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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 17 minutes

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I saw two of my favourite musicians live the other night. It was brilliant, here's some stuff I wrote down.

Dave Gunning and JP Cormier are both Nova Scotian folk musicians (JP Cormier is one of those guys that adopted the East Coast despite not actually being from there, but in this case “East Coast Canadian folk music” is more of a genre than a specific location) who’ve been among my favourties since I was young, so I was delighted in 2017 when I heard they were putting out an album together. When I actually got to hear the album, it exceeded my very high expectations, it’s one of my favourite albums in the entire world, by anyone. It’s called Two.

They’re both among the best on their own for different reasons, but together they’re so much more than the sum of their parts. The biggest thing that I still cannot get over about them together are the vocal harmonies. The seams between their voices disappear completely on every song, they do it like it’s nothing. It’s incredible.

JP Cormier is head and shoulders above most of his peers as an amazing multi-instrumentalist. He can play the guitar and the fiddle and the mandolin and the banjo and the cello and somehow percussion and piano. And he doesn’t just “dabble” in the variety. He put out an entire album of instrumental-only guitar tracks once and it was amazing, he’s also won multiple awards for his fiddling. Also he’s got the most beautiful melodious singing voice. On pure talent he’s just the best at everything. I saw him do a two-hour solo concert at a bar in 2008, his album The Messenger had just come out and he played almost every track off it and that is such a good album, and it was one of the best fucking things I’ve ever seen.

In 2012 I went to the Stan Rogers Folk Festival in Canso, Nova Scotia. JP Cormier had played that festival every year for decades, he was a hero there, and it was a big story throughout the festival that this year, for some reason, he’d agreed to perform at the Sudbury Folk Festival on the same weekend so he wouldn’t be at Canso. It was disappointing. It was my second time at StanFest (it’s a 16-hour drive from where I live, followed by a weekend of camping, I’ve been in 2002 and 2012), and I had greatly enjoyed seeing JP Cormier there the first time I went, so I was sorry that my second trip happened to be the one time he wasn’t there.

On the Sunday, last day of the festival, they have a tradition where at noon, they stop all the stages besides the main stage, so everyone at the entire festival gathers in the big field at the main stage for an hour. They put about 12 musicians on stage, who take turns singing Stan Rogers songs/playing backup music on each other’s songs, and at the end of the hour everyone in the entire crowd singings Barrett Privateers and Northwest Passage a cappella and I get to see some old people around me cry so that’s fun (seriously, it’s fucking beautiful).

That weekend, they’d just finished introducing the 12 musicians on stage when suddenly I heard the crowd around me erupt into cheers and they were all turned around, so I turned around and saw this huge man walking down the aisle separating the lawn chairs. The cheers were deafening and kept up all the way until he reached the stage, walked up, grabbed the mic out of the announcer’s hand, and shouted “I was on the plane to Sudbury when I realized I belong here, so I told those people they can shove it and I turned around!” And then he proceeded to back up all the other musicians in their Stan songs, and he sang one of his own. And you have never seen a crowd of senior citizens go so wild.

It wasn’t until after it was over that my dad pointed out to me that they never said his name. JP Cormier’s got a pretty distinctive appearance – basically he’s massive – and every person in that entire crowd all recognized him instantly, and collectively lost their shit despite him having no introduction. That’s pretty cool. It also, of course, occurred to me that actually, if he really canceled on a different festival at the last moment, that’s kind of a shitty thing to do. But I’m going to hope he was just saying that for bravado to a crowd that wanted to hear it, as he didn’t arrive in Canso until noon on Sunday. He’d have had time to play a bit in Sudbury and then fly back. Hopefully that’s what he actually did. But that crowd in Canso, Nova Scotia was pretty fucking happy to hear he’d told Sudbury to shove it for them.

I’ve seen JP Cormier live lots of times, but the other major one that comes to mind was in 2019, when I went to the Celtic Colours Festival in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. My parents and I got tickets to see him in a concert hall with Tim Edey, this British guy he’d been touring with. They both started playing guitar at the beginning of the hour… and then they didn’t stop. Not once. For the entire hour. Mostly they played at the same time, sometimes one or the other would play solo for a bit, but the whole time, neither of them said a word, and at least one was always playing. Sometimes one of them would slow down enough to make it look like they were going to stop this, turn to the crowd, say “Thanks for indulging our fun improv”, and then start playing their actual songs, which was what the audience had expected (it hadn’t be advertised as anything but a normal concert by two guys who do have songs). But just as they’d almost faded out, they’d renew their energy and start playing faster. Sometimes they’d get in each other’s faces, one would play something particularly fast or odd, challenging the other to match or one-up it, and they would, the other one would repeat the riff and add something, and then other would repeat that but even faster, and they’d go back and forth and it would be incredible. They did not stop until the hour was over, when they waved to the crowd and walked off stage.

I suppose that technically, the audience didn’t get what they expected when they paid for the tickets. But I cannot imagine a single person in that building could feel cheated. I’ve seen many concerts, but I’ve never seen anything like that. My parents and I still talk about what an incredible thing we all got to witness that night.

So JP Cormier is a fucking legend, which makes it odd that off the two people in the double act I saw the other night, if pressed to choose between them, I think Dave Gunning would be my favourite. Dave Gunning’s a strong candidate for my favourite musician. I would probably say Lennie Gallant is my favourite musician, but I think I’ve spent more hours of my life listening to Dave Gunning than to Lennie Gallant. I’ve spent more hours listening to Dave Gunning than to JP Cormier. To almost anyone.

I first saw Dave Gunning at the Lunenburg Folk Festival in 2014, when I was 13 years old. I normally went to folk festivals with my father, but he was back home while my mother and I were visiting my grandparents in Nova Scotia. We drove into this little Nova Scotian town called Lunenburg, because their folk festival was on while we were there, and a Cape Breton guy I really liked named Bruce Guthro was playing.

Bruce Guthro had a guy opening for him, just playing about three songs before Guthro did his full hour. That guy was tall and skinny and appeared mildly terrified to be there, but then all three of his songs absolutely captivated me. My mom and I kept nudging each other to say “Oh wow, this guy’s better than we were expecting.” At the end of his short set he plugged his solo show that he was doing later that day at a (smaller) stage at the same festival, and his then-new album, Two-Bit World. I enjoyed the Bruce Guthro show that followed, but when it ended, my main comment to my mother was I couldn’t believe how good the opener was. We went to his own show in the afternoon, saw him do an hour of socially awkward patter around incredible songs, they were too good to match how self-effacing he was. We immediately went to the CD tent and bought his album.

This was exciting to me, because until then, all my favourite music was stuff to which my dad had introduced me. My dad had a huge CD collection that I was lucky enough to be able to use as a library when I was a kid, taking CDs to my room a few at a time to play on my boom box stereo, because that’s the era in which I grew up. I hear people talk about what was the “first album” they bought, and I’m not sure what mine was, because my favourite albums as a kid were all things I didn’t have to buy as my dad just let me use them.

So when I was 13, Dave Gunning because the first music I ever got to introduce to my dad, rather than the other way around. I was so excited to play the CD for him when we got home from Nova Scotia. He asked how he didn’t already know this guy, and I said I don’t know, I can’t believe he’d missed him. My dad listened to that CD once, and immediately started looking into acquiring Gunning’s other albums, and looking up when he was performing out our way so he could see him live too.

Dave Gunning has been a staple in our family ever since. We did acquire the stuff he made before 2004 – a live album from 2002, and one from 2000 called Caught Between Shadows. He also has a couple of albums from the 90s that I have tried quite hard to find but they do not appear to exist anymore.

I have no idea how many times I’ve seen Dave Gunning live since that day in 2004, but it’s a lot. A lot of times my dad and I would see him several times in one festival, just following him from one stage to another. He was on stage at StanFest 2012 when JP Cormier made the whole crowd scream at once by telling Sudbury to shove it, and the day before that, I think I’d seen Dave Gunning play four different workshops. I have every album he’s released since Two-Bit World, and I think for all but two of them, I saw him live at least once when that album was new and he was promoting it, so I’ve seen him play most of his albums live. I’ve seen him play in fields and basements and pubs and concert halls and community centres.

I think anyone would admit that Dave Gunning does not have the blinding multi-instrumental talent of JP Cormier, because absolutely no one has the blinding multi-instrumental talent of JP Cormier. But pretty well no one can write a song like Dave Gunning. They’re deceptively simple but subtly complicated. They’re sometimes playful and sometimes contemplative and sometimes devastatingly poignant and sometimes meaningful stories and a surprising number of them are about old-timey executions.

My mother’s parents grew up as high school sweethearts in Nova Scotia, then moved all over the place as my mother was growing up, and 30 years ago retired back to rural Nova Scotia. They’ve been married for almost 57 years. This year they both turned 90 – my grandmother in November 2023 and my grandfather in January 2024. I wanted to make them something special, so I found a bunch of old pictures from when they were younger, and put them together in a video to play at their birthday celebration and make my grandmother and my mother cry (that mission was very much accomplished).

There was no question about what song to use: Dave Gunning’s Saltwater Hearts, a song about an elderly Nova Scotian couple that had lived their lives by the Atlantic Ocean together. This song is off Two-Bit World, the first CD I ever bought by him, and it was one of the three songs he played the first time I ever saw him, when he opened for Bruce Guthro. The first time I ever heard that song it made me think of my grandparents, and now my grandmother calls me every few weeks to tell me she’s watched the video again with the pictures and the song about her and my grandfather. My family history has been embedded into Dave Gunning’s music.

I’ve written before about the kid at the centre where I work as an autism therapist, who loves music. He can only say a few words, he doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to use augmented communication, he gets overwhelmed easily and can try to hurt himself or others, and unlike a lot of the kids there, he’s not interested in toys, so there’s not much we can do to keep him happy. The only thing he really likes is music, but he loves that, so I’ve learned how to use that to help him emotionally regulate. I play him a big variety of stuff, but I think I can say Dave Gunning’s his favourite. It’s probably the stuff I play him most often. It started because Gunning’s put out a couple of Christmas albums, and I played the kid some Christmas songs because that’s good kid-friendly stuff. But then one day I accidentally put on one of Dave Gunning’s fiddle medleys, and the kid loved it, so now I play him Dave Gunning’s full catalogue, from the silly Christmas songs to the trad Celtic stuff and everything in between, and it all goes over well.

I think the kid’s favourite album is Dave Gunning’s Tribute to John Allan Cameron, which I first saw Dave Gunning promote at a bar in Halifax where he played most of the album and the crowd went wild for it and it was amazing. That album came out in 2010, four years after the death of John Allan Cameron, who was a Cape Breton (small island that’s part of Nova Scotia where they have an incredible number of folk singers per capita) guy who got credited with talking the folk songs that got sang in kitchens of Cape Breton, and playing them in public to popularize them. He died, Dave Gunning made an album with a combination of covers of songs written by John Allan Cameron and songs that John Allan Cameron just liked a lot, it’s Gunning’s most traditional album since John Allen Cameron was a trad guy, it’s also the kid’s favourite album, proving that I never had to be concerned about avoiding music that would be too traditional for a kid. A silly concern, really, as I loved traditional music when I was a kid.

One time I was able to stop the kid in the middle of a meltdown by putting on The Mingulay Boat Song – he went from standing up and crying to immediately sitting down on his knees, closing his eyes, and just swaying back and forth until the song ended. Because of that kid, I’ve been listening to a lot of Dave Gunning the last eight months or so, as I’ve been playing it at work as well as at home.

I have so many memories of Dave Gunning across so many years. I remember the first time I heard his song Made on a Monday, played at some folk festival or other (I think it was the Stewart Park Festival in Perth, Ontario), which he introduced by saying he wrote it after being told to never buy a car that was made on a Monday because no one does their best work on Mondays, and when I heard that song, it was the first time I ever thought, “Oh, cool, there’s an adult who feels like I do.” I now, of course, know that the world is full of songs about teenagers who don’t fit in. But I didn’t know that when I was a teenager, because I only listened to folk music that was mainly popular among people my dad’s age. So it was a revelation to hear an adult sing about feeling like you’d been made wrong.

That was the same album that had the song Big Shoes, so I’d have heard that for the first time at the same festival, in probably the same set. I don’t remember the exact circumstances around it, but I distinctly recall the first time I heard that one, sitting on a lawn chair in some field and being overwhelmed by hearing a man describe how music felt to me. Big Shoes is a song that Dave Gunning wrote about how he felt when he saw Stan Rogers and John Allan Cameron live, but I heard it and looked up at Dave Gunning and thought that’s how Dave Gunning makes me feel, as does so much else at that folk festival. “It was rock and roll to me/He might as well have been the king.” Amazing line to hear when I was 19 and had this music that I loved and shared with no one but my parents, no one at school had heard of any of it, they were all talking about their teenage bands and I just had these folk musicians who were my rock and roll. (In my late teens/early 20s I did actually get into various genres of rock music, as well as alt-country, but for the first 20-ish years I was pretty exclusively into Canadian folk music, which meant I had nothing to contribute to conversations with people my age about what we were listening to.)

Given all this, you can imagine my delight when JP Cormier and Dave Gunning put out a joint album in 2017. And you can imagine my further delight when it was even better than I’d expected, even better than the sum of its parts, it’s now one of my favourite all-time albums. And you can imagine my further delight when they put out a follow-up album in 2023 called Leather and Dust. And you can imagine my mixed emotions when, in summer 2023, my parents were in Nova Scotia at the same time as Gunning and Comier were playing a small folk festival out there to promote their new album, while I was back home and couldn’t go. Both my parents went, and I made my dad send me pictures and videos. It looked amazing.

I actually got pretty emotional about that, because I realized I’d seen almost no live music in several years, since pre-COVID. I’d taken folk festivals for granted for so much of my life, as a staple of every summer, as well as more live music sprinkled across the year. When 2020 cut all that off, I just never took up live music again. Watching short videos of my parents seeing Gunning and Cormier last year reminded me of how much I missed it.

I figured I can’t have the amazing East Coast music scene because I’m not in Nova Scotia, but they still have stuff here, so I Googled folk music in my area. Learned about a relatively new venue that plays folk music exclusively and has a monthly Celtic night. Bought tickets to that Celtic night, attended it in August 2023, loved it, resolved to take up live music again. Since then, I’ve been to a bunch of gigs at that same venue, it’s a wonderful place, I’m so glad I was prompted to discover it. A folk festival crowd all year round.

In November, I was browsing that venue’s calendar because I didn’t have a Christmas gift for my parents, and I saw that Gunning and Cormier were playing there on April 25. Perfect. I got tickets. Well, I got Garnet Rogers tickets for my mom and I, which we went to in February and that was also great. I got Gunning and Cormier tickets for my dad and I. I shared the plan with my mom and she got a ticket too.

And that is where I was a couple of nights ago. Fucking amazing night. I’m still most blown away by the harmonies. I’d never seen them play together before (not specifically as a double act, anyway – I’d seen them share stages with lots of others a few times at festivals), and it was incredible how little setup there was. I hear the magical vocal combinations on their albums, and I assume they must plan that carefully, do several takes, have to get into the zone to be able to pull that off. But nope. Live, they can be joking around with the crowd, and then two seconds later they’re playing their guitars and matching their voices perfectly. If I close my eyes it could be one person singing.

They put on a great show. JP Cormier is gruff in his inter-song patter, such a contrast to his soft and lovely singing voice. Dave Gunning talking is exactly what you’d expect from his songs, exactly what you’d expect from his gangly appearance, awkward and humble and differential to JP, but repeatedly genuinely funny. They were both funny.

They gave interesting stories to explain some of the weird shit going on in their Leather and Dust album, which was cool, because I had been wondering. It’s a wonderful album, but in some cases, fucking weird. They’re a couple of Nova Scotian folk singers, but this album contains covers of The Alan Parsons Project, this weird American guy who sang about school shootings among other things, Stompin’ Tom Connors, and The Killers. The last one being one of the few songs off Leather and Dust that they didn’t play and also didn’t acknowledge at any point, we got no explanation for why they did that. Human by The Killers – a pop/rock song that used to be inescapable on mainstream radio – is just on a Gunning and Cormier album and they felt no need to tell us why.

It reminds me a bit of that time when Great Big Sea wrote an apology for going all weird on us after they got famous in the States, and put it on the same album as a Led Zeppelin cover. To be fair Gallows Pole is a traditional song and therefore technically more in the wheelhouse of Great Big Sea than Led Zeppelin, but Robert Plant has an arranging credit on a Great Big Sea album, and that is the only case of East Coast Canadian folk musicians covering something out of character that’s more weird than Gunning and Cormier doing The Killers.

Anyway, though, the point is that the concert was great even if they didn’t explain that. Dave Gunning pulled out his Stompin’ Tom impression briefly, which reminded me of that time on his live album from 2002 when he did an entire Stompin’ Tom cover in character as his Stompin’ Tom impression, and it’s a fucking good impression. I once played that song for my mother without telling her what it was, and it took her over two minutes to realize that wasn’t the actual Stompin’ Tom singing.

