Getting the Joke: The inner workings of stand-up comedy 9781408174609, 9781408177686, 9781408177709

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Getting the Joke 2nd Edition

Getting the Joke 2nd Edition The inner workings of stand-up comedy

OLIVER DOUBLE

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First edition published 2005 Second edition first published 2014 © Oliver Double, 2005, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Oliver Double has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organisation acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4081-7770-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

CONTENTS Acknowledgements  vii Foreword  ix

1 Born not made  1 2 What’s the definition of stand-up comedy?  17 3 Stand-up USA  23 4 Stand-up UK  35 5 What’s new in stand-up?  49 6 Stand-up on stage  65 7 The outer limits of stand-up  77 8 Affection  97 9 The personality spectrum  121 10 Onstage, offstage  141 11 Truth 159 12 Working the audience  187 13 Sharing 203 14 References 221 15 Insiders and outsiders  243 16 Licence 261 17 Politics 287

vi Contents

18 Recorded live  309 19 The present tense  325 20 Conversation 339 21 Improvisation 351 22 Timing 365 23 Delivery 383 24 Instant character  393 25 Magic 409 26 Material 415 27 Performance 429 28 Why bother?  449 Appendix: Exercises for teaching stand-up comedy  459 Glossary of comedians  469 Bibliography  495

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’d like to thank everybody who has helped me in the writing of this book – this version and the original edition – even if you’ve only been one of those people who I’ve tried to explain some bit I’ve been working on to, to the point where your eyes glaze over. A particularly enormous thank you to those comedians who were kind enough to give interviews, for the first edition or this revised version. Those who let me interview them the first time around were: Shelley Berman; Adam Bloom; Jo Brand; Rhona Cameron; James Campbell; Rhys Darby; Omid Djalili; Dave Gorman; Jeremy Hardy; Harry Hill; Alex Horne; Milton Jones; Phill Jupitus; Mark Lamarr; Shazia Mirza; Ross Noble; Alexei Sayle; Mark Thomas; and Andre Vincent. For this edition I interviewed: Stephen K. Amos; Margaret Cho (twice!); Tiernan Douieb; Richard Herring; Wil Hodgson; Milton Jones; Stewart Lee; Josie Long; Jimmy McGhie; Sarah Millican; Al Murray; Ross Noble; Pappy’s (Ben Clark, Matthew Crosby and Tom Parry); Howard Read; Mark Thomas; and Mark Watson. Conducting these interviews was fantastic fun and an invaluable source of information, much of which was unavailable elsewhere. I was hugely impressed by how willing and open these comedians were to discuss the way they work, and found them genuinely friendly and nice to talk to. Thanks are also due to the agents who helped to set up the interviews (especially Brett Vincent at Bound and Gagged who actively suggested people to me), and also Ian Baird, Matthew Crosby, Colin Anderson and especially Tiernan Douieb, who all put me in touch with people I wanted to talk to. And more thanks go out to those comedians who said they’d do an interview, but I didn’t get time to actually follow it up.

viii Acknowledgements

I’m very grateful to the University of Kent for giving me study leave so that I had time to write the book (both times around), and to the SDFVA Research Committee for funding some of the cost of seeing shows and doing interviews for the first edition. I’d like to thank Jimmy, Katie, Charlie and Gav for letting me talk about your work on the course – keep in touch. Also, thanks to all of the students I’ve taught on any of my stand-up courses, for drawing my attention to things and making me think so long and hard about all of this stuff – and particularly those like Jimmy and Tiernan who have gone on to become successful comedians. Professor Chris Baugh gave me moral support and good advice on the general tone of my research for the first edition, and Tony Allen has been an important influence on my writing, through his own work and the many conversations we’ve had over the years. Thanks are due to Alan Story from the Kent Law School for detailed and helpful advice on copyright law. I’m indebted to Louise Arnold for the comedy videos, and to Mark Lamarr for kindly giving me some of his old comedy albums. Huge thanks to Ross Noble for writing the new foreword to this edition, and for the many times you’ve got me tickets for your shows – particularly Laughs in the Park in 2011. Thank you to all the people at Methuen, especially Anna Brewer, my editor. Finally, a great big thank you to my wife Jacqui, who read through various drafts despite having better things to do, pointed out typos, made helpful suggestions and vehemently encouraged me to make my prose zippy, not stodgy. And a final, final thank you to my sons Joe and Tom, who make me howl with laughter and are generally lovely to have around.

FOREWORD To the casual observer I as a stand-up comic spend my time on stage just dicking about and showing off. And those people might be surprised to see me writing the foreword to a serious book by Britain’s foremost comedy academic. Well I first met Oliver Double over 20 years ago when he ran and hosted a comedy club. Unlike a lot of comics and promoters he had a genuine passion for understanding and discussing the inner working of comedy. These conversations I find endlessly fascinating and I take great delight in watching people with little interest in the workings of comedy backing away after a prolonged dissection of a routine of a long forgotten music hall comic. It always amazes me when people think that a group of comics sitting around talking about comedy would be hilarious. Although it can be, especially if one of their number has suffered a terrible on-stage death, but for the most part I would liken it to bunch of chefs talking about creating recipes*. At the time we first met I was a tiny child (some would say the Shirley Temple of the British stand-up circuit) with an obsession with stand-up comedy. Little did I realise back then, when we would discuss the topic at great length, that he would go on to write one of the most in-depth books studying the art of stand-up comedy and that I would be deemed worthy to introduce it as a leading exponent of the art form. It may seem a tad pretentious to describe stand-up in artistic terms, but as you will see from these pages it very much is. It is however rarely treated as such, and for many reasons, not least as it is so populist and often those who archive a reasonable degree of success in the field are more than happy to sidestep into other less challenging yet lucrative areas of the

x Foreword

entertainment world. Another reason stand-up is not taken as seriously as an art form is the simple reason that when it is done well it looks so effortless and natural, that it appears as if the performer is not doing anything, merely joining the audience in a moment that would have naturally happened. The conceit of watching a show is forgotten and the audience member feels like the comic is talking to them in a one-to-one conversation yet at the same time being swept away with the energy of those around them. The crowd and the performer are lost in the moment and the experience becomes an emotional rather than a cerebral one. Laughs are seemingly triggered by nothing more than tiny movements of the face or a pause that contains no words or sounds. It is this emotional response to stand-up that makes it so different from other art forms and in a live setting there is no way to fake it. The success of a comic is judged instantly – if they laugh you’re a hit, if they don’t you’re not. Also a fledgling stand-up must often learn their craft in pubs and clubs where their art is being judged, often by drunks and often leading to fairly lowbrow topics and a lack of imagination and risk taking. But it is this harsh critical environment that a truly brilliant stand-up must go through to equip them with the skills to develop and form them into a seasoned performer. Ironically, the raw and spontaneous development process that forms the comic and their act can, when a performer has found their audience and taken their act to television or DVD, leave an end result which has been tailored more for the home viewer, honed, edited and give a slight sense of losing the magic. All of this aside, this book explores stand-up as it should be, as a true art, and uncovers the mechanics and mysteries in creating it. Stand-up as an art form is unique in that there is no way to rehearse it. It can only be done in front of an audience, and can only be mastered by doing it live there and then in front of people. For every rule you create, a laugh can be gained by breaking that rule. And even though stand-up has its roots in theatre poetry and literature at its most primitive, it is just one person with funny bones in front of a group of

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people being funny. Holding the audience and being totally in the moment. There is something thrilling and magical about that moment, and it is for that reason that it is so intriguing. The joy and the secret of it is in that moment. It is not a passive medium – all the elements must come together, the ideas, the performance and the environment must perfectly align and the comic must merge all of these elements perfectly, controlling and timing everything just right while the audience gets lost in the moment. And it is that moment that makes stand-up so special. That moment that lives for a second and then is gone, never to be repeated. That moment where hundreds of people all feel the same joy and release of laugher at the same time, and that makes it the most direct form of expression with the comic being the writer, director and performer all at the same time. Those are the moments that make comedians appear like strange aliens, alchemists of the imagination who create delight and wonder from the mundane and make connections that most people would miss. This book is a chance to look behind the curtain and lift the lid and get an insight into the how those moments are achieved. I am not quite sure why there is a lid behind the curtains, so if you want to know about that I suggest you buy a book about home furnishing Far from being cerebral alchemy, stand-up is in many ways like playing music, with a comedian’s on-stage persona the instrument, and the gags and physical performance like musical notes: how they are arranged and played have very different effects on the audience. A comic can bang out a familiar crowd-pleasing tune or experiment with a concept album. They can tightly prepare the jokes and deliver them with amazing precision as if performing a classical movement or go on stage and wing it like a free-form jazz performer. Anyone can be funny in the same way that anyone can very quickly bang out a bit of a tune, but it is only through getting up on stage every night for years that a comic can attempt to master the medium and begin to understand how to live

xii Foreword

in those moments and play those notes and beats. However, in this book Oliver has taken this vast, complex and neverending topic and managed to give an insight into what goes into getting there. He has managed to get to the heart of what is behind what we see in that moment. How it all fits together, the history of the medium and how different movements and individuals have shaped the comedy landscape to create the modern form we know today. He explores where and how ideas are created and how those ideas are executed, the essence of who is telling the gag and how the character or persona of the person on stage is absolutely integral to whether a joke gets a laugh or not. And shows how a person goes from being a funny bloke in the pub to a fully-fledged performer able to perform a comedic symphony, conducting the audience and riding the energy of their laughter, taking their input and using it to take the whole performance to another level. This book is for anyone who wants to be a comic or wants to know why anyone would want to be one. In essence a cookbook for the comical and in many ways a manual on how to show off and dick about. Ross Noble

Note *

Currently both chefs and comics infest the TV schedules, and at some point a TV commissioner will create a TV chef– stand-up hybrid which will signal the end of television, and the beginning of the end of days

CHAPTER ONE

Born not made Let’s start with the fact that I’ve got a bit of a weird job. Since the late 1990s, I’ve been teaching university students how to do stand-up comedy. When I tell people that, the first thing they ask tends to be, ‘How on earth do you do that?’ Lurking behind the question is either genuine fascination or plain cynicism. That’s something I’ve got used to. When I first started at the University of Kent, where I now work, there was a flurry of press interest in the fact that they’d appointed a comedian to teach students how to do stand-up. Most of them went for the ‘hey-you’ll-never-believe-what-these-crazy-academics-areup-to-now’ angle. The Sun named my teaching among their examples of ‘odd offerings from the wacky world of education’, and argued that some of the courses students choose to study ‘are worthless and will do nothing to help them get jobs.’1 Comedians themselves have also been somewhat sceptical about the idea of teaching comedy. Rhona Cameron, for example, says: I don’t feel you can study stand-up, and learn stand-up from a situation like that. I’ve got quite strong views on that. I feel like stand-up has to be … a thing you have to kind of drift into. I think it’s an organic thing, and I think it comes from a kind of crossroads of life, or a feeling that … you’ve never fitted in or you haven’t got along with others.2

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GETTING THE JOKE

I understand the cynicism about teaching stand-up, and if I wasn’t involved in it I might feel that way myself. However, while a formal comedy course might sound like a dreadful idea, clearly there is a learning process involved when somebody starts out as a stand-up – unless you subscribe to the notion that the comedian’s magical powers are fully manifested the first time they perform to an audience. There are certain technical skills which need to be acquired through experience, and Jeremy Hardy points out that ‘the tricks in stand-up are something you can learn’.3 Stephen K. Amos agrees: If someone told me when I first started that, you know, there’s techniques you can learn, I’d have said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But there is … you know, a look, a pause … the timing of taking a sip of water or beer or whatever. Or the callback to a certain member of the audience or something you said earlier. There’s all those things you learn…4 This learning process usually takes place in front of a live audience. Most comedians begin by being bad at their job. Their early performances are marred by nerves. They are clumsy and awkward onstage. They fail to get laughs. The bad experiences are usually leavened by the occasional show where the new comic clicks with an audience and goes down well. With experience, the act improves. The comedian learns the job simply by doing it, as Alexei Sayle describes: ‘I did as many as seven appearances a night, sometimes – one audience would be cold, the next warm, then one lukewarm, then another cold, then a really hot one … In a technical sense it’s fantastic training.’5

Advice The long, demoralising slog of hard experience isn’t the only way of learning, though. Comedians may be sceptical



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about teaching stand-up, but in many cases they are teachers themselves. There’s a long tradition of older comedians giving advice and informal tuition to less experienced acts. Groucho Marx acted as a father figure to many younger comedians, and was an early admirer of Woody Allen’s stand-up act. Milton Berle was an established act when he first met Henny Youngman, who was doing weekend shows in the Catskills, and Berle gave him advice about timing and delivery. In 1949, Bob Monkhouse was appearing low down on the bill of a concert at the London Coliseum in aid of war refugees. Max Miller was topping the bill, and Monkhouse asked him for advice. Though feeling unwell, Miller made the effort to watch the younger comedian’s act. Afterwards, Miller gave him what Monkhouse describes as ‘a master class in patter comedy by its greatest living exponent’. There was advice on delivery, vocal projection, energy, comic authority, timing and using gesture to create a mental picture. Miller even gave Monkhouse detailed advice on how to improve the structure of particular jokes.6 Speaking on Radio 4, John Sessions says that the thought of comedy courses ‘really chills me’, but goes on to describe how John Cleese saw one of his early performances and phoned him the next day to discuss it in detail. Cleese advised him to give the jokes more space, and to try not to lump too many ideas together in one gag. Sessions found the advice ‘fantastic’.7 Omid Djalili had a more sustained relationship with his informal comedy mentor: It was really Ivor Dembina who then came to see me and took me under his wing and said, ‘Look, you’ve obviously got something, and you’re not quite there yet, you need someone to help you write some material.’… And I think he taught me a hell of a lot actually, he taught me how to write jokes … to be honest, he taught me how to do it.8

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GETTING THE JOKE

In other cases, comedians share knowledge among themselves on a more equal basis. Alexei Sayle remembers: In the early days, I think we used to stay up all night, I can remember me and Tony Allen and Andy de la Tour, for instance, round Tony’s flat, staying up all night talking about comedy, and the nature of it … we talked about the kind of ethical aspects of it, and … I can certainly remember talking about the technical [aspects].9 Younger comics can learn from older acts simply by watching them and observing their technique. Bob Monkhouse wrote about how he absorbed technique from comedians like Max Miller, Arthur Askey and Max Wall ‘by osmosis’.10 Chris Rock talks of the need to ‘study comedy’, and recalls how listening to albums by acts like Woody Allen and Richard Pryor helped him develop.11 Adam Bloom describes how watching other comics at the Bearcat Club helped him prepare for his first appearance: I used to go every single Monday without fail, and just watch, and learn, and suss it out. I kind of learnt by other people’s mistakes, in a way. Just, you know, worked out what open spots were doing wrong. And I could see there was a command that the established acts had that the open spots didn’t have.12 There’s a long tradition of agents and managers helping to nurture and develop the acts they represent, particularly in America. Woody Allen was helped through the sometimes painful transition from successful comedy writer to stand-up act by his managers Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe. They found him bookings in small venues to allow him to develop his performance skills, talked with him about comedy until 4am, and helped him to edit his material. Allen looks back on Rollins as ‘a great coach, a great teacher, a great manager’.13 Later, Joffe and Rollins helped to develop Robin Williams, for



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example advising him to end a character piece about an old man looking back at the time before World War Three with a moment of pathos.14 Comedians can sometimes get similar help from the people who run the venues in which they perform. At the original Comedy Store in Los Angeles, Mitzi Shore would critique each of the new young acts she put on. When George Black ran the London Palladium, he would sometimes offer advice to the acts he booked. He might, for example, criticise a weak routine, telling the comic, ‘It’s dull … You’d better lose your pants or something.’15 When fledgling comics progress to appearances on radio or TV, they may find themselves working with people who can help them adjust their acts to the new medium. Hughie Green would advise and help to shape the acts that appeared on his TV talent show Opportunity Knocks. Later, when Bob Monkhouse hosted the same show, he would offer detailed advice to comedians, helping them with delivery, joke construction and the structure of the overall act. Working on the regional BBC Radio show Wotcheor Geordie, Bobby Thompson received detailed coaching from his producer, Richard Kelly, who remembers: ‘[O]f course, we spent quite a lot of time instructing him, giving him hints and tips on how to handle an audience, on pauses, on timing, … particularly on emphasis.’16 When Thompson used up his existing material, Kelly found a writer called Lisle Willis to provide him with more. Thompson found learning the new material difficult, as he had a poor memory. Kelly would spend long hours rehearsing with him, teaching him different ways of working with punchlines and ensuring he got the emphasis right in particular sentences. One joke had a pay-off line which went, ‘And leave me outside the way you’ve always done,’ and Thompson kept insisting on placing the emphasis on the word ‘done’ instead of where it should have been, on ‘always’. It could take a whole afternoon’s work to iron out such problems.17

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GETTING THE JOKE

Advice can also be found in the range of ‘how to’ guides to stand-up comedy published over the years.18 In 1945, Lupino Lane wrote a book called How to Become a Comedian. Lane came from a line of comic performers which stretched back to the seventeenth century, and worked in silent comedies, stage musicals and variety. Some of the chapters in his book – ‘How to Use an Old Gag’, ‘Patter’ and ‘Timing’ – might have been useful to fledgling front cloth comics in variety theatres. Others – ‘Female Impersonation’, ‘Crazy, Acrobatic, Knockabout and Slapstick Comedy’ and ‘Ventriloquism’ – are clearly aimed at other types of comedian. In the last 20 years, the number of ‘how to’ guides has proliferated, but the problem with many of these is that they tend to oversimplify the subtle techniques of stand-up and offer dogmatic advice which is sometimes simply wrong. In Stand-Up Comedy: The Book, Judy Carter defines modern stand-up as a form of self-expression: ‘People confuse stand-up comedy with telling jokes … Joke-telling is the old Catskill school of comedy… The new school of comedy is personal comedy. Your act is about you: your gut issues, your body, your marriage, your divorce, your drug habit …’ However, having argued against simply ‘telling jokes’ – thus implying a freer, more creative approach – she goes on to stipulate ‘specific stand-up formulas’ and argues: ‘All stand-up material must be organised into the setup/punch format. If your material isn’t organised like this, you’re not doing stand-up.’19 It defies belief that the free-flowing routines of geniuses like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly or Eddie Izzard were produced with this rigid, formulaic set-up/ punch approach. Carter specifically warns against personal anecdotes, saying ‘stories don’t work’.20 In the unlikely event that, say, Pryor or Connolly had followed this advice, they would have had to shed some of their strongest material.



