The Sex Life of a Comedian

The Sex Life of a Comedian - review

Written by stand-up comedian Dave Thompson, The Sex Life of a Comedian delivers some home truths about the life on the road. It's hard not to believe that the main character Doug Tucker's last minute arrivals at venues, or the way he spends hours crossing the country for underpaid gigs in unpleasant dives, don't have some inspiration in reality. As, I suspect, do the way that the various comedians who come into Tucker's life become huge successes or fail in ways that are little connected to their talent.

However, this is a novel, not a memoir, for which we can assume Thompson is thankful, because Doug Tucker's life is no bed of roses. Admittedly Doug seems to enjoy (with occasional regret and shame) the huge amount of (explicit) sex and drug taking he encounters, but there is a murky unpleasantness to his existence that shades into outright gangland violence. And Doug's luck rarely stays positive for long, while the car crash events that pull his life apart come with painful regularity.

To begin with, as we hear of Doug's extremely colourful sex life, it's hard not to think of this as a modern version of those 1970s 'Confessions of a Window Cleaner' type books. I never read one, but my suspicion is that they would have had the same, rather simplistic narrating style, with a series of sexual escapades (though I doubt if the content of these were as explicitly portrayed as are Doug's). But as the Tucker story develops, I was reminded much more of the books of the once extremely famous Leslie Thomas.

In part it was the period feel - the first part of the book is set in the nineties, but it feels more like the seventies - but mostly it was the similarity to Leslie Thomas's classic story arc of a likeable but weak-willed central character who is manipulated sexually and practically by unpleasant people to produce a trajectory that begins with a degree of success but that ends in a disastrous spiral of destruction. Like the best of Thomas's central characters, Doug Tucker has an element of an innocent, introduced to a dark world that seems first enticing and then destructive. And he has a hint of mystery about him with his rabid dislike of children and frequent reference to his mummy's knife.

I had been warned about the sex scenes, which are definitely not suitable for reading on the train if the person next to you glances at your book (as I experienced), but I found the rampant drug taking more disturbing, while the ending seemed rushed and not entirely satisfactory. I certainly wouldn't buy this if you are easily shocked or looking for a jolly romp, rather than a gut-wrenching story. However, by the time I was a quarter of the way in I had to discover Doug Tucker's fate, and it's a book that I won't forget in quite a while.

The Sex Life of a Comedian is available as an ebook on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com, or as a paperback from Lulu.com
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog