The tragic case of the comedy debut

At this point, Gillian Bogle’s biggest handicap was that she was Gillian Bogle.
All the other comics and wannabe comics had been indulged with good-natured chuckles and unwarranted laughs as they gamely paraded their by turns weak, inappropriate and unpolished material.
The one Indian lady had somehow managed to get away with a joke that rode on the premise of a barman mishearing the name Hansa. The punchline was, “How can I give you a Hansa when I don’t even know the question yet?”
Admittedly there were islands of quality amid the dross.
Comedy prodigy David Kabuka from Uganda had this killer riff about black defiance.
“If you want to get black people to do something, your best approach would be to ban them from doing it. Dude, they’ll be toyi-toyi-ing in the streets about it: ‘Kitesurfing! Viva kitesurfing! We demand the right to go kitesurfing!’”
And he also had this line about what he says when locals speak to him in Sotho and he has no idea what they’re saying: “Sho-sho. Sho-sho!”
Kibuka was just a newcomer giving it a go and everybody was on his side. He had them in the palm of his hand from the minute he walked on with his scruffy pants blazer and his shy grin.
But how would they take to a notorious soap celebrity who now thought she could do comedy? What if they simply didn’t like her character on the series? There could be no better way of getting your revenge than going to someone’s comedy debut and simply not laughing.
On Sunday nights at the Comedy Underground, the novices are given five-minute slots before the break, and the bigger names, the comedy heavyweights, come on after the break. Gillian was opening the second half, before Chris Forrest, John Vlismas and Martin Jonas, the king of Johannesburg comedy.
It was a bit like playing your first gig at open-mic night at the folk club and coming on before Steve Hofmeyr, Koos Kombuis and Arno Carstens.
And as one does when you find yourself on the business end of such an imposing line-up, Gillian hit the bar. Hard. Two tequilas were down before she’d even got her wallet out of her purse. These were followed by a glass of wine that dived down her gullet like a bucket down a well.
She was feeling a lot more confident by the time she took the stage, clutching her second glass and puffing on the first cigarette she’d had since varsity.
It wasn’t quite the comic persona she’d been planning to project, but there you go. These were desperate times.
Where her soap opera character was a control-freak bitch, Comedy Gillian ended up coming across as a wild-eyed, foul-mouthed, female Eddie Murphy.
She’d chosen rather hardcore material to begin with, and the booze only hardened her attitude.
Gillian opened with joke that made fun of white people. And it was downhill from there. She should have felt the mixed student audience’s discomfort with racial material, but she’d had four drinks. She wasn’t quite in touch…
She’d recently had her hair corn-rowed for a celebrity boxing match, and she used the opportunity to gently mock the amount black people spent on haircare.
It went down like a bomb threat.
Then she started saying something about TK, the late R&B singer. She didn’t even manage to get to the punchline before she was drowned out in a chorus of unimpressed murmurs.
Eventually she got the hint, and lurched onto an awkward story about going shopping with her boyfriend. It was supposed to be a bit of observational comedy about the green-eyed monster of jealousy that rears its head every time her boyfriend looks at another girl at the mall.
But she never got there. The murmurs became a roar of disapproval and then a slow handclap and some whistles. They were hating her.
Gillian felt panic set in. She went blank. She had a sip of wine to buy some time, but there were no more jokes forthcoming.
“Do you want me to go?” she asked, and it won the biggest round of applause of the evening.
That night she went home and finished another bottle of wine in her flat, all on her own.
Then she crawled into her room and cried and cried and cried. Until she fell sleep.
At that point, Gillian Bogle’s biggest handicap was that she was Gillian Bogle.