510: My Band (A Routine)

I'm going to start a band that only works on cruise ships... it'll be called A Band On Ship. It'll be great; we'll never need to play a note. Every time we are announced on stage the crowd will run screaming for the life boats. Which is good for me because I have no musical ability whatsoever. But, if the audience fail to notice the play on words, and just hear a literally-minded band name, they'll remain seated, passive-aggressively demanding I entertain them. I'll be left on stage mumbling A... Band... On... Ship... It's, it's, sort of a joke... a band on ship... I'm sorry but that joke was all I have... there will be no music this evening... sorry, good night and sorry.

What a marvellous idea if I do say so myself (and if I don't). I imagine there is absolutely nothing more simultaneous terrifying and liberating than dying painfully onstage. Looking forward to it and it seems like an unbearably painful humiliation, but I imagine looking back it wouldn't seem so bad, and might give one the power to give it another go. Of course how to respond to deathly silence is one thing, but how to respond to smart arse hecklers, drunken hecklers, or hecklers armed with google who can quickly discover that A Band On Ship is the name of the Alton Towers Resort Hotel resident band.

"Excuse me, Mr. Man on the stage," the heckler might request, after putting his hand up. "It says here that A Band On Ship is the resident band of the Alton Towers Resort Hotel. Pardon me if I'm mistaken, but I do believe we are not currently situated in the Alton Towers Resort Hotel, thus rendering present the possibility that you are not in fact A Band On Ship who are, as previously mentioned, the Alton Towers Resort Hotel resident band."

"Yes I know that." I will respond quick as a flash. "Admittedly I didn't know when I thought of the joke, only discovering so later when I too decided to google the search term "A Band On Ship", however I naively thought you, the collective "you" of this audience, would be able to momentarily suspend your disbelief in order to be rewarded with the permission to giggle. I'm sorry if that isn't enough for you. I thought the resident band at the Alton Towers Resort Hotel was sufficiently obscure that most people wouldn't have heard of them, even going so far as to assume that even people who had seen them perform at the Alton Towers Resort Hotel would not have remembered the name."

"The thought also occurred to me," I continued, "that members of the audience would not find it necessary to source attribution to every little detail, and offer a running dissection of the show. I ask you, nay, I implore you, consider in your heart whether it does indeed matter, for the joke to work, that there is in fact an existent band called A Band On Ship; that they do not in fact perform on a ship, but instead in the Alton Towers Resort Hotel, and I am not actually a real member of the band, A Band On Ship. Does it matter? I ask you."