Free Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down by Jo Brand Page A

shepherded onto a big boat which seated about thirty people.
There then ensued what seemed like a combination of being shaken about so much
that your bones rattled whilst continuously having buckets of water thrown over
you. It was good fun. However, it was too much for one of our party who,
fuelled by extreme anxiety went into a sort of catatonic state of paralysis. A
little boat bustled over to our bigger boat and he was taken off, poor sod, as
stiff as a board.
    I came
up against a few unlikeable comedians on that trip. Each Montreal Festival
flies in an elderly statesman of comedy and for my first trip there it was
Milton Berle. To be honest, I’d never heard of him, but people assured me he
was dead famous in the States. Also, as I am not at the nerdy end of the comedy
world, I haven’t assiduously studied the lives of all comics going back to the
Ice Age which certainly some of my peer group have done. Milton Berle looked
about 150 but he may only have been in his eighties. He was to compere the Gala
show I was doing. This involved bursting out of a big box at the back of the
stage, and as it’s not something we all do every day we had to go to the
3,200-seater theatre to rehearse it in case we walked out of the box backwards,
I suppose, or accidentally burst out of the side.
    We were
all introduced to Milton Berle at this point and his interpersonal skills with
women seemed to be somewhat lacking. As someone gestured at me and said, ‘And
this is Jo Brand,’ he moved towards me, saying, ‘Well, come here then, girl,
I’m not going to touch your titties.’
    First
of all, I hate that word ‘titties’ — it’s a word children and pervy old men use
— and he obviously fell into the latter category. I was in another country,
faced with a very famous American comic, and tongue-tied for those reasons. I
regret not giving the old fart as good as I got.
    The
night of the Gala arrived and terrifying it was too. I had never performed in
front of such a big audience before and was nervous as hell. However, I managed
to come out of the front of the box and deliver my words all in the right
order, to some nice laughs and applause.
    Unfortunately
Jerry Sadowitz didn’t fare quite so well. This may be to do with the fact that
he opened his set by saying, ‘Good evening, moose fuckers.’ I’m not sure the
Canadians were particularly enamoured with that title, since a man right at the
back got out of his seat, strolled nonchalantly down the steps, got up on stage
and lamped Jerry right in the face. Jerry got up and was hit again before a
security man ambled across the stage and removed the offender in as
congratulatory a way as he could possibly have managed. It was the talk of the
festival, of course, and most of us felt relieved that it wasn’t us.
    I was
on my way to the after-show party when an audience member cornered me in the
corridor.
    ‘Well
done,’ he enthused, ‘and I thought it was particularly funny that you have two
balloons down your front. They looked so natural.’ Well, I didn’t have any
balloons down my front and, worried he was going to do a Milton Berle and
check, I legged it.
    After
we’d had a few drinks, we went for a meal at a restaurant nearby where lots of
the comics and agents hung out. As I was heading back from the toilet to join
my friends, I passed a table that appeared to be populated by the Italian
Mafia: lots of guys in sharp suits doing the wearing-sunglasses-inside thing.
No women. As I passed, one of them stared straight at me. Well, I think he was
looking at me; his face was turned in my direction. He initially pointed at me
without a word and then curled his finger in a supercilious, beckoning motion.
    Maybe
he thinks I’m a waitress, I thought, but instead of politely informing him I wasn’t,
and fuelled by a couple of sherries, I looked at him and said, ‘Piss off, you
twat.’
    On
arrival back at my table I asked a Canadian comic who the group of Mafia
lookey-likeys