Submission 17

Comedian Bio

Paul Hughes is from England, and has been performing stand-up comedy since November 2016

Story

One of the most common questions stand-up comics are asked is why they chose to perform comedy in the first instance. In a male-dominated industry, many comedians who feign a genuine interest in the art- and may be attempting to mask their sex-and-ego-driven impulses- may tell women that they have always been a ‘class clown’. The reality is that most of us are united by an absence of impulse control, personal tragedies, poor mental health, addictions and self- destructive lifestyle choices, as much as we are by laughter. However, I doubt there are many stand-ups living today who have taken as many risks as I have with their physical health, sanity and lived to tell the tale. I no longer feel that I have any dignity left to lose and I am working on that basis henceforward. We should also remember that humour- particularly that which is dark and morose like mine- can serve as defence mechanism against the painful realities that life throws at us. In my case, it can also function as a way of denying what a despicable person you have been- until some recent epiphanies brought about by a near-death experience have coerced you into staring in the mirror and facing the reality of the bastard man that stares back at you. I should begin by saying that I only blame myself for the events that I am about to describe. Yes, I have had enablers, but part of growing up is acknowledging that you and you only are responsible for your own actions. I have danced with the devil on many occasions. If the saying ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ rings true, then perhaps I can find some comfort in the fact I have become a better person now. For every success story you may have read about a Richard Pryor or Russell Brand, there are ample more people who have taken similar paths in life and ended up in prison, in lunatic asylums or in a coffin. I imagine a lot of the misery experienced by comedians in the abysmal cycles of behaviour could be categorised under the wide umbrella of love, sex and relationships. For reasons I am about to describe, I can comfortably that some of these interlinked events could easily have been deleted scenes from Darren Aronofsky’s cinematic masterpiece, Requiem for a Dream. The fact I attended a single sex boys’ school was likely a contributor to the opening chapters of the apocalyptic disaster that was my love life between the ages of 12 and 20. We all had ways of coping with this dearth of female contact. One friend of mine swapped his Nintendo Wii for a bag of cocaine aged 13. Another aged 14 was given a restraining order by the local girls’ school for his overzealous behaviour outside their school gates. As for me, my coping mechanisms lay somewhere in between eating like a horse and developing an unrequited love for pornography. As any average overweight 15-year-old with poor hygiene aspires to, I inevitably became something of a ‘porn connoisseur’- given my increasingly deep insight into the genre. As I failed to realise at the time- in my autopilot state of mind of comfortably watching drug addicts rub their genitals together in increasingly depraved ways- but have come to realise since, porn was rewiring my brain in a rather unhealthy way. Whilst I should have been out looking for a normal teenage girl as a means through which to quench my sexual thirst, I instead lived in a self-constructed fantasy that I could continue to sit in my bedroom and a goddess with Double F breasts, perfect features and a golden tan would climb through my window and provide me with world- class fellatio without any questions asked. After hours of searching for the right video, I remember once stumbling upon Paris Hilton’s sex tape ‘A Night in Paris’ and declining Pornhub’s offer because her breasts were not sufficiently large for a porn connoisseur like myself. A perfectly wise and rational position to hold I’m sure readers will agree. I ought to have asked for a toffee hammer in the Christmas of 2009 so that I could have chiselled my way out of the masturbation furnace I had trapped myself inside. I imagine that during my teenage years, I produced enough semen while looking at porn to have enabled a small African country to thrive using only hydropower stations. Although there was a gaping void in love life at this time, I did have considerable success in other areas of my life. I had great friends and was consistently a straight-A student. Had I been able to kick my habit of watching pornography every single night, I imagine that I would have been a far happier teenager. I was not an entirely soulless creature despite my self-destructive habit. After a long porn-aided session of strangling my penis like I was Peter Sutcliffe and his last victim, I would often have a therapeutic few hours wherein I would attempt to purify my soul with some relaxing music. However, the rewiring pornography had done to my brain became apparent when I once played an album on Spotify. The title read back to me Born to Die by ‘Anal Del Ray’. By the time I arrived at university, things were looking up. In the first week of Freshers (aged 18) I had successfully performed a ‘normal’ social transaction which paid dividends of being sucked off by a 21-year-old girl. I had gotten her back to my room on the false pretence that I was fluent in German. Given that she spoke like her life depended on reaching a verbal pace of 200-words-a-minute, I was able to get by saying genau (I agree) at regular intervals. Once the dishwater-like alcoholic spirits had transformed my brain into a beacon of Dutch courage, I also told her that I had two brothers and liked to play football with my friends at the weekend. (People of my Grandparents’ generation often crowbar into everyday conversations the fact that had the Allies not won the war, we ‘would all be speaking German’. I am inclined to disagree with this given the broken attempts of most English people to speak in a foreign tongue. At best, if Nazi Germany had conquered Great Britain, I would be speaking in a pigeon hybrid of predominantly English with a sprinkle of Deutsch.) Nevertheless, this