Funny Girl
Tina yearned for a chance to stand on the stage and make people laugh but now her time had come...and she was terrified
Tina sat at the back of the theatre. It was little more than a large pub. It was a damp Thursday in 1982 and Tina had left her husband minding their children while she came to investigate what made up a comedy night.
“Before I introduce the first act...” the compere began. His microphone squealed with feedback, and the audience called out objections to the noise.
“Be patient. The first comic is just memorising his ‘Big Book Of Bad Jokes’ out the back. He won’t be long.”
There was jeering and some laughter. The jeering made Tina want to get off her stool and go home. She wasn’t one of the acts; she just hoped that one day she might be. The first comic came on too early, while the compere was still winding up his introduction. He looked surprised.
“Oh, no! There’s two of you!” some wag at the front called out, and that got a laugh.
“Don’t stand out, mate,” the compere called back. “You’re in the front row, and the comics behind this curtain will mince you!”
“Don’t stand out.” The words echoed in Tina’s brain.
“Don’t get too big for your boots,” Aunt Jan was fond of saying. Applying to stand in front of 50 people and tell jokes was definitely getting too big for one’s boots. It was standing out.
Tina was 35, with children and a home and a job in an insurance office.
She was an ordinary woman, raised to work hard and behave nicely by a woman who’d taken her on at the age of three when her parents died.
Aunt Jan had been her entire world. Uncle Raymond had been there, too, through the late 1950s and 60s, but it had been Jan in the foreground, peering over a pair of spectacles with pointy-winged frames.
Aunt Jan liked the theatre, but only what she called “the higher levels”. Tina was taken to the Empire, the only theatre in their suburb, to what Aunt Jan deemed serious material.
Tina longed to see the panto, which her school friends said made them laugh so hard their chests hurt.
Jan bought tickets for the ballet, sometimes an orchestral concert.
Tina liked their Empire trips, mainly because she loved the atmosphere of a darkened auditorium and the hush that fell as the curtain rose.
If there was a funny bit in a play, Tina would feel a bubble of delight inside her.
She would look at the faces of the rows in front, absorbing their joy, and Aunt Jan would frown and tut. They always bought seats in what Jan called “the gods”. Tina was 20 before she worked out that this referred to the position of their seats, at the back and high up. On the bus to work next day she found herself making up a little routine for her colleagues about the way children get words wrong, or fail to understand them for years.
By the time she reached her desk she had told herself that the idea wasn’t funny. Now, Tina knew that she and Aunt Jan sat in the gods because those seats were the cheapest. “Stop, Tina,” Jan would say as they left the theatre and reached street level. “Give me your shoes.”
Tina had to bend one leg, then the other, so that Jan could get any whitewash residue off the back of her T-bars. Her aunt used a hanky and spit to wipe away any sign that they’d been in the cheap seats, which were not really seats at all, but long concrete benches, whitewashed to keep them smart. Aunt Jan didn’t want people knowing they watched from the gods. Appearances meant a lot.
When the family finally got a television, they never watched the funny programmes like “Hancock’s Half Hour” or “Steptoe And Son”, and Jan made sure that the neighbours knew they didn’t.
Tina had a good life with her uncle and aunt, with plenty of attention and everything she needed. But as she grew to adulthood one phrase kept ringing true with her.
At work, if someone went home early, they were said to be “not quite themselves”.
“Your uncle’s not feeling himself today,” her aunt would say if he didn’t clean the car at the weekend.
Tina felt that, in some way she could not define, she didn’t feel herself and never had.
At school she was middling at lessons, and was told off for what the teachers referred to as “mucking about”.
She would provide a commentary of school life – the bad food and the hilarious members of staff.
Girls would gather, leaning against the wall or balancing on chairs, all crying with laughter because of her, Tina Bell.
Sometimes Aunt Jan witnessed Tina’s behaviour and then she’d say, “You don’t always have to play the fool, Christina.”
“But I don’t play the fool,” Tina would reply, puzzled.
She had simply been talking in her own way. It was just that people laughed.
Tina had left school and got a job, fallen in love and had two children. She was happy even if, sometimes, she felt that she was not quite herself.
