What a comic should do if an audience member throws her artificial leg at you

Lewis Schaffer (centre) last night with Alex Mason and Heather Stevens, part of his increasing entourage of helpers

Sometimes comedians have people walk out of their shows.

Comedian Lewis Schaffer’s shows tend to take matters to quirky excess and things happen which are scarcely credible.

As I arrived last night for his twice-weekly Free Until Famous show at the Source Below in Soho, he was still at the door greeting people on the way in when out came three French people who had decided to leave… He had not even started the show!

When I went into the venue, there were another three French people in there and, when Lewis Schaffer did start his comedy monologue, it was obvious only one of them could understand English.

They left during the interval but, before they left, yet another three French people arrived to see the show which, by now, was halfway through. As far as I could guess, none of the latest three bemused-looking French people understood any English and, after about 15 minutes, they left.

Even for Lewis Schaffer, it is a rare thing to have nine French people walking out of his show.

The language problem I can gloss over. But why they were all travelling in groups of three simply mystifies me.

After the show, Lewis Schaffer and I and two of his increasing entourage of helpers went with comedian Joel Sanders to eat at a falafel cafe in Old Compton Street.

I always find the best way to write daily blogs is to get other people to do the work, so I asked Lewis Schaffer to chat to Joel Sanders and get something for today’s blog while I ignored what they said and chatted to the Alex Mason/Heather Stevens section of Lewis Schaffer’s increasing entourage of helpers.

Lewis Schaffer (left) ‘ blog interviews’ Joel Sanders last night

“You told me an amazing story on my weekly radio show…” said Lewis Schaffer to Joel Sanders, remembering the first golden rule when one comedian talks to another – Always publicise yourself.

“Your weekly radio show?” asked Joel Sanders.

“Nunhead American Radio,” replied Lewis Schaffer. “Every Monday on Resonance FM… What I wanna know is… What I… What I wanna know…” he continued, trying to think of something he might actually want to know about anyone else. “You’ve been around America a lot, Joel. Did you see the dark side of America?”

“It was like Deliverance,” Joel told him.

“Did you fear for your life?” asked Lewis Schaffer, becoming more enthusiastic. “Did they ask you to squeal like a pig?”

“They didn’t quite get to that stage,” Joel replied.

“Have you ever squealed like a pig?’ asked Lewis Schaffer even more enthusiastically.

“Not in the context of comedy,” shrugged Joel.

“So what happened in Johnson City, Tennessee?” asked Lewis Schaffer. “Where IS Johnson City, Tennessee?”

“In the mountains,” explained Joel, “about a mile from the North Carolina border.”

“Is it a coal mining area?” asked Lewis Schaffer.

“I don’t know what they do there,” said Joel, “except I do know they have a Dukes of Hazzard festival there once a year. You know, the South is beautiful. The mountains are beautiful, but that is also where the shit happens. The most beautiful parts of America are also the most dangerous parts.”

At this point, I interrupted: “I heard the words Beautiful and America,” I said. “That’s no use for my blog. Get on to something eccentric involving bestiality.”

“So what about the woman’s leg?” Lewis Schaffer asked Joel.

“Are we going to get a train?” asked Joel.

“No,” I said, “not until you tell me an interesting story about a woman’s leg. You’re my blog for tomorrow.”

Entourage member Heather Stevens reacts to a Schafferism

“Don’t mention the squealing like a pig,” Lewis Schaffer told Joel.

“It was in Hot Springs, Arkansas,” Joel began. “It was in a venue which had once been a sex club and they had converted it to a comedy club, but it still had the poles for the pole dancing. This was in the year 2000. It was strange. There were two shows that night: an early show and a late show. What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t listening to what you and Brian were talking about.”

“Who?” asked Joel.

“Lewis Schaffer,” I said.

“Is this funnier than the Johnson City, Tennessee story?” asked Lewis Schaffer.

“Yes,” said Joel. “So, that night in Hot Springs, Arkansas, there was an early show and a late show and, at the end of the early show, about four people left but all the rest stayed for the late show.”

“I had nine French people walk out tonight,” lamented Lewis Schaffer.

“I know,” said Joel.

“We were there,” I told Lewis Schaffer.

“The French don’t like me,” said Lewis Schaffer. “They hate me. The French hate me.”

“So,” said Joel, resuming his story, “almost all of the first audience stayed in the club and a few new people came along and we started the late show. It was basically the same audience watching the same comedians.”

“Why did they stay?” I asked.

“That was what they did there,” said Joel. “There was nothing else to do in Hot Springs, Arkansas… It was Bill Clinton’s boyhood home: the best barbecue I’ve ever had… Anyway, there was a woman sitting at the front of the audience. She’d been a bit of a pain in the early show. But, by the late show, she’s completely drunk – totally pissed – and, about ten minutes into my set, she took her leg off.”

“She took her leg off?” I asked.

Joel Sanders holds the artificial leg on stage

“She just detached it,” explained Joel. “There was no cue for her to do this. No trigger words. She had been interrupting and I had been responding and she was just playing a game of one-upmanship. And she won, because she removed her leg and hurled it onto the stage as if to say: Well… deal with that!”

