Is comedian Lewis Schaffer’s comedy life-changing? For two people, yes it is.

Lewis Schaffer being intimate at the Source Below last night

This week, after his return to London from the Edinburgh Fringe, American comic Lewis Schaffer re-started his twice-a-week Free Until Famous shows at the Source Below in Soho.

About halfway through last night’s show, I started to realise I no longer have any idea what is funny or not for ordinary people watching his show. I really dread to think how many times I have seen Lewis Schaffer perform and all the shows tend to blend into one.

He probably has about 15 hours of material and every show is mostly drawn from the same well but each is totally different, totally shaped round each audience and full of good off-the-cuff gags which, in the past, he used to forget. Now one of his entourage writes them down and there is a chance he will remember them and add them to future shows.

“I don’t have an entourage,” Lewis Schaffer told me last night. “It’s a crew. I think it sounds better. Do you think it sounds better?”

“It sounds suitably street talk and American,” I said.

“I don’t want to be part of a crew,” Rose, one of his entourage, told me later.

I was laughing out loud throughout Lewis Schaffer’s show at the Source Below last night. So was Rose. So were comedians Matt Roper and Prince Abdi and comedian Pippa Evans’ dad, who were in the audience. People who had seen a lot of comedy were certainly enjoying the show. And I think the audience was mostly enjoying it. But I realised I had lost the ability to know. I watched two couples in the audience. In each couple, one was laughing throughout and the other was straight-faced. I have no idea if the straight-faced ones were enjoying the show or not. I think they were. Who knows? I don’t.

Rikki Fulton: comic with footsteps

Lewis had decided to zero-in on two Scots girls in the front row whose faces I could not see but one of whom should consider a career following in Rikki Fulton’s footsteps. And, in lieu of a ‘real’ black man in the audience, Lewis Schaffer decided that Somalian-born Prince Abdi would stand-in as “the black man in the audience”.

Lewis Schaffer’s comedy shows can be difficult to describe.

This one ended on time and he made a faster-than-normal exit, as he had to get to the Bloomsbury Theatre for a fundraising show in aid of Resonance FM Radio which comedian Stewart Lee had organised.

Each week, Lewis Schaffer performs two Free Until Famous shows at the Source Below, one American in London show at the Leicester Square Theatre and his Nunhead American Radio show on Resonance FM. You have to admire the fact he has avoided becoming famous.

So Lewis Schaffer and two of his entourage/crew and I got a taxi to the Bloomsbury Theatre.

He had been scheduled to be top of the bill at the gig solely because he could only arrive  just before the end of the show.

The watching Bloomsbury Theatre technician was laughing

I think he went down well. The audience certainly laughed in all the right places. As did Stewart Lee and the sound technician in the wings – usually a very good sign. If the sound technician laughs, it’s good.

Stewart Lee called him back on stage for an encore.

Yesterday was the 12th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center. Lewis Schaffer has a very good story about it.

“Tell the story,” Rose and I said to him as he went back on stage. The perfect story to round-off the show that night.

Of course, he did not. He told a story about a blind man. It seemed to go down well with the audience.

After the show, in the foyer, I saw two people having their photo taken with Lewis Schaffer.

This is a big advance, I thought. People must be starting to think Lewis Schaffer is actually famous.

“Listen to this,” Lewis Schaffer told me. “This is Alex and Alicia. They went to see my show at the Source Below three-and-a-half years ago.”

Matchmaking Lewis Schaffer (centre) with Alicia and Alex

“We had our very first date by going to see Lewis’ show,” Alex explained to me. “We’d read about this interesting comedy gig, but we didn’t know what to expect.

“When we arrived, we thought This is a very small place to have a comedy gig and we quickly realised we were two of five people in the entire audience. We sat at the back, but Lewis asked us to move to the front to fill out the crowd and, when he discovered that Alicia was half-Welsh and half-Indian, that became the focus of the next hour’s set.

“So this first date became a kind of trial by fire for Alicia to defend her heritage as an Indian and a Welsh person and, three-and-a-half years later, we’ve stayed together and we’re now engaged.”

“When are you getting married?” I asked.

“In a couple of year’s time,” said a broadly-smiling Alicia who then added the Lewis Schaffer like proviso. “Enough time for me to back out.”