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Acting schools and comedy classes Some comedians have had a more formal training, albeit not specifically aimed at preparing them for stand-up. Shelley Berman trained as an actor at the Goodman Theatre School in Chicago, and feels that this contributed to the development of his unique and extraordinary vocal style: The study of speech, for example, I felt contributed to my work … as a comedian. The placement of my voice – I don’t know why, but somehow I know I can perform in a theatre without a microphone …Yes, certainly the education is a contributing factor there. Whatever is natural is natural, but there was considerable vocal development and speech development in my schooling …21 Then there are stand-up comedy classes. My stand-up course was by no means the first attempt at offering some kind of formal training specifically geared for comedy, and the idea probably originates in the training which took place within theatrical families for hundreds of years. Lupino Lane writes about the knowledge which was passed down within his own family, with tuition in such areas as acrobatic tricks, juggling and ‘The art of miming or expressing the emotions, in “dumb show”’. He also remembers his father, who he describes as ‘a most patient tutor’, teaching him comedy skills and specific routines.22 Classes aimed at the general public – as opposed to training within families – have existed for at least 100 years. In 1907, the young Marx Brothers spent some time in the newly established Ned Wayburn’s College of Vaudeville, and appeared in a showcase performance featuring some of those that had studied there. Like the ‘how to’ guides, comedy classes have proliferated more recently. In 1972, Pete Crofts set up his Humourversity, which describes itself as ‘Australia’s foremost training

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GETTING THE JOKE

institution in the art of humour, comedy and laughter’. It offers courses and workshops on stand-up as well as related topics like comedy writing, and public speaking with humour. In America, comedy workshops are offered by comedians like Judy Carter, or by venues like the Comic Strip in New York, which offers an eight-week programme and private tutoring. Jamie Masada, who runs the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard, has even established a Comedy Camp for Kids, where students from inner-city schools can learn stand-up skills. In the UK, the idea of teaching comedy has been floating around since the 1970s, when Trevor Griffiths set his play Comedians in a nightschool class for stand-ups.23 It’s only more recently that classes like this have become well established outside the world of theatrical fiction. In the late 1980s, when he was just starting out as a comic, Frank Skinner ran stand-up workshops at the college where he was working. Although he looks back at the experience as ‘the near sighted leading the blind’, he received media coverage for the course, and this attracted the attention of Jasper Carrott, who turned up to one of the classes and offered advice and encouragement to the participants.24 Later, Skinner ran workshops as part of a Red Stripe-sponsored tour for Amnesty International, and the class at the Wythenshawe Forum in Manchester was attended by future comics Caroline Aherne and Dave Gorman, who was just 19 years old. Gorman remembers: It was … 20-odd people sitting around, and Frank sort of talked through what he thought about stand-up and showed a little video, and then that was discussed and analysed, and then anyone who wanted to was able to get up and do … five minutes in front of everyone else. A few of us did, and I did.25 The experience proved to be crucial, because on the strength of this five-minute performance in the class, Gorman was booked for a benefit gig by Henry Normal, then a stand-up



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poet on the Manchester circuit. Skinner was headlining that show, and he went on to offer Gorman a paid booking at the 4X Cabaret in Birmingham which he was compèring at the time. This was the beginning of Gorman’s professional career. At around the same time, the Jacksons Lane Community Centre in Highgate ran comedy workshops taught by comics from the London circuit, covering such subjects as improvisation, writing and compèring, in 11 two-hour sessions. Often, the tutors would be performers who had previously been students, like Ivor Dembina, Patrick Marber and Jim Tavaré. Jacksons Lane no longer runs comedy workshops, but there are still plenty of places to find them. The Comedy School, founded in 1998, offers classes taught by comics like Paul Merton, Arnold Brown and Adam Bloom. Logan Murray has been teaching his Stand Up and Deliver courses since 2000 in association with the Amused Moose comedy club, and has an impressive list of alumni.26 Tony Allen runs what is described as ‘a crash course in stand-up comedy’ made up of six two-hour sessions, and some of the exercises they use are described in Allen’s book Attitude: Wanna Make Something of It?27

Stand-up goes to university Mine is certainly not the first university comedy course. Middlesex University has been running one as part of its drama degree since the mid-1980s; and Salford University started a stand-up course in 1993, with Peter Kay as its most illustrious alumnus. More have followed in recent years, notably Southampton Solent University’s three-year BA in Comedy Writing and Performance. I had started teaching stand-up at Liverpool John Moores University even before I moved to Kent, as a result of the peculiar way my life was turning out. I’d started working as a

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GETTING THE JOKE

stand-up about ten years before I got the job at John Moores, making a living from the regular paid bookings I was getting as well as the comedy club I compèred and co-managed. I’d also written my first book on stand-up.28 In 1997, personal circumstances meant I had to get a proper job, so I started applying for drama lectureships. It was only after my first term at John Moores that I was asked to develop a stand-up course. Initially, the course was quite modest – one three-hour workshop per week for one term, leading to a single performance in a local pub. When I moved to Kent, I was asked to develop something similar. This time it was bigger – two sessions per week for a whole year, with three performances at regular intervals. Learning to teach students how to perform stand-up comedy wasn’t easy. I’d been taught in the traditional way – by experience. Now I had to find ways of passing on this knowledge to students. My first task was to break down what I knew, to try and untangle and identify the skills so they were no longer merely automatic. I started to do this purely by reacting to what the students were doing in class, and at first, my only way of passing on what I had learnt was simply by telling it to the students. Gradually, I found better ways of approaching the problem, developing a series of simple exercises which help the students to make discoveries for themselves.29 The Kent drama degree is a four-year course, and students specialise in just one practical subject for the whole of their final year. In 2001, I developed stand-up comedy as a fourth year option. It was a chance to teach more intensively, and I had the freedom to shape the course exactly as I wanted it. Taking advantage of this, I decided that the best way forward was to make the idea of learning by doing much more central. I would ask the students to do their first show ten days into the course, and then perform every week for the rest of the term. In each of the 11 shows, the students would be expected to come up with new material. That way, by the end of the term, they would have had a fair amount of stage



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experience, and a repertoire of tried and tested routines to choose from. I knew this would be throwing them in at the deep end, so I had to find a sympathetic venue. I chose Mungo’s, a bar in one of the university’s colleges. It wasn’t perfect. The walls were slatted not solid, so that the corridor outside would act as a natural echo chamber, and people walking past could disrupt the show by shouting. It was too small for a raised stage, so we would have to just perform in one corner of the room. Worst of all, the doors stayed permanently open, and we wouldn’t be able to charge people to come in.30 Normally, this is the kiss of death for a comedy night. On the other hand, it was a regular haunt of other drama students, so it felt like home territory, and by working hard at publicity, we thought we would be able to only attract people who were interested in seeing the stand-up. In the second term, the students would put together a 20-minute set from the best bits they had done in Mungo’s, and take it out into away territory, doing a show in a Canterbury pub. They would also carry out a research project, and arrange for themselves a series of open mike performances in real comedy clubs. Again, the idea was for them to perform as much as possible, and even the research project would involve putting on a show. On 25 September, it was time for the first workshop, and the four students who had opted for stand-up arrived, looking distinctly nervous. Jimmy, a good-looking middle-class chap, had spent most of the previous three years underachieving by being cheekily lazy. Katie – the polar opposite of Jimmy – was a self-confessed swot, who was convinced that everyone thought she was too boring to do be a comedian. Gav was a gentle skinhead anarchist with a penchant for the surreal. Charlie had a kind of post-punk chic, and liked to take risks. Although they were a very mixed bunch, they all had the same ashen expression on their faces. I asked what the matter was, and they told me they’d all been in the bar together, drinking to calm their nerves. Apparently, even the workshop was a scary prospect.

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GETTING THE JOKE

As it turned out, they quickly relaxed into the exercises, laughing and messing about. The atmosphere of the workshops is important. When I was a drama student, the emphasis tended to be on discipline. We wore standard black clothes, worked barefoot, had to arrive strictly on time and were sometimes forbidden from talking about life in the outside world. Casual chatting and laughter were frowned on. This is a productive atmosphere for learning physical theatre skills or the techniques of Jerzy Grotowski, but not for stand-up. Although it’s still important to arrive on time, students wear their own clothes, and talking about the outside world is a positive requirement. As long as it is focused, casual chatting can be very productive. There’s a feeling of just playing about, and people gently make fun of each other – and me. Maintaining the balance between this casual atmosphere and the task in hand is a delicate matter. Then, after five sessions like this, the students had to face a live audience for the first time.

The first night It’s Thursday, 4 October 2001, 8 p.m. Mungo’s is teeming with people, but I’m not sure they’re here to see the comedy. There’s a big party of students here as part of a fancy dress pub-crawl, and I really hope they’ll be gone by the time we start. I’m already thinking about other venues we might try if tonight’s a disaster. I’m going to compère the show myself, to try and make sure the atmosphere is warm and the audience is focused – and I know I’ll have a job on my hands. It’s still chaotic at 8.30 when I walk on to start the show. The drunken fancy dressers have moved on, but there are still 80 people or more packed into the bar. There’s a lot of background chatter, and I’m distracted by the echoey acoustics. I work hard to bring the room together, taking the crowd through a silly audience participation thing, and



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playing them Lipps Inc.’s 1980 disco classic ‘Funkytown’ on the mandolin. After ten minutes, it feels like an audience rather than a random collection of people who happen to be in the same room together. I introduce Charlie, who’s on first, and there’s a huge burst of cheering and applause, with the kind of excitable edge you’d expect from an audience dominated by drama students. Charlie does well with the story of a one-night stand, and Katie follows by talking about her family. She plays on her swottiness, apologising after she says ‘shit’ – ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say the brown word.’ The audience like her. Gav is next, and he suddenly shows a control he’s lacked in the workshops, where he’s tended to veer off all over the place. He gets a big laugh for his opening gag (Gav: ‘Anyone here from Chester?’ Punter: ‘Yeah!’ Gav: ‘My dad died there.’), then lights himself a cigarette, taking his time over it. It’s a high-status gesture – he’s quite happy to keep a room full of people waiting until he’s ready. Jimmy goes on last, and it’s clear from the beginning that he’s a natural. He has the kind of casualness which shows a deep confidence, and he’s prepared to play about on stage. He starts by taking the piss out of me, saying I’ve only set the course up as a kind of revenge for all the times I died on stage when I was a working comic. Then he tells the tale of when he recently ‘shit himself’ while backpacking around Thailand. It’s well-structured and beautifully performed. After a Thai curry and some Chang beers, he’s in a sleeping bag under a mosquito net. ‘And then it came,’ he says. There’s a laugh of anticipation. ‘Blup!’ he says, impersonating the noise of his stomach. ‘Blululup!’ There’s another laugh, and he continues, in a genuinely cheerful voice: My guts were trying to tell me something! [laughter] They were! They were telling me I was about to shit myself! [laughter and applause] There’s a red Thai curry in there that wants to leave! [laughter] It wants to explore the world via my anus! [laughter] So yeah, so I just, I thought, ‘No,

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GETTING THE JOKE

bollocks,’ you know, ‘I’m tucked away, I’ve got all my stuff, I’m in my Action Millets Bearproof fucking Sleeping Bag, I’m not going anywhere, ‘cos it’s – it’s bound to just be a fart. [laughter] I’ll stand up, I’ll get out of the bedroom and I’ll just go thhhppp! [laughter] Then I’ll have to go back to bed.’ So I took the gamble. [laughter] So I did the Jimmy, I took the fucking gamble. I decided that I was going to take it on. So I stayed in bed. [pause] Silly Jimmy. [laughter and some clapping] The first night is a big success but it isn’t always this easy. The crowd fluctuates. Sometimes it’s big and noisy, but sometimes the students find themselves playing to 30-odd quiet punters. One week, the PA system starts to emit blue smoke while we’re soundchecking, then refuses to work – we have to perform acoustic. By halfway through the term, the students are starting to feel the strain of having to come up with new material every week. The process of teaching them, of helping them through the stresses and strains, starts to raise certain questions for me. I can draw on my previous research to answer the easier questions – like where stand-up comedy came from – but there are fundamental aspects of the art form that rarely get addressed in books: Who do comedians become when they’re on stage? What do they do to establish a relationship with their audience? How much do they improvise? Which different techniques do they use to perfect their delivery? And perhaps most crucial and most mysterious of all, how do comedians actually go about their job?

Notes 1

Tim Spanton, ‘I’ve got a degree in Beckhamology’, The Sun, 14 August 2000

2

Interview with Rhona Cameron, by telephone, 19 March 2004



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3

Interview with Jeremy Hardy, Streatham, 1 April 2004

4

Interview with Stephen K. Amos, by telephone, 18 September 2012

5

John Hind, The Comic Inquisition: Conversations with Great Comedians, London: Virgin, 1991, p. 32

6

See Bob Monkhouse, Crying with Laughter, London: Arrow Books, 1993, pp. 56–9 for a lovely, detailed account of this.

7

Pillories of the State, Radio 4, 28 January 2001

8

Interview with Omid Djalili, by telephone, 28 June 2004

9

Interview with Alexei Sayle, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003

10 See Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993–8, London: Century, 1998, p. 184 11 See Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999, p. 581 and Kings of Black Comedy, Channel 4, 9 March 2002 12 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004 13 Quoted in Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 548 14 The routine in question is ‘Grandpa Funk’, which can be heard on Robin Williams, Reality…What a Concept, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH 1104 15 Quoted in Ian Bevan, Top of the Bill: The Story of the London Palladium, London: Frederick Muller, 1952, p. 81 16 Bobby Thompson … The Little Waster, a documentary originally screened on Channel 4 in 1982, available on the video: Bobby Thompson, The Little Waster, Tyne Tees Television/Mawson & Wareham Music, 1986, MWMV1003 17 See Dave Nicolson, Bobby Thompson: A Private Audience, Newcastle Upon Tyne: TUPS Books, 1996, pp. 104–8 18 A number of comedians have told me that they found the first edition of Getting the Joke useful as a source of information when they were first getting started, even though it wasn’t written as a ‘how to’ guide. I felt immensely flattered when

16

GETTING THE JOKE Sarah Millican, for example, told me, ‘[Y]our book was very, very helpful to me’, not least because I’m a fan of her comedy. Modesty prevented me from including this information in the main text, but clearly I’m vain enough to include it as a footnote

19 See Judy Carter, Stand-Up Comedy: The Book, New York: Dell Publishing, 1989, pp. 3, 45, 46 20 Judy Carter, Stand-Up Comedy: The Book, New York: Dell Publishing, 1989, p. 5 21 Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004 22 See Lupino Lane, How to Become a Comedian, London: Frederick Muller, 1945, pp. 55–6, 61 23 Trevor Griffiths, Comedians, London: Faber, 1976. Tony Allen offers a commentary on the play in Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of it? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, pp. 123–6, and makes some insightful criticisms of Eddie Waters’s deficiencies as a teacher of stand-up. 24 Frank Skinner, Frank Skinner, London: Century, 2001, pp. 254–8 25 Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004 26 Logan Murray has also written what is for my money probably the best ‘how to’ guide on stand-up comedy (Logan Murray, Be a Great Stand-Up: Teach Yourself, London: 2010). It’s full of detailed advice without being too dogmatic, and it draws on interviews with some very good comedians. Murray is also an interesting comic in his own right 27 For an example of one of their exercises, see Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of it? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, p. 37 28 Oliver Double, Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian, London: Methuen, 1997 29 See Appendix 1 for a full description of some of the exercises I have developed 30 A few years ago, Mungo’s was completely remodelled, making it a better performance space and significantly increasing its audience capacity. My students now regularly play to audiences of 100–50, and have been known to attract crowds of up to 250

CHAPTER TWO

What’s the definition of stand-up comedy? Back in 2000, I happened across a fact that shocked me. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘stand-up comic’ was first used in an article in The Listener, published on 11 August 1966.1 Maybe shock is a bit of a strong reaction, perhaps even a little sad, but at the time I’d had a keen – not to say obsessive – interest in stand-up comedy for well over a decade. In all that time, I had never actually bothered to look into the origin of the term. My first reaction – after kicking myself for not being obsessive enough – was disbelief. Surely the term must have been in use before 1966? After all, by that point the style of performance it describes had been in existence for at least 60 years, and some of its most famous practitioners were already dead and gone. Indeed, the article hit the news-stands exactly eight days after Lenny Bruce was found dead on his toilet. I felt that the Oxford English Dictionary had thrown down the gauntlet, and I was determined to pick it up. I went straight to the Listener article which the OED says is the earliest recorded usage, to look for clues. It’s a piece reporting the ideas of the marvellously named Miss Ethel Strainchamps about the effect of television on spoken English, and it contains two references to ‘stand-up comics’.2 However,

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it couldn’t possibly be the actual first usage of the term, not least because it’s actually a description of an earlier article, from an American journal called Television Quarterly, in which Miss Strainchamps wrote: Stand-up comics, the only kind of professional performers who have ever attempted to talk solo before a TV camera for more than two minutes at a time, must use the device of the studio audience or the laugh-track. Their purpose is to convert their total audience to the preliterate type by inducing a ‘crowd’ response.3 Having tracked down a copy of the Television Quarterly article, I started to look for other earlier usages. Amazingly, I found one in the OED’s rival: Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961. It gives a definition of the adjective ‘stand-up’ as: ‘[P]erformed in or requiring a standing erect position ’.4 Great! So the term ‘stand-up comedy’ was definitely in use in Lenny Bruce’s time. In fact, an even earlier usage crops up in a radio interview with Bruce from 1959, in which the interviewer, Studs Terkel, asks: ‘Where does this leave the stand-up comics, quote unquote, who have stables of writers?’5 It’s unlikely that Terkel coined the term there and then, or Bruce would have probably asked him what he meant by it, but the chances are its exact origins are impossible to track down. An article in The Guardian claims it was first used on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, but Carson only started on that show in 1962, three years after the Lenny Bruce interview. This claim kicked off an internet discussion, in which someone suggests that Milton Berle did the coining in 1942, but this seems unlikely given that he disliked the phrase.6 But if finding the origin of the term ‘stand-up comedy’ is hard, it’s nothing compared with the difficulty of actually trying to define it. It’s an instantly recognisable form of entertainment, but putting a finger on what makes it so easy to



What ’s the definition of stand-up comedy?