James Keelaghan was in the crowd (at the gig the other night, not during the live album from 20 years ago - I mean he might have been there too, I guess), which was fucking cool, you know you're at a cool music show when other musicians you like are also there (I've been playing a bunch of James Keelaghan for the kid at work lately, it's been going down well). They even referenced something I remember from years ago! When I was a kid, I saw several folk festival workshops with Lennie Gallant and James Keelaghan on the same stage, where they'd always tell the story of how they once got into a debate about who had killed off the most people in their songs. "And I thought I'd won," Lennie would say, "Because I've written a song about the Titanic. But James wrote a song called Everyone Dies." The other night, Dave Gunning and JP Cormier made some jokes about how they keep writing songs about outlaws getting hung on guillotines, and they like to kill people off in their songs, and then they pointed at James Keelaghan and said of course, the master of killing people off in songs is here tonight. That was fun.

During the intermission, Dave Gunning came out and was walking around. JP Cormier stayed backstage, which is fair enough, and while I heard a few people asking where he was, my father commented “That’s what I’d do, if I were him, rather than go out and make small talk with strangers.” You can see why my father and I get along so well.

I’ve written before on this blog about how I get painfully star struck; the few times I have been in the same room as comedians I like, I have found it overwhelmingly scary to imagine them even briefly perceiving my presence. Last year I managed to push this aside enough to get autographs from both Josie Long and Grace Petrie at their shows, which was cool as fuck, but I did do a lot of panicking and quite literal stuttering at them and basically being an incoherent mess during our brief interactions. I do not do well with meeting famous people.

However, that doesn’t normally apply to the Canadian folk musicians. I think because I’ve been seeing them since I was a kid, so I am used them. My parents taught me the etiquette when I was young for the acceptable way to approach after a show or during intermission: buy something from their merch table – even if you already own all the CDs, buy another copy anyway as a bribe for a moment of their time and then just give it to someone as a gift or something – go over to them with a marker and ask them to sign it, politely tell them you’re a big fan and the show’s great, then run away before there’s any risk of outstaying your welcome. I’ve done it many times, I know the drill.

I think I might also be less intimidated by Canadian musicians than by British comedians because – well, I tend to operate under the assumption that if someone lives all the way in Britain but I’ve still heard of them from Canada, they must be very, very famous. While with Canadian folk musicians, I might slightly under-estimate their fame, because I live in the country where they’re from and I never meet anyone who’s heard of them (besides my parents), so they can’t be too famous to have twenty seconds to talk to me when they’re signing CDs, right? Even though of course that’s a fallacy, because these people are quite famous, just not among people my age.

Anyway, the other night, I looked over the merch table to see what was on offer. There were a bunch of CDs I already owned, and, interestingly, a couple of vinyl records. I don’t have a turntable, but I thought it would be cool to have a Gunning and Cormier vinyl album cover on my bedroom wall. Especially if it’s signed. The price was a bit steep for what I’d be essentially using as a poster, but it wouldn’t consider it too much money for a signed poster.

I bought the album and saw Dave Gunning over by the bar, talking to a woman who’d bought an album just before me and was getting it signed. I went over and stood sort of near them – close enough so I could get in there once she moved along, but I hoped, not so close that I’d seem to be awkwardly putting pressure on the situation.

As I stood there, I started to get very anxious. I’d done this many times before, but not for years (not with Canadian musicians, anyway), and I suddenly started thinking about the massive influence Dave Gunning has had on 20 years of my life and how fucking wild it was that he was just standing right there in person and how I didn’t belong here. It was the first time I’d been in a room with Dave Gunning for about five years, even though I used to see him two or three times a year. My mind started racing, and I worried about taking up too much of his time when I approached him, and then I realized the record had plastic packaging on it, and I didn’t want to make Dave Gunning wait while I took that off.

So I started taking it off while standing by the bar, making sure that when Dave Gunning was free, I could approach him, hand him the album, hand him my dad’s pen, get a signature, mumble the words “big fan”, and get out in under 20 seconds, he’d barely notice me, it would not be a big thing, it would be fine. While I was thinking this, I finally got the plastic off the album, but it turned out I was holding the case upside down, so when the plastic came off, the record fell out and loudly hit the floor.

My efforts to avoid attention had backfired, as a bunch of people in the area turned to look. Including Dave Gunning, as the woman talked to him had just wandered away and he was now free. I immediately started apologizing to the people around me, saying it’s okay, no need for a commotion, the record is fine, I’ll just pick it up. But before I could do that, Dave Gunning came over and picked up my album off the floor. He asked if it was okay, and I said yes yes it’s fine sorry it’s absolutely fine I’m so sorry yes it’s fine. Dave Gunning then walked a few paces away where there was better light, and he held up my record to the light to look for scratches. On one side, and then he turned it over to check the other side. He told me, “If there’s any damage we’ll get you another one.” I just stood there freaking out, not wanting to take up the time of an important person, but also not wanting to tell him: “Look, I basically bought this to use as a poster, I don’t even have a record player, it doesn’t matter whether or not the record itself is scratched.”

Dave Gunning finally pronounced the record unharmed, and handed it back to me. I stammered that the reason I’d unwrapped it in the first place was to ask him to sign it, and then I reached into my pocket and panicked again when I could not immediately find the pen my father had lent me for the occasion. Dave Gunning said not to worry, and then he pulled a sharpie out of his own pocket and signed the cover. Then he put the record back in the cover, handed it back to me, and showed me the correct way to hold it so nothing falls out (it turns out, for anyone who’s unaware, you’re supposed to hold it so the opening is at the top), I thanked him several times and then ran away, and realized afterward that I hadn’t even had the presence of mind to say the words “Big fan” to him.

But he was so nice. He’s so so cool. So cool. And after the concert, I stayed at my parents’ place where I was reminded that they have a turntable, so we played the record for a bit before I left for work the next morning. I ended up leaving the record itself at my parents’ place, so they can play it on their turntable. But I took the cover home.

My mother even found a couple of glass frames that are meant to hold vinyl records. Because she had two of them, she told me I could take my pick from her/my dad’s record collection and have one other record cover to put on the wall next to my new one. I picked out Ian Tyson’s Cowboyography, because it’s an iconic record that pretty much Canadian country music in its modern form (modern form only, of course, all due respect to Hank Snow). So now I have this on my bedroom wall:

In a larger section of my bedroom wall that contains my Cape Breton Nova Scotia poster (okay, it's a dish towel that I got in my stocking at Christmas one year and decided to put up on my wall like a poster instead of using it as a dish towel), the photograph of Signal Hill in Newfoundland that my dad bought me after a trip there years ago, the old Josie Long poster that I got signed last year by both Josie Long and Grace Petrie, the printout of one of my favourite Bugle quotes, and the Nova Scotia sea glass art that my mother bought me when I graduated university:

Pretty good, I think. Solid use of bedroom wall space.

I miss live music and I'm glad I'm getting more of it back into my life. I'm planning to go back to that venue next month for their Celtic music night. Here are JP Cormier and Dave Gunning playing together at the Celtic Colours Folk Festival in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 2018 (I wasn't there that year, but I did get there in 2019 to see JP Cormier play guitar for an entire fucking hour like the coolest person in the world):

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And here they are on April 25, 2024 (I only took one quick picture and then put my phone away, I promise):

#Youtube

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 11 hours

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When Alex first turned up to the load bearing task wearing a weightlifting belt, I assumed that thing would be required, or at least at some point used, for the task itself. But that did not end up happening, so he didn't procure it for functional purposes. His job was to tell people about an event in which they had to take part, and he chose to make that announcement in a costume that was related to the theme of the event, even though he could have announced it just as easily without the costume.

Has anyone done a gifset comparison to Dean Pelton from Community yet?

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 3 days

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It's felt like a vaguely depressing week in comedy, so here are a couple of happy things.

I haven't done one of my Chortle headlines roundup posts in a while, but here's one particularly excellent headline. I've thought for a while that it's odd John Kearns doesn't have any full stand-up specials released, not even in some smaller audio form or anything, as far as I can tell. This one that he's filming is The Varnishing Days, that got all those wildly good reviews last year and got nominated for that award in Melbourne this year, which is great, I can't wait to see it.

Stewart Lee filming Basic Lee is less big news just because I took it for granted that it would happen at some point, but I'm still pleased to have it confirmed. That show I have heard before but a version that'll be about two years old by the time this comes out, and I thought it was very very good, so I'm looking forward to seeing what it turned into.

