I’m not a stand-up comedian. I’ll say that now. I don’t know how to designate an entire set to making people laugh. If people don’t laugh, I can hide behind the literary worth. If people are laughing, I needn’t concern myself with literary worth. I was a bit apprehensive about playing at Richard Sandling’s mega Perfect Movie night. I had done it before with some found haikus from Arnie films. This time I was the headline act. The night was building up to me. So while my friends Gavin James Bower and Stuart Evers and Emma Young hobnobbed with David Vann and Florence of ‘and the Machine’ fame at To Hell With Books, I was shitting myself in the front row while Nathaniel Metcalfe deconstructed the title of the film Precious: based on the book ‘Push’ by Sapphire, Nick Helms read from Chevy Chase’s autobiography and Richard Sandling and James Mullinger had a VHS Deathmatch. Everyone was laughing.
Then it was my time. See, the headline act of Perfect Movie chooses their five favourite movie scenes, including a beginning and an end and acts each one out with help from Rich and the audience.
I chose:
Predator: the opening scene and its macho arm-wrestle, as well as the immortal line ‘CIA got you pushing too many pencils’ is too genius to not do.
Grosse Point Blank: the film is so achingly cool and fun and the scene where Dan Ackroyd calls John Cusack a scab then threatens to fuck him in the bullet hole is always fun.
Do the Right Thing: I’m always a fan of people with halfthought opinions being super righteous on films. The scene where Buggin Out accuses a passerby of gentrification when he scuffs his trainer, backed by a baying crowd, trying to set him off is hilarious.
Sholay: I read the subtitles (and corrected any mistakes) and Rich and another guy played Gabbar Singh and the bandits, trying to wade through pidgin phonetic Hindu to the guffaws of the crowd. We slipped into Welsh, Borat and Apu for the accents but it wasn’t racist, cos we were onstage.
Boogie Nights: So many films end finitely and cheesily but this has the most ‘balls out’ (tee hee) ending ever with Dirk Diggler coaching his cock through a porn scene.
So there you go. No more gigs for a while. Back to the lab to prepare Coconut Unlimited for publication. Hellz yeah.