19

recognise is not so simple. You can start with the obvious fact that it’s funny, but that doesn’t narrow it down far enough. I’ve fallen into this trap myself. In my first book, I define stand-up as: ‘[A] single performer standing in front of an audience, talking to them with the specific intention of making them laugh.’7 Now I find myself having to nitpick this to pieces. I say ‘a single performer’, but couldn’t what Morecambe and Wise did in their routines in front of the velvet curtains be described as stand-up? And aren’t there other performers who fit this description, who are not stand-up comedians? What about comic poets? Circus clowns? Storytellers? Performers of character monologues, like Joyce Grenfell? Other definitions fall short for similar reasons. The OED defines the stand-up comic as ‘a comedian whose act consists of standing before an audience and telling a succession of jokes.’8 This description more or less fits the work of acts like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly, Ross Noble, Stewart Lee and Josie Long, but doesn’t even touch on the extra things they do that make them so extraordinary. Having thought long and hard about it, I’ve come up with a list of the three things which define stand-up comedy, besides the fact of it being funny: Personality It puts a person on display in front of an audience, whether that person is an exaggerated comic character or a version of the performer’s own self. Direct communication It involves direct communication between performer and audience. It’s an intense relationship, with energy flowing back and forth between stage and auditorium. It’s like a conversation made up of jokes, laughter and sometimes less pleasant responses. Present tense It happens in the present tense, in the here and now. It

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GETTING THE JOKE

acknowledges the performance situation. The stand-up comedian is duty bound to incorporate events in the venue into the act. Failure to respond to a heckler, a dropped glass or the ringing of a mobile phone is a sign of weakness which will result in the audience losing faith in the performer’s ability. If this definition of stand-up comedy is any good, then the form has been around a lot longer than the term which describes it. There’s been much speculation about the roots of the form, and it’s been suggested that its ancestors might include the shaman, jesters, Commedia dell’Arte, Shakespearean clowns like Richard Tarleton, English pantomime clowns like Joseph Grimaldi, circus clowns, British music hall comedians, American vaudeville entertainers, the stump speeches of American minstrelsy, nineteenth century humorous lecturers like Mark Twain and medicine shows. It’s been said that stand-up comedy itself is an American invention. US comedian Richard Belzer, for example, describes it as, ‘[O]ne of the few art forms indigenous to this country: jazz, abstract painting, and stand-up comedy.’9 British comedy critic William Cook agrees, adding: ‘British comics have adapted American stand-up to their own ends, but … our parochial version is still way off the pace.’10 As somebody who’s resented American cultural imperialism ever since I first heard the Clash’s ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’, I feel duty bound to challenge the idea that stand-up originated on the other side of the Atlantic. The easiest way to do this is by looking at the evidence, tracing the history of stand-up first in the US, then in Britain.

Notes 1

‘Television and English’, The Listener, vol. LXXVI, no. 1950, 11 August 1966, p. 194. To be honest, I didn’t make the



What ’s the definition of stand-up comedy?

21

discovery by going to the OED myself. It came up in a student essay, and even then, the student hadn’t got the information direct from the OED, but via another book: John Limon, Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, p. 7, 126 2

The two sentences read, ‘People, she points out, who appear before television cameras (apart from “stand-up comics”) never attempt to talk for more than two minutes at a time’; and ‘In television complex sentences need to be eschewed, especially by stand-up comics’. Oddly, it is the second of these sentences which the OED quotes

3

Ethel Strainchamps, ‘Television and the English Language’, Television Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1966, p. 61

4

Philip Babcock Gove, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, London: G. Bell & Sons and Springfield, MA: G&C Merriam, 1961, p. 2225

5

Kitty Bruce (ed.), The Unpublished Lenny Bruce, Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984, p. 16. Interview broadcast 26 February 1959, WFMT, Chicago

6

The claim about the term being coined on Carson’s show is made in William Cook, ‘Rising to the Joke’, The Guardian (The Guide section), 22–28 February 2003, p. 5, However, the following website reveals that although The Tonight Show actually started in 1954, Carson didn’t follow Steve Allen and Jack Paar as host until 1962: http://www.johnnycarson. com/carson/did_you_know/history/index.jsp [accessed 27 September 2004]. The web discussion that followed can be found at http://pub122.ezboard.com/fwordoriginsorgfrm8. showMessage?topicID=464.topic [accessed 27 September 2004]. The person who posted the message says that Berle claimed to have originated the term in 1942, although the claim was actually made in 1991. Sadly, the 1991 source of the supposed claim is not actually cited. That’s the internet for you, isn’t it?

7

Oliver Double, Stand-Up! On being a Comedian, London: Methuen, 1997, p. 4. Other examples of laughter-based definitions include: Lenny Bruce, ‘A comedian is one who

22

GETTING THE JOKE performs words or actions of his own original creation, usually before a group of people in a place of assembly, and these words or actions should cause the people assembled to laugh at a minimum of … one laugh every 25 seconds for a period of not less than 45 minutes, and accomplish this feat with consistency 18 out of 20 shows.’ (Kitty Bruce (ed.), The Unpublished Lenny Bruce, Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984, pp. 41–2); John Limon, ‘Your laughter is the single end of stand-up … Stand-up comedy does not require plot, closure, or point, and there need not be anything but jokes. Constant, unanimous laughter is the limit case.’ (John Limon, Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 12–13); Mark Lamarr, ‘…defining stand-up in itself is very simple: a solo performer, usually a man, performing verbal comedy’ (Stand-Up America, BBC Two, 22 February 2003)

8

J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (eds), The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, Volume XVI soot-Styx), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, p. 515

9

Quoted in Franklin Ajaye, Comic Insights: the Art of Stand-Up Comedy, Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2002, p. 65. Belzer’s view is supported by an entry on ‘Hispanic Humor’ in Alleen Pace Nilsen and Don L. F. Nilsen (eds) Encyclopedia of 20th Century American Humor, Pheonix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 2000, which refers to ‘the American tradition of professional stand-up comedy’ (p. 145) and ‘the American custom of stand-up comedy’ (p. 147)

10 William Cook, ‘Rising to the Joke’, The Guardian (The Guide section), 22–28 February 2003, p. 5

CHAPTER THREE

Stand-up USA Vaudeville In America, the story of stand-up starts in vaudeville, a form of popular theatre which began in the late nineteenth century. Growing out of earlier forms of popular entertainment like dime museums and Yiddish theatre, the first proper vaudeville venue was probably Tony Pastor’s New Fourteenth Street Theatre, which opened in New York in October 1881. Pastor was the first to take this type of popular entertainment out of saloons and present it to a respectable audience. Over a decade later, in March 1894, B. F. Keith opened his first theatre in Boston, and this was the first to actually use the word ‘vaudeville’ to describe what it offered its customers. The entertainment on offer took the form of a mixed bill of acts, which might include singers, dancers, speciality acts and comedy quartets. To give a specific example, if you were at the Palace Theatre in New York in the week beginning 2 May 1921, you could have enjoyed the following acts: 1 Fink’s Mules, animal act 2 Miller and Capman, singers and dancers 3 Georgia Campbell and Co., in ‘Gone Are the Days’ 4 Toney and Norman, songs and talk 5 Dorothy Jardon, prima donna

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GETTING THE JOKE

INTERMISSION 6 Kennedy and Berle, youthful entertainers 7 Ford Sisters, dancers 8 Watson Sisters, singing comediennes 9 Robbie Gordon, posing act1

There were different grades of theatre, and the organisation of the entertainment in the major theatres differed from that in the smaller venues. Big-time vaudeville changed the bill weekly and ran the show twice nightly. Small-time vaudeville changed the bill twice a week, ran three to six performances per day, had fewer acts per show and lacked headliners. Small-time vaudeville included the venues run by the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), which booked black acts and attracted black audiences. The need for its existence is an indication of the segregation which afflicted America, although some black acts, notably Bert Williams, did manage to break into the big-time circuits. Williams was just one of the many legendary comedians that vaudeville produced. Others included Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, The Marx Brothers, Mae West, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Milton Berle. Some of these were comic singers or sketch comedians, but others did something which we would recognise as a form of stand-up comedy. First, there were MCs, like Frank Fay, who introduced the other acts. By definition, they had to address the audience directly, and they would also make comic ad libs.2 Then there were the monologists, like Jack Benny, Bob Hope and Milton Berle. These are now thought of as classic stand-up comics in the traditional style, but in a 1991 interview, Berle rejects this idea: ‘We were monologists. Not stand-up comedians. That’s a new term. You know why they’re called stand-up comics today? Because all they do is stand there and take the microphone off the stand.’3



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Berle was contemptuous of acts who just stand there and tell gags, because he and his contemporaries did more than just that. His first solo act, in 1924, was 12 minutes long. As well as gags, it also featured two songs, a card trick, a soft-shoe dance and an impersonation of Eddie Cantor. Similarly, Jack Benny’s act contained elements which aren’t normally found in modern stand-up, like a female stooge, described in a 1927 review as ‘a nice-looking girl, who plays the role of a selfconscious “Dumb Dora”.’4 The monologists were like modern stand-ups because they addressed the audience directly and told jokes, but they probably only started doing this towards the end of the vaudeville era. A 1921 review of Fred Allen’s act notes that as well as singing a song and using what is intriguingly described as ‘a wabbly umbrella’, he also told a series of gags: ‘His chatter is unrelated and aimed for laughs, which he secured.’ This leads the reviewer to conclude that, ‘Allen is not a monologist.’5 Clearly, in the early 1920s this proto stand-up element was new to the art of monologism. Vaudeville was a very popular form of entertainment. In its heyday, there were at least 1,000 vaudeville theatres in the US, playing host to 25,000 performers. It quickly became big business, with huge theatre chains being formed by entrepreneurs like B. F. Keith, Edward F. Albee and Martin Beck. By 1927, the huge chains had merged into one enormous one, which combined the Keith & Albee circuit with the Orpheum. This meant that all major vaudeville theatres and many smaller ones came under the control of one organisation. At this point, vaudeville was facing competition from silent cinema, with some theatres responding by including movies between the other acts. The pressure increased when sound cinema arrived in the late 1920s, particularly as big vaudeville stars like Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Bert Lahr started to appear in ‘talkies’. Such stars also appeared on the radio, another new medium competing for audiences. What made vaudeville fatally vulnerable to such competition was the fact that so many of its theatres had been

26

GETTING THE JOKE

amalgamated into one circuit. When Joseph P. Kennedy – the father of JFK – took control of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit by buying up 200,000 shares in it, vaudeville’s fate was sealed. Kennedy had a background in the movie business, and wasn’t interested in live theatre. In 1930, he sold his stock to the Radio Corporation of America, which became RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum). With virtually all the theatres in the hands of a film company, live vaudeville was over. By 1935, it had virtually disappeared, living on for a while in the form of live acts performing between the films in cinemas.

Borscht and Chitlins When vaudeville died, it might have taken the embryonic stand-up of the monologists with it. In 1938, Groucho Marx was worried that vaudeville’s demise would make comedians ‘a vanishing species’.6 In fact, it lived on in a variety of venues, like the hotels and resorts in the Catskill Mountains, known as the ‘Borscht Belt’. From the 1930s, the Borscht Belt was a favourite holiday destination for New York Jews. There were more than 500 hotels, including Brown’s, the Concord, Grossinger’s, Kutsher’s and the Tamarack, and the shows they put on led to them being dubbed ‘the new vaudeville’. Comedians who started out in the Borscht Belt include Red Buttons, Danny Kaye and Joey Bishop. In addition to headline comics, newer acts were booked as ‘toomlers’. Like the redcoats of British holiday camps, as well as doing a stage act the toomlers had to mingle with the guests – telling them gags and entertaining them as they did so, performing card tricks or jumping into the swimming pool fully clothed. This must have encouraged key elements of stand-up like an intensely direct relationship with the audience, improvisation and a firm emphasis on the here and now. Another arena where stand-up survived was the Chitlin Circuit, a series of cabarets, nightclubs and small theatres



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27

catering to black audiences in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington DC and Philadelphia. The pinnacle of the circuit was Harlem’s Apollo Theater, which still thrives today. On the Chitlin Circuit, great black comedians like Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx appeared alongside jazz bands, bluesmen, tap dancers and doo-wop groups. Then there were the white stand-up comedians like Minnie Pearl, who emerged from the country music scene. The casinos of Las Vegas provided a stage for the big names of comedy, paying them big money. Beyond all of these, would-be stand-ups could try to find work in cafés, bars or strip clubs.

The sick comics Then in 1953, a young comic called Mort Sahl made his debut at a venue called the hungry i in San Francisco. Run by a beret-topped bohemian called Enrico Banducci, it was a small cellar club that played host to folksingers and beatnik poets. Behind the stage was just a brick wall, and this was the origin of the classic image of the American stand-up comedian telling gags in front of a bare brick backdrop. Sahl’s act at the hungry i was revolutionary. He eschewed smart suits in favour of slacks and a casual sweater, worn over an open-necked shirt. His delivery was just as informal, and his subject matter was relevant to a young, hip, beatnicky audience. Emerging in the context of McCarthyism, he was unafraid of controversy. He joked that he had bought a McCarthy jacket which is ‘like an Eisenhower jacket only it’s got an extra flap that fits over the mouth.’7 Others followed in Sahl’s wake, like Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Mike Nichols & Elaine May, Jonathan Winters, Phyllis Diller, Bob Newhart and Woody Allen. They played at the hungry i and other hip venues in other American cities, places like Bon Soir, Le Ruban Bleu, Mocambo, the

28

GETTING THE JOKE

Purple Onion, the Bitter End, Mr Kelly’s and the Blue Angel. Hugh Hefner was an enthusiastic fan of the new comedians, and booked them in to his Playboy clubs. They were labelled the ‘sick comics’, and Time Magazine described their style: They joked about father and Freud; about mother and masochism; about sister and sadism. They delightedly told of airline pilots throwing out a few passengers to lighten the load, of a graduate school for dope addicts, of parents so loving they always ‘got upset if anyone else made me cry’.8 All of these acts were exciting and inventive, but Lenny Bruce stands out for the sheer daring of his act and the frenzied controversy he managed to whip up. Bruce had started out as a Borscht Belt impressionist, doing Peter Lorre, James Cagney and Maurice Chevalier. In the late 1940s, he had what might have been a big break, performing a bit called The Bavarian Mimic on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts, but his career failed to take off.9 At this point, he was still a rather conventional comic, but during the 1950s his style started to change. He began hanging out with a bunch of young comics at a luncheonette called Hanson’s in New York. They would try out material on each other, and Bruce was particularly influenced by Joe Ancis, who never really worked as a professional comedian, particularly his ability to improvise outrageous comedy routines across the lunch table. When Bruce started working as an MC in strip clubs like Duffy’s Gaieties and Strip City, he began to try a riskier approach to stand-up. He would improvise, do very obscene stuff, insult the waitresses and wind up the customers. He would talk about jazz, and loved making the band laugh. Famously, one night he came on after one of the strippers, having taken all of his own clothes off. The audience was outraged, but Bruce was unrepentant: ‘What are you all staring at? You see nudity on this stage every night. What’s the big deal if I get naked?’10 When he broke out into more



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respectable venues, he took with him his improvisational flair, and his willingness to confront taboos with routines about sex, race and illegal drugs. Another stand-out act was Dick Gregory. Gregory started off on the Chitlin Circuit, and got his big break with a booking at the Playboy Club in Chicago on 13 January 1960. Replacing a white comedian who’d had to cancel, and playing to a white audience including a big party of Southern white businessmen, he stormed the gig, presenting an unashamedly black perspective and satirising racism. Gregory’s success opened the door for many more black comedians. Phyllis Diller – who started out in venues like the Purple Onion and the hungry i in the mid-1950s – made a similar breakthrough for women. There had been other female stand-ups before her, notably Moms Mabley and Minnie Pearl, but Diller was the first American comedienne to become a big star. The sick comics massively expanded the possibilities of stand-up, in terms of both presentation and subject matter. They paved the way for comedians to become less formal, wear casual clothes and adopt a natural, conversational delivery. They made room for comedy to be literate and intellectual, as well as letting it into taboo areas. Just one example of how they drew the blueprint for modern stand-up is the observational style of Shelley Berman who, among other things, was the first to talk about the anxieties of flying, a subject which comedians still harp on about today.11 Perhaps understandably, older comics viewed these newcomers with suspicion. As Albert Goldman put it, Mort Sahl ‘so revolutionised the role of the comic that professional comedians viewed him with the same mixture of alarm and envy with which professional singers regarded Elvis Presley.’12 With the taste of sour grapes in his mouth, older comic Joey Bishop dismissed the new generation: ‘Those guys … tried their hardest to make it our way; when they couldn’t, they switched.’13

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GETTING THE JOKE

Comedy clubs The world’s first comedy club opened in 1962, in Sheepshead Bay, New York. A comedian called George Schultz capitalised on the new hipness and popularity which the likes of Sahl, Bruce and Gregory had brought to stand-up, and opened up a new venue called Pips, which was exclusively devoted to comedy. Here, stand-ups could perform without having to share the bill with dancers, posing acts, performing mules, beatnik poets or folksingers. Stand-up luminaries like Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers and Jerry Seinfeld played there early in their careers before moving on to bigger and better things. Pips enjoyed a long life, soldiering on until around 2007, when it closed down to be replaced by a sushi bar. The Improv – or the Improvisation Café as it was originally known – enjoys a much more legendary position in the history of American stand-up than Pips. Even though it didn’t open until the following year, it has a strong claim on being the originator of the modern idea of a comedy club. In previous incarnations, it had been a luncheonette and a Vietnamese restaurant, but in 1963, Budd Friedman reopened it as a late night café aimed at theatre people. Like the hungry i, it boasted the kind of bare brick backdrop which has become symbolic of American stand-up. In spite of the fact that Friedman could be, in his own words, ‘a son of a bitch’, it became the central location for new comics to cut their teeth, because as Richard Zoglin puts it, ‘[I]f you were a beginning stand-up who wanted to work on your craft every night, the choice was pretty much the Improv or your bathroom mirror.’14 Comics who played the Improv include Robert Klein, Richard Lewis, Jimmie Walker, Freddie Prinze, Elayne Boosler, Robin Williams, Jay Leno and Gilbert Gottfried. Although the original New York Improv has gone the same way as Pips, it spawned a whole chain of clubs across North America, in cities like Chicago, Cleveland,



