Christmas has come early. Frankie Boyle has lost his joke book. Maybe someone has put it to better use and as we speak is wiping their arse with it. Except that Boyle has a particular reason for wanting this book back.
The comedian has put out an appeal on Twitter asking people to look for it and is pulling on heartstrings in his own inimitable fashion. It apparently contained routines that he was going to use at a forthcoming charity gig: 'To you, my notebook will just seem like a lot of random sentences about rape, drone warfare & being fingered by a sign language interpreter. People who would have benefited from my charity gig will probably die if you don't find my notebook,' he tweeted.
Boyle, of course is not the first comedian whose material has gone walkabout. Bob Monkhouse's legendary gag volumes went AWOL in the nineties. I remember seeing them in a TV documentary. They were amazing, hand-written, heavily annotated, tightly written big books, none of your cheap WH Smith reporters pads. And this October Miranda Hart put out an appeal when she was burgled and lost a laptop with what she described as "precious creative projects" on it. Joke theft like this is not funny.
I recently took part in the British Comedy Guide's comedy conference and one of the pieces of advice I gave to aspiring stand-ups was "always carry a notebook with you. And also a pen." This is something I've heard about down the years. It could have been Samuel Johnson or maybe Will Self that first said it and it seems like sound advice. Inspiration can clearly strike anywhere, any time.
The only trouble is, I've hung around with a lot of comedians and I've never seen any of them ever making notes. Maybe I've just not said anything witty enough in their presence. I've heard stories of a comedian who pretends to suffer from bowel problems and has a habit of repeatedly running to the toilet at dinner parties - actually to note down precious comic anecdotes so that he can use them in his act. But this feels a little like an urban myth.
Most professional comedians actually do the bulk of their writing in an office, not on the hoof. That's why the loss of Miranda Hart's laptop rang so true. She obviously works really hard. Two words Miranda. Back. Up. It is one of the ironies of stand-up that people become comedians to escape the tedium of working in an office only to end up working in an office.
The reports do not make it clear if Boyle's work-in-progress was stolen or if he mislaid it. Maybe the small brown book was so offended by its contents it left of its own volition. The funny thing is that earlier this year Frankie Boyle seemed to be mellowing, but if his recent tweets are serious maybe that was just a Radio 4 blip. Anyway, I hope Boyle gets his notebook back. It would be a shame for all that work to be wasted. And I can't imagine that it would be of use to anybody else. Unless they have run out of toilet paper.
