Diary of a stand-up comedian

DENNIS explained the brief to me.

I was to stop men in the street and talk to them about their prostate.

“Complete strangers?” says I.

He nodded and smiled as if I were talking about something as simple as the weather. It isn’t that easy. Men hate talking about their health or anything they are scared of.

There was a time when humans had to worry about sabre-toothed tigers and wolves.

I read once that humans began to live together to increase their chances of survival in the event of an attack by a predator.

By sleeping in a big group it offered protection in case a wild animal should stray into a cave.

The beast would have loads of people to choose from, thus reducing a caveman’s chances of being chosen as dinner.

I have tried to promote the theory that snoring is a leftover behaviour from those times when my forefathers had to sleep alone. The snoring was designed to scare predators away.

They would hear this noise and think that something big and fierce was asleep in the cave.

Well it has always been my response when told that my snoring is noisy. “I am protecting us!” I have said. I don’t know if my nighttime growling would put a burglar off but it is a good excuse for me to make noise at night.

Now that we appear to have protected ourselves and defeated the natural predators that used to feed on us, we have other things to fear. Prostate cancer kills one man every hour in Britain.

Each year 36,000 men are told that they have prostate cancer; about the same amount of people can get into the Pearce GAA stadium in Galway. In the great scheme of things I guess that isn’t a massive amount of people, but it is still too many.

I stopped a few people in the street and asked them if they knew what the prostate was.

Very few did. Many men were too busy to talk, or simply chose not to.

Those that I did manage to talk to all had similar fears. Men seem to fear an examination by a doctor wearing rubber gloves.

I am not sure if it is the doctor’s fingers, the fear of what he may find or just the rubber that causes the stress.

We associate rubber gloves with washing dishes.

I have often thought that men fear a dirty plate as much as an internal examination. I tried using humour to get my point across in the street and ended up talking about washing dishes too much.

In the early stages of the disease, there are no symptoms. I always think that is the scariest thing about it. If you have no clue it is developing, how do you protect yourself?

It was the same with a mate of mine who would turn up without warning and throw my house into chaos until we could get rid of him.

I read the statistics: “A man aged 50 has a one-in-11 chance of developing prostate cancer.”

Developing doesn’t mean getting though, it is only a chance. I told a few of the lads I stopped in the street. They seemed surprised but not bothered.

For some reason single men are diagnosed much less frequently than married men. Maybe that is because they have no-one telling them to get help?

Maybe having someone to talk to and to share feelings with is helpful.

How you get men to talk about anything other than football though is another thing.

Okay, so people die from cancer, but people also live with it too. Dennis is very forthright about how he lives with the Big C. “Cancer doesn’t have to be the big scary thing it is made out to be,” he says before explaining his belief.

Cancer can’t destroy love, hope, faith or friendship. It isn’t able to shatter courage or beat the human soul.

It is an awful affliction but it doesn’t have to be the end of everything. We fear talking about it and we all know someone who has lived with it.

We used to be scared of sabre-toothed tigers and we beat them off.

Maybe one day we will look back and remember that we beat cancer.

Until then I guess we have to keep talking about it.