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Hollywood, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Ontario, Pittsburgh and Washington DC.15 Gradually, more comedy clubs emerged. By the mid-1970s, New York had two more showcase venues, The Comic Strip and Catch a Rising Star, both of which would thrive and become famous. Then there was The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, which opened on 10 April 1972. It was set up by an ex-comic called Sammy Shore, who had worked in Vegas and opened for Elvis prior to becoming a comedy promoter. Control passed to his wife Mitzi on their divorce in 1974, and she became infamous for putting the fear of God into the new comedians she nurtured there. Unlike the venues which had preceded them, from vaudeville to the hungry i, the early comedy clubs didn’t actually pay the stand-ups who worked in them. The logic was that they offered comedians valuable exposure and the chance to be spotted by TV producers, so paying them in cab fares and free meals was perfectly acceptable. In 1979, Mitzi Shore’s refusal to pay the acts at the Comedy Store led to the extraordinary phenomenon of a strike by stand-up comedians. This was no laughing matter. Once the dispute had been settled and Shore had started paying the acts, a comic who believed he was not being booked because of his involvement in the strike committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a nearby building, holding a note which read, ‘My name is Steve Lubetkin. I used to work at The Comedy Store.’16 In the 1980s, there was an extraordinary explosion of comedy clubs in America. At the beginning of the decade, there were only ten of them that actually paid their acts, but by 1992 there were over 300, playing host to about 2,000 comedians. As in vaudeville, chains of venues were formed, with branches of the Improv and Catch a Rising Star opening all over the country. Small comedy clubs sprung up in every corner of the US, like (to pick three at random): The Looney Bin in Walled Lake, Florida; Uncle Funny’s in Miami, Florida; and Filly’s Comedy Shoppe in Rapid City, South Dakota. The success of stand-up comedy led to the coining of the cliché that

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it had become ‘the new rock and roll’.17 Perhaps inevitably, by the early 1990s the expansion in the stand-up scene slowed down, and some venues were forced to close – but in spite of the fallback, there are still comedy clubs all over the US. Stand-up grew big not just in the mushrooming growth of comedy clubs, but also in the scale of popularity of comedy’s biggest stars. Steve Martin started performing as a teenager, doing a comedy magic act before building a stand-up career not in comedy clubs, but in nightclubs like the Boarding House in San Francisco and the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Appearances on Saturday Night Live and sales of his comedy albums exponentially boosted demand for his live shows, and he became the first stand-up to play arenas. In 1977, he grossed over $1 million for a tour in which he played to a total audience of 500,000 in enormous venues in 50 cities. A single engagement at the Coliseum in Richfield, Ohio, saw him play to an audience of 18,695 people. However reluctant I am to accept the idea that America invented stand-up comedy, I have to admit it has an intimidatingly good claim. The MCs and monologists of vaudeville were doing something rather like it as early as the 1920s, the form continued to develop in the Borscht Belt and the Chitlin Circuit, the blueprint for modern stand-up was drawn up by the sick comedians, the comedy club was born in New York, and it even gave the world the arena comedy gig. As if that wasn’t enough, the chances are that the term ‘stand-up comedy’ was coined in America.

Notes 1

This bill is reproduced in Milton Berle (with Haskel Frankel), Milton Berle – An Autobiography, New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1974, p. 86

2

Berle remembers swapping ad libs with the acts he introduced, admitting that they were actually pre-arranged and rehearsed



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(Milton Berle with Haskel Frankel, Milton Berle – An Autobiography, New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1974, p. 121) 3

Vernon Scott, United Press International, 20 August 1991, BC Cycle

4

See Milton Berle (with Haskel Frankel), Milton Berle – An Autobiography, New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1974, pp. 114-15; and Anthony Slide (ed.), Selected Vaudeville Criticism, Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1988, p. 20

5

Anthony Slide (ed.), Selected Vaudeville Criticism, Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1988, p. 1

6

Simon Louvish, Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers, London: Faber, 1999, p. 331

7

See Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon, 2003, pp. 9–13, 58, 61

8

Quoted in Lisa Appignanesi, Cabaret: The First Hundred Years, London: Methuen, 1984, p. 175

9

Lenny Bruce’s act for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts can be heard on various commercially released recordings, for example Lenny Bruce, Warning: Lenny Bruce Is Out Again, SicSicSic Inc., 2002, LBSU-666, track 28

10 Albert Goldman (from the journalism of Lawrence Schiller), Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce!!, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, pp. 151–3, 163; Phil Berger, The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, pp. 75–6 11 Berman’s routines ‘Airlines’ and ‘Stewardess’ are available on Shelley Berman, Inside Shelley Berman, Laugh.Com, 2002, LGH1111 12 Albert Goldman (from the journalism of Lawrence Schiller), Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce!!, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 226 13 Quoted (or paraphrased?) by Paul Krassner in an interview with Lenny Bruce, Kitty Bruce (ed.), The Unpublished Lenny Bruce, Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984, p. 40

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14 Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America, New York: Bloomsbury, 2008, pp. 94–5. Friedman’s self-description as a ‘son of a bitch’ is quoted on p. 89 15 It’s a shameful sign of stand-up comedy’s comparatively low cultural esteem that the passing of the iconic New York Improv into history attracted so little attention. Neither Google nor the Nexis database of newspaper and magazine articles yield any information about why it closed or even exactly when it happened 16 Phil Berger, The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, p. 384. Also see Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America, New York: Bloomsbury, 2008, pp. 195–202 17 To give one specific example of the ‘new rock and roll’ idea: ‘I read in a much-respected music magazine in America that over the next 10 years, comedy will replace rock music as the new form of cult entertainment.’ – Jasper Carrott (Stand-Up America, BBC Two, 7 July 1987)

CHAPTER FOUR

Stand-up UK Music hall Given all the evidence, how could Britain have any claim as the birthplace of stand-up comedy? Well, it’s simply that an embryonic version of stand-up existed in Britain even before it did in America, evolving in parallel with its American counterpart and arguably contributing just as much to the development of the form. The story of British stand-up starts in music hall, a slightly older tradition than vaudeville. The generally recognised date of music hall’s birth is 1852, when Charles Morton opened the Canterbury Hall in London. Music hall grew out of tavern-based entertainment which had become increasingly formalised even before Morton opened his Hall, and the entertainment took the form of a series of acts – mainly singers – performing to male-dominated, largely working-class audiences who drank and ate as they watched. Like vaudeville, music hall became popular very quickly. By 1868, there were 200 halls in London and 300 in the provinces. As new venues were built and old ones adapted and expanded to cope with bigger audiences, the halls began to look less like taverns and more like theatres. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when venues like the Hackney Empire were built, music halls were pretty much

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indistinguishable in shape from the theatres in which straight drama was presented. Meanwhile, significant changes were taking place in the entertainment which took place in them. A classic music hall show lasted three or four hours, and customers would often come and go, not necessarily staying for the whole show. There would be a huge number of acts on the bill. A programme from the Canterbury Hall in 1887 shows 53 items on the bill, including Little Tich, Raffin’s Pigs and Monkeys and the Sisters du Cane. This is outdone by a bill from the London Pavilion for 29 May 1899, which shows an extraordinary 85 acts including Florrie Forde, Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd. By the first decade of the twentieth century, this format was being abandoned in favour of a shorter show, presented twice nightly. A bill from the Holborn Empire for the week commencing 3 March 1913, for example, shows just 13 acts in a show which started at 6.20 p.m. and 9.10 p.m.1 The actual acts themselves had also begun to change. The classic music hall style of solo performers singing comic or serious songs in character was gradually replaced by a more varied set of acts. For example, if you were at the Leeds Empire in the week commencing 28 February 1938, you could see seven individual acts making up the following bill 1 Overture [a musical introduction played by the theatre 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

orchestra] Toko & Barry, Unique Dancers Russ Carr with Olive Grey and the Boy Friend [a ventriloquist] Charly Wood, Juggler on the Uni-Cycle Norman Carroll, Comedian The Two Brasellos, Thrills on the Wire Intermission [including more tunes from the orchestra] Toko & Barry, Will Entertain Again [the opening dance act doing another number]



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9 Harry Jerome, Comedy Magician 10 Harry Roy and his Band, Conductor – Harry Roy2

To reflect the change in the organisation and nature of entertainment, people began to refer to it as ‘variety’ instead of ‘music hall’.

Why is music hall like stand-up comedy? The roots of stand-up comedy are unmistakable in the classic music hall style. Although a music hall act was largely made up of songs, these were often comic and were sung directly to the audience. Through time, they became more like stand-up, as a patter section was introduced, with the orchestra stopping and the comedian telling a series of gags, before the music struck up again for the final chorus. Gradually, the patter became more important, and the song which bracketed it became more like an afterthought. Dan Leno, probably the most popular British comedian of the late nineteenth century, was acknowledged as the performer who ‘shifted the centre of gravity from song to “patter”’.3 It seems likely that music hall comedians related to the audience exactly like modern stand-ups do. It’s difficult to prove this, because while there are many studio recordings of acts like Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd and Little Tich, they were never recorded live. However, some acts did survive long enough to perform in an era when live theatre recordings had become possible. Veterans of the music hall era toured around the variety theatres in shows like Don Ross’s Thanks for the Memory, which featured Randolph Sutton, Nellie Wallace, Ella Shields, Talbot O’Farrell, Gertie Gitana, Billy Danvers and G. H. Elliott. This was recorded for radio in around 1948, and Nellie Wallace’s act is particularly interesting.

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Wallace had made her music hall debut in Birmingham in 1888 whilst in her teens, and was in her late 70s by the time of this recording. She performs just one song, ‘Mother’s Pie Crust’, but manages to spin it out for over seven minutes. The act starts with the musical introduction, and she proceeds to sing the song, getting regular laughs. It finishes, and the audience applaud. Then she launches into a spoken routine, which sounds exactly like what we would recognise as stand-up comedy: Oh dear, dear! My poor, dear father! I can see ‘im now! I can see ‘im so plainly! Just before ‘e died, he called me to his bedside! He said, “Are you there – my pretty one?” [laughter] He was unconscious! [laughter] Ahh. Ahh, poor darling, how he suffered, how he suffered! And in silence! The doctors wanted us to take ‘im – to the seaside. But – we couldn’t afford it! We hadn’t the money! So what do you think I did? His noble daughter. I sat by ‘is bedside, and fanned him with a kipper! [laughter]4 The delivery is more stylised than that of most modern comedians – her voice high-pitched, melodramatic and wobbling with age and emotion. She emphasises certain words or phrases by eeeelongaaaating the syllables, and adopting a singsong tone. But in spite of this, the energy and rhythm of her speech are distinctly like stand-up. She is as successful as a modern comedian in getting laughs, and building them. The laugh she gets with the third joke lasts for ten seconds, about twice as long as for the first joke. The ‘oh dear, dear’ which begins the routine is actually a kind of catchphrase, appearing in a number of her patter routines. As in stand-up, much of the humour comes from putting a personality on display in front of an audience. The audience laugh when she recalls her father calling her ‘my pretty one’, because they are familiar with her stage persona: a clownishly unglamorous ageing spinster with delusions of attractiveness. She wore outlandish costumes, with funny



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hats and flea-bitten furs, her face made comically gawky with exaggerated make-up, and sometimes thick, round-framed glasses. The gag about fanning her father with a kipper fits in perfectly with her grotesque image. Then there is the directness of communication. She acknowledges the audience’s presence, talks directly to them. She goes on to ask them to join in with the song’s chorus (which closes the act), getting another laugh by telling them, ‘And when we come to that part, “The deep blue sea!” don’t mess about with it!’ Although she is not heckled in this recording, she would certainly have known how to deal with hostile audiences. T. S. Eliot remembered seeing her being jeered and heckled: ‘I have seen her, hardly pausing in her act, make some quick retort that silenced her tormentors for the rest of the evening.’5 The intense rapport between Wallace and her audience was essential to her act, and this makes her much more similar to a stand-up than to revue comedians like Joyce Grenfell. Wallace and Grenfell once appeared on the same bill in a wartime concert in a small country cinema. The difference in their approach becomes clear in Grenfell’s recollection of the incident, which manages to be affectionate whilst also portraying Wallace as a rather bad-tempered eccentric. Grenfell’s approach to the audience was the opposite of Wallace’s: ‘I felt secure only if I was safely behind the footlights and couldn’t see the audience.’ Wallace talked to the people who had come to see her, but Grenfell had others to converse with: ‘I’m pretending there is someone else on stage with me and I talk to him. If I pretend clearly enough I should be able to make you, the audience, accept the invisible character I’m imagining.’ Wallace found the idea of a solo comedian ignoring the audience bizarre, to the extent that she stood backstage making loud comments about it even while Grenfell was doing her act: ‘[A]ll was going fairly well when suddenly I heard Nellie Wallace say in a desperate sort of way, and clearly: “What does she think she’s doing out there on her own talking to herself?” Somehow I knew she didn’t want an answer!’6

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Music hall turns into stand-up It was a short evolutionary leap from the classic music hall which Nellie Wallace performed to stand-up comedy, and some performers straddled the two styles. Will Fyffe, for example, was born in Dundee in 1885, and started as a classic music hall comedian, singing character songs which played on his Scottish ethnicity. His trademark song was ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, sung in the character of a drunken Glaswegian. It uses the standard format of the late music hall. Halfway through, the music cuts out, and he goes into a patter routine, complaining about rich ‘cap-u-tilists’ in slurred tones, before slipping back into the final chorus.7 Later, he did routines which weren’t bracketed within songs, like this radio recording in which he talks about being chatted up by a widow: But I knew she wanted me, sailors have that instinct. I knew it because one night, we were sitting on the die-van together – [quiet laughter] all right, the sofae. [laughter] This widow and I, we were sittin’ on the sofae. And all of a sudden, she looked right up into my dial. [laughter] In the way that widows can. Any o’ you lads ever had a widow looking at ye? [laughter] Eh? Y’ever noticed that sly, sleekit look, you know? You’ve, you’ve seen a ferret looking at a rabbit? [laughter]8 This is distinctly recognisable as stand-up. It’s a conversation with the audience, with the joke-laugh rhythm that’s distinctive to the form. His connection with his punters is made more direct by the fact that he asks the ‘lads’ if they’ve had the same experience of widows as he has. In the variety era, the song-and-patter format of the music hall disappeared, except in the acts of veterans like Nellie Wallace. Instead, comedians like Max Miller, Tommy Trinder, Ted Ray, Billy Russell, Suzette Tarri, Beryl Reid and Frankie



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Howerd performed something which was stand-up comedy in all but name. These performers were known as ‘front cloth comics’. The name derives from the staging of British variety theatre, in which acts using the full stage were alternated with ones which could be performed in front of a painted backdrop at the front of the stage. This allowed the show to run smoothly, with no breaks – while one act performed in front cloth, the stage behind the curtains was set for the following one. Front cloth comedy existed at least as early as the 1920s – a 1926 review describes Max Miller as ‘a comedian of the new school’, presumably referring to this emerging style.9

Variety outlives vaudeville Front cloth comics had longer to evolve and develop than their US equivalents, the monologists, because British variety survived decades longer than American vaudeville. This was due to a quirk of fate. Whereas control of most vaudeville theatres had fallen into the hands of somebody who had no interest in live theatre, variety theatres came under the control of two people who were passionately committed to keeping the form alive: George Black and Val Parnell. In the 1920s, variety was in decline, and many performers were convinced that it was doomed. As in America, there was a trend for shows in which variety acts performed alongside films, and when Walter Gibbons took control of the London Palladium – the pinnacle of the variety circuit – he experimented with putting on cine-variety there. It was so unsuccessful that ownership of the venue changed hands. It now belonged to Gaumont-British, which also took possession of the associated GTC circuit of cinemas and theatres. The company put Black and Parnell in charge of them. The two men were determined to make the Palladium work as a world-class variety theatre, and although Gaumont-British was a film company, unlike RKO

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in America it was happy to keep running theatres as well as cinemas. Black realised that in order to make the Palladium work, he would have to revive the national variety circuit, so that it could keep him supplied with experienced acts. With this in mind, he and Parnell made efforts to improve the quality of entertainment in the theatres they controlled. The Palladium was reopened as a pure variety theatre in September 1928, with a bill which included comedians Dick Henderson, Gracie Fields and Billy Bennett. The posters for the relaunch bore the slogan: ‘Variety is coming back … to the Palladium.’10 Later, in 1932, the larger and more prestigious Moss chain of theatres was rumoured to be about to switch from variety to cinema, but instead it was sold to Gaumont-British. They decided to keep the venues as variety theatres so as to avoid competition with their established cinemas. This meant that more than 30 more theatres fell into Black’s hands, to add to the 12 GTC halls he already controlled, and the future of British variety was secure.11 By July 1938, the entertainment trade paper The Era was topping its front page with the headline, ‘Biggest Variety Boom for Years’. It reported that many more cinemas were booking variety acts, some were converting back into variety theatres, and there were even fears that bookers would not be able to find enough ‘star-material’ to put on their bills.12

When Batley ruled British showbusiness Variety continued to more or less thrive through World War II and even into the 1950s, but by the beginning of the following decade it was giving out its last gasps, killed by the competition of television. Whereas American stand-up found a post-vaudeville home in the Borscht Belt and the Chitlin



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Circuit, its British equivalent survived in the working men’s clubs, which had existed since the mid-nineteenth century. When variety died, entertainment in working men’s clubs boomed, leading entrepreneurs to set up bigger, privatelyowned clubs built around the same model but with the budget to put on really spectacular shows. The Batley Variety Club, for example, was opened by James Corrigan in the small Yorkshire town in 1967. Corrigan had worked out that there were about two million people living within a 20-mile radius of Batley, who would be happy to travel to be entertained. He raised £65,000 from Newcastle and Scottish Breweries, and built a club that could hold 2,000 people. This allowed a small Yorkshire town to play host to the kind of glamorous, big name acts that you would never expect to find there, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, Engelbert Humperdinck, Lulu, Matt Monro, the Beverley Sisters, Roy Orbison, Louis Armstrong, Shirley Bassey and Jayne Mansfield.13 Big clubs like Batley put on established comedians like Tommy Cooper and Dave Allen, but the stand-ups who actually started their careers on the club circuit had a distinctive style. In 1971, a group of them including Bernard Manning, Frank Carson, Ken Goodwin and Charlie Williams appeared in Granada Television’s The Comedians. Whereas the front cloth comics in the variety theatres had used catchphrases, costumes and comic personas, their acts fleshed out with songs and even dances, club comics had a more minimal approach – unoriginal, self-contained gags, told one after another, with little else going on. Meanwhile, there were more interesting stand-ups emerging from Britain’s folk music clubs. Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott and Mike Harding started as folksingers, but gradually, the comic introductions to their songs grew and became the most important part of their acts, just as stand-up comedy had originally grown out of the patter section on music hall song. In folk clubs, stand-up became more conversational, and comics like Connolly and Carrott built a very personal

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relationship with their audience, putting personal anecdotes into their acts alongside observational routines. Victoria Wood was another singer who turned into a stand-up, although she started her career singing cabaret songs rather than folk. After an appearance on the TV talent show New Faces in 1974, she struggled to find suitable audiences. She appeared in revue and wrote successful plays, and by the early 1980s, her act had evolved into stand-up. Successful television shows like Victoria Wood – As Seen on TV helped build her audience to the point where she had become one of the most successful stars of British stand-up, having twice sold out a 15-night run in the 5,000-capacity Royal Albert Hall. Wood was not Britain’s first female stand-up, but – like Phyllis Diller in America – was the first to become a really big star.

Alternative comedy and beyond America reinvented stand-up in the 1950s with the rise of the sick comedians, and it started to spawn comedy clubs as early as the 1960s. In this respect, Britain seriously lagged behind. The Comedy Store, the UK’s first dedicated stand-up club, didn’t open until May 1979, 17 years after Pips had made its first customers laugh. The Store was directly inspired by the American model. An insurance salesman called Peter Rosengard had visited the LA Comedy Store in the summer of 1978 and had been extremely impressed. He copied the idea and the name, setting up his own version in a room above a strip club at 69 Dean Street, Soho. Acts who found a platform there included Alexei Sayle, Tony Allen, Rik Mayall and French & Saunders. They were the first British comedians to seriously rival the likes of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, because they directly challenged the crusty conventions of traditional stand-up and expanded the possibilities of the form. Despite the argument that British comedians are ‘way off the pace’ set by the Americans, the



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first alternative comedians were genuinely groundbreaking. In a 1987 interview, Mark Breslin, who founded the Canadian comedy club chain Yuk Yuk’s, said that whereas American comedians like Jay Leno avoided controversial topics like the then-recent Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the same could not be said of ‘that guy out of England’, Alexei Sayle, who would ‘do a Chernobyl joke and have no problem with it.’14 As in America, once the idea of comedy clubs was established, there was a boom. Initially, alternative comedy was a semi-amateur affair – when the Comedy Store first opened, the only act to actually get paid was the compère. A group called Alternative Cabaret (founded by Tony Allen) toured around pubs, arts centres, students unions and other small venues, thus sowing the seeds for the pub-based comedy clubs that began to flourish initially in London, and then in most large provincial towns and cities. This is where my own tiny part of the story comes in. From the late 1980s, I worked in small clubs in London and the provinces, and in 1992 I helped to set up Sheffield’s longest-running comedy club, the Last Laugh, in the Lescar pub, Hunters Bar. I co-managed and compèred it until 1997 when I had to give it up to start my first university job, but it still thrives today in the hands of Toby Foster, who played the drummer in Phoenix Nights.15 By the end of the twentieth century, the stand-up scene was big business. In 1999, the Comedy Store (now run by Don Ward, who had been part of it from the beginning) had an annual turnover of about £2.5 million in a purpose-built, 400-seat venue in Oxendon Street. In 2000, the Jongleurs chain of venues was sold to Regent Inns in a deal reported to be worth as much as £8.5 million. In 2001, the turnover of the Avalon agency had grown from £250,000 in 1988 to £30 million. As the new comedy scene thrived, it became absolutely central to British stand-up. Just about every major British stand-up comedian in the last 25 years has started his or her career in what would once have been called alternative comedy

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clubs, including Ben Elton, Jo Brand, Jack Dee, Lee Evans, Eddie Izzard, Harry Hill, Peter Kay, Ross Noble, Jimmy Carr, Sarah Millican, John Bishop and Michael McIntyre. Then there were the offshoots, like the black comedy scene, which started with a series of shows in Ladbroke Grove, Deptford and Brixton; and the opening of the 291 Club in the Hackney Empire, which took its inspiration from the Live at the Apollo shows at Harlem’s famous theatre. These roots grew into a healthy circuit. One of its most important promoters, John Simmit, ran shows all over the UK under the banner Upfront Comedy, as well as playing Dipsy in the cult children’s TV show Teletubbies. There’s also the Irish comedy scene, which got going when the Comedy Cellar in Dublin’s International Bar opened in 1988. A core of performers played there regularly, learning their trade, and constantly trying new material. Some, like Ardal O’Hanlon and Dylan Moran, moved to the UK and quickly became very successful. Comparing the history of stand-up in Britain and America, it becomes obvious that rather than British comedians adopting and adapting an American invention, the form has actually undergone a parallel evolution on either side of the Atlantic. What’s striking is how similarly this played out in the two countries. In both cases, it started in theatres which presented a variety of acts, continued in other types of venues when the theatres shut down, underwent a major reinvention, and finally found its home in dedicated comedy clubs. While America may have been significantly ahead at certain points, there’s no evidence that stand-up actually sprang to life there. In fact, if you accept music hall as a form of embryonic stand-up, then Britain was probably the first to come up with it. To throw the question even further up into the air, there may be other countries which could claim to have originated the form. Australia, for example, had its own music hall tradition dating back to the nineteenth Century, and an alternative comedy scene which started in the early 1980s.



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Ultimately it’s probably impossible to say with absolute certainty exactly where stand-up came from, but whatever the case, its success as a performance genre is undeniable. It has become an international phenomenon, spreading its tentacles across Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and further afield into countries all over the world, from Scandinavia to the Middle East, from India to Indonesia. Although it is still primarily an Anglophone form, the extent to which is has thrived in other languages is demonstrated by the fact that the largest ever stand-up comedy show was performed not in English but in German. This took place on 12 July 2008, at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, where Mario Barth played to an implausibly massive audience made up of 67,733 individual comedy fans.16

Notes 1

This bill is reproduced in Roger Wilmut, Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety, 1919–1960, London: Methuen, 1985, p. 12

2

This bill is reproduced from a theatre programme in my own collection of variety materials

3

Max Beerbohm, The Bodley Head Max Beerbohm (ed. David Cecil), London, Sydney and Toronto: The Bodley Head, 1970, p. 375

4

Various artists, Music Hall Alive: Edwardian Stars Recorded on Stage 1938 & 1948, Music Hall Masters, 2003, MHM022/3

5

T. S. Eliot, ‘Marie Lloyd’, in John Gross (ed.), The Oxford Book of Essays, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 428

6

See Joyce Grenfell, Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure, London: Macmillan, 1976, pp. 262, 247

7

Various artists, The Golden Years of the Music Hall, Saydisc, 1990, CSDL380

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8

Various artists, Fifty Years of Radio Comedy, BBC Records, 1972, REC 138M

9

See Valantyne Napier, Glossary of Terms Used in Variety, Vaudeville, Revue & Pantomime, Westbury, Wiltshire: Badger Press, 1996, pp. 7, 27; and John M. East, Max Miller: The Cheeky Chappie, London: Robson Books, 1993, p. 66

10 Ian Bevan, Top of the Bill: The Story of the London Palladium, London: Frederick Muller, 1952, p. 74 11 There’s a more detailed account of Black’s and Parnell’s contribution to the history of variety in my book Britain Had Talent: A History of Variety Theatre, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 (esp. see chapter 4, ‘The Golden Age of Variety, 1928–52’, pp. 51–68) 12 ‘Biggest Variety Boom for Years’, The Era, vol. 101 no. 5207, 21 July 1938, p. 1 13 See Barry Salmon, ‘Building the Dream’, The Dewsbury Reporter, 16 October 1998, p. 8; and Barry Salmon, ‘Amazing First Week Silenced the Doubters’, The Dewsbury Reporter, 2 October 1998, pp. 10–11 14 Eve Drobot, ‘No Laughing Matter, Yuk Yuk’s Mark Breslin: Better a Microphone than a Gun’, Descant, vol. 18, SpringSummer 1987, pp. 162–3 15 The Last Laugh at the Lescar has now become the Little Last Laugh, to distinguish it from bigger shows under the Last Laugh banner staged at the Sheffield City Memorial Hall. Toby also runs a chain of other gigs in the South Yorkshire area. See http://www.lastlaughcomedy.com/ for more details 16 And yet still the xenophobic clichés about Germans lacking a sense of humour persist

CHAPTER FIVE

What’s new in stand-up? Stand-up online I finished the first edition of Getting the Joke in 2005, having done most of the work the previous year. That’s comparatively recent. Given that stand-up comedy has been around for at least a hundred years, it would be easy to imagine that not much could have happened to significantly advance the form in the last seven. In fact, there have been some pretty significant changes. First, there’s the increasing importance of the internet. Comedy already had an online presence, with websites like Chortle tirelessly documenting the British stand-up scene with news, reviews and listings; and the American-based Laugh.com selling a wallet-draining range of comedy CDs and DVDs, including vintage albums reissued on their own label. What’s changed is the rise of social media sites and usergenerated content. YouTube, for example – officially launched in November 2005 – has made recordings of stand-up comedy infinitely more accessible. Where I once had to scour the TV and radio listings, or search the racks of record shops for vinyl, cassettes, VHS tapes, CDs or DVDs, I can now go to YouTube and access uncountable hours of stand-up material with little more than a few keystrokes. Some of this may be official content, but much more of it will pay scant regard to

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copyright – segments ripped from TV shows or DVDs, fans’ bootlegs of live shows filmed on mobile phones, even stuff from comedians’ own recordings. Because anyone can post content on YouTube, even the lowliest open spot can try to kick start their career by posting a film of their latest gig. Then there is Twitter, the site which allows people to document their every thought as long as they can squeeze it into 140 characters. Twitter has been hailed by many comedians and comedy writers as a fantastic medium in which to hone joke-writing skills. As Tiernan Douieb puts it, ‘I’ve found if you can put a joke into 140 characters … you’ve already edited it to its most edited point …’1 Similarly, Sarah Millican uses the responses she’s had to tweets when looking for material for her stage act: Sometimes I go through my Twitter account, I go through and see, ‘Have I posted up anything funny …?’ Also there’s a website called Favstar where you can actually look at how many retweets you got on Twitter. So if I’ve put something up that I think is quite funny and it gets retweeted over a hundred times I think, ‘Maybe there’ll be material in that …’2 Matthew Crosby – a solo comic who also comprises a third of the sketch team Pappy’s – has a different view of Twitter’s usefulness as a source of material, admitting that ‘some of the worst moments of doing stand-up have been when I’ve tried to put Twitter jokes onstage. You realise they pretty much only work written down.’ However, he still finds it useful as ‘a way of generating … a feeling of communion with the people who come and see you live …’: [O]n the way to a gig we can be tweeting the funny things that are happening along the way to the gig … so people can be looking forward to you coming and you can have an interaction with your audience before and after a gig in a way that you never used to … Normally … when you leave



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a gig, that’s pretty much the end of your relationship with that audience, but with Tweeting, it’s almost like they can text you afterwards. Pappy’s have also used their Flatshare Slamdown and Bangers & Mash podcasts to build the audience for their live shows: ‘We didn’t do Edinburgh last year for the first time in five years … but we ended up … somewhere in the region of … 30,000 downloads for the podcast. Whereas we would’ve played to [about] 7,000 people if we’d gone up to Edinburgh.’3 The American stand-up Dane Cook has taken this kind of online audience cultivation to its logical extreme. In 2003, he started to build his following on the newly-launched social media site MySpace, accepting every friend request until he had enough virtual followers to populate a decent-sized city. By November 2007, he had gone from being what Newsweek described as a ‘fairly obscure comic’, to the kind of act that could fill Madison Square Garden twice in the same night.4 He is one of a small number of American stand-ups big enough to tour arenas, has released a series of bestselling comedy albums, and as of 11 October 2012 he currently boasts 2,685,184 MySpace friends and 4.2 million subscribers on Facebook.

The British stand-up explosion Meanwhile, Britain has seen an unprecedented explosion in the popularity of stand-up comedy, precipitated not by the newfangled internet, but by an older and cosier technology – television. It used to be received wisdom among both comedians and TV executives that stand-up doesn’t really work on television, and there hadn’t been much of it on the airwaves since the late 1990s with programmes like BBC One’s The Stand Up Show and the numerous cheaply-produced stand-up showcases that peppered the early schedules of Channel 5.

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Whilst researching the first edition of Getting the Joke, I became aware of a new show that was about to launch on BBC One, called Jack Dee Live at the Apollo. I saw Dee and Jo Brand doing warm-up gigs, sharpening up to prepare for filming, and I interviewed Ross Noble around the time he did his act for the cameras. He was enthusiastic about the format, which involved Dee introducing exciting stand-ups who were used to playing big venues, and crucially being given enough screen time to properly give a flavour of what they did live. His words were surprisingly prescient: I think we’re entering sort of a new era of TV stand-up … it’s done at the Hammersmith Apollo … you know, it’s a 3,000 seat rock venue which is brilliant for comedy … it’s basically like a stand-up show … and it’s done on a big scale and they’ve spent the money and it’s not some dingy little club … I think that’s the way that stand-up on TV’s going to have to go.5 After two series, the show began to use different comedians to compère the acts and became simply Live at the Apollo. Already successful, its popularity was boosted when it was brought in as a hasty substitute for Jonathan Ross’s chat show in 2009, when Ross was suspended by the BBC for making prank calls to the actor Andrew Sachs on Russell Brand’s radio show. This meant a shift to a peak time Friday night slot, where it attracted almost as big an audience as Ross had been getting.6 The basic format of Live at the Apollo – pure stand-up, no bands or other acts, filmed in a big venue, smattering of minor celebrities on the front rows – has provided the blueprint for a number of other shows, like Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow (BBC One, prime Saturday night slots) and Dave’s One Night Stand (on the comparatively humble Dave channel). This approach to filming stand-up seems to have become fairly orthodox on British television. Even ITV’s Comedy Rocks with Jason Manford varied the format only slightly, by filming



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in a studio rather than a theatre, and throwing a band into the mix. All of these shows give stand-up acts enough space to breathe, and use a large live audience to create a rather frenetic enthusiasm, their gales of laughter clearly signalling to the viewer at home that they should be finding this funny. Whatever the drawbacks of the formula, their success has finally persuaded TV executives that stand-up can work on television, even in primetime slots. Indeed, in 2011 BBC One aired an episode of Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow at 10.35 p.m. on Christmas Day. Panel shows provided stand-ups with another way on to TV, with Mock the Week (first aired in 2005) enjoying particularly conspicuous success. The quiz element – with host Dara Ó Briain asking questions and awarding points – is actually just a platform for comedians to deliver topical gags loosely inspired by the week’s news stories. It’s a competitive environment. Deadpan surrealist Milton Jones – who has made frequent appearances in recent series – likens it to ‘filming dogs fighting’, and describes why it’s a difficult show to do: The hardest thing about Mock the Week … is, in the general banter, getting a word in. Because the whole thing is set up as seven people trying to get through a door for two. And inevitably five won’t make it on every single thing, and so many good things I’ve had either I didn’t get a chance to say or someone else has said it roughly already.7 However difficult they may be, the value of appearing on these shows is that they can hugely increase the profile of an act. Frankie Boyle was a permanent fixture in the early series of Mock the Week, and became infamous for his willingness to comically stamp around on sensitive issues. The introduction to his first live DVD includes vox pop interviews with his fans going into the Hackney Empire, and for many of them it was his TV appearances that drew them to the theatre:

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Basically, I think he’s the best thing on the BBC at the moment, so I’m really looking forward to seeing him tonight. I love him on Mock the Week, I think he’s brilliant. I thought if he’s good on Mock the Week, he has to be good live.8 Comedians are very aware of how useful these shows are to them. Milton Jones – who has also appeared on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, Live at the Apollo and Dave’s One Night Stand – acknowledges that ‘of course it has benefited me enormously … the last tour I did started off in three- or four hundred seaters … and ended up at the Hammersmith Apollo … We sold out very quickly the first 40-odd dates, and just then trebled the venue size.’9 Sarah Millican – who has been given her own series as well as appearing in the same set of shows as Jones – makes a similar point, seeing television as a means to an end, rather than the other way around: I think it makes people go out, like I’ve had people say I was the first stand-up comedy they saw, and the only reason they came out was because they saw me on telly. I’m not stupid, I know how it works, and it’s a really good way of sort of advancing your profile really quickly … Telly’s great and I love doing the telly, and I know it’s the telly that fills the theatre … but I also know that it’s the theatre that I love, and whether the theatre is the theatre or a comedy club … Stand-up shouldn’t be a way to get on the telly. Stand-up should be the thing that you love more than anything. And sometimes when people say, ‘Oh, you know I just want to be a TV presenter,’ you think, ‘Oh! It’s like you’re punching my child!’10 As Millican suggests, the newfound popularity of stand-up on television has whetted the British public’s appetite for live comedy, and the peak of stand-up success is no longer filling



