Laugh or Cry?

Have you ever had one of those nights that are so surreal that the next morning you wonder if you dreamt it?

Wednesday was one of those nights. I was doing a gig at this trendy bar. I'd done my set and was sitting with a pint of Guinness, waiting for the compere to introduce the headliner.

That was when things got really weird. The compere, Jim, was enjoying a little bit of banter with a girl in the audience. He had been chatting with her all night and had built up a nice rapport with her.

It all seemed to be going very well. Then he made a remark about her boyfriend and everything changed.

"My boyfriend's dead," she said.

The place fell silent. Jim's comment had been fairly innocuous but it had clearly upset her. Her body language had changed and she looked like she was fighting back tears. Her friend sitting next to her looked horrified and covered her face with her hands.

I looked around the audience - every single person was staring at their shoes. The tension in the room was unbelievable. Meanwhile, all the colour had drained out of Jim's face. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times - but what could he say?

The girl got to her feet and fled to the toilets. Jim watched her go. He still didn't say anything. It wasn't just the show he was worried about - he was plainly upset at the distress he had caused. Eventually he turned back to the audience who were now all staring at him. "How was I to know?" he pleaded.

As a comedian, these are the situations you dread. A heckle can be dealt with. A drunk punter can be put down. But exposing a person's genuine suffering in front of a room full of people is pretty hard to turn around.

In establishing a rapport with an audience you are creating an illusion of intimacy. The joy of this is that everybody feels like they are spending a few hours among friends. They relax. They drink. They laugh.

But actually you don't know these people from Adam. Their problems and vulnerabilities are hidden below the surface of their happy faces like emotional land-mines, just waiting for a joke to fall wrong-footed. Jim had just walked blindly into a minefield. The girl was in tears. The audience were silent. And Jim looked genuinely devastated at upsetting the bereaved girl.

Then, just as I was wondering what the hell he would do or say next. The girl emerged from the toilets.

"April Fool!" she said.

I have never experienced such a complex mixture of collective emotions. Here was a crowd of people who just didn't know what to feel. Some laughed. Some jeered. Some were silent.

Jim himself was a good sport - laughing with sheer relief, I should imagine. I don't know what he felt inside. But I was really angry. I felt like punching her. Like the rest of us, Jim had worked his balls off to try and get the gig moving and give everyone a good time. And then this daft cow had undermined it all with a cheap and pretty sick practical joke. I had a complete sense-of-humour-failure. And a weird sense of betrayal.

And it wasn't just me. Everyone seemed to go weird after that. A string of bizarre hecklers emerged from the shadows: a man in a wedding dress; a small bearded man who looked like Mr Tumnus from the Narnia Chronicles; and a woman who kept shouting out something about a goat. It was as if the girl's sick joke had caused a complete breakdown in everyone's idea of what is normal.

It made me realise that behind every social situation there are unwritten rules about how to behave. There are jokes, and there are those things beyond a joke. You don't have to be a comedian to overstep the line. And, often it's not clear where the line is, until you're standing on the other side.