Bits and Brits

Pubs close at 11:30pm in London. It's ridiculous. I'm pretty sure the reason there is such a problem with alcoholism here is because you have to pound beers as fast as humanly possible or start drinking incredibly early to accomplish any sort of buzz at all before last call.

Saturday night, strangely we weren't ready to go home at 11:45, so we went to an after hours club called HOSPITAL (you have to be a member to get in but - we gots connections). That closed at 1:30am.

The tube stops running at 12:30am, so the only way home at that hour was a night bus (which was described to me as "hell's gauntlet") or a black cab. I took a black cab, and as it swept me down the curvy streets of London from Soho to Earl's Court, we drove past Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, and it suddenly hit me, "I'm actually performing this show in London for a month."

We had our first two performances of the newly-extended GUTENBERG! this weekend (the show now has 16 songs!). Critics come tonight, so that will be the real test, but so far feedback has been very good. It's been enlightening performing the show for a London audience that is also primarily a theatre audience and not a comedy audience. Comedy is very narrowly defined here, so it seems our bizarre hybrid of comedy, theatre, parody, and pantomime is somewhat hard to categorize for some people.

The number-one comment we've gotten so far is, "There are so many jokes! Almost too many!" More than a few people have told us that the jokes come so quickly they don't have time to get them."

The epitome of this has to do with a joke that has always been a sure-fire laugh in the states. Near the end of the show, I'm lecturing the audience about their "ridiculous hatred of the Jews" and I say, "Think of where all this hatred could lead. Before you know it, we could be in the middle of a second world war."

In the states, that was always a definite laugh line. But so far in London? Silence.

I asked a few people about it, and this is what they all told me, "I heard you say it, but then it took me a second to realize that the time-period of the show was actually before the first world war, and once I realized that, I realized it was a joke and very funny, but you had already moved on to the next joke."

Overall the holocaust stuff in the show gets only chuckles here - though they laugh uproariously every time one of us sings "I hate Jews." That was also explained to me - "I think for the most part the holocaust simply isn't in our conciousness as much as it is in New York City. We don't really have Jews here and because we're English, we tend to side with the Palestinians."

Hopefully they can work out this whole Israel-Palestine thing before we close. It's killing us!