DAVENPORT IS A BIT OF A SURPRISE. THEY EXCEED ALL RECORDS WITH THE ENCORE BUCKET, AND THERE’S $142 IN THERE BY THE END! THAT’S OUR RECORD AND PER CAPITA IT IS MILES AHEAD OF ANYONE, SO I THINK WE PLEASED ’EM. THIS is before I tell the audience that the money is for charity, so it’s impressive and there is clearly a future for me in comedy lap dancing. They really enjoyed the show, a good crowd and wildly enthusiastic. We are very high energy and there are loads of laughs.
My wife’s a bit worried about my returning home. She’s been reading my diary and is concerned about how I am going to adapt to normal life after all these standing ovations. I tell her I can’t wait to get home and, if she likes, she can give me standing ovations. It isn’t easy to slip from one life into another, there is bound to be a small period of readjustment. We’ve all had to adapt to living on a bus and constantly being on the move, but she has a point, it might seem a bit dull. But that is the very point of home. I’m really looking forward to it. I can’t wait to be dull. She has helped me through these times before. After I had been on Munchausen for six months I had per diem withdrawal. Per diems are weekly cash payments on movies to cover your expenses. In Italy they came in fat brown envelopes stuffed with thousands of lire. A cup of coffee was about ten thousand lire, so a couple of hundred bucks meant a huge wad of Italian cash. It was about as rich as I have ever felt, and I became so addicted to these envelopes that for several weeks after filming ended Tania would fill a fat brown envelope with English cash for me. Now that’s a wife….
I’m missing Kevin Nealon’s birthday party. He is turning forty (at least that’s what he’s told his adorable young girlfriend) and is having a big celebration. I call him, and he teases me that all my friends are going to be there, Billy Connolly and John McEuen (the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) are coming to play banjo. Later I see Billy on CNN flogging Timeline. I’m a bit bummed that he mentions Kevin Nealon and Steve Martin and John McEuen all sitting around playing banjos, but he doesn’t mention me. That’s the trouble with fucking banjo players. As a guitarist you’re just invisible. You sit around for hours playing three chords so that their strangulated instruments can sound vaguely tuneful, but you might as well not be there. I once spent an evening with five of them—it’s a nightmare for a guitarist. They always have one more fucking plaintive lament to play involving E minor, dead miners, and a cat. Banjo players hate all other musicians. They can only tolerate other banjo players. What’s the line you never hear at a recording studio? Will the banjo player please move his Ferrari. I once saw a decal in the back of a truck with a picture of a banjo with a red line through it. It read “It’s the law. Play a banjo, go to jail.” John McEuen told me that someone said to him, “If banjo playing was a good idea the Beatles would have done it.” Clint Black tells a gag about an unhappy banjo player: someone broke into his car, where he kept his instrument, and left nine other banjos. In the Rutles sequel Can’t Buy Me Lunch my narrator says, “The banjo: the last resort of the antisocial.” It does seem weird to me that three of my friends who are all comedians, all play the banjo. I wonder if John Cleese is a secret banjo player?