Also, I will watch the Lucy Beaumont special, as that's another person whom you'd think would have had a full-length stand-up special released at some point already, but as far as I can tell, she hasn't. I've seen clips of her stand-up on YouTube, but Lucy Beaumont seems like an odd enough act so you probably need to see her stuff in context to understand what's going on (similar, in that specific way, to John Kearns again).

And secondly, I had a rare look at Twitter this week, and I'm glad I did because I am always disproportionately delighted at any modern content that calls back the Chocolate Milk Gang days. Like this picture that David O'Doherty posted the other day (from Australia, where all the comedians are now) of him in April 2024 shaking hands with Jermaine Clement over a mural featuring John Oliver.

Calling back, of course, to DO'D playing with Flight of the Conchords in Edinburgh in the early 00s, leading to him opening for them on some major tours in the later 00s, here he is backing them up on keyboards in Edinburgh in 2004:

And here he is passing half a cow to the Edinburgh crowd with John Oliver in 2003, with what I'm almost sure is Jermaine Clement backing them up on percussion just out of shot:

This screenshot also features Adam Hills, and I have to admit I briefly considered this week that part of me wants to put Adam Hills on my list of people to see in Edinburgh this year entirely so I can say I'm taking the opportunity to see anyone who was part of Cowgate and is still going to Edinburgh in 2024 (I already have DO'D tickets, I will of course scramble to pick up Kitson tickets the moment he announces anything in Edinburgh no matter what it is, and John Oliver/Demetri Martin/Flight of the Conchords have moved on with their lives, though there's still time to change your minds before Edinburgh 2024 starts, guys). And then I remembered there are good reasons why I've gone off Adam Hills and I can't dedicate a timeslot (and the cost of a ticket that's more expensive than most) to a guy I've gone off just for the sake of a 2003-based point (I mean, I still very much like a lot of things about Adam Hills in general, but I don't love some major aspects of the 2024 incarnation of him, and the 2024 incarnation is who will be showing up to Edinburgh 2024).

Anyway, this is a post about good things, and David O'Doherty shaking hands with Jermaine Clement in front of a mural of John Oliver 21 years after those men were all involved in late-night ritual cow sacrifice is a pretty good thing. It's probably the only good reason to keep Twitter around.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 4 days

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I don’t keep up with new music nearly as much as I used to. Not even discovering new artists or anything, but even new stuff put out by people I already like, it passes me by more than it used to. Late in 2023, I was shocked to learn two of my absolute favourite musicians had put out new albums in 2022 and I didn’t even notice. For most of my life I’ve found out about new music – both new artists and new albums – via folk festivals and country music blogs. Which is why so much of my music collection is Canadian folk music and American (plus some Canadian) country music.

But I haven’t been to a folk festival since pre-COVID – last year I finally started going to see live music again sometimes, this week I’ll be going to my sixth music gig since last August, which is less than I used to but significantly more than I did from 2020-2023, and it’s been really good. I let myself forget, in the depths of the pandemic, how big a part of my life live music was. I took it for granted most of my life, just going to folk festivals with my dad because that’s what happens every summer. And while I’ve been back to concerts, I haven’t been back to festivals, so I haven’t learned about anything new. And I don’t read country music blogs anymore because I’m too busy reading comedy forums.

So aside from blogs and festivals, how am I supposed to know if even my very favourite musicians put out new stuff? I also don’t do Twitter or anything. And of course I don’t do Spotify. I didn’t really know how Spotify worked until recently, I was just vaguely aware that it’s some demon ruining the music industry so I never looked into it. And I am still not going to look into it! Don’t worry everyone, I still have my principles, I am still horrified by the fact that my brother owns no music files and thinks it’s fine to just rent access to music that he only gets to keep hearing as long as he keeps paying and he has internet access and a corporation chooses to keep it on their platform.

However, my friend whom I moved in with in December uses Spotify, and when I hang out with him in the living room, we listen to music via the TV that’s connected to his computer, and I have to admit it’s convenient. Especially when I started typing in my favourite artists and learned that some of them have entire albums I hadn’t even known about. And, even though I’m pretty sure algorithms are a terrible thing to introduce to art, I have found a few new people I like from that.

I haven’t entirely sold out, though, because I did not sign up for Spotify (I would genuinely never do that, I will draw the line at occasionally benefitting from my roommate using it), I went and bought the albums on Bandcamp. Quick reminder of a thing that I never miss an opportunity to remind people, Bandcamp is the way to buy music where the highest percentage of the profits go to the artist (aside from just handing them money for a CD at a gig, I guess), also it’s the most convenient way to get it for the consumer (one easily downloadable folder with every song on the album as DRM-free mp3s).

I also recently raided the CD collection in my dad’s basement, because there was a bunch of stuff I knew he had and I knew I liked but was somehow not in the music collection on my hard drive. So as a result of that, I have a bunch of new music, and I’ve been greatly enjoying it.

Okay, here’s the actual point of this post, after all that pre-amble: Cody Jinks put out an album one month ago, thanks to the evils of corporatized technology I became aware of it when it was only a month old, I’ve been listening to it non-stop for several days, it’s fucking fantastic. It might be my favourite Cody Jinks album, though I’m aware that recency bias in in play. And I like Cody Jinks’ previous stuff a lot.

I should actually say that this might be my favourite Cody Jinks studio album, because he has a live album called Red Rocks Live and nothing's better than that. It's a solid cross-section of his earlier work so a good introduction, if anyone's interested in getting to know him. Which you should be, if you like his sort of thing. His sort of thing is modern American outlaw country music by a guy who used to be in a metal band. All the best country singers used to be in metal bands (him and Corb Lund).

This live version of his song Head Case is as good as country music gets. Good thing to play for anyone who spouts that claim that country music was only good back in the 70s (it was good back in the 70s, but probably wasn't good back then either if the only thing you listened to was pop music on the radio that incorrectly markets itself as country). My horrible abusive high school coach used to nickname me and any other athletes who struggled mentally/psychologically "head case", and now I play this song whenever I get sad about that, which definitely isn't that often or anything because I'm fine and not still trying to win every argument I had when I was 17. Definitely not.

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Anyway, his new album is called Change the Game, and I can't stop listening to it.

It covers the usual themes - sad, angry, drinks too much, would like to stop drinking so much (going a little harder on that last point than some of his previous albums, or maybe I'm just predisposed to notice that these days), and of course the designed outlaw country anthem, in this case it's the title track and it's great. I keep finding new stuff in it.

I often find that my favourite songs on an album change from what they are when I first hear it, but at the moment, the one I've had on repeat the most is:

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And then I listen to the level of guitar going on in this one that's ages ahead of some of the older stuff:

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But I think once the initial excitement of the new album wears off, this song is going to end up as my favourite:

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I was on the bus to work yesterday when I first put this one on and had to change the track, because the bus is not an appropriate setting for being as emotionally moved as I was by a lyric like "Don't waste your days on dreams that don't fill you/Find out what you love, and let it kill you".

Anyway, I might need to start subscribing to some musician mailing lists or something. Because I'm not signing up for Spotify or Twitter but it is nice to actually find out about this stuff.

#Youtube

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 4 days

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I put my listening to the John Robins/Elis James Radio X podcasts on hold a few weeks ago, due to, as they say, factors, but after a couple of weeks I've decided it's probably okay, I probably don't need to avoid everything forever, and also, I'd gotten to episode 250, over 300 if you include the bonus ones, it only goes up to episode 264, I can't go that far and not just finish the thing. So I'm going to just finish the thing, and then decide whether to jump into the BBC ones or just forget I ever started this.

Put on episode 251 on the way home from work today, a December 29 episode where Elis is off having a family so John just talks to the producer, it gets to this in literally in the first five minutes, and I find myself sitting on the bus thinking - Jesus Christ, Robins. Was it always this bleak?

All right, strong tone to set for the last leg of the bleakness journey! I ended up drinking with my roommate a few days ago after telling myself I wouldn't and I am still upset with myself about it, so actually that tone is about the appropriate level of bleakness for my current state, I am personally on board with it. But it's probably good overall that Elis is usually there to lighten things a bit.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 4 days

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April 2024 was a big month for Scottish comedians on television networks. Here are some things I watched.

Baby Reindeer

I watched this a couple of days ago, and in those couple of days I must admit I have done some Googling and have come to the conclusion that the last thing the world needs is one more person publicly expressing anything about that show. It’s a very good show. It’s very well made, well written and well acted and a compelling and terrifying story well told. I highly recommend it if you like that sort of thing, though I do recommend first looking up what sort of thing it is, because trigger warning for just about everything. Mainly stalking and sexual assault.

