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Los Angeles and India - October 9, 2007

Hello everyone,

It’s October the 9th, which as we all know is National Blog Day, so here’s mine. I’m back in Edinburgh until further notice, which rather sounds like I’ve been sent home from a war, but just means that I’m currently enjoying some time off. If stand up was like war, then I feel like I’ve spent at least some of the past 7 months on the front line. In fact there are some gigs where I would have happily delivered my show from a bunker, and would have been comforted to see a roll of barbed wire between me and the audience…you know who you are Dubbo.

Fortunately, most of this year has signalled ‘peace in our time’ on the stand up front. I am delighted to say that the gigs in India at the beginning of September were some of the most enjoyable I’ve ever done. I have performed abroad on many occasions in the past, but this was something entirely different. For a start, this wasn’t one of those foreign jaunts to some club-cum-nightclub in Hong Kong to perform to a bunch of leery ex-pats who I would studiously avoid back home. No. This was a proper 850-seater theatre in Mumbai full (or nearly full) of polite, erudite, open-minded Indian people. My hosts for the trip were 2 delightful young promoters called Nevil and Nicole, who, while running around trying to get everything right for opening night, were also kind enough to field an endless succession of “do you get this here?” or “is it ok to say that here?” More often than not, they did get this and you could say that, so in fact any fears I had of having to do a largely edited performance were unfounded. I seem to remember jokes about English cricket going down particularly well. Funny that?

I flew straight from India to LA, for some meetings with some writers. I’m currently writing a pilot for a major American network, but that’s as much as I can tell you about that at the moment… I got to hang out with Brett and Jermaine from The Flight of the Conchords which is always fun. They took me to the HBO Emmys party, were I got quite drunk, and think I nearly started a fight with one of the Sopranos? Apparently, you can’t just sit anywhere at these things! Al Gore was also there, but for someone so clued up on the environment, he didn’t seem to care much for my recycled gags? What else? Oh yeah, I met Gabrielle Byrne at lunch one day, and he told me how his mum and dad got together which was a little weird given that all asked was for him to “pass the salt, please?” I don’t know, sometimes these celebrities just don’t seem to know when to button it.

So, there you go. Not the most informative blog, but there’s really nothing to tell at the moment. What have you guys been up to? Anything interesting?

Cheers,
Danny