Take A Joke. Just Don't Tweet It.

So, the other day, I responded to a tweet from Mock The Week. They were asking for gags, specifically Unlikely Complaints To A TV Channel. By the time I saw the tweet, it was about twenty hours old, but I threw a gag or two their way anyway, confident in the assumption that whatever I came up with would've been done already.

Initially, I tried to do a joke about Mock The Week itself, and it's notoriously low number of female comedians on the panel, but I couldn't see how to do it without coming across as overly combative. Not under 140 characters, anyway. I briefly considered some joke about Frankie Boyle being trapped in a car crash, but it just sounded like I wanted Frankie Boyle to be in a car crash (not actually true), and anyway, the man hasn't even been on the show for about three years.

In the end, then, I went for the second most obvious gag: suggesting that it was annoying that there was no TV channel to watch old episodes of Mock The Week. A weak joke, I know, but the only one that occurred to me at the time. After a couple of hours, however, Mock The Week re-tweeted the joke. It must have been a slow night.

It occurred to me then, of course, that a lot more people would now see my tweet than would normally be the case if it had just turned up in the feeds of my 'followers'. I assumed that the worst that would happen would be that a few thousand people would see my joke, tut, think 'that's not funny', and go about their day. Perhaps a few of them would feel compelled to tweet me personally to tell me that my joke was not in any way amusing. Or maybe I was being too hard on myself: maybe one or two people would actually find the gag at least mildly amusing. What I didn't expect, however, is what actually happened.

Over the next few hours, I got a reasonable amount of unreasonable tweets. Some derisive (you could say mocking), some actually angry. But all of them linked by a common thread: they all seemed to genuinely believe that I hadn't heard of the TV channel Dave. Even though that was the point of the joke.

I tried to remain open-minded about it all. Possibly, as naivety was the foundation of my joke, perhaps my respondents were playing along in the same spirit: pretending to honestly believe that I was hunting furiously for year old repeats of MTW, but didn't know about Dave. But the tweets were too bitchy, too teasing, too ready to take the mick. Even the ones who were nice clearly thought that I was being sincere, including the lovely lady who pointed out that the previous weeks episode often appeared on YouTube (but, as she pointed out, in two parts). I guess I was just startled that so many viewers of Mock The Week were unable to understand what a joke was. (insert your own punchline).

In other news, there's now about four weeks to go until the performances of Three Kinds Of Me. In an ideal world, we'd be rehearsing every day of the next month. As it is, time and constraints limit us to a few evenings and some Sunday afternoons. We have a kind of technical meeting tonight, where our lighting & sound designers and operators are going to want to joe exactly what it is I want. And I, like the most annoying and unprofessional director ever, am going to have to declare that as yet, I'm not entirely sure. I'm very lucky in that I have a designer that can be both pedantic and patient (usually, you have to settle for one or the other, and the combination of both is a startlingly valuable commodity), and who can usually decipher what ill-formed (and ill-conceived) ideas I'm struggling to come up with. We're halfway through the play now (in terms of pages rehearsed), and I'm hopeful that we will pick up pace even further in the next week or so, giving us a comfortable amount of time to run the whole thing over a few times. Anyway, that's the plan. As I've mentioned, it'll be on next month at the New Venture Theatre in Bedford Place, Hove, and tickets (already selling) can be booked via http://www.ticketsource.co.uk/newventuretheatre/ .