From Jester To King CX
By Simon Barget
- 665 reads
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Napier, Kentucky.
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Middle of nowhere. My Mum used to call it 'Lazier.'
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Two story house, pretty isolated. On one of those classic two-lane blacktop roads you know every so often an orange pick-up rolls by. My room was at the front and the window was one of those sliders where each of the two panes could slide all the way back either way and it had this key lock when both panes were in place so you could lock it except the frames were warped, I mean the metal frames were, so that they never came together properly and every traffic sound seemed to thrust its way into my room.
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If there was any I certainly didn’t find it! I used to hang out in my room and watch TV until I got bored of four hours of solid TV and I would walk around the back of the house right into these open wheat fields we had and just talk to myself in my different voices.
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That’s how it started!
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Just by myself for a couple of hours. Python, The Kids from The Hall. I used to do whole sketches, repeat them practise them, usually two characters.
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The whole thing. Only ever noted down a word or phrase.
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I think you get used it, I never want anything to be prepared, I think that’s one way of keeping it fresh. When you note it down it loses something. I never have notes when I perform now, it’s all committed to memory.
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Yeah well I had to invent the people I was going to interact with.
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I think I broke the self-conscious thing. I mean people tell me they couldn’t do it, maybe I got used to doing all the accents in the fields, having all that space to talk to. Free not to be judged.
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19, Lexington, Where’s Your Funny Bone.
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Pretty well, I realised people like funny voices! It just breaks down the resistance.
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I played baseball on the odd occasion I liked to cook, I used to make pancakes and coke floats and brownies. I read quite a lot, I never thought of myself as much of a reader until I got older and realised how little other people read.
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Yes there was just me in the house, I have a sister eleven years older but by that time she’d gone to live in Philadelphia and she only came back very rarely not even on Christmas.
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6 years now.
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I love it here, I think a part of me feels British.
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The audiences never have a problem, it’s just the promoters. If you're straight with the promoters and make no secret of telling them the industry is false and safe and frigidly PC, they see that as a threat. I mean their job is to keep the status quo, to preserve it, so that they pick up the party line from the TV people and the production companies as to what’s going to work, I mean that’s the only way anyone's going to make money…
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Yeah it’s also a fear thing, a part of human nature that lots of people don’t want to do anything that they know is going to draw condemnation.
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It’s fine I suppose, but it just becomes ingrained so that people forget to question that such and such is the case, I mean take Trump, and everyone knows I’m a supporter. It's not like I’m wearing it as a badge of honour, he's no paragon of virtue, all I’m saying is that things needed a shakeup. If anything Trump is a classic Agent Provocateur, he’s not afraid of entering the PC debate of what you can and can't say. In fact he just says it without a sense there’s any debate in the first place. He calls a spade you know.
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Yeah I lost a lot of work but I wouldn’t go back. I mean I can’t be that guy that toes the line. I’m not interested in ruffling feathers for the sake of it. Am I?
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A weird wander in the mind of
A weird wander in the mind of a comedian. It hits the spot for me.
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