Edinblog Day 10 and 11

Oof I have had two very full shows in a row. This is really lovely and very strange. Last night (Saturday, the turf of drunken douchebags coming into shows they have no idea about) was actually a lovely crowd, with an early mild heckle that I came down on with polite venom. Today was a different beast.

The afternoon was lovely - I went on Stephen K Amos' talk show with the excellent Tiff Stevenson, Mark Steele and Tom Stade. Then I went to MC the Comedy Club 4 Kids, which is always a fun exercise in realising that most of the the jokes I have where I don't swear are usually about death or philosophy.

Tonight at Empire, I had a full room and the show began as probably the warmest, nicest, laughiest audience I have had so far.

It was lovely, until about the 3/4 mark, where I've dived into the 'deliberately playing with reactive discomfort' part of the show - (without spoilers, the joke is about the way women are asked to dress and my sense of the ridiculousness of religious tribal signalling that discomfits the audience by juxtaposing politically dicey turfs against each other and walking a razor edge. There are a few sharp left turns in it. I talk about orthodox Jewish fashion, modern western fashion and the hijab. I do it late in the show because the audience needs to trust me quite a lot to get through it safely) And a lady in the second row did not. She pitched in at the turn of the joke - or rather, just before the turn of the joke with a statement that the subject of the joke could never be an appropriate subject.

Holy crap it was tense. I tried to deal with her concerns, defend my bona fides and the even-handedness of the joke and eventually clawed my way back onto the plateau of laughter. I hope I dealt with it comprehensively enough and settled her mind enough that she won't go home and send up the bat-signal for decontextualised rage to the people of the internet.

I worry that I won't have. It's very hard to back off a moment of outrage, or hear reasoned counter-arguments when your adrenaline is up. I stand by the joke, and as I say in the show (in the on-ramp to the joke) that I think it's important for people to talk about uncomfortable things. Otherwise the only people who are talking about it are the people who are angry and the people who are scared. The point of Tea With Alice is to do that joke. I stand by the subject of the joke and its execution, though I respect the right of people to have opinions that differ.

That said, I really hate conflict, I don't like being blindsided, I'm not super keen on people who refuse to listen to the whole course of a multi-part argument before jumping in with a rage emoji, and my hands didn't stop shaking for 45 minutes after the show.

Oof. This job.