I do not recommend further Googling, as I found out after watching it that that it was apparently much closer to “true crime” than I’d thought initially. I mean, I knew it was based on a true story. I knew it covered the same part of his real life as the autobiographical story in his stand-up show Monkey See Monkey Do, which was broadcast on Comedy Central and which I also watched last week and it’s also very good.

But it’s looking like Baby Reindeer may be less fictionalized than I’d assumed, and maybe covers ground that’s less resolved/consigned to the past than I’d assumed, that makes it seem like a weird thing to put on Netflix, and definitely makes me think it doesn’t need more people pontificating about it publicly on the internet. So I won’t do much more of that. Something seems a bit off in general and makes me want to stay away from much comment. This part of the post would have been a lot longer if I’d written it a couple of days ago. Seriously though, it’s a very good show. If you assume it exists in a vacuum.

Dinosaur

I watched this because I liked Ashely Storrie from things like The News Quiz, and she has a special I liked on Radio 4, and, you know, autism stories. I think I made a mistake by watching it immediately after I watched Baby Reindeer. I’d thought I could use it as a bit of a palette cleanser for that heavier show, the way if I see a horror movie I always have to immediately watch an episode of 30 Rock after or I can’t sleep. But Baby Reindeer’s heaviness got so deep in my head that it made it hard to get too into anything else, so my enjoyment of Dinosaur suffered for that, which is not Ashley Storrie’s fault.

I’m pretty sure this show is pretty good for what it is, which is a fairly formulaic sitcom but with the twist of an openly autistic main character who can point out how bullshit more sitcom tropes are. Watching two people get married when they’ve known each other for two months is more fun to watch from the perspective of an outsider who thinks it’s stupid, than it would be to see it just from their perspective.

This show definitely picked up steam as it went along, and as the characters developed slightly beyond stock sitcom people. I think my favourite parts of the show were Ashley Storrie at her paleontology job, so I was sorry that we didn’t see much of that after the first episode. I’m just not that into shows based around a wedding, even if it’s only to point out how bad the idea is.

Overall I came away thinking it was all right, but also that I’d definitely watch a second season if there is one, because by the very end I’d found myself starting to get invested in the characters and thinking this has potential. And the wedding’s happened now so season 2 might be built around something else. And I did think the main character was good. Six episodes was just not quite enough time for me to fully get into it.

Fern Brady – Autistic Bikini Queen

Fucking brilliant, as good as I expected it to be and that was a pretty high bar. I’d heard probably 40% of the material before in some form or another, because small parts of it were in her previous show and her next show, bits of it were in her book, and I’ve sought out so much Fern Brady stuff that I’ve seen her tell a few of these stories in other contexts. But that made it seem like a consolidation of the best jokes I’ve heard her tell before, plus a bunch of stuff I haven’t heard, and it was so good.

It is, as she says at the beginning, only a bit about autism. Well only a bit of it is explicitly about autism – the rest is about her views on life and death and love and marriage, and those are of course partly influenced by autism, and they feel refreshing and interesting and funny to me. The hour went by so fast, I thought it was only about halfway done when she started wrapping up.

I love her delivery so much, I think it's improved over the years and really peaked here. The confidence really adds to it.

There isn’t one obvious theme, aside from the idea that romanticized notions are bullshit, but it still feels like everything she says makes sense together. There’s no classic “sad bit at the end” (though it does build to a fun little ending, no spoilers), but it still felt meaningful as well as funny. A lot of it was delightfully rude but it wasn’t funny (just) because it was rude, and it was edgy without being, you know, a dick about it. All the other words that get thrown around about Fern Brady, brutal and honest and whatever else, were earned. And it was funny.

I hear she’s cracking America now, so everyone should watch this (plus the two other specials she has on YouTube) so you can say you were into her stand-up before she was a huge American star (she's already a fairly huge British star, but still).

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 5 days

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The big story of the 300th Bugle episode AO (after Oliver) should be that it's Ahir Shah's debut, but I'm 7 minutes into it and Hari Kondabolu is already stealing the show. For anyone who doesn't know, Hari Kondabolu is an American comedian who became a Bugle regular I think because John Oliver must have recommended him, as I cannot imagine him crossing paths with Andy otherwise. His role on the podcast is to be sardonic about politics and baffled about Andy Zaltzman, and it's frequently gold (he also has several very funny comedy albums on Bandcamp, if anyone's interested in that).

He hasn't been on The Bugle in a while, and I'd forgotten that sometimes he likes to come on UK comedy podcasts and talk shit about the entire UK comedy industry. He did this in much more detail on the Comedian's Comedian podcast, I found his episode a fascinating exploration of UK vs US comedy. In that episode Hari did express admiration for various UK comedians and for their work ethic as a group, it was a nuanced conversation about pros and cons on both sides and made a great interview. That, however, is less funny than Hari just turning up on a podcast with 2 English comedians and shit talking their entire life's work, as he's done within the first seven minutes of this Bugle episode.

Andy Zaltzman: So, you two shared a flat in Edinburgh in 2011?

Hari Kondabolu: Yes, yes. Ahir was a fetus at the time. He was still in the womb, yet somehow finishing up at Cambridge. And I was a 28/29-year-old comic, hungry, excited for the future, thinking there was a career for me in the UK and beyond. And, no. No, not so much.

Andy Zaltzman: So, Ahir, are you going to Edinburgh this year?

Ahir Shah: I'm going back to the Fringe. I'm going to do a fortnight of the show I did last year.

Andy Zaltzman: Well that sounds like quite a long show. Is this the edited down version of it?

Ahir Shah: Yeah, it's like one of those Mark Watson things that takes absolutely fucking ages.

Hari Kondabolu: Has anyone ever made money at that festival? My understanding of how your system in the UK works is that you spend two weeks to a month in Edinburgh, and you lose all your money, and you owe your management company all the money for putting up the show, and then you spend a good chunk of the year paying them back. It seems like it only works because you have good social services that allow you to survive somehow.

Andy Zaltzman: That's a charmingly nostalgic view of the state of British social services, to be honest.

Ahir Shah: Yeah. The Edinburgh Festival, brought to you by the NHS.

Andy Zaltzman: Well, you know, it's just good for creativity. Most great figures from the creative arts through history were stung into action by needing to earn money. So that's the way the Edinburgh Festival works, clearly, is it makes people hungry in that regard.

Hari Kondabolu: I really do love watching a bunch of half-finished hours of comedy that should have probably taken a year or two more to be polished and perfect, but of course the drive for having a new hour every year is so important. And then making the full hour of comedy brilliant, and then not recording it, and sharing it with the world. Therefore no one has ever really seen it other than a few people in your own country. It's a brilliant strategy.

Andy Zaltzman: It's a great strategy, yeah.

Ahir Shah: I'm feeling really intensely patriotic at the moment, after all of these - it's like, you leave our festival alone, okay? You visited one time. You visited one time. It doesn't even count.

Hari Kondabolu: I did visit one time.

Andy Zaltzman: Well maybe we should take up the New York system of just doing the same seven minutes for twenty-five years, and ending up bitter at why fame has passed you by.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 6 days

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Update: I've just realized there has been a Perrier (or whatever it is) Award winner in every Taskmaster season since 13. Bridget Christie, John Kearns, Jenny Eclair, Sam Campbell, John Robins. So we have to be due for Ahir Shah next, right? Him or Jordan Brookes or Richard Gadd, according to the pattern. And they wouldn't break a pattern, would they?

Yes! I think it was just over a year ago when I first asked when we're going to get Ahir Shah on The Bugle, because he'd be great. Now they just need to get him on Taskmaster, and quick, before The Bugle raises his profile so much that he's too big for TM.

Also good to see they've got Hari back, it's been a while. Oh, and, small thing, this is episode 300. After doing 295 in the original run with John Oliver. Andy got so close to 300, and then HBO made him start all over, and he still got back there. Well done!

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 6 days

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 6 days

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Just finished watching Baby Reindeer and Jesus Christ that was intense, I knew it would be from what I'd read and from watching his Monkey See Monkey Do show last week, but still, I would say it was even harder to watch than I was prepared for. Very good, well made and everything. But way too much going on for me to make any thoughts coherent enough to put into a Tumblr post within 20 minutes of having finished the show, which is when it is now.