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big theatres, but the ability to stalk the immense stages of arenas and stadiums. As we have seen, Steve Martin pioneered this particular manifestation of stand-up in the 1970s, and others have followed in his footsteps either side of the Atlantic. In 1998, for example, four comedians from the black comedy TV showcase Def Comedy Jam toured the US as The Original Kings of Comedy, playing to a total audience of one million people. In December 1993, Rob Newman and David Baddiel became the first British arena comics, playing to the 11,500-seat Wembley Arena.11 Comics like Lee Evans and Eddie Izzard followed them with occasional forays into arenas, but the recent explosion in British stand-up has meant that this type of gig is no longer an oddity or a symptom of a freakish explosion of a particular comedian’s popularity. The first significant shift was in 2003, when Izzard played a whole tour of arena dates instead of a single engagement. Mick Perrin – who promoted the Sexie tour – has recalled how he had to fight to get these huge venues to take the idea of booking a stand-up comedian seriously: ‘They thought it was ludicrous to expect that Eddie would sell … I had venue managers laughing at me when I rang them up.’12 Another change was in the sheer scale of the venues comics can play. Visiting American comic Chris Rock managed to fill London’s titanic O2 Arena – which has a maximum capacity of 20,000 – for two nights in May 2008, paving the way for British stand-ups like Al Murray, Dylan Moran and Russell Howard to appear there, and stand-up is now an important part of the venue’s programme. The result of all of this is that annual ticket sales for arena stand-up gigs in London increased tenfold between 2004 and 2009, by which point they had risen to over a million. Sales of tickets and DVDs have made the most successful stand-ups extremely wealthy. The Sunday Times published a list of the top earners, naming six comics whose takings from stand-up in 2011 could be counted in the millions. At the top was Peter Kay with an estimated £20.34 million.13

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At the epicentre of the British stand-up explosion is Michael McIntyre, whose rise has been meteoric. Back in February 2004, when I was doing the spadework for the first edition of Getting the Joke, I saw him at the Comedy Store in London, where he had been booked for the Thursday night only rather than the whole weekend.14 He was first on in the second half of the show, and I remember him being an able and engaging performer, well-liked by the audience. In the notes I made on the train on the way back from the show, I wrote that he looked a bit like Bill Hicks, that he was posh but with a less defined persona than Jimmy Carr (who had been on earlier in the show), and that he was good at characterization, one routine contrasting an incongruously posh rugby player with an inarticulate footballer. Nothing suggests that I had any inkling that he was destined for greatness. His autobiography, Life & Laughing, recalls the frustrations of an early career as a jobbing comic, unable to break out of filling the grim opening slot for the Jongleurs chain, despite being nominated for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards in 2003. His fortunes improved when he moved to the powerful Off the Kerb agency in 2005, and appeared in the Royal Variety Performance the following year, then built his reputation with appearances on key TV shows like Mock the Week and Live at the Apollo. After hosting an episode of the latter, he was given his own series, Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, compèring acts that were slightly newer to television. He is now so popular as a live act that in 2012 he embarked on a record-breaking arena tour with dates in Cardiff, Nottingham, Birmingham, Sheffield, Belfast, Manchester, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Newcastle, Dublin, Liverpool and at two different London venues.15 He played each of these gargantuan venues for several nights, including a 10-night stint at London’s O2 Arena. One newspaper estimated that the tour would earn around £40 million.16



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DIY comedy and American alternative comedy Inevitably, not every stand-up working aspires to the kind of career trajectory that will see them reach such dizzying heights of commercial success. Mick Perrin has likened the current popularity to 1970s glam rock and predicted ‘there’s a punk revolution brewing.’17 Similarly, Stewart Lee has argued that the ‘ubiquity’ of comics like McIntyre ‘means “alternative” comics do, for the first time since the 1970s, have a clearly visible mainstream to define themselves in opposition to’.18 This new breed of alternative comedy is already firmly established, having been identified by an article in The Guardian as long ago as 2007. It names acts like Robin Ince, Terry Saunders and Pappy’s Fun Club as part of what it dubs ‘the DIY comedy scene’, and picks out Josie Long as the ‘leader’ of the movement.19 In February 2012, Long explained to me what marks out this new comedy: What I think’s been a really big change has been like me and Robin and people like that keeping doing tours around certain venues, and building up more of a touring circuit …. so for me there’s like a real shift between the circuit, the big clubs, the weekend clubs and the clubs that I do and my friends do and the gigs that I get to do … It’s really trying to like grow your own audience. I suppose in that way it is smaller and it is more real … It’s not just about playing different venues, though. It’s also a different kind of approach: ‘I suppose like temperamentally if you’re slightly like awkward or something, it means that it’s harder for you to become like a mainstream-propelled success person.’20 She wears this slight ‘awkwardness’ on her sleeve, bringing it right into her stage act: ‘Like I’ve never been the sort of comedian that comes out and goes, “I’m gonna entertain the shit out of you, you’re a dick, bang, jokes!” No.

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[laughter] Like, if anything, I think I am: unreliable at best. [laughter]’21 She has also been known to tell audiences that she definitely is a comedian because it says so on her passport – then produce a homemade passport on which she’s crayoned the word ‘comedian’.22 The DIY comedians have taken a conscious influence from an older generation of comedians like Demetri Martin, Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee, but interestingly, Lee has also written about how the DIY scene influenced him. Having started on what was still the ‘alternative comedy’ circuit in the late 1980s, he had been a successful comedian and starred in various radio and TV shows, before drifting away from stand-up to concentrate on other projects, notably the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera. In 2004, he started moving back into stand-up, and in his book How I Escaped My Certain Fate, he writes about the split in the circuit he was returning to, between the big clubs like the Comedy Store and Jongleurs, and a ‘new underground scene’: ‘[Y]ou could almost say we were witnessing the birth of a new Alternative Comedy, in opposition to the crowd-pleasing composite that the Alternative Comedy of old had become.’23 Lee was drawn towards this new model of stand-up, and started to tour around smaller venues, choosing Josie Long as the support act for his 2005 tour. If the original wave of British alternative comedy was one influence on the DIY scene, another was the American alternative comedy scene from which Demetri Martin had emerged. This started in the 1990s with the arrival of comedians like David Cross, Marc Maron, Margaret Cho and Janeane Garofalo (who, according to Cho, was ‘really the founder of it’).24 Comedy venues like the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York (and later LA) also played an important role.25 Like DIY comedy, American altcom is partly about performing outside of established comedy clubs and taking stand-up into new venues. One of the key figures is Patton Oswalt, who set up the Comedians of Comedy tour, in which he performed alongside fellow comics Brian Posehn,



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Maria Bamford and Zach Galifianakis.26 As Oswalt has explained, the tour was consciously set up to try and connect with a younger, hipper audience: [A] lot of younger people, 18 to 24, they can’t afford to go to a comedy club. There’s a two-drink minimum, there’s parking, there’s an admission fee. These are the kind of people that will support indie rock bands for 20 years, they’ll follow a band … I hope that they will start doing that the way that comedy is, because very few people follow comedians and how they develop … I thought there’s got to be a way to book smaller rock clubs that don’t cost a lot of money to rent, and that way you can lower the prices.27 Stylistically, American alternative comedy is, as one journalist wrote, ‘hard to define and frequently in flux’,28 but like its UK equivalent, it tends to be loose, quirky, folksy, homemade, autobiographical, politically liberal and full of geeky pop culture references, with gags about comic books or cultish punk bands. As W. Kamau Bell puts it, ‘If you think of comedy as a high school, Dane Cook would be one of the jocks and cool kids, and alt comedians would be the geeks.’29 It would be tempting to argue that on both sides of the Atlantic there has been a simple bifurcation in stand-up comedy – on one side of the divide the Dane Cooks and Michael McIntyres reaping incredible financial rewards by touring the enormodomes, on the other the plucky indie kids of comedy touring their Edinburgh shows or taking stand-up to rock and roll clubs. In fact, the truth is more complex. In the UK, some see a different kind of division in comedy. Milton Jones, for example, points out ‘a gulf opening up between those who’ve done telly and those who haven’t’, with comedy clubs struggling to gain an audience ‘if they haven’t got anyone who’s on telly’, and a split between the club circuit and the touring circuit for comics who have enough recognition from TV to tour under their own name.30 There’s also the fact that the neat, journalist tag of ‘DIY comedy’ describes

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something much looser than the homogenous scene that such a label implies. Wil Hodgson, for example – one of the acts named in the Guardian article – points out: I don’t fit in with the mainstream faction, but I’ve never been particularly comfortable with this DIY-LoFi thing, even though I like a lot of the comedians that are involved in it. The initial article that coined that phrase DIY revolution for some reason seemed to think I was something to do with it, which I never was.31 What has happened since the first edition of Getting the Joke is that stand-up comedy has continued to evolve, splinter and diversify, thus furthering the possibilities of the form. As a result, the experience of going to watch stand-up can differ enormously, depending on the type of venue hosting it, and the particular flavour of comedian standing on its stage.

Notes 1

Interview with Tiernan Douieb, Gulbenkian Café, Canterbury, 17 March 2012

2

Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012

3

Interview with Pappy’s, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 29 February 2012

4

See Steven Levy and Brad Stone, ‘The New Wisdom of the Web; Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it’s all about … you’, Newsweek, 3 April 2006, p. 47; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dane_Cook [accessed 11 October 2012]

5

Interview with Ross Noble, 24 June 2004, Orchard Theatre, Dartford

6

3.5 million as opposed to 3.7 million, according to the



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Independent (Gerard Gilbert, ‘So, did anyone miss him?; Three months after “Sachsgate”, Jonathan Ross makes his comeback next week – and already he’s receiving a frosty welcome. Gerard Gilbert on why he’s got his work cut out’, Independent Extra, 14 January 2009, p. 6) 7

Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 August 2012

8

Frankie Boyle, Live, 4DVD, 2008, C4DVD10161

9

Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 August 2012

10 Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012 11 The show was filmed and issued as a video: Newman and Baddiel, Live and in Pieces, VVL, 1993, 088 4763 12 Quoted in Brian Logan, ‘Boom, boom: They’ve taken over TV, they top the book charts, they appear on Question Time – and now they’re filling entire arenas night after night. Brian Logan on the standup comedy explosion’, the Guardian, 11 November 2010, p. 19 13 The others were Lee Evans – £12.9 million; Alan Carr – £5.99 million; John Bishop – £4.98 million; Russell Howard – £3.26 million; and Sarah Millican – £1.46 million (Nicholas Hellen and Cal Flyn, ‘Rock on – comics rake in millions; Peter Kay Heads A New Breed Of Comedian With Tour Earnings That Match The Giants Of Pop’, Sunday Times, 12 February 2012, p. 3) 14 The show took place on 26 February 2004. Interestingly, this doesn’t chime with the official version of McIntyre’s career, as documented in his autobiography. According to McIntyre’s own account, he didn’t play the Comedy Store until 2005. He’s slightly vague about the dates, but he says he played an early open spot there, and messed up a subsequent 10-minute spot, then didn’t appear there again for another six years. He claims he didn’t get another booking there until he had been signed by the Off the Kerb agency, which happened shortly after the birth of his first child, Lucas, on 29 June 2005. (See Michael McIntyre, Life & Laughing, London: Penguin, 2010, pp. 259–60, 264, 334, 342) 15 To be specific, the tour saw McIntyre playing: Motorpoint

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GETTING THE JOKE Arena, Cardiff (9 nights); Capital FM Arena, Nottingham (6 nights); NIA, Birmingham (8 nights); O2 Arena, London (10 nights); Motorpoint Arena, Sheffield (4 nights); Odyssey Arena, Belfast (4 nights); Manchester Arena (6 nights); EEC, Aberdeen (2 nights); Metro Radio Arena, Newcastle (4 nights); O2 Arena, Dublin (4 nights); Echo Arena, Liverpool (3 nights); and the Wembley Arena, London (6 nights)

16 Stephen Armstrong, ‘Can You Hear Me At The Back? The main players in comedy now perform to huge crowds of all ages. What if your material doesn’t travel to these vast arenas? Stephen Armstrong talks to the next wave of comics aiming for the big time’, Sunday Times (Culture section), 19 February 2012, pp. 12–13 17 Quoted in Brian Logan, ‘Boom, boom: They’ve taken over TV, they top the book charts, they appear on Question Time – and now they’re filling entire arenas night after night. Brian Logan on the standup comedy explosion’, the Guardian, 11 November 2010, p. 19 18 Stewart Lee, ‘Stewart Lee: What I really think about McIntyre…and the Daily Mail, too’, Chortle, http://www.chortle.co.uk/features/2011/07/19/13653/ stewart_lee%3A_what_i_really_think_about_michael_ mcintyre [accessed 15 October 2012] 19 Tim Jonze, ‘Laugh? I nearly DIY’d: There’s a new breed of quipsters rescuing the comedy scene from stale one liners. Tom Jonze meets their leader, Josie Long’, the Guardian (The Guide section), 4 August 2007, p. 4. Pappy’s Fun Club was the original name of the sketch group Pappy’s. 20 Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012 21 Josie Long, Trying is Good, Real Talent/PIAS UK, 2008, RTDVD001 22 From Kindness and Exuberance, included as an extra feature on Trying is Good, Real Talent/PIAS UK, 2008, RTDVD001 23 Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 36



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24 Interview with Margaret Cho, Leicester Square Theatre, 29 October 2012 25 Significantly, Josie Long wears a T-shirt with the Upright Citizens Brigade logo in her Trying is Good DVD 26 A lovely bit of trivia – Oswalt provided the voice of Remy, the gastronomic rat, in Disney Pixar’s 2007 movie Ratatouille 27 The Comedians of Comedy, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2005, DV1510 28 Reyhan Harmanci, ‘Funny Places To Laugh’, San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday Datebook section), 21 October 2007, p. N18 29 Quoted in Reyhan Harmanci, ‘Funny Places To Laugh’, San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday Datebook section), 21 October 2007, p. N18 30 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 August 2012 31 Interview with Wil Hodgson, by telephone, 12 September 2012

CHAPTER SIX

Stand-up on stage Where does stand-up happen? Throughout the twists and turns of its history, stand-up comedy has taken place in a whole range of venues, from the tiny to the implausibly large. Today, a typical location would be the comedy club, but even these vary from one to the next. Some are purpose-built, others take place in a bar or a pub function room. Normally, the audience will sit around tables drinking alcohol, but they might be as small as 30 and as big as 400. The stage might be a corner of the room with a mike stand, or it could be a raised platform with a backdrop and theatre lights. The show might start as early as 8pm or as late as midnight. Generally, it will be introduced by a compère, and there will be three or four acts; but sometimes the format varies. Stand-up works well in small, intimate clubs, but it started its life in the big theatres of vaudeville and variety. Here the comic would perform on a large raised stage, framed by a proscenium, projecting the gags over the orchestra pit to an audience in raked seating, arranged into stalls and balconies, the wealthier patrons in boxes either side of the stage. The typical variety theatre accommodated far more punters than a modern comedy club. The Holborn Empire, for example – where Max Miller made his first live theatre recording – could

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seat a grand total of 2,000 people.1 As we have seen, since the 1970s audiences for the biggest stand-up shows have grown to sizes that would dwarf this, in the arena gigs which are becoming increasingly common for the biggest comedians. From the monstrously huge to the ridiculously small, Mark Thomas once did a stand-up show in somebody’s living room. In the last episode of his first TV series, he gambled the entire budget for the show on a horse race, which he had also sponsored, naming it ‘The Mark Thomas Chum Special Handicap’. His horse lost, giving him no money to make the episode, so he filmed a stand-up show in ‘Andy’s living room’. It was lit in green and red, with the show’s logo projected on to the walls, but it was clearly a real living room, with coving, a picture rail, plants on a shelf and slatted cupboard doors. At one point, Thomas pauses mid-routine to draw attention to the sound of a train going past, getting a laugh by commenting, ‘I just want the folks back home to get a bit of social realism.’2 At the fringes, stand-up finds its way into all kinds of quirky venues. In the 1970s, Steve Martin found himself playing to an audience seated in their own cars in a drive-in movie theatre, listening to his gags via speakers hooked up to their windows. In his autobiography, he recalls that, ‘If the drive-in patrons thought a joke was funny, they honked.’3 James Campbell is building a career by performing stand-up to children, and he started doing this in primary schools, doing up to four of them in a day. Milton Jones is a Christian, and he regularly performs to audiences of fellow believers, sometimes even in church. Understandably, it’s not an easy place to do comedy, as he points out: ‘[O]ften, if it’s literally in a church … people aren’t quite sure how to react. Because they have this thing of, “Do we laugh or do we not? Is it appropriate?”’4 Some comics have gone so far as to deliberately seek out unlikely venues within which to put on stand-up gigs. Terry Saunders used to run Laughter in Odd Places – which he described as ‘an attempt to demonstrate that comedy doesn’t have to happen in a pub’ – putting on free Sunday afternoon



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shows in such improbable venues as a record shop, an art gallery, a vegan café, the children’s section of a local library and next to a bandstand on Hampstead Heath.5 Similarly, in 2011 Josie Long mounted the Alternative Reality tour, in which she assembled a bunch of comedians and musicians – including Simon Munnery, Tiernan Douieb, Tom Parry and Grace Petrie – and drove to such unglamorous show business locations as Margate, Sheppey, Milton Keynes, Bedford, Hull and Leicester. Once there, they would stage and promote the kind of homemade impromptu show that epitomises the DIY ethos. Long explains how it worked: I rented a minibus, and I paid for, like, the petrol and the bus and other than that everyone else was, like, really happy to take no money from it because there was no money to be taken, and we would like go to places that people slag off … we just thought we’d find places that we could turn into theatre spaces, and then put up a backdrop with scaffolding, used the lights of the van and just do it, and it was brilliant. Like we’d show up at 3pm, we’d flyer loads of kids, we’d tweet it, we’d set the location up, we’d do it, and then we’d go off and, like, have dinner …6

Standing behind microphones The classic image of stand-up is that it’s a low-tech format. All you need is a microphone, somebody to stand behind it, and perhaps a spotlight. Even more than the bare brick backdrop, the hand mike has become a symbol of stand-up. Go to a show at the London Comedy Store, and one minute before the show starts, red backlights come on, and the microphone is picked out in white, forming a dramatic theatrical image of stand-up with the iconic mike at its centre. This may be the classic image, but it’s not always accurate. For a start, there isn’t always a microphone. The earliest

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stand-ups, in vaudeville and variety, wouldn’t have used them. They weren’t introduced into British theatres until the 1930s, and even then, some of the older performers shunned them, seeing them as the hallmark of an inferior performer. Before the mike, performers would have had to develop powerful vocal projection, something which must have involved great physical effort. Microphones allowed for more subtle performance, but also restricted physical movement, as the technology of the time meant they couldn’t be removed from the stand, so comedians were forced to do their act standing in one particular spot.7 Even today, when hand mikes are standard in most comedy clubs, comedians don’t always use them. In the big theatres, comics often prefer small, wireless clip mikes, attached to their clothes or worn as a headset. Ross Noble, whose act involves a lot of high-energy physical work, wears a headset mike because although it ‘cuts down the amount of sound effects you can do’, it also allows him to ‘be as physical as I possibly can’ and ‘demonstrate things with my hands … right down to [my] fingertips’.8 Al Murray positively dislikes the traditional hand mike, arguing it restricts the creative possibilities of stand-up: I hate the paradigm of the microphone, of the SM58 on a stand … I can’t bear that. And whenever I see a picture of a comic with a microphone I think, ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ You know, because that, for me, falls into the idea that … it’s not a show, that it’s just talking, the idea that there’s no true performance in the whole thing …Which is why I’ve not used a microphone on a cable since ’97. I’ve put it away … I have a mike in a piece of Blu-Tack in my tie, and I’ve done that because you can’t perform if you’re tethered … I often feel that the microphone, as well, is symbolic of sort of a tethering of the imagination of stand-up.9 Then there’s the fact that, paradoxically, stand-ups don’t always stand up. Shelley Berman was probably the first to



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work sitting down, performing his routines perched on a barstool. A little later, Dick Gregory also worked sitting down, because it helped with his relaxed style: ‘The stool was where you sit and you talk and you had a drink.’10 In the 1970s, Irish comedian Dave Allen became famous on British TV for performing in a chair. By 1990, he had abandoned this and reverted to performing standing up, but the chair was still there on stage with him as a reminder of his former trademark style. Daniel Kitson – who won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002 – has been known to have a scruffy armchair on stage during his show, performing some of his act whilst lolling in it, impressively unaffected by the fact that he is onstage being watched by paying punters.

