Comedy news: On The Road: Leaving things to the last minute with Yianni Agisilaou

In the first of a series of special On The Road features from the Melbourne Comedy Festival, Yianni Agisilaou ponders the consequences of leaving things to the last minute...

Friend - We’re really looking forward to your show Yianni. We’re coming next week!

Me - Um…there are no shows next week. The last show is this Sunday. There is a fundamental human propensity to leave things, even extremely pleasurable things, until the last minute.

This is fairly obvious in the case of unpleasant tasks such as cleaning the toilet or submitting your tax return. The human capacity for denial commandeers your brain, convincing you that the later you leave the task, the more space you create for some miraculous deus ex machina to appear, saving you the sheer drudgery. I indulged in this in January this year, day after day hoping that the entire income tax regime might be repealed and replaced with a sort of ‘try your luck’ game show involving spinning wheels, gambling and prizes. I am informed that such a system has already been introduced. It’s called “Auditing”

Even extremely pleasurable things are often left until the last possible moment. To wit, sex very rarely BEGINS with an orgasm. Except for that time I walked in on my girlfriend cruising at 30,000 feet whilst ‘flying solo’, pretended to feel really upset and rejected and guilted her into a conciliatory shag. Say what you want about guilt, and the Catholics will tell you the same, it gets the job done.

Thus it was that after a couple of first week shows to crowds which – if they were ages – wouldn’t be served a beer, last night I turned up for my last show to hear the bar manager Kevin suggest to me that we open the doors to the auditorium early as the bar downstairs “was getting pretty crowded.”  And crowded it was, wall to wall with tardy yet well-meaning friends.

We opened the door. The crowd I’d spent a week yearning for surged up the stairs, spilling into the room. Where previously I’d had to instruct people to sit at the front, people were now forced to for lack of other available seats. With all the seats filled up, a problem, even if quite a good one, presented itself. Where to fit the numerous seatless others?

I used every ounce of my creativity to squeeze a crowd of 120 into a room designed to hold 70; pouffes became chairs; the wings of the stage became makeshift play-school type seating mats; more adventurous people were hung from the ceiling and periodically flipped for reasons of blood circulation; a live video feed was fed through to a local football stadium and the overspill sent there to watch.

Warm fuzzy feeling borne of shoehorning people in ingeniously aside, part of me couldn’t help but think “where the fuck were you people last week?!?”

Where were you when double figures went from a worst to a best-case scenario?

Where were you when the joke about the word ‘cunt’ fell flat because everyone felt self conscious, exposed and unable to laugh?

Where were you when my parents sat me down after the show and asked whether ‘this comedy thing’ was really worthwhile?

Really though, it didn’t matter. They were at least there, which put them indisputably above the next category of people. People who don’t submit their tax returns at all, people who never clean their toilets and the people who will – in the coming week – email, text or call to tell me how they’re so sorry and thought there were more shows.

After the show, a sequence of people approached me, complimented the show and my performance.  I smiled and nodded. I agreed that the show was good, but deep down I knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been.

See, the thing is, I kind of left writing it until the last minute. Really, I should have put more work into it. But I had so much on, what with submitting my tax return, cleaning my toilet and guilting my girlfriend into sex.

It’s alright though. It’ll be much better by Edinburgh. Because this time, I’m going to have it ready early, maybe by the end of May. Or maybe come July 29th I will find myself in front of my laptop, script open, rereading this blog with a fatalistic sense of self-loathing. Only time will tell.

* Written on Monday 12th April. Deadline was Friday 9th April.

Yianni Agisilaou has just completed a sell-out show at Tony Starr's Kitten Club as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. This summer he will be performing two new solo shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – 6-30 August,  at Just The Tonic at The Caves at 10.15pm and Cabaret Voltaire (Free Fringe) at 7.15pm.