I'll probably make an actual post about the actual show at some point, but in the meantime, in the absence of me knowing what else to say about it, I will say that if you finish watching Baby Reindeer and then Google Richard Gadd's early stand-up to see how similar it really was to what we saw in the show, you will learn that the jokes in the show were actually taken verbatim from his real routines, such as this one where he's compered by Baby Ed Gamble in 2012:

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And if you watch that video, possibly while having the same algorithm-influencing search history as I do, you will find this video in the sidebar, which I found quite funny:

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Elis James heckling his co-host from a different mic is pretty funny. Baby Reindeer was fucking horrifying but very good. Those are all the comments I've got at the moment.

#Youtube

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 7 days

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This is a post I decided to make entirely for my own reasons and is definitely not just me doing that thing I do sometimes where I read something elsewhere on the internet and write a reply to it in a post on a different website to people who don’t have the original context. Such petty behaviour is beneath me and I would never do that. But anyway, here is how a post comparing Jon Richardson to John Robins should look.

They have a lot in common, obviously. They’ve both based their comedy personas on “I am bitter and anxious and think about things until it ruins my life and get upset when other people do things differently from me, and for related reasons I have a drinking problem”. Both of these comedic personas are… I mean, if it’s that far apart from the reality, then they’ve done a hell of a job of committing to the bit for nearly 20 years. I assume the truth in overlapping personas is why they venerate each other’s work so much, and get along so well, Jon Richardson seemed to get Robins in the divorce (his, um, first divorce – the first time he got divorced from a blond comedian with ADHD). There’s not a lot of point in pitting them against each other when they seem to go together in many ways.

However, here are some differences that immediately come to mind:

- I guess I can’t speak to this for sure as I haven’t listened to Jon Richardson’s solo radio show (aside from the couple of Robins-featuring episodes that I’ve listened to as part of my Robins-completism), but based on the radio shows I’ve heard – all of the Jon/Russell 6 Music era from 2006 to 2008 and almost all of the Elis/John XFM/Radio X era from 2014-2019 – Jon Richardson is really harsh on the radio and mellows a bit in his stand-up. While John Robins gives us a bit of a moderated and euphemized version of his darkness on the radio, and then just unleashes it all in stand-up. The latter version seems like the logical way to do it, given the nature of radio and the nature of stand-up. But I think Russell specifically brought out something in Jon that made him furious, so when he was on his own he comparatively calmed down.

- Having said that, I would argue that mostly, Jon Richardson’s stand-up is about how his outsider way of doing things is better and everyone else should do that too. While John Robins, in stand-up, will tell you his manifesto and then quickly acknowledge that trying to live this way has ruined his life and it would be better if he could be more like other people. But on the radio it’s the opposite. John Robins mostly defending his own darkness-based choices, while Jon Richardson was moaning about how the reality of living that way was actually pretty harrowing and he should stop.

- In stand-up, at least, Jon Richardson tends to keep it fairly superficial, getting deep into household things and only making tenuous ties to bigger stuff. While John Robins will do the jokes about domestic things only as a way into what Elis James has eloquently called “the cynical inclusion of emotional heft”. And that was true for several years before his Darkness of Robins show, even if he didn’t go as big on it before then. Jon Richardson is willing to imply the emotional heft a little more, rather than staring the audience down and laying it out.

- This is me speculating but it doesn’t take a lot of speculative inferring to say Jon Richardson might be more capable of adjusting his most difficult qualities in certain situations to make himself easier to work with, which would be how he got the decade-long panel show career and Robins not so much. Also, it takes no speculation at all to say Jon Richardson can usually “play along” his way through an awkward panel show situation, which John Robins demonstrably cannot. Though there are some exceptions to Richardson’s ability to do this, ie. the Jimmy Carr tax episode and that time when they made him go talk to strangers in America with Sean Lock.

- John Robins wrote a fun and friendly book with a positive message about mental health and Jon Richardson wrote the most harrowing fucking memoir I’ve ever read.

- John Robins has a pointlessly intense and earnest side that Richardson never quite reaches – not in his public persona, at least. I have never seen Jon Richardson unironically quote both Phil Kay and Anthony Burgess while describing breaking up a fight in the streets of Edinburgh.

On the other hand, I’ve never heard John Robins get jealous of a clock because someone else was checking the time instead of looking at him. Richardson certainly has his own brand of intensity.

And here are some similarities besides the very obvious (anxiety, alcoholism):

- Both have politics that are left-wing but less left-wing than I am, both are very pragmatic in their political views and seem to have more pragmatic than ideological objections to the far-left, both specifically a big fan of taxes.

- Both fairly obsessive about letting people know when they have done more work on something than other people, and generally cannot even the slightest disparity in fairness.

- Both are highly competitive, and by and large, pretty good at the thing they get to be competitive about during public performance on a long-term basis (Jon is pretty good at Countdown, John is good at quizzes and quick-thinking-based games). This comes into play in their actual competitions (Catsdown, the games they play on John and Elis’ radio show, they’ve both done Taskmaster), but it’s also a much larger part of their overall comedic persona.

This is interesting as a status thing, because it can be both. When they’re winning, it can be a way for them to claw the high status from a persona that usually isn’t that. But even then, it isn’t always. Even at the best of times, it’s very easy for their competitive nature to get turned around on them, it just takes one person (this person can be someone else in a competition, or it can be Jon/John pointing it out about themselves) to point out how pitiful it is to want to win something unimportant that badly, and it turns into a low status thing.

Of course I’ve thought of this lately because Taskmaster’s airing again, and various people have wildly different views on whether competitiveness on a comedy show is a good thing, but I’ve realized that one of the ways I diverge with other people on that is on how I view it, status-wise. I don’t like the hyper-competitive contestants because they’re cool, I like them because they’re not. Even if they actually are very good at the thing they’re competitive about, they’re still walking around caring deeply about something arbitrary and pointless. The cool people are the ones who don’t give a shit, and in many cases I dislike them for being so cool. To use the current example, fuck Steve Pemberton for being “together” enough to do a whole Taskmaster task while still thinking about how to best show off for the cameras and help them with their edit. I like John Robins and his inability to moderate his maladaptive qualities even when doing so would be professionally beneficial to him. And through that, I like the guy who is winning points-wise, but it still feels like supporting the flawed/lower status one.

This has been a post I've made for no particular reason and not as a response to anything whatsoever, but on an unrelated note, I may have made a compilation almost four years ago of John Robins and Sara Pascoe on that one car crash of a Mock the Week episode, because I wanted to show someone why I didn't like that guy, and Tumblr didn't let you embed videos in the middle of posts back then, and I hadn't yet figured out that it's easier to just share videos via Google Drive, so if I wanted to embed a video in my Tumblr post, I'd upload it to YouTube to do it from there. I did not properly think through the ways which that can cause a video you've made to break containment, and may someday be used to make a point you don't even agree with anymore, now that you've gained a view of John Robins that's broader than that one terrible Mock the Week episode. The point is, never post anything outside of Tumblr. And don't let Mock the Week be your introduction to John Robins. And if you're a comedian who gets invited on a panel show, maybe think carefully about which of your stand-up bits you want to take out of context on camera.

Oh, John Robins has better music taste. There's another big difference. That's important.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 7 days

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Sarah Keyworth won the thing that is no longer a Barry Award for their excellent show this year that everyone who can should watch. It's called My Eyes Are Up Here and it's about family and identity and ADHD and top surgery and growing up and and lesbian foursomes. It has excellent jokes and structure that ties together and an ending that sneaks up on you. And now they're officially the best comedian in Australia. Well done.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 7 days

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Comes from the Two Hearts (musical comedy duo with Laura Daniel and her husband Joseph Moore) Instagram here. Apparently everyone is having a good time at the Melbourne Comedy Festival this year.

I once spent two weeks traveling around New Zealand with a (too) large group of people that about half Kiwis and half Aussies (aside from me and my three Canadian friends who'd gone down there for this), and I can confirm that that's exactly how combative it gets when you put these people in a room together. They all spent two weeks making fun of the differences in each other's language and accents as though they didn't all have exactly the same accent. They just had slightly different words for coolers and flip-flops.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 8 days

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So, does anyone want a spreadsheet with every character Daniel Kitson has ever named? Because I’ve made a spreadsheet with every character Daniel Kitson has ever named. There are 198 of them.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks, re-listening to all his shows with fictional characters so I could make a spreadsheet. I’ll be honest, when I started the project I thought it would be much smaller and more manageable than it turned out to be. You try picking apart where a character’s voice is coming from in a show with multiple unreliable and frequently narrators, characters inventing each other, confusing timelines, stand-up and songs and stories blending into each other, meta experimentation. The meta experimentation was the worst. I mean, it’s very good if you’re trying to have your mind blown by audacious theatre. It’s not so good if you’re trying to pin them down to a spreadsheet. I think I did fine.

It specifically lists named characters only, meaning I left out some major characters who have no names, ie. both Kitson and Key’s guys in Tree. Though on the other hand, I included some things that are can only extremely tenuously be called characters, just because they were given names. Like Isy Suttie’s car in the Christmas show. And various hypothetical people that characters in various shows invent. And one time in the play Mouse, when Kitson’s character (one of the two characters played by Kitson that interact with each other and have the exact same name because they’re different versions of each other, you see the problem in trying to spreadsheet this) just lists various first names and then says what he associates with those names, I included that too because technically it’s a name.

I don’t generally share my name on this site but I will say Tim Key has voiced characters in two different Kitson story shows, and in both of them, he had a love interest with my first name. My name appears three times – twice connected to Tim, once in a character named by Gavin, none of them are outright villains (I mean, let’s assume his date in Tree didn’t know he was married), so I come out all right. Some people don’t. There are a lot of bad guys named Brian. I think Brian is the most common villain name, followed by Barry. The most common hero/Kitson self-insert name is William. Followed by Benjamin, I think. More Claires than I'd noticed before putting this together. And a lot of characters where them sometimes going by one version of their name and sometimes going by another is significant to the narrative (again, this is a strong storytelling device but makes for irritating admin).

I caught a couple of characters where I think I know why he picked that name, but idle speculation is beneath us. Given the size of this spreadsheet and how long it took to put together, I think most names were chosen just because he'd already used every name he'd ever heard and was scrambling to find yet another one.

There are a few things missing from this spreadsheet. I'm pretty sure there are only two Daniel Kitson story shows I've never heard: A Made Up Story from 2003, and The Revenge of Heckmondwyke from 2008. A Made Up Story was from before he was as big a name so I think there were fewer people bootlegging him, and I've just never found a recording even though it was performed lots of times. Its two main characters are in my spreadsheet because I got their names off a review, but God knows how many other characters are missing.

Daniel Kitson does this thing where every once in a while he goes into Regent's Park with Gavin Osborn and does stand-up and a story show, and Gavin plays music during the story, and sometimes Gavin plays how own songs too, and for some reason those Regent Park nights are a part of the Kitson catalogue with which I'm particularly obsessed. It just think it's an amazingly cool thing, those little one-off nights in this cool theatre. I have "Go look at the Regent's Park theatre" on my list of things to do when I go to London this summer, as a pilgrimage to where history's taken place.

Anyway, The Revenge of Heckmondwyke was the story portion of the 2008 Regent's Park night, which I haven't heard recorded. However, the version of Impotent Fury of the Privileged that's on Kitson's Bandcamp page was recorded on that Regent's Park night, and I don't think he'd have recorded only the stand-up half of the night and not the story show, which means at least one Revenge of Heckmondwyke recording exists, Kitson must have it. He's just choosing not to share. Which is annoying, both because I want to hear that show, and because it's one of the few things standing between me and having a complete set of Kitson and Osborn in Regent's Park recordings (that, and the original Stories For the Starlit Sky from 2009).

I usually try to be slightly more discreet than this about the exact nature of my collection so maybe I'll take this post down in a bit, but I wanted to share at least temporarily because this took me 1.5 weeks and it's too big. Look at it, guys. Look how many characters there are. Why did I write down all those characters? There was no reason to write down all those characters. But there they are.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 8 days

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“I know I sound a bit self-righteous, but that’s the risk you run if you yourself are right.” – Daniel Kitson

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 8 days

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I finally decided to listen to the Perfect Brains podcast, did all four episodes that are out so far in the last couple of days. And, okay, I wasn’t going to say this because I didn’t want to be pointlessly negative about something people enjoy – but now that I no longer hold this opinion, I can say, I was pretty skeptical when this was first announced. It felt like a weirdly manufactured pairing, since as far as I knew Sam Campbell and Lucy Beaumont had nothing to do with each other before Taskmaster, and it’s not even like they clicked with each other especially well during Taskmaster.

It felt like one of those things where people on Reddit (or, to be fair, Tumblr) see two people on a panel show and say “Oh my God, they should have a sitcom!” And then Avalon just gave them a sitcom podcast, not because there were any artistic reasons to believe that would actually work, but just because fans thought it would be a funny concept. This seemed especially true since they didn’t even have a format when they launched, just said “Okay you guys liked these two on Taskmaster, well here, subscribe to this then.”

And I wasn’t convinced it would work. Sam and Lucy don’t have anything that would make them work well together except that they’re both weird, and they’re not even the same type of weird, or particularly compatible types of weird. Zany characters can be very funny on their own, but when bouncing off someone else, the “straight man” role exists for a reason. The weird one has to be paired with someone who’s been tailored to fit with them.

I can say all those now because it turns out my concerns were unfounded – this shit’s hilarious. It still seems like a bit of a cynical idea that might have just got lucky, but it really works. Possibly because I didn’t need to be worried about the lack of a straight man. They have a “straight man” in the podcast, and his name is Sam Campbell. And it turns out it’s amazingly funny to listen to Sam Campbell playing the straight man. He’s surprisingly good at it.

There’s a kid at the autism centre where I work who speaks almost entirely in “scripts”, in which he’s repeating things he’s heard elsewhere (songs, TV shows), mostly talking to himself, sometimes he can be persuaded to answer a question but only if it’s a very simple one and he can answer with something from his repertoire of quotes. By last week, I’d spent probably 50 hours with him one-on-one in various sessions over several months, and I was very used to his voice. But then we introduced a new program that he didn’t like, and when I started doing it, he suddenly said “All done all done!” in a completely different voice that I had never heard before. It was significantly higher-pitched. He normally mumbles a lot but this was clearly enunciated. If I heard that voice out of context I’d never have guessed it was him. It was shocking to realize I’d heard him say thousands of words and this was the first time I’d ever heard his “real” voice. How he sounds when he’s talking as himself, and not scripting from other things he’s heard. (Not relevant to the story but just to be clear: I didn’t finish the program after he said that. I do not torture children for a living.)

That’s what I thought of the first time I heard Sam Campbell respond to one of Lucy Beaumont’s most absurd statements. Sam stays in character on everything, even situations where most comedians break character (Taskmaster podcast, Off Menu), so the first time Lucy caught him so off guard that he just gave a genuine surprise response, his answer shocked me almost more than her statement. I had that same moment of “Oh shit, I’ve heard you say a lot of words before but I think I’ve just heard your real voice for the first time.” It’s not constant or anything, Sam’s still mostly in character throughout this. But every once in a while Lucy will throw him right off and it’s delightful. Her mother had him unable to keep up any persona for pretty much the whole time he was on, I think he nearly forgot he was meant to be acting and just enjoy the stories. (Please note: That moment of “Oh shit, you became a different person for a moment there and I think that’s the real one” is as far as this analogy goes, I feel the need to clarify because I know the internet is full of speculation about Sam being somewhere on some spectrum or other and that’s not the point I’m making here. I have no theories as to what spectrum Sam Campbell may or may not be on. But I do have views on how funny it is when someone gets emotionally pushed to the point of suddenly turning into the “real” person, my view is: not particularly funny if it’s a child confronted with a therapy program they don’t want and you should probably back off, but very funny if it’s a comedian who’s too confused by another comedian’s mother’s holiday anecdote to remember to do his inflection.)

The biggest downside to this podcast is I just can’t imagine anything living up to that guest episode. Tim Key was so good that by the time his segment finished, I felt bad for Lucy and her mother trying to live up to that. But I needn’t have, as by the time Lucy’s mother was done, I felt bad for Tim having given his time to that podcast only to be comedically upstaged by someone who isn’t actually a comedian (although Lucy’s mother is a playwright, and she sure crafted some theatre in that episode).

I’ve gone through various phases in my assumptions about Lucy Beaumont. It started with – well obviously that’s a character, it’s funny. Then – she is committing to that bit really hard, is there any chance she’s just actually like that and has lucked into her career? Then – oh that was some shitty misogyny of me to even consider that, no one wonders whether someone like Sam Campbell is a character act, obviously Lucy Beaumont also has a differently-pitched voice of a completely different person that she uses in real life, she just never lets it come out in a performance. Then I listened to her on the Comedian’s Comedian podcast where she started talking about how all famous literature was written by ghosts, and Stuart Goldsmith gave her so many opportunities to clarify herself, he kept saying that’s an interesting idea but she means it metaphorically of course, and she kept saying “No I mean it completely literally, I think people are possessed by spirits”, and you could hear the moment when it clicked to Stuart that he wasn’t going to get her to admit she’s doing a bit because she’s not, and he finally said “Are you pulling my leg, Lucy?” and she said no, and then he hurried off the topic. And after that I stopped feeling bad about wondering whether Lucy Beaumont might be actually just like that, not some carefully crafted character. I mean, obviously some of it is crafted. Obviously she couldn’t get where she is if she didn’t know what she was doing and understand that some of her absurd thoughts are funny, and funnier if she plays into that. But I think she does mean this stuff.