blowjob was also engineered while I had a cocktail of vodka and vomit floating around my tonsils. Nevertheless, it was a successful operation. She was from Moscow and inevitably plenty of ‘From Russia with Love’ puns floated around my student halls of residence like stale farts for the following three days. This was until the spotlight shifted onto one unlucky lady who had slept with a different boy every night of Freshers’ week. The fact that one of my best friends who lived in the corridor opposite had fingered ‘Russia’ (reader insert your own WW2 pun here) two days earlier was not enough to tarnish my newfound confidence with women. A few weeks later I did meet a girl who I genuinely really liked. In a similar vein to Romeo and Juliet’s meeting at a ball hosted by Lord Capulet, I had always hoped to meet my first love in an equally extravagant playground of romance and glamour. We therefore met at a bus stop in Hyde Park in Leeds. We were both on the same pyjamas-themed pub-crawl. Black tie and evening dress was not the order of the day. For a shy 18-year-old attempting to chat up a confident 21-year-old, I was a surprisingly smooth operator. My words came out particularly smoothly given that they were spoken in slurred, vibrato tones courtesy of the 9 pints of lager I had consumed. We had spoken in jigsaw-pieces of dialogue previously, but later came to converse uninterrupted by other people or my nerves; which had sent the moving vehicle of our conversation down a cul-de-sac, rather than the open crossroads I had hoped for. Like all great love tales, the social catalyst for our mutually flying sparks came just before midnight. Less moonlight romance, more drunk snog under the blanket of industrial pollution of Leeds. Prior to this, she had saved me from a dangerous character I had met at the bus stop. Very much in the style of a third-wave feminist fairy-tale, the princess had been called in to rescue the prince (or me in this case). Stood in my Primark dressing gown, I was conversing with said mentalist (who went by the affectionate nickname of ‘DJ Love Muscle’) about some areas of his life that should have screamed ‘Run away now!’. But nine pints deep, I was walking on a tightrope without a circus net. Ready to fall in the abysses of ‘Dutch courage’ and ‘downright stupidity’, I fell from a great height with one foot in each state of mind as I carried on this conversation with him despite said warning signs. This man informed me that he was on day release after spending 10 years in prison for attempted murder. I playfully suggested that he should have done the job properly if he would have served a decade inside anyway. In a slow-motion avalanche of ultraviolence (one which would have made Keanu Reeves in the Matrix look like a quadriplegic Christopher Reeves), DJ Love Muscle showed me where on the temple of my skull he had unsuccessfully tried to kill this man. He then proceeded to show me pressure points on my body where he could take my strength away. Harry Houdini with a darker past. The sight of me attempting to lift this man from underneath his shoulders- while he clutched at pinpoint coordinates on my wrists- must have surely been a peculiar one for any passers-by. The opening fistfight in Fight Club outside the bar would have surely raised fewer eyebrows. She must have seen this sight from across the darkened underpass where the bus-stop lay and wondered if her drink had been spiked with hallucinogenic drugs. She drunkenly stumbled across the road as I proceeded to tell her that I’d invited him back to my place- to officially celebrate his release from prison with a party of students. She humbly advised that my friendship with DJ Love Muscle would have to end prematurely. I left this maniac to his own devices and we headed back to the first-world concentration camp that was my student halls. After checking his WhatsApp profile picture the following day, it transpired that he was also a cross-dresser. I had considered his character rather plain up until that point. Despite the perfect, picturesque start to our relationship, things between her and I began to turn sour. I tried, and I tried and I tried to quench my thirst. Like a horny corgi trying to mount Queen Elizabeth II. But she would not give it up. She kept a proverbial padlock chained around the bank vault that lay between her legs. No matter how gentlemanly I was; no matter how interested I pretended to be in the most bollocky and monotonous details of her life, we were not going further than first base. Stephen Hawking would have crawled round a baseball field in faster time. And it wasn’t just her boring life I had to hear about. I had to give calm and considered advice to her friends- micromanaging their minor problems like I was the manager of an Apple sweatshop dealing with Ming Ho’s headaches- while Steve Jobs told me that I need to increase production in time for Christmas. Suggesting structural improvements to Ellie’s piss-poor essay with the same degree of seriousness a doctor would give their patient regarding a terminal cancer diagnosis. All in a vain attempt to get laid. Robert De Niro’s skin colour would have been indistinguishable from that of a Peruvian toad had he witnessed the skill and precision involved in my acting. Ellie you owe me that time back you cretin. This went on for months and felt like multiple life cycles. During one of my lowest periods of desperation, I even agreed to watch an episode of Glee with her in a last-ditch attempt to persuade her to gratify my sexual urges. Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler circa 1938 paled into insignificance in comparison to this. After no more than ten minutes, my agony became unbearable. I told her that my maternal Great Grandfather had committed suicide due to shellshock following the Second World War and that she should let her guard down so that my mother would not see her son reach the same fate. No dice, however. In an effort escape the torturous signals being tattooed onto my sex-starved cerebellum, I sought to exercise military-tactics to escape this prison I found myself in. I randomly stumbled upon a pertinent and somewhat heart-breaking story in a newspaper. Master of puppets-style, it pulled on every heart string I had. I had finally found a story that I could relate to. The headline read as follows: ‘Man gives up masturbating for 700 days - and claims it gave him "superpowers”. I thought: ‘this is golden- if I’m more of a man that I used to be she’s bound to give it up’. However, I only lasted as-long-as 26 days. And it transpires that having a wet dream so messy that she had to throw out her bedsheets does not necessarily qualify as a superpower. Like a burst pipe at an oil distillery. Less black gold, more cantankerous waves of spermatozoa. After this, I gave up. I told her I couldn’t carry for another 4 months with someone who protected her own virginity more closely than far-right conservatives protect the lives of down-syndrome foetuses. Asides from the physical aspect of things, we did still get on. So unsurprisingly, she was quite upset about this ‘break-up’. I was rather crude in my choice of language as I left her bedroom. Inspired by lyrics of my beloved Anal Del Ray, I told her she was prettier when she cried first thing in the morning than she was with a full face of make-up on. I felt bad at the time, of course I did. However, I later found out she had also cried during an argument about the messiness of the kitchen the day before. Swings and roundabouts. By the end of my second semester, the bulging veins in my ball sack were reminiscent of those in Saddam’s Hussein face in the last moments of his hanging. I’m sure the millions of Africans travelling on the Middle Passage felt similarly aggrieved at the cruel denial of their basic human needs. Like trying the struggle of trying to find a decent shirt in TK Maxx, I had somehow managed to find a girl who ticked all my boxes. Lucy was- and still is- truly gorgeous. But more importantly, she understands my sense of humour. She has a good heart and a kind of shy innocence that I’ve always liked in girls. Lucy was an angel in my eyes. And crucially, one without the scabbed wings of vanity and ego. Even if she is timid at times, I’d take a girl like Lucy in a heartbeat over the loud, degenerate nutcase- regardless of how beautiful she may be. Sorry to crush your dreams, Lindsay Lohan. No fictional God will save you from your own cheating heart. Sort yourself a bit and I’d take you home to meet my mum, Miss Lohan (Mrs Hughes in a decade’s time, no doubt). In this weird, wonderful and sometimes downright disturbing 21-year I have spent on this Earth, I can count on one hand the number of love interests I’ve had who have qualified as angels with unscabbed wings. And despite being from the inbreeding-capital of the UK (Birmingham), I do in fact have five fingers and not sixteen tumour-shaped stumps attached to my palm. Perhaps my pending applications at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge further evidence the breadth of the gene pool in my family. Either that, or I’m an incredibly high-achieving invalid. Should I not see Lucy again, I expect that I may see her on television one evening. As dramatic music floats in the background (Barber’s Adagio for Strings would be perfect), David Attenborough will narrate a heart-breaking montage about endangered species on this planet. Black and white photographs of Lucy (and Layha, Kate, Mollie, and Louisa - you know who you are) will float by like a French art film. An emotive appeal will be put out to make sure beautiful women like them can continue to survive in spite of the sniper bullets of sin and temptation that mankind might throw at them. I’ve stumbled into car-crashes of pornography involving women having sex with animals (posted by mentalists on Facebook) more often than I have found love interests with these women. I’ve quite literally encountered more women having sex with horses in cyberspace than I have with pretty faces and healthy minds in real life. Bestiality firmly aside, our mutual enjoyment of each other’s company blossomed week by week. Once I had overcome the initial seasickness of speaking to her, our relationship sailed sweetly out to sea. We shared many laughter-filled evenings, holding hands and laughing at the bands of chimpanzees surrounding us at parties. One night everything fell perfectly into place. Our Siamese twin third-wheels have finally left us alone. As I tried not appear like an excited child on Christmas morning, there was an unspoken understanding between us about what was coming. Something that is quite relevant to the story is that I was under the influence of MDMA that night. Whether I had taken it voluntary- or whether it had flown up my nose because of a sudden gust of wind and a spilled bag on the floor- remains to be seen. But as should be common knowledge to anyone with only half their head screwed on, drugs are bad for the brain (m’kay). We headed back to my bedroom. I fancied her so much my penis should have been stiffer than the digits of a corpse six hours deep into rigor mortis. I might have well been a corpse. With this gloomy sense of existential hanging over my head, I have never felt such a sledgehammer of a blow to my manhood. This was like the Red Army Soldiers arriving in 1945 to liberate the starving inmates at Auschwitz- only to discover they’d forgotten the wire cutters. Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom only for the key to his cell to break at the last second as the guards arrived to free him. Talk to Frank could have walked through the door at the exact moment- as I crawled back under the duvet like a broken little boy- and started filming a poignant anti-drug commercial. My penis lay there like some worthless stillborn reptile for the rest of the night. As she left the following morning, I felt the same sense of shame and despair at my poor life decisions as the parents of the Columbine Killers must have felt when they received that phone call from the Colorado Springs Police Department. I hope this public exposure of my poor judgement will serve as an effective apology to Lucy for that night. And more importantly, my spiral into downright idiocy thereafter. You can find a better man than a degenerate hedonist who opts for the chemical high rather than a night spent with you. (For Lucy, the angel without scabbed wings).