Staging stand-up Increasingly stand-up is moving beyond the simple, low-tech set-up of a bare stage, a spotlight and microphone. In Britain, Eddie Izzard was one of the comics who pioneered a more sophisticated approach to staging. The programme for his Sexie tour, for example, credits 21 people with the running of the show, covering such areas as ‘Scenic & Lighting Design’, ‘Sound Design’, ‘Music’, ‘Personal Trainer’ and ‘Master Carpenter’. The costume alone required the work of three people. In the enormous stadium gigs projection screens are a necessity, compensating for how tiny the performer looks to the people in the back rows. Al Murray – who has played the O2 Arena – points out how performing in arenas affected his performing style in a surprising way: I found there was a counterintuitive difference which is we had a big screen … you’d think, ‘Oh I’m going to have to make this all bigger. I might have to go, like, crazy to make my point and things, and they’re a long way away

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at the back.’ But if they’re watching you on a big screen, and you’re in a medium close-up or closer, they can see what your eyebrows are doing and so it actually, it weirdly flipped it and turned it round into a completely different … performing place.11 Projection screens are also becoming a fixture in shows which tour around theatres, although here their use is less functional and more creative. Instead of simply showing a live feed of the comedian, they are part of the overall visual design of the show. Jimmy Carr projects his tour logo – as seen on publicity materials – and also builds routines around a series of images shown on the screen. In the Monster II tour, Dylan Moran performs in front of a screen on to which his scratchy, Spike Milliganesque cartoons are projected. Every few minutes, the image changes, and sometimes it connects with what he’s talking about. A skull-like picture flashes up during a routine about death, for example. The drawings also crop up in the merchandising. They’re printed in the tour programme, on mugs and T-shirts on sale in the foyer, and on the sleeve of the subsequent audio CD of the show.12 Often the projection is accompanied by other staging elements, providing a physical context which fits the character of the comedian’s act. Al Murray performs as the Pub Landlord, a working class pontificator whose ridiculous patriotism is matched with a hatred of Europe in general and France in particular. In his 2003–4 tour, the backdrop is the character’s coat of arms, and Murray shares the stage with a bar. Occasionally, he takes drinks or packets of crisps out from behind it, and gives them to members of the audience. Ross Noble is enthusiastic about the creative possibilities of staging stand-up: If you’re gonna play big theatres then you might as well do a show that they couldn’t see in a comedy club. Because otherwise, you’re just playing to more people,



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doing something that you could be doing in an intimate room where everyone could be right on top on you.13 The set for his 2012 Mindblender tour is a good example of the approach he prefers. Before the show, the stage is flanked by two inflatable objects – mechanical spheres, one of which is a robotic eyeball – and hung between them is a big, billowing cloth on to which a version of the tour poster is projected. The show starts with a film spoofing the old Green Cross Code road safety campaigns of the 1970s, then the cloth drops down and is quickly whisked off into the wings. It reveals that the spheres are part of a huge set, which fills the entire stage. It’s a kind of steampunk factory, with a pressure gauge, pipework, mechanical body parts and even a fake brick wall backdrop, and the entire thing is inflatable. I’m reminded of the transformation scene in Victorian pantomime, and I almost gasp when it’s revealed.14 Even Jim Davidson – whose working men’s clubs origins might suggest a very basic approach to stand-up – is not averse to sophisticated staging. His 2003 Vote for Jim tour involves the concept of him running for Prime Minister, the show being his attempt to unveil his policies. He performs in front of a projected ‘Vote for Jim’ logo, and rather than his usual casual stage clothes, he wears an expensive pinstripe suit, decorated with a purple rosette. In some cases, the set does more than set the aesthetic tone for the show. In Carpet Remnant World, for example, Stewart Lee performs in front of a row of rolled-up carpets. The show uses the kind of out-of-town discount warehouses that provided its title as a kind of comic metaphor for Lee’s inability to make sense of the alienating consumerism of modern Britain. He has numerous jokes suggesting that, for example, a Carpet Remnant World would be an entire world where everything and all the inhabitants are made of carpet remnants. At a deeper level, the show is also about the middleaged comedian’s failure to comically deal with the world he finds himself in.

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In the first half of the show, he tells us that he can’t write material because his life consists of nothing more than childcare and driving to gigs, where he sees outlets like Carpet Remnant World. He says that he will create the illusion of coherence and depth by using certain structural devices, and one of these will be something at the end of the show that plays on the phrase ‘Carpet Remnant World’. He assures us that we will know it’s significant, because it will be obvious. At the end of the show, he makes good his promise. Tiny rows of lights appear in the rolled-up carpets at the back of the stage, transforming them into carpet remnant skyscrapers from the literal carpet remnant world. Even though he’s already exposed this as a cynical structural device, it’s a lovely moment which is as strangely moving as it is funny.15 Thus the set plays a central role in the show. Given its importance, great care was taken in its design. As Stewart Lee explains, it had to avoid giving away the big reveal at the end, and also help to suggest the idea that he was some kind of comic loser: [T]he designer was given a really clear brief to not give any indication that anything would happen with the carpet. And actually you just think, like … “Is that the best they could do? Just bring some carpets – boring idea.” And I like it that they just look really drab. Also they look inconvenient, like it must be really hard to carry them around the country and you don’t even do anything with them …16

Creating the right expectation The particular circumstances within which stand-up takes place are important, because they can profoundly affect what the audience expects of the comedian. A show in a small comedy club will have a radically different dynamic from one that takes place in an arena. Some of the variables – venue, start time, ticket price, etc. – will probably be pragmatic



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business decisions. On other aspects, the comedian can often make more aesthetic choices. Not just the stage set, but everything that is put into the venue can make an impact on how the show plays out, including the range of products on the merchandise stall and the music playing as the audience walk into the auditorium. Stewart Lee is fully aware of this: Since 2004, I’ve always thought very carefully about pre-show music. It’s all part of set and setting. A show begins the moment the audience walk into a venue … I don’t want the pre-show music to seem like I am eager to please. I want to start wrong-footing the audience before they’ve even sat down.17 Going against the grain of expectation, instead of the cheery, high-energy pop music that often precedes a stand-up show, Lee favours more esoteric and sometimes unsettling tunes, by artists like free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker, Krautrock pioneers Amon Düül and Japanese retro rock and roll band the 5-6-7-8’s. Thus he sets the scene for the inventive awkwardness of the stand-up he is about to perform. Similarly, Mark Thomas makes sure that the circumstances surrounding the gig create the right set of expectations for his passionate, opinionated, well-informed political satire: [T]he details of everything … as they go in, are important … What I want is when people come to gigs there’ll be stalls outside, and there’ll be people talking about ideas and issues and what have you … we did some gigs and we had Banksy art works up as people came in and stuff like that … [I]t sets the mood that there is a debate going on, that there is a factual content.18

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Notes 1

See Diane Howard, London Theatres and Music Halls 1850–1950, London: Library Association, 1970, pp. 113–14

2

The Mark Thomas Comedy Product, Channel 4, 29 March 1996

3

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 96

4

Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004

5

Malcolm Hay, ‘Anytime, any place, anywhere? Terry Saunders tells Malcolm Hay why charity shops, cafés, museums and launderettes are the best venues for his comic vision’, Time Out, 27 June 2007, p. 54

6

Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012

7

See Roger Wilmut, Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety, 1919–1960, London: Methuen, 1985, pp. 68–9 for more on this.

8

Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004

9

Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012

10 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 486 11 Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012 12 Dylan Moran, Monster – Live, Sound Entertainment, 2004, TLCD 53 13 Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 14 Ross Noble, Mindblender, Assembly Hall, Tunbridge Wells, 1 October 2012 15 Stewart Lee, Carpet Remnant World, Leicester Square Theatre, 10 December 2011; and Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 24 February 2012 16 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012



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17 Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 43 18 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004. ‘Banksy’ is the cult graffiti artist whose work is featured on the cover of the Blur album Think Tank

CHAPTER SEVEN

The outer limits of stand-up One of the things that makes stand-up comedy so difficult to define is the fact that its boundaries are fluid and fuzzy. Many of the qualities that seem to be central to it – personality, rapport, immediacy, even funniness – are not unique to stand-up. They can be found in a whole range of other types of performance, including straight acting, political oratory and live music. There are stand-up comedians who have pushed so hard at the boundaries that what they do seems to hardly fit their own category, and other performance styles have emerged that seem so close to stand-up as to differ in name only.

Spoken Word Spoken Word is a very good example. It’s a relatively young performance genre, growing out of the American punk and underground music scene of the early 1980s. Harvey Kubernik, an LA-based journalist who had been involved in the music business, started encouraging musicians and singers to perform in venues like the Llasa Club in Hollywood: ‘I didn’t want to put on poetry readings, so I coined this term

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Spoken Word, and I wanted it to be diary-rants, improv, fragments of song-lyrics, some traditional poetry, excerpts from in-progress books – I wanted it to be narratives, but I took off the strait-jacket …’1 Henry Rollins – then the lead singer of seminal Californian hardcore punk band Black Flag – was one of the performers that Kubernik recruited, and Rollins now only performs as a Spoken Word artist, his musical career with the Rollins Band having fallen into disuse. Later, Kubernik persuaded the Dead Kennedys’ lead singer Jello Biafra to take the same path, and Biafra is now as much a Spoken Word artist as a musician.2 Not all of the performers drawn into the genre come from music. In 1998, Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha set up the Spitfire tour, described on its website as ‘Musicians, Actors & Activists Speaking Out on Global Affairs’. Its roster of acts included musicians like Lydia Lunch, Exene Cervenka and Angelo Moore, rappers like Ice T and Michael Franti, actors like Rosie Perez and Woody Harrelson, and campaigners like Ralph Nader.3 The main distinction between Spoken Word and stand-up seems to be the title: performers like Rollins and Biafra do not refer to themselves as stand-ups. A 1998 Time Out article brings Rollins together with Eddie Izzard to discuss their performance, and Izzard asks Rollins how stand-up differs from Spoken Word. Rollins gives no clear answer, hesitating to define what he does, simply describing it as ‘the talking shows, or whatever it is I do up there’. Izzard – a passionate advocate for the art of stand-up – seems slightly put out by not having Rollins in the stand-up camp: ‘In a competitive way, it’s annoying that you’re good, having come from music.’4 Outside of the terminology, the similarities between the two forms are striking: both involve a single performer, talking directly to an audience, with personality, rapport and immediacy. As with stand-up, Spoken Word exists in live shows and in the recorded form – both Rollins and Biafra have released numerous albums of their performances.



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There seem to be three main differences between the two forms. Firstly, Spoken Word performers start out with an established reputation and image forged in another discipline. When Biafra did his first talking show, he was already well known as a punk singer, and it is inevitable that his performances will be seen in that light. Secondly, Spoken Word performances tend to be longer than the average stand-up act. Both Rollins and Biafra have regularly done shows of three hours or more. Finally, stand-up comedy is defined by the fact it is funny, but while Spoken Word performers do get laughs, they are not obliged by definition to do so. Rollins’s early Spoken Word performances were clearly different from stand-up. He was often as confrontational as he is in his music, and there’s an account of a performance at the Llasa Club where he punched a member of the audience. In his earliest recordings, he only plays for laughs intermittently, and there is material that is far more extreme than most stand-up. On Sweatbox, recorded in 1987–8, he recalls an encounter with a cop which finishes with him fantasizing about ‘an uptight white pig getting wasted by a Mexican’.5 In the 1990s, his performance became lighter, less confrontational, and started to contrast strongly with the darkness of his music, although there was still some serious content. I saw a show at the Octagon, Sheffield in the early 1990s, where he talked about his abusive upbringing in a way that was by turns funny, touching and insightful. More recently, the shows tend to be heavily weighted towards humour, and are distinguishable from stand-up only in that many of the anecdotes relate to his being an alternative rock star. A 1999 routine sees him reading out a letter from a Czech fan, and marvelling at the use of language in it, particularly a sentence which reads, ‘On two concert, I’m should collective photo, but small, fat, bald-headed technologist be insane.’ Taking care not to simply ridicule the fan, who is after all struggling with a second language, Rollins goes on to imagine a feature-length movie with this kind of language. He has an air stewardess making an emergency announcement:

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‘For making landing immediate time, incredibly! [laughter] Broken, moving, not now, stupid motor on flaming! [laughter] I declaration: emergency! [laughter and applause]’6 The piece has a classic stand-up structure, setting up the basic premise, then applying the same logic to an imaginary situation. Rollins’s rhythm and delivery are absolutely like those of a stand-up. Biafra’s Spoken Word is different, closer to performance art and political oratory, with a style of delivery that owes more to the cadences and inflections of his punk singing than stand-up comedy. In a show in Sheffield in 2001, he enters the stage in a large overcoat, his eyes obscured by round, reflective sunglasses, reading out an imaginary declaration of martial law in sinister tones. It’s less than a month after the aircraft flew into the Twin Towers, and much of the show deals with this new world situation. While there are plenty of jokes and satirical barbs about this in distinctly stand-up-like passages, there is also much political invective as he weaves complex conspiracy theories. Unlike most comedians, he often reads from notes, regaling the audience with what he sees as ‘suppressed information’. Like Rollins’ early work, Biafra’s Spoken Word bears the hallmark of his punk origins, sometimes delving into shocking material. On his first album No More Cocoons, he imagines a theme park called ‘Vietnam Never Happened’, which includes such attractions as a petting zoo ‘where you can feed over-priced McDonaldland cookies to our pen full of children deformed by Agent Orange’. Some of this gets laughs from the audience, but as he cranks up the horror, the response sounds more uneasy, and at one point he asks, ‘Is that getting a bit much?’7

Pappy’s – where sketch meets stand-up Another example is sketch comedy. Any major comedy circuit is likely to encompass not just stand-up but also improv and



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sketch comedy. Pappy’s is a sketch team that started out in 2004, initially as a quartet with the slightly longer name of Pappy’s Fun Club. Since 2009, they have been a trio, made up of Matthew Crosby, Ben Clark and Tom Parry – all of whom have also worked as solo stand-ups – and their work muddies the distinction between stand-up and sketch. When they started out, they felt much more at home in stand-up clubs than at sketch nights. As Crosby explains, ‘We had lots of fun at stand-up nights because we’d try and be live. Sketch nights, you’d see a lot of people who had spent a lot of time on the costume and learning their lines, which for us were the two least important things.’ What they found particularly odd was that the other sketch groups tended to avoid interaction with the audience or playing with the liveness of the situation. As Crosby puts it, ‘If you have an audience in front of you it seems crazy not to acknowledge the fact.’ Pappy’s approach is much more interactive, as Parry explains: We always talk about that in rehearsals – like, the direction of a sketch … as soon as we realise that the direction of a sketch is too like horizontal to each other, it’s got to have some kind of way of it being to the audience, and with the audience, as much as it is with each other. Another quality they share with stand-up is that they play on the personalities of the performers involved, breaking out of their sketches to comment on the scrappiness of a prop or costume, or the way one of them has just performed something. Crosby argues that in 2012’s Pappy’s Last Show Ever, the line separating them from full-blown stand-up has become even fuzzier: [W]e go out at the start to say hello to the audience, and we know what our first thing is we’re going to do, but there’ll often be five or six minutes of us just messing around together onstage with the audience. And it’s the closest we’ve ever got to three-man stand-up …

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The main difference is that the nature of sketch – with props, costumes and an element of scripting that is still visible – cannot ever be as off-the-cuff and impromptu as stand-up pretends to be. As Crosby puts it, ‘[T]he key difference still remains between stand-up and sketch is that once you get into the actual sketches, people can’t suspend their disbelief that it’s prepared.’8

Pushing at the boundaries If the definition of stand-up is challenged from the outside, by other forms which bear strong similarities with it, it is also tested from the inside by comedians who push at the perimeter of the form, fearlessly exploring the outer limits of its creative possibilities. Keith Allen had a very short stand-up career in the early days of alternative comedy, and has left little evidence behind of his act except a few video clips and a collection of legendary word of mouth stories. Some of these relate to what he did onstage, like smashing plates over his head; or performing a naked ventriloquism act, in the course of which he kept adjusting his penis, eventually pointing out to the audience that while he did this, nobody noticed that his lips were moving. In other anecdotes, he didn’t even reach the stage, perhaps announcing from the side that he was too famous to actually make an entrance, or replacing himself with a tape recorder which played the beginning of his act. Sometimes, he broke the most fundamental rule of all, by being deliberately unfunny.9 Andy Kaufman was also deliberately unfunny at times, although he enjoyed greater success than Allen. He was a big name in America from the mid-1970s until his death in 1984.10 One of Kaufman’s celebrated stunts was to go on at the Improv and start reading The Great Gatsby to the audience. Initially, they would laugh, but as it became



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clear that he really did intend to read the entire novel, they would start to leave. A more tasteless episode saw him make audience members line up and pay him a dollar per person to touch a cyst on his neck.11 Sometimes it’s not the comedian but the show’s organisers who test the possibilities of stand-up. A good example is Geoff Rowe, who has been running Comedy in the Dark since 2009, when the show first ran at the Leicester Comedy Festival. The idea is simple – a stand-up show that takes place in pitch darkness. Blind comic Chris McCausland explains the advantage of this: ‘Light makes people more self-conscious about laughing. So the darker the room gets, the better it is, really.’12

Space Some comics have expanded the possibilities by pushing through the spatial boundaries of stand-up. There’s normally a clear division between performer and audience. In a theatre, the comedian stands on a stage, and the audience sit in the auditorium. Even where there is no literal stage and no formal auditorium, a stage area is almost always marked out, and people are seated in such a way as to give the sense of being an audience. This creates a clear spatial boundary for the act, and in many gigs this is not crossed by the performer except at the beginning when they come on, and at the end when they leave. In his 1978 TV series, Jasper Carrott defies this convention. Towards the end of the third episode, Carrott goes into an extended rant about Monty Python. He’s pretending he hates it, but the gag is that he’s clearly obsessed and watches it all the time, and a lot of the comedy arises from his mock anger and hyperbolic imagery. As he continues to rave, he starts pushing at the boundaries of the stage area, which is simply the section of the studio floor between the set and the seating blocks housing the audience. He goes right up to the front row

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and shouts into people’s faces. The audience is clearly excited by the transgression, and their laughter becomes almost continuous. We see him wandering up the steps of the seating block, still ranting away, occasionally addressing something to particular punters seated either side of him. Now he’s back on the stage, and he gets laughter and applause simply by awkwardly dodging around one of the TV cameras. Finally he wanders off, still chuntering away.13 In recent years, Stewart Lee has made this kind of border incursion a central feature of his act, taking his inspiration from the gloriously unhinged northern character comic Johnny Vegas. He has acknowledged that, ‘Since 90’s Comedian I always aim to try and spend as much time during the show offstage as possible.’14 There’s a lovely example of this towards the end of his show If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, as filmed at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow. Again, this starts with an absurdist rant, in this case about an advertising slogan for Magners pear cider. At a certain point, he lets the microphone drop to the stage, as if carried away by his own anger. The audience laugh, and he holds the pause, leading to further laughter. He starts to shout off mike, and when he jumps off the front of the stage to continue his invective, the audience acknowledge the thrill of the boundary infringement with another laugh. Then he passes through a door and now he’s not even in the auditorium, but walking quickly down corridors and up stairs, relentlessly continuing to rant. As he reappears on the first balcony, the audience laugh and applaud his audacity. The houselights come on so that he can be seen, causing him to yell, ‘Don’t light this up! [laughter] This isn’t an entertainment! [laughter]’ On and on he goes, shouting about imaginary wrongs as he works his way along the front of the balcony. He spots somebody filming him on his phone, and gets laughs by manically remonstrating with the copyright infringer, leaning right over the woman in front of him to shout in his face. We see the people in the stalls craning their necks round to follow



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the action, as Lee leans over the balcony to shout down at them. Eventually, he disappears through a door and runs back down to the stage, where he reappears, only to get another big laugh by jumping off the front of the stage again. Finally, he gets back up on to the stage and picks the mike up. By this point, he has spent around ten minutes outside of the normal spatial boundaries of stand-up.

Time In other cases, it’s the temporal boundaries that are breached. In most cases, there’s a clear indication of when a stand-up show starts and ends, but in the 1970s Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin found ways of challenging this. At the end of a show at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Martin was faced with an audience that refused to accept that the act was over. Even when he packed away his props and told them he’d finished, they thought he was just kidding and that it was simply part of the act. In the end, he took them with him out on to the campus, eventually persuading them all to get into an empty swimming pool and pretending to swim over the top of them. In his autobiography, he recalls, ‘That night I went to bed feeling I had entered new comic territory.’15 After that he found a number of ways of throwing into question exactly when his act had ended. At the Troubadour in LA, he kept talking into a backstage mike after leaving the stage, adopting the role of a nasty prima donna with a monstrous ego: ‘They can’t hear me out there, can they? … What a bunch of assholes. Where can I get some pot?’16 At Bubba’s in Coconut Grove, Florida, he finished by taking the audience with him out on to the street, hailing a taxi, and driving off. He got the cab driver to go round the block and waved as he passed them by, then drove off and simply left them there. Presumably they stood there in the street

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wondering what was going to happen next, eventually drifting away wondering at what point the show had actually finished. One of Andy Kaufman’s most boundary-stretching moments came at the end of his Carnegie Hall concert in April 1979, when he invited the entire audience to come with him for milk and cookies. The video of the event shows Kaufman, wrapped in a dressing gown, joining audience members as they file out of the theatre and start getting on to 20 buses. ‘Come on everybody!’ shouts Kaufman, and you can hear punters shout ‘We’re with ya!’ and, ‘Let’s do it!’ It cuts to shots of a canteen, with rows of milk cartons, and Kaufman surrounded by punters. ‘Tomorrow the show will be continuing … at one o’clock at the Staten Island ferry,’ he announces.17 According to Kaufman’s collaborator Bob Zmuda, they turned up at the ferry the next day and were joined by about 300 audience members from the night before, treating them all to ferry tickets and ice creams.18 More recently, Mark Watson has challenged the temporal boundaries in a different way – by occasionally putting on shows that are unconventionally long. Historically, the amount of time stand-ups have spent on stage has varied from a few minutes to three hours or more, but in the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe, Watson gave these time limits a big stretch in a show called Mark Watson’s Overambitious 24-Hour Show, which really was as long as advertised. Since then he has done two similar shows in Melbourne, and five more in Edinburgh, the final one in 2009. Most of them have lasted for 24 hours, but the longest went on for 36. Incredibly this is not the longest stand-up show that has ever happened. That honour belongs to the American comic Bob Marley, who performed for 40 hours between the 22 and 23 September 2010, at a club in Portland, Maine. Nonetheless, Watson doesn’t mind about not holding the record for the longest ever stand-up show, as he ‘was never interested in doing like slightly longer just for the sake of a record or something. 24 [hours] is about as long as you’d ever want to be onstage.’ He argues that these absurdly long shows



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were not a mere publicity stunt, more a way of venturing into the unknown: If you want to sort of dignify it with a more complicated description than ‘stunt’, it is basically for me an opportunity to explore what you can do once you’ve got an audience there, because obviously over 24 hours, the audience goes through a psychological journey of its own. And the atmosphere at the end is unlike anything that you’d ever find really. Each time, the climaxes of those shows have been among my most memorable moments … There’s a real sense of excitement at the start, then there’s a lot of hard work for about 18 hours, and then when you finally get to the end, it’s elation, the sort of slightly drunken atmosphere that you get when people have been awake for too long. It feels like the end of a really crazy all-night party. There’s a mixture of sort of gratitude that it’s over, but also people are just basically emotionally shredded by the experience. So you do have an immense control over the audience by that point. All at the same time, they’re blank like zombies.19

Conceptual shows Stand-up comedy often tends towards bittiness. A stand-up act or even a full-length solo show tends to be made up of a series of smaller units, and these gags and routines can easily be re-edited and put together in a different order. In comedy jargon, these smaller units of comedy are even called ‘bits’. However, an increasing number of British comedians – including Daniel Kitson, Mark Thomas, Richard Herring, Dave Gorman, Stewart Lee and Josie Long – are creating longer shows in which a theme, a concept or a narrative is explored in a much more sustained fashion. This kind of work can offer greater artistic possibilities than a 20-minute club set

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or even a full-length stand-up show made up of unrelated bits. The comic takes the audience on a journey, which can allow tonal shifts, quieter passages, raw emotion, exploration of ideas and a sense of building to a satisfying ending. In Dave Gorman’s shows, he relates the stories of outlandish challenges he’s set himself, like travelling the world to find a given number of people called Dave Gorman, or using the internet to find ten Googlewhacks in a row.20 Gorman describes his work as ‘documentary comedy’ so as to change audience expectations: ‘Everyone thinks they know what stand-up is. And people will come up and go, “You don’t wanna bother with any of that fucking clever-clever nonsense, you want some fucking knob jokes.” And they think they’re right.’ He has used staging to change this kind of expectation, deliberately avoiding the typical stand-up setting: When they walk into the show, there’s two screens, two projectors, no microphone. And just the fact that they don’t recognise it means they don’t think they know what it is. And they give me a little bit of leeway … The minute there’s a microphone in the stand and a spotlight, and it’s a format they think they know best about, they have a different … set of demands.21 Gorman explains why it’s important to differentiate what he does: ‘The only reason that I don’t think what I do is stand-up is that I can’t go to a club and do 20 minutes. There’s no such thing as 20 minutes of what I do … You can’t do an excerpt from them.’22 Similarly, Jimmy McGhie, who has created three themed shows for the Edinburgh Fringe, identifies the problem with this approach: ‘[W]hat I always did was write a brand new show from scratch for Edinburgh … But then go back to the circuit afterwards and have to basically scrap it all, because none of it worked individually. There were no actual bits in it, it was all too linked together.’23 Richard Herring has been touring themed shows since the



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1990s, basing them on autobiography (like explaining what it was like growing up as the headmaster’s son), or off-kilter social experiments (like seeing how people would react if he grew a Hitler moustache).24 He compares these shows with a straight stand-up set, as performed in a comedy club: They’re sort of different and they’re the same … you could take bits out that will work in a stand-up club, but it’s much more about the whole experience, so even if there’s a good routine, it all feeds into everything at the end … I want to create a show that makes people think, that has an overarching theme that has stuff that all comes together and makes sense …25 Stewart Lee makes similar points about being unable to split his full-length shows into individual bits, but argues, ‘I think it is stand-up. And I think we should call it that.’26 He likens straight stand-up to comic books and conceptual shows to graphic novels, pointing out that the great comics writer Alan Moore rejects the distinction between the two, arguing that both should simply be called ‘comics’. Lee goes on to argue that the reason conceptual shows have flourished is because Britain has an appropriate circuit of venues around which they can tour, thus making them economically viable: [T]he conceptual show thing is also unique to this country, and it’s about the fact that even now, there’s still enough midscale arts centres with funding … to have created a sustainable middle ground where … people can make 30 grand a year doing their 70 minute Edinburgh think-show in those places, when in fact they can’t chop it up to play the Comedy Store – because it’s not that kind of show.27

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Music Stand-up comedy has musical roots – with connections to music hall, vaudeville, folk, country, even punk – and for much of the twentieth century it was normal for comedians to finish their act with a song. In spite of this, the modern conception of stand-up is that it’s primarily a spoken form, lacking musical accompaniment. Having said this, it’s not especially unusual for find comedians whose acts are based on comic songs, good examples being Tim Minchin and Bill Bailey – whose staging suggests a rock gig more than a stand-up show. There are also comics who have experimented with adding music to what would otherwise be conventional spoken routines. Zach Galifianakis – huge bush of beard, crazy thatch of hair – tells gags sitting at the piano and playing a plaintive, ringing melody. This completely changes the texture of the performance. He comes across as a bar-room pianist with pretentions to being a great artist, tipping his head back and closing his eyes as if absorbed by his own music as the audience guffaw at his one-liners – which, as a result, seem like a mere afterthought. The music makes sense of the big pauses between laughs, and its wistfulness offers an intriguing tonal contrast with the silliness of jokes like: ‘I hate to be gross, but the only time it’s good to yell out, “I have diarrhoea” [laughter] – is when you’re playing Scrabble. [laughter] Because it’s worth a shitload of points. [laughter]’28 Demetri Martin’s one-liners have the blend of silliness, cleverness and absurdity that could put him in the same bracket as deadpan surrealists like Steven Wright and Milton Jones. Typical examples include: I find that – at most theme parks, the theme is – ‘Wait in line, fatty.’ [laughter] Every fight is a food fight – when you’re a cannibal. [laughter]



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There’s a store in my neighbourhood called Futon World. Love that name, Futon World. Makes me think of a magical place – that becomes less comfortable over time. [laughter]29 However, Martin manages to create a completely different feel to his act, partly by setting strings of gags to music. He might, for example, underscore a 13-minute sequence of short jokes by busily picking melancholy arpeggios on an acoustic guitar. He starts another routine by telling the audience: ‘I’d like to try something for you guys. I’d like to remix some of my jokes for you. [quiet, anticipatory laughter] By playing this glockenspiel and this keyboard. [laughter] While I tell them.’ The clunky mechanical rhythm of a cheap electric keyboard starts up, and this is incongruous enough in itself to get a laugh. The music he plays treads a fine line between cutesy and avant garde – a repetitive two-note glockenspiel riff, sporadically sprinkled with electronic notes. The music meshes with his manner, which makes him come across like a talented bedroom composer, sharing some things he’s been working on with a few friends. He calls the audience ‘you guys’ – instead of the more traditional ‘ladies and gentlemen’ – and says he’s going to ‘try something’ for them. The overall effect is charmingly whimsical and homemade, as if a modern urban folk musician like Jeffrey Lewis or Sufjan Stevens had taken up comedy.

Technology However low-tech stand-up comedy has traditionally been, in the last few years there have been some interesting attempts to coax it into the virtual world. In February 2007, Jimmy Carr became one of the first comedians to perform a show in the online virtual world Second Life. A basement bar in central London was rigged to allow him to play simultaneously to a

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small live audience – made up of fans chosen from MySpace – right in front of him, and a virtual audience in Second Life. The live audience could see the virtual version of the show projected on a screen, and most of the impromptu laughs came from Carr making fun of the technical inadequacies of the set-up. He comments on the fact that initially the live audience’s laughter is being played back to them with a big delay (‘Literally retarded’), how his avatar looks (‘I’m wearing – sort of a grey leotard’) and its unconvincing movements. It staggers forward, and he gets laughter and applause simply by saying, ‘What the fuck is that?’ It flails around on the ground, and he says, ‘Well now it looks as if I’m sucking off the floor. [laughter and applause]’30 Shortly afterwards, another attempt at virtual stand-up was made not by a comedian but by designers at the Magic Kingdom® in Florida’s Walt Disney World® Resort. In April 2007, they launched the Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor® – an attraction which purports to be a comedy club in the world of the Pixar film. The show is compèred by Mike Wazowski, one of the main characters from the movie, who introduces a series of bizarre monster comedians. Given that all of this is computer animated and projected on to a screen, it might seem to lack the essential interactivity and spontaneity of real stand-up. However, while some of the soundtrack is pre-recorded – assuming Billy Crystal’s career hasn’t nosedived to the point where he’s prepared to spend his every waking hour backstage in a theme park – some of the characters are voiced live. This allows them to talk to individual punters and improvise gags based on the information they get from them. When I see the ‘show’ in July 2011, a two-headed monster talks to a woman from Austin, Texas who has her son Darius with her. The monster then sings a new national anthem for Austin, which rhymes its ‘attractions various’ with ‘Darius’. Setting up an attraction like this must have been expensive enough to put it out of reach of the average working comic, but in 2009 Tiernan Douieb staged a virtual stand-up show



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that only required access to a computer and a decent internet connection. After playing to a small audience in a comedy club, he tweeted about how disappointed he was: I complained on Twitter … it was meant to be a big gig and seven in, this is terrible. And they all said, ‘There’s thousands of us on here – why don’t you do a gig for us?’ And I was like, ‘Oo, this is actually very interesting.’ And then also realised I could potentially do a show in my pyjamas. He recruited fellow comics like Mark Watson, Mitch Benn, Matt Kirshen and Pappy’s, who all tweeted a set of gags, compèred by Douieb’s tweeting between the sets. The ‘show’ was ‘watched’ by around 17,000 people on the night of 8 June, which as Douieb points out is a stadium-sized audience. Two months later, they staged a similar show at the Edinburgh Fringe, this time playing simultaneously to a live audience in the venue and a virtual one on Twitter. It’s a moot point whether a series of 140-character sentences on a computer screen could really qualify as stand-up comedy, and it certainly lacked the vital raft of information that an actual performer can convey with face, voice and body. However, what it did do was to destroy any of the physical or geographical boundaries that might have prevented some of the punters who watched it from attending a real show, as Douieb points out: I had a paraplegic guy contact me on Twitter and just say, ‘I haven’t been able to go to a live comedy gig since it’s happened. You brought it to me. This is … amazing.’ … When I was gigging in Estonia earlier this year, somebody twittered afterwards just going, ‘Oh I’ve just seen Tiernan Douieb, really enjoyed it. Wondered where I’d seen him before. Of course, he hosted Twitter Comedy Club.’ I thought, ‘God, there are people in Estonia watching it!’31

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Trying to understand stand-up comedy is a bit like trying to keep hold of a wet bar of soap. Just when you think you’ve got to grips with it, it slips out of your hands. You can trace its history, but establishing exactly when and where it first sprang into life is very difficult. The origin of the term ‘stand-up’ is just as hard to hold down, or even to define. At its heart, it’s a very simple form, and what makes it exciting is that the boundaries which give it definition are fuzzy and easy to break through. This makes it extremely malleable, allowing it to be tweaked, twisted or turned on its head at the whim of the individual comedian. In order to explore stand-up’s enormous creative potential, the following chapters will explore how some of its defining features work in performance.

Notes 1

James Parker, Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins, London: Phoenix House, 1998, p. 131

2

Jeffrey Drake, ‘Point Man against Censorship’, http://reocities. com/SunsetStrip/palms/1845/DK-html/jello-interview.html [accessed September 2004]

3

http://www.spitfiretour.org/zack.html [accessed 7 September 2004]

4

Garry Mulholland, ‘When Eddie Met Henry’, Time Out, 2–9 December 1998, p. 24

5

‘Santa Cruz Pig’ on Henry Rollins, Sweatbox, Quarterstick Records/Touch and Go Records, 1992, QS10CD

6

‘Language’ on Henry Rollins, A Rollins in the Wry, Quarterstick Records, 2000, QS63CD

7

‘Vietnam Never Happened’ on Jello Biafra