Applying to stand in front of 50 people and tell jokes was definitely getting too big for one’s boots
During long days at home with the children, Tina listened to the radio. She knew the scheduled
times of every comedy show. She would imagine her aunt (who had died soon after the arrival of Tina’s second child) walking through the front door, shaking her head.
“I don’t know why you’d want to listen to that, Christina, I really don’t.”
But to Tina, to laugh was to survive. A joke well told was what gave the cake of life its delicious icing.
One day, Tina heard an archive recording of something she remembered from her schooldays.
In a crackly recording an American comic asked his co-performer to remind him how old she was.
“Why, I’m 44,” she said in a clipped New York accent.
Tina could hear the wry smile on her face – she was older than she’d admit.
“I came into this wonderful world in 1906,” she added in a breezy tone.
He sounded doubtful, and asked if she had documentation to prove it.“Well,”
the woman began, “you see, there was an earthquake just then, and my birth certificate was destroyed.”
“I know about that earthquake,” the man said, “but that was in April, and your birthday’s in July.”
Tina, listening in 1974 with a toddler on her knee, heard again the perfect, exquisite length of the pause following his line.
She held her breath, listening to the audience holding theirs as they anticipate the pleasure to come.
“Well, it was an awfully big earthquake,” the woman said. Tina burst out laughing.
Her child looked up, astonished, and then he joined in.
Tina’s breath was taken from her by the sheer skill of the comics, the timing and the rhythm of the joke. It was genius.
“Brilliant!” she said to her son.
He dropped from her lap and toddled off into the hall. The lounge was silent again.
Tina stood and followed the toddler.
“An awfully big earthquake,” she said to the television screen as she passed it, and her face was reflected back at her.
It was not a kind reflection – stretched and green and bulbous. She was getting older now; before too long she had to find a way to make people laugh.
It was a mad idea, and for more than a week she didn’t even tell Connor, her husband.
When she did, he said, “Yeah, definitely,” and picked up the salt pot.
Tina stared at him.
“What did you say?” she asked. Connor looked up from his mashed potato.
Their son began yelling that his sister had taken his fish finger, so Connor had to raise his voice.
“You’re funny,” he told her. “I’ve told you before. Why do you think I married you?”
He hadn’t told her that – not in so many words. Tina was sure of it.
They had always laughed together, just as she had laughed at school and with her friends.
But to be told, just like that . . . Connor put down the salt, embarrassed. “I mean, I married you because you’re beautiful, Tina.” “No,” she replied. “That’s fine.” And here she was, in 1982, at a comedy night. The organiser had said she could have five minutes at the end for a chat.
She had called the venue and been given a name and number.
It was all impossible and crazy, yet here she was.
A fortnight after that, Tina was on the stage herself, looking at the stool she had sat on that first night.
The stage seemed as big as an ocean and the audience as quiet as a grave, and she was going to die, very slowly and publicly.
“Do you ever . . .?” Her throat was dry and the words barely registered.
She swallowed. “Do you ever get bored looking after kids?”
Her heart sank as she scanned the audience and saw a sea of men out there in the half-darkness – men, young and old, looking back at her with blank expressions on their faces. But this was her act, and all she had. “This one mum, she suggested I play a game of draughts with them,” Tina said, and took a deep breath. “But it was really hard to find 24!”
Half a second seemed like a week as the punchline sank in, but somebody at the side chuckled and the chuckle spread like a forest fire.
Tina had won her first real laugh, and the warmth of it wrapped itself around her and lit up her innards.
Connor didn’t get a word in edgeways as he drove her home that night. “You were funny,” he said when her stream of hysterical chatter and celebration petered out.
He made it sound like the most normal thing in the world.
“I keep thinking about Aunt Jan,” she said.
Connor turned in the driver’s seat to face her. They were at traffic lights.
“Why her, of all people?”
“She told me not to get too big for my boots. She would have been horrified by this.” Tina frowned. “No, not horrified. Puzzled.”
“Sweetheart, your aunt had no sense of humour – not a jot, not a whiff, not an iota.”
Tina gaped at him as he pulled away from the light. That had never occurred to her. She wondered if everybody failed to understand the people who brought them up. Jan was just Jan; Ray was Ray.
But there had been a gulf between them, and she had taken half a life to find out that it was there, and to find out who she was.
“They loved you,” Connor asked. “Will you go back?”
“Are you nuts?” she asked. “Tomorrow night!”