Lewis Schaffer was beaming.

He had had an impact on two people’s lives.

(There is now a YouTube clip of the first section of Lewis Schaffer’s appearance at the Bloomsbury Theatre HERE)

How a comedy night out in London’s Soho led to what some might call this misanthropic anti-Japanese blog

I had been going to write a blog about American comic Lewis Schaffer’s show Free Until Famous which runs in Soho every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Almost as a joke, he started saying it was the longest-running solo comedy show in London’s West End. Then he realised that, in fact, it probably was.

He’s been performing it in various nightly configurations since October 2008. Initially, he played it Tuesdays and Wednesdays then, because too many people were turning up, he occasionally played it twice-nightly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays – at 8.00pm and 9.30pm. For the last few weeks, he’s been running it every Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday night at 8.00pm.

He successfully brought the model of Edinburgh’s Free Fringe to London. You don’t pay anything as you go into the venue but as you leave at the end, if you liked the show, you pay whatever you think it was worth.

Lewis tells me: “When I started, there were no free shows in London and now there are millions. What makes my show unique is that all the other shows are group shows with maybe one or two acts the punters will like and the rest not to their liking. I am akin to a single malt in a world of blends. If you like it, you love it; if you don’t you won’t; but the ones who like it…”

Whenever I have gone, his audience is always, eclectic and bizarrely international. Last Wednesday, that meant three Saudi women who were coming to his show for the third time. They don’t live in London but, every few months, when they are over here, they make a pilgrimage to Lewis’ comedy show. He doesn’t know why. I don’t know why. Even they probably don’t know why.

I asked Lewis about this after the show.

“They have told me directly We are fans!,” he said, bemused. “But they cover their faces after every joke! Maybe it’s the guilty pleasure of listening to dirty things from a double infidel – I’m an American AND I’m a Jew – plus maybe they find my Semitic look attractive, with my naturally dark hair.”

(Lewis tried not dying his hair the other week; I told him it really wasn’t a success.)

He always moans to me that it’s hard to get people in – moan moan moan these bloody Colonials – but, when I went last Wednesday night, it was a full house – it always is when I wander along – and Lewis was on unusually good form. Normally, he plays a blindingly good first half then loses confidence and tries to persuade the audience they’re not enjoying themselves as much as they think they are. Or he starts the show by saying he’s shit tonight but, by at least halfway through, he’s storming it. Last week, he stormed it for about 95% of the time though, of course, afterwards he was complaining to me that he hadn’t done very well.

Much like Lewis’ rollercoaster shows, it’s always worth any trip to Soho anytime because there are always unexpected and eccentric things happening. Last Wednesday, after the show, my friend and I had to plough through a crowded Brewer Street, which was being used for location shooting of some big-budget Bollywood movie. When I asked one of the crew who the star was, we were told:

“All I know is he’s a mega-star in Bollywood. Their equivalent of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise combined. I don’t know who the fuck he is.”

O vanitas vanitatum. A good overview of superstardom.

Then, in a doorway, we passed two red-faced drunks sitting on a doorstep between a sex shop and a pub, clutching bottles, almost falling sideways as they slurred a drunken conversation with each other. As we passed, I only heard the words:

“Ave you ‘eard 50 Cent’s latest? It ain’t nowhere near as good as his last one.”

Drunks who follow 50 Cent and the latest music trends. Only in Soho.

So I WAS going to blog about all that but decided not to.

Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier.

Anyway, during the show, Lewis made a joke about how people gave money to Japan following their triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear ‘accident’. Remember we are talking here about a comic who, to my mind, has the best Holocaust joke(s) I have ever heard.

The audience reaction to Lewis’ Japanese joke was to gasp – possibly because it was a truth spoken openly for the first time – and then to laugh. I won’t tell the full joke as it’s one to be heard live on stage.

But there was a news item yesterday that the owners of the stricken Japanese nuclear power plant say it will take another 6-9 months to sort out the mess.

I have a friend who has worked at Oxfam for many years. So I’m not unsympathetic to disaster-hit countries. She was recently in a country even I had barely heard of.

But people in the UK donating aid and holding charity gigs to raise money to supply aid to Japan? Give me a break.

Japan has the third biggest economy in the world, after the US and China. It has a stronger economy that Germany, France and – in 6th place – the United Kingdom.

Haiti is largely ignored now. It is still an impoverished disaster area. And people have been donating money to Japan? That’s an example of people donating money to charity to make themselves feel better not to make a disastrous situation any better.

Countries in Africa and Asia where babies are routinely living for a few days or hours or being born dead because of the poverty are not as ‘sexy’ as Japan was for a few weeks because the TV pictures were not there on TV screens.

There were 62 tornado reports in North Carolina on Saturday. Communities across Oklahoma and the Carolinas have been devastated.

Do I feel sorry for people in those areas? Am I sad at the deaths? Yes.

Am I going to donate money to the world’s strongest economy to alleviate my own sadness and cheer myself up about the USA’s tragedy? No.

Will I donate money to children in certain parts of Africa? Yes.

If some tragedy occurs in Hampstead or Islington, I would not expect the good people of Haiti to have a whip-round or put on charity gigs to raise money to help.

The unnecessarily old Lewis Schaffer, his secret sex scandal and his apparently never-ending comedy show

American comedian Lewis Schaffer, trapped in London because he has two children here, has let his hair go boldly grey. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea or not. I think I prefer the previous black. People have been telling him it looks distinguished. I think it just makes him look unnecessarily old. Perhaps he should alternate it – one week grey, the next week dyed black – then it would be as varied as his ever-changing show.

Last night I went to see his apparently never-ending and constantly changing Free Until Famous show at The Source Below in Soho and, afterwards, we had a frustrating chat while eating falafels.

The second reason it was frustrating was he kept talking for so long that the ice-cream shop next door had closed by the time we left.

The primary reason for my frustration, though, was because he told me an absolute humdinger of an unpublished true sexual scandal about another comedian… but (given what the story is) I can’t print it.

Deep frustration.

For you and me both.

But no falafel with Lewis is ever a wasted falafel and there was a moment when I was reminded of writing Malcolm Hardee’s constantly-promoted* autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake (* constantly-promoted by me, here)

It is still available at surprisingly outrageous prices on Amazon…

Anyway… Malcolm’s book is full of incredible stories – literally incredible because, although I think only two small details of two stories in the book are untrue (for comic effect), the main stories themselves are so extraordinary that people assume they must have been made up. It’s a bit like comedians’ stage acts: the likely-sounding true stories are usually made up and the more ludicrous unlikely stories are very often true.

The frustrating thing with Malcolm Hardee writing his autobiography was that he could seldom remember in which order the bizarre facts of his life happened and, in some cases, he could not even remember which decade they happened in; I had to work out the timeline by talking to other people or linking the stories to other dated events.

Lewis, it transpired last night, couldn’t remember whether he started performing his Free Until Famous show in London in October 2009 or in 2008.

He has recently taken to saying in his publicity that Free Until Famous is the longest-running solo comedy show ever performed in London. I took this as hyperbole until we started talking. Then I thought about it and I reckon it might actually (almost accidentally) be true.

The show has been running every Tuesday and Wednesday since at least October 2009 (or maybe 2008) with gaps for the Edinburgh Fringe and, in its early days, Lewis was sometimes performing Free Until Famous twice on Tuesday nights and twice on Wednesday nights. From this week, for at least three weeks, he is also performing it on Mondays.

This is quite a run and, as anyone who has ever seen a Lewis Schaffer show knows, it is either:

a) constantly evolving or

b) just never the same twice

…depending on your viewpoint.

I reckon he must have about four or five hours of good material and, with each individual show, he simply plucks out and rearranges the material according to the audience and his whim on the night. So, if you have seen Free Until Famous once and go back, it is the same show but totally different. Few shows are so real-character-based.

He deserves credit for bringing the Free Fringe concept wholesale (he is, after all, Jewish) from Edinburgh to London, with free entry to his shows and a metal bucket at the end for contributions. The bucket is metal, as he points out to audience members, because notes make no sound but he is able to tell if people only put coins in.

With a Wikipedian knowledge of trivial facts retrieved from his brain at the drop of a punter’s birthplace or biographical detail, why Lewis has not been picked up by TV or radio as a comic social commentator on Britain in the Bill Bryson style, I don’t know.

He is Bill Bryson with attitude.