“And did you?” I asked.

“Well, I tried,” said Joel. “The first thing was I refused to give it back. She started screaming I need to go to the bathroom! and I told her to detach her vagina, give it to her husband and he could take it for her.”

“Surely she could have hopped to the toilet?” I asked.

“Well no,” explained Joel. “By this point, she had taken both her legs off and both legs were now on the stage. So I had this woman sitting at the front of the audience – just a body with arms… and I was standing on stage holding these legs.”

“I think that’s enough for the blog,” I said. “Leave them wanting more.”

In case you should think this story has been made up, the incident on stage in Hot Springs, Arkansas, was captured on video and is posted on YouTube:

Ian Hinchliffe: “You’ll never work here again” – Never any point asking WHY!

It is not often that a celebration of someone’s life includes a tribute by a belly dancer, four people smashing wine glasses with small hammers and two people with blood capsules in their mouths eating beer glasses with the result that apparent glass and blood spews down onto the stage, but Ian Hinchliffe was the sort of performance artist/comic/artist/musician/absurdist in whose memory this seemed an almost understated tribute.

Ian drowned while fishing on a lake in Arkansas on 3rd December last year.

An obituary written by his friends said he “was a performer who could bring a sense of menace, unpredictability and a surreal/absurd humour into any creative arena, unrivalled by any other artist of his time.”

He was indisputably – and perhaps again this understates the reality – mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Roger Ely was a friend and occasional co-performer. He organised yesterday’s six-hour event Ian Hinchliffe: The Memorial at Beaconsfield arts studio in London. As part of his tribute, Roger said Ian was “one of the most loveable people and one of the most difficult people” he had ever met. “He could be an evil sod,” he added, but one who created occasional “pieces of genius”.

Writer and performer Jim Sweeney was too Ill to be there yesterday, but sent a tribute saying: “He was the best of drunks and he was the worst of drunks.”

Dave Stephens is now a sculptor but was originally a performance artist often credited as an early forerunner of alternative comedy. He said that, in the early days performing with Ian, the routine was to “go down the pub, get pissed and see what happens”.

There were colourful reminiscences aplenty, including a tale of furniture being thrown out of a pub window and, when people went in to discover why, they found Ian with porridge coming out of his trousers because he was simulating an abortion.

I only met Ian a handful of times but, when I got chatting to Lois Keidan who was Director of Live Arts at the ICA in the 1990s, she told me he had once set fire to his own foot there. Why he did that she had no idea. But Why was perhaps always an unnecessary and unanswerable question in Ian Hinchliffe’s life.

Lois also told me a story about police going into the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith and saying to the staff: “There’s a man outside doing strange things in the roadworks.”

“Oh,” the police were told, “that’s just Ian Hinchliffe. It’s art.”

The police, to do them justice, apparently accepted this answer though exactly what “strange things” he was doing remain lost in the mists of anecdote.

At Beaconsfield yesterday, Simon Miles and Pete Mielniczek did a tribute performance in which a small plastic skull, perhaps not irrelevantly, quoted those famous lines from the Scottish play…

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

The indomitable Tony Green told a true story about Ian Hinchliffe performing at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith and, not for the first time, Ian was naked. He got hold of a chair and cut about three inches off one of its legs so it was unstable. He then got a broom handle and broke it in half. He managed to stuff about six inches of it up his arsehole, leaving half a broom handle protruding. He then balanced a full pint of beer on the chair, put both hands on the sides of the chair, leant forward so that his genitalia were in the pint of beer and lifted his feet off the ground so he was balancing.

“You’ll never work here again,” he was told afterwards.

I presume the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith was not the first venue to have told him that.

There is a YouTube video of Ian Hinchliffe performing in 1990 here.

A visit to a fetish club and the recent death of a unique British comedy performer

I blogged yesterday about a Pull the Other One show in Herne Hill, South East London, run by Vivienne and Martin Soan.

Before the show, Martin told me: “I’m in the final of a mime competition at the Royal Festival Hall on 29th May. It’s going to be me against France.”

“The whole of France?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied Martin. “It’s in honour of Malcolm Hardee because he admired the art of mime so much.”

(Malcolm thought mime was “a tragic waste of time”)

“You’re competing against the whole of France?” I asked Martin.

“Yes. I’ve actually got a real French mime artist to take part and I’m going to win. The contest is rigged because Malcolm would have approved of that.”

“Have there been any heats?” I asked.

“No,” said Martin. “No heats. But it’s called The England v France Mime-Off and I’ve got through to the final.”

I think he was joking but, with a surreal comedian, you can never be altogether certain.

It was also an interesting night at Pull the Other One because Tony Green was performing in his guise as The Obnoxious Man, whose act is to shout two-minutes of ad-libbed vitriolic abuse at the audience.

I first met him in the early 1990s, when the late Malcolm Hardee suggested I see Tony compere at a now long-forgotten comedy night called T’others at The Ship in Kennington, South London.

