In 2005, I was experimenting with character monologues instead of just stand-up. I wanted to draw more from my background in theatre. My solo show Please Stop Trying To Kill Me, Dad was more along the lines of stand-up theatre or stand-up storytelling. I had taken it to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004 and was itching to go back.
Over the years I’d seen Steve Coogan’s Live ‘n’ Lewd, and The Man Who Thinks He’s It, and I’d seen the play Anorak of Fire in 1994. So I had been fascinated by comic monologues and character comedy for some time.
I think it was around this time I picked up a copy of the book Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. A lot of the performers and extracts from their shows really inspired me. I liked Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner’s work, John Leguizamo, Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Hoch, and others. They all spoke to me for different reasons, not just the character side of things, but the details of the stories and how the people and situations in them came alive.
From there, I read the scripts for Eric Bogosian’s shows Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, watched Whoopi Goldberg’s Direct from Broadway show, John Leguizamo’s Sexaholix… A Love Story, and Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop.
So I tried to write a few different pieces. But as with any creative endeavour, they sucked. Which is to be expected. I developed this one piece about a clown who’s in the middle of performing a show when he gets a phone call from his girlfriend, and she breaks up with him.
I took the monologue to a comedy club, one of those rooms-above-a-pub type places. It was a small place. Probably seated about 50 people. Don’t quite remember. Also, I hadn’t quite figured out the logic of why he was performing at a comedy club., doing balloon animals.
I was in full clown makeup. At one point in the piece, I take an unused condom out of my pocket by mistake. I think I even attached it to my balloon pump and tried to blow it up. That was a sight to behold. Then I pull out a balloon animal from another pocket and start pumping it up. My phone rings. Well, it didn’t, but I pretended it did (it was on vibrate mode), and was full of apologies to the audience. So my character answered it. I had decided that this character’s girlfriend was going to end their relationship with him in the middle of his performance.
I launch into the breakup part of the monologue. You have to understand, there’s no script. I have a loose outline in my head, and so I am improvising what I’m saying on the phone and to the audience.
After I, as the character, gets dumped, in the world of the piece, I smear off the makeup across my face, so it looked like tears.
Most of the audience, roughly 49 people. sat in stony silence, not really sure what they were watching. But there was one guy, somewhere near the back on my right-hand side, laughing continuously. I can still hear his laugh in my memory all these years later.
He was my guy. I performed for him.
I did that monologue twice. The next time I came back to the club, I was planning to do a regular stand-up. The booker looked at me and said, “You’re not going to do that clown thing again, are you?” I guess not.
Some years later, I felt that monologue was my strongest piece. So I focused on that. What do I do? Do I expand it? Do I write similar pieces? Do I try to up my game with the other monologues and character ideas? Because this one really took hold.
As I said, I had planned to go back to the Edinburgh Festival in 2005, but I realized my heart wasn’t in it, and neither was my bank balance.
I abandoned the idea of a one-man character show. And realized that there was probably something in this clown break-up character.
Over time, this became one element of the source material for what ended up being my first feature film, Falling for You.
