EDINBURGH 2022: Patrick Spicer Guest Blog

Guest Blog: Patrick Spicer brings endearing, self-deprecating new stand-up comedy show to the Fringe

Patrick discusses exposing his most humiliating moments on stage

Chortle's Best Newcomer Nominee Patrick Spicer blogs for Broadway World about bringing Who's This All Of A Sudden? to Edinburgh, his heightened emotions, lying about your sexual conquests and why honesty is always the best policy.

I've always been someone who tries to be normal and regular. Who acts, thinks and smells like everybody else, and obsessively hides any evidence that I may not be meeting The Standard. The Standard is of course collectively set by anybody who I decide is better than me, which is a big circle that for convenience's sake we can call everyone.

If I had to describe MY vibe, I would say it is "Oh my god, don't look." Unfortunately, people often do look because you've asked them a question or you're buying bananas. In those cases, the trick is to try and shape your personality into their personality like a sort of needy chameleon. Because they'll like to look at themselves. Who doesn't like themselves!?

This personality level embarrassment has broadly been the driving force behind all of my most terrible decisions, and all of my most unconvincing disguises.

When I was thirteen, I tried to impress my less anxious friends by taking ecstasy in a park, which led to them having a great afternoon, and to me having my first panic attack.

Eighteen years later and I've had buckets of panic attacks, but I've impressed absolutely nobody. Even though I do everything I can to hide them. Most people wouldn't even realise I was having one. They'd just think "this is a suddenly very quiet and sweaty man."

In my late teens my regular ass friends started going to the bone zone, but I was too scared and embarrassed about it going badly, so I just started lying that I already had. My girlfriend went to a different school! Bermuda Triangle High! They don't have Wi-Fi there, so you won't be able to contact her!

Whilst inventing an increasingly complex sexual track record that I imagined people would like me to have, I never really dealt with any of the feelings of wrongness or inadequacy.

So when, in my twenties, I had a brush with a very casual GP who led me down a path of thinking there was something horribly medically wrong with me, I kept it all to myself. Magnetic sex-hounds like myself didn't have things wrong with them. They hounded for sex. That was their whole thing.

Maybe all of this sounds like a ridiculous background to writing and performing a show entirely about the most humiliating things that have happened to me. If it does sound that way, I'm sorry. Please text me the sort of things you say. I'll come to your house and say them to you.

The truth is I thought when I started talking about it all on stage the people in my life would see the real not normal guy and say YUCK! I like my friends like I like my coffee - sexually confident, mentally healthy, and physiologically pristine! Also, what's coffee??

But as it turns out, all those cliches about honesty being the best policy were annoyingly true. Telling everyone the worst stuff about me I could think of revealed something I don't think I could have expected, which is that nobody cares. Everybody is thinking about how they fit in, not about how you fit in.

Sure, it sucks saying it for the first time, but it's like going to the bone zone. The important thing is that you have done it.

I think anyone who's ever felt humiliated or afraid or like there's something wrong with them could see my show and laugh with me. Or at least at me. The point is we're all sharing and we're all having a good time and I'm sorry.

Patrick Spicer: Who's This All Of A Sudden?, Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Coorie), 6.20pm, 3-28 August (not 16)

Photo credit: James Deacon

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