A few months later, Tony somehow persuaded me it would be interesting to go to the monthly fetish club Torture Garden which, that month, was being held in a three-storey warehouse in Islington. The top floor was given over to unconventional cabaret acts and Tony’s chum Sophie Seashell, the partner of one of The Tiger Lillies, had booked bizarre acts for the night. That month’s acts included the extraordinary Andrew Bailey.

Torture Garden still exists and, earlier this year, Adolf Hitler singing act Frank Sanazi told me he was performing there, so their taste for the bizarre clearly still remain high.

There was and I presume still is a dress code at Torture Garden and perhaps rather naively, when I went, my concession to fetishism was wearing an ageing hippie Indian-style shirt and colourful trousers while Tony was wearing a white straw hat and rather louche suit and looked a bit like Sylvester McCoy’s incarnation of Doctor Who.

When we arrived, Tony was told: “You’re OK, you look perverted,” but my shirt was not deemed good enough as a costume. The people on the door suggested I take off my shirt so I was naked from the waist up, then take off my black leather belt and tie it diagonally across my chest with the buckle at the front. I think it may have been some personal fantasy of the man on the door.

“If I take my belt off, my trousers may fall down,” I said.

“All the better,” the man replied.

“It won’t be a pretty sight,” I warned him.

“All the better,” the man replied.

That’s the good thing about sado-masochists – they always see half a glass – although whether it is half-full or half-empty depends on their particular tendencies.

I was not reassured a fetish club was my scene, but it was certainly interesting. I think Americans take to such things much more wholeheartedly – there was a look in the more outrageously dressed (or un-dressed) people’s eyes at Torture Garden which made me think a strong British sense of irony and an active sense of the ridiculous don’t gel (if that’s the word) with wearing outlandish sado-masochistic costumes for sexual thrills.

Tony Green took in his stride such things as a slightly-self-conscious naked fat man ‘walking’ his wife like a dog on a lead. She was scrambling about on all-fours and I think her knees were playing up a bit. Presumably in suburbia there are carpets.

At Pull the Other One, Tony told me things are looking up for him at the moment as he is performing in the play Reign at 4th Floor West Studios in Commercial Road this week. Tony is a man never short of an interesting story.

When I mentioned that Pull the Other One has more than a touch of Andy Kaufman’s experimental anarchy about it, inevitably, Tony had an Andy Kaufman story.

He told me of an evening in the early 1980s when Comedy Store founder Pete Rosengard phoned up Andy Kaufman, who was in London, and persuaded him to come down and perform at the Store. Andy appeared as his ‘women’s wrestling champion’ character, challenging any women in the audience to wrestle him on stage… and was gonged off. This was the early 1980s and Tony himself led heckles of “Fuck off, you sexist pig!” perhaps not unconnected to the fact he himself had been gonged off earlier.

Andy Kaufman was not amused.

Tony also told me sad news which I had not heard – that the extraordinary performance artist and comedy performer Ian Hinchliffe drowned in Arkansas around two months ago. He was there with his American partner and, the way Tony told it, Ian was fishing in a boat on a lake with a 94-year-old friend. They caught a whopper of a large fish, both got excited, both fell out of the boat and the 94-year-old man survived but Ian, 68, drowned.

Malcolm Hardee’s autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake (Malcolm drowned too, in 2005) quoted an anecdote about Ian Hinchliffe and Ian was not amused because his surname was mis-spelled ‘Hinchcliffe’ – not surprising as, even though I wrote the manuscript, publishers Fourth Estate never showed me a proof copy and the result was a plethora of mis-prints throughout the book.

I had not met Ian at the time the book was published but I met him later and he was most certainly a one-off. We exchanged slightly odd Christmas cards for a while although I hadn’t seen him for years.

The reference to him in I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake is below (with the spelling of his name corrected):

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Some acts, of course, are just too weird to ever make it. Like Ian Hinchliffe.

I heard about him years and years ago, even before I started with The Greatest Show on Legs. Someone asked me:

“Do you want to go and see this bloke called Ian Hinchliffe who eats glass?”

I never went to see him but, years later, I bumped into him when he was in his fifties and saw him in various pub shows where he threw bits of liver around. He was, he said, a performance artist and in one part of his act he pretended to disembowel himself. He had liver and bits of offal in a bag that he pretended was coming out of his stomach. Then he started throwing it at the audience.

One show I saw was in an East End pub with a particularly rough landlord. The liver and offal flew right over the audience’s head, hit the landlord and knocked the optics off behind the bar. The landlord came over to beat him up and Ian Hinchliffe jumped out of the first floor window. He landed on the landlord’s car, putting a big dent in the bonnet. He didn’t perform at that pub again.

At another gig in Birmingham, a member of the audience got up halfway through and left. Ian Hinchliffe stopped the show and followed him home. Quite what the audience felt, I don’t know.

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Tony Green tells me an Ian Hinchliffe Memorial Day is being organised on Saturday 2nd July, probably starting around 2.00pm, at Beaconsfield arts studio in Newport Street, SE11 which will include Tony Allen’s Jazz Tea Party and a host of prominent early alternative comedians.

If the day is anything like Ian Hinchliffe, it will be truly original.