Hearing her mother on that podcast has broadened my view of Lucy Beaumont further, to thinking – oh, she might be the normal one. She might be genuinely like this but only because that’s her compromise between the normal she was taught and objective reality. And she, being very intelligent (and you can’t have as successful a career as Lucy Beaumont with having lots of intelligence, even if that someone goes alongside the belief that 1984 was written by an angry spirit), figured out where to find the humour in that compromise and in the gaps, and it’s worked out great. That’s my current working theory. I’ll let you all know how it evolves in another ten or so episodes.

The guests were great, but the three episodes with just the two of them have been funny too. Sam Campbell obviously brings a lot to the table, I’ve had the theme song stuck in my head for 48 hours straight, so fuck him for that, and Paul Williams too for good measure. It is fun to listen to them pass the brain cell back and forth, jockey for which one gets to be the weird one, and Sam Campbell normally loses, which is funny. But he still gets to be the weirder one often enough for that to also be very funny. Four episodes in and I'm sold.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 8 days

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I enjoyed that latest Taskmaster episode a lot. I don’t know why I’ve hardly written any posts about this season since it started, as it’s been really good. Here’s a brief summary of my updates opinions four episodes in:

- The main thing I wanted for Nick was a chance to show off his magician-related skills. He got that chance in the tension task… it did not go as I’d predicted. However, he has made up for breaking my predictions by turning out to be the sweetest person in the world. It’s been a while since we’ve had a proper cinnamon roll on Taskmaster. I think his gentle banter with Greg continues to be the funniest thing he brings, it’s delightful every time.

- Steve Pemberton won me over in the first couple of episodes, but then lost me pretty hard by admitting he broke that egg on purpose, I must admit I am now pretty focused on hoping he loses specifically as punishment for that. I got mad at him then for sacrificing the task in order to play to the TV edit/try too hard to be funny – he’s done similar things several times since, like imposing extra rules in the Mr. Blobby task and writing puns in the hand task. It is not in the spirit of Taskmaster! He’s probably basically fine but I want him to lose so that future Taskmaster contestants understand you do not come here to perform, you come here to play. I don’t even just hold that belief because of how competitive I am, I also think it’s much funnier if you let you and throw yourself right into the game, which he’s not quite doing, and it disproportionately annoys me.

- I find Sophie Willan’s unpredictability entertaining. Usually she’s shit at the tasks, and every once in a while she’ll be great. She has no idea what’s going on almost ever but apparently has a good eye for art. She talks to horses. She nearly drowns in a river that only goes up to her waist. She demonstrates sexy dances that literally no one asked her to do? She has never seen this show before. You never know what she’s going to bring to the table next.

- All right, Joanne McNally’s won me around. She went in with a significant deficit in my opinion of her because I say some quite shitty things on a different TV show once, but four episodes in, she’s been entertaining enough for me to forgive it (I mean… I don’t actually forgive the sentiment expressed, but I can decide I like her enough to choose to assume it was just a misguided attempt to be funny). She’s breathing life into tense situations and tension into situations where the task explicitly requests it. She’s also never seen the show before but she’s throwing herself all the way into it. She’s consistently funny. She’s sharp and knows what’s going on, task-wise, almost all the time, while making it look fairly effortless. She didn’t do the prep work but I respect that she still showed up to play.

- Well, we haven’t had the full-on meltdowns from Robins, but I kind of knew that would happen, as they caught him just as he was moving into his “sober and more enlightened” era. It will always be a loss that Taskmaster never cast Farthinggate-era Robins when they had the chance, but I’m actually surprised at how much I’m enjoying “on his best behaviour Robins”. Mainly because it is visibly incredibly difficult for him to not have competitive meltdowns and to play it as chill as he is (which still isn’t very chill, it’s just chill compared to what he used to be), and the tension of that difficulty can be very funny. Maybe it’s like how people trying to avoid swearing on the radio is funnier than just hearing them swear. I’ve heard John Robins have plenty of proper competitive meltdowns – it is a new and uniquely entertaining thing to watch him sit there and try to physically force every nerve in his body to not do that. A whole new level of the pointless intensity. Those team tasks especially have potential for it. Also, they’ve used the same joke several times now, but I don’t mind at all. They could keep implying that John’s fucked up a task and giving him time to panic before saying it’s fine – that might get old after 100 or so episodes, but 10 episodes wouldn’t be nearly enough for that to stop being funny. I’d be fine if they keep it up all season. I desperately hope he wins but I also hope they torture him.

I have to admit I may have got too into the competition too early in this season, because normally it isn’t until the last few episodes, if the scores are tight, when I start to get really concerned about whether it’ll end up going my way. But yesterday, while watching episode four, I found myself genuinely stressed during every task because of how much I want John Robins to beat Steve Pemberton. I mean, I want him to win, but I specifically want him to beat Steve Pemberton, because I do not want someone to get away with being smugly too good to throw himself entirely into Taskmaster. I’m too invested. I knew John had gone in one point ahead of both Steve and Joanne, and I was keeping score in my head throughout the episode, of how far each score led him to extend his lead over both of them. I don’t usually count points as the episode goes along until episodes 9 or 10.

Most tasks I’m less interested in John’s total score and more interested in his score relative to Steve. I realize Joanne is also competitive and a threat to win and I want him to beat her too, but I don’t think she’s as likely to win overall, she’s not as competitive in general and the only reason she’s so close to the top right now is she got a lucky 5-0 that’s not likely to repeat itself. Also, if she wins I’ll be disappointed, but not nearly as disappointed as I’ll be if Steve does.

Anyway, I thought episode 4 was great fun. It does feel a bit more “simmering” than some other Taskmaster seasons – I almost wrote “gentle” but I don’t think that’s quite true, because there seems to be a lot going on. It’s just not all being shouted the way it is in some seasons. I like it, I enjoy the unpredictable mystery of Sophie Willan and the incomprehensible charm of Nick Mohammed and the understated arrogance of Steve Pemberton (in a “fuck this guy but he makes a good villain” way) and the simmering anger of John Robins. Also Joanne McNally is there, cheerfully shouting whatever thoughts occur to her, and they’re almost always funny.

One note I do have to mention in writing a post about Taskmaster s17e04 – if you have a good friend who’s recently quit drinking due to quite a severe and life-ruining alcohol addiction, with rum as his drink of choice for a number of years, you should maybe not trick him into drinking rum on national television even if it’s non-alcoholic? Ed Gamble said on the podcast that he thinks the rest of them got regular rum and only John got special non-alcoholic rum, and I think/hope Ed was wrong about that, because you really shouldn’t trick people into drinking hard liquor at work even if they’re not alcoholics in recovery. Especially since any of those people could have gone all in and drank the whole glove for a laugh. Going out of their way to procure special non-alcoholic rum is a pretty weird thing to do when Ribena has been used on the show before and has to be cheaper/easier to find/avoids the thorny issue of alcohol altogether. I found it funny that they threw pickled onions in there, because anyone who’s listened to John Robins on the radio will know he’s obsessed with pickled onions; I figured Alex added that as a sort of in-joke with his friend, to the point where it’s almost unfair that by being friends with Alex, John gets an item on the task tailored to things he’s most likely to recognize. But Alex will also know that rum was John Robins’ drink of choice for a long time (I mean, I know it, so I'm pretty sure his real-life drinking buddy Alex Horne does), which sort of makes putting rum in the task look like an incredibly twisted and fucked up version of that joke. I'm sure it was just an oversight, but still, pretty big oversight. Even if they didn’t have an alcoholic in the cast, why bring alcohol into it at all when you could just use some other drink that starts with R?

Having said that, does anyone know if non-alcoholic whiskey can replicate the burning sensation of the real thing, or does it just try for the taste? Asking for a friend who's trying to give up whiskey but really misses it and specifically misses its burning qualities and that friend is me. I actually hadn't thought about non-alcoholic hard liquor until Alex mentioned it on the show, I just knew about non-alcoholic beer and wine. I might look into that. But anyway, they probably shouldn't feed it to people who are at work without warning.

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