing that the best thing to do is speak straight into it and hope they’ve switched the bloody thing on.
Next, he does a few gigs while conducting his research. From Weston-Super Mare to New York via Manchester and Birmingham he picks up some chuckles and a sprinkling of good laughs and does quite well.
But it’s that word ‘quite’ that Jacobi is rightly alarmed by. Wherever he goes and whomever he meets, the harder he tries to make sense of why funniness eludes him, the more sure we are that disaster awaits him.
He came unstuck because he was trying to let go of his feelings while recording them at the same time.
To do stand-up you have to switch off your brain and just trust yourself. If the audience see you trusting your own funniness then they will trust you too.
In other words, the book he’s authored was the problem itself. He didn’t realise you can’t commit to something as ethereal as stand-up comedy when you have one eye trained on your publishers’ deadline.
Like a Greek tragedy, his strength, in this case his desire to share his understanding with us, becomes the flaw that brings about his downfall.
A pity, because Jacobi’s wry humour and deft turn of phrase suggests he’s a lot more funny than many of the professional comedians I’ve met.
His problem was he cared too much and nowhere was this more evident than at his final performance; a brutal public humiliation by an audience of the peculiarly English kind you find on a Friday night in south-east London.
Ever so slowly, step by step, he makes us feel every painful cut and desperate loneliness of the stand-up comedian when the audience en masse turns against him.
That night on the way home he’d probably have been recalled as “that useless twat,” but I’ll remember Steve Jacobi’s actual name because he’s done in his book what he consistently failed to do on stage.
By being authentic and admitting his shortcomings he made me care about what happened to him. More importantly he helped me realised that a sense of humour means nothing more than people laughing at the same things as you do.