Critic Kate Copstick and the sexual alure of squeezing teenage boys’ acne spots

Kate Copstick recording the Grouchy Club podcast yesterday

Yesterday, comedy critic Kate Copstick and I recorded our weekly Grouchy Club Podcast.

Subjects ranged from how to get early reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe to why stand-up comics are lazy and comedienne Janey Godley‘s promise to give Copstick macaroni pies throughout the four weeks of the Fringe in August.

But then conversation turned to comic Omar Hamdi, who currently has a case of facial acne…

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Copstick
I used to love… I used to dream about having acne. I never ever had spots.

John
So you went out with boys who did have acne?

Copstick
I went out with boys… one particular boy who had amazing acne. I used to exchange sexual favours if he would let me squeeze his spots.

John
What did you do with the accumulated pus?

Copstick
Nothing. You clean it up. It’s no fun cleaning your face if there’s nothing… OK, it’s ugly, but there’s nothing to clean off. It’s like cleaning a floor. It’s much more satisfying to clean a floor if it’s really dirty. You think Whoa! That’s fantastic!

So – Normal face – That’s just normal – There’s no fun in cleaning it.

Face covered in pustules – You squeeze them, the pus comes out, you clean it up and – Look! – There’s a nice, clean, non-pusy face where, before, there was a pusy face.

John
So let’s say this sexually-attractive boy has, say, 20 spots on his left cheek. Did you squeeze one and clean off the pus. Or did you wait until all 20…

Copstick
No no no no no… In an ideal world, there’s a time… Did you not have spots, John?

John
I did, but I didn’t have a lady to squeeze mine.

Copstick
So what did you do?

John
I squeezed them myself. A lone life.

Copstick
I can imagine that. Talk us through it… Talk us through it… You’d be looking in the mirror…

John
I looked in the mirror, thought: That’s horrible; I wouldn’t have anything to do with that and… I don’t know if I did squeeze them. I don’t know what I did with them. It’s a long time ago.

Copstick
Cast your mind back.

John
It was the mid-19th century. I can’t remember at all.

Copstick
You must have… You must have… You can’t resist… It’s the catharsis. That’s the word. It’s a catharsis. Spot-squeezing is a catharsis.

John
I never had the urge to pop the poppable things in packing. It’s not a thing we Presbyterians do.

Copstick
Really?

John
It’s against God’s nature.

Copstick
Every time we sit here and podcast, I find out more strange things about you. You don’t like to squeeze spots…

John
No.

Copstick
You don’t pop bubble-wrap…

John
No. And I don’t like cheese.

Copstick
And you don’t like cheese… What do you do to relieve tension? Please don’t say Wank.

(LONG, LONG SILENCE)

John
I’ve got nothing to say, really.

Copstick
OK, fine. Back to squeezing spots… If you get the spot at the right point in its spotty little life, when you squeeze it, the pus is projectile.

John
So do you think Omar should actually pursue this as a way of audience interaction?

Copstick
He could auction off his spots.

John
Well, not his spots. His pus.

Copstick
Oh my God! Can you imagine if Bob Slayer could develop a really good-going dose of acne what he could do? The showbiz mileage Bob Slayer could get out of a face full of acne!

John
Bob Slayer is a large man who used to be a jockey, but he is a large man, especially for a jockey.

Copstick
I suppose his face is quite large. But, anyway, back to Omar. It could be end-of-the-show… A couple of nice young ladies, one on either side. (GASP) One on either side!… They race!… They race to squeeze the spots on each side.

John
It’s a TV game show.

Copstick
It’s fantastic!

John
It’s Friday night! It’s seven o’clock! It’s live from Norwich!

Copstick
Oh, wait wait wait wait wait… then he would only be able to do it on the first night, because I don’t think the pus would regenerate. Well, he could do it once a week. I have never had acne, but I assume it kind of regenerates…

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You can listen to the full 28-minute audio version of the latest Grouchy Club Podcast on Podomatic and/or download that audio podcast from iTunes.

And you can watch the video version on YouTube.

The practicalities of putting your head in a gas oven: my 2nd suicide attempt

Me… when I was aged eighteen

The second time I tried to commit suicide was by gassing myself. I was 19.

I had tried overdosing on tablets about eight months before, but that had proved a bad idea as I was shit at Chemistry at school and I just ended up having my stomach pumped – not pleasant – and being briefly in a mental home until I discharged myself.

It was all over a girl, of course. Well, two girls. Nothing serious. Just silly teenage angst.

If you want to gas yourself, you need a gas appliance. The traditional appliance is a cooker and all you have to do is switch it on and put your head in.

Except it is not as simple as that.

If you put your head in a gas oven you have, of necessity, to open the oven door of the cooker. This means a lot of the gas which enters the oven will escape. Presumably most of the gas. And, once in the room, unless you have very good double glazing, some of the gas will escape through little cracks round the window frames, doorframe, even the keyhole.

Now, dear reader, you probably think this must be all bollocks. Because gas does not flow into the oven, does it? The oven is just heated up. The gas fumes only exist if you light the hobs on top of the cooker and you then extinguish the flame. But this was in olden days when gas really did go into the oven.

When you are obsessed enough to want to kill yourself, your brain is befuddled.

And sometimes the befuddlement lasts.

And I know my memory is shit, so I had to phone up my friend Lynn – who has a gas cooker – to ask if even my memory of trying to kill myself was befuddled. She reassured me that putting my head in a gas oven when I was 19 was, indeed, a practical thing to do. She did not give her opinion on whether is was a good idea.

Anyway, I know my 19-year-old thinking process went that you have to cover the cracks and potential cracks with towels and dishcloths. And you need quite a lot of those. If you are in a kitchen on a corner, as I was, it has two exterior walls and sets of windows.

Then there is the not-inconsiderable matter of how you put your head in the gas oven.

Gas ovens are not primarily designed for suicide attempts. So the height of the oven is wrong.

Very often, under the gas oven, there is a storage space for trays and suchlike. This may be as much as eight inches high. This means you cannot just lie on the floor and put your head in the gas oven.

It means you have to kneel on all-fours. But the top of the storage area under the oven (which creates the ‘floor’ of the gas oven), compared to the distance between your on-all-fours knees and your torso when bent over, when taking into consideration the height of the ‘ceiling’ of the oven, means that you cannot just easily kneel down with your head in the oven. It means you have to kneel with your head bent slightly but not remotely wholly down.

And then there is this factor of kneeling with your head slightly down in an oven in a room with towels and clothes round window frames and door (how do you attach a towel to the vertical edges of windows and doors?) and the fact a lot of the gas is escaping out of the cooker into the room.

How long does it take for the escaping gas to fill the room and/or the gas remaining inside the open oven to combine with it to have an effect?

Eventually, after about half an hour or so, my memory is that the incongruity of the whole thing overwhelmed my suicidal self-absorption and I gave up.

A few years later, I read the great Dorothy Parker’s poem Resumé:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

The young Dorothy Parker (1893-1967). Died aged 73.

I don’t regret my first attempt at suicide. The one with the pills. Pity it did not work. Pity I had no natural aptitude for nor interest in Chemistry at school. But, of course, in the un-self-obsessed light of day, you morally can’t kill yourself anyway – because it would affect other people. Even if only slightly and only a few. But it would. Bit of a bum fact of life, that. You have to laugh.

Norman Wisdom, a future hero of the Albanian people, tries three ways to kill himself 10 mins 27 secs into his comedy film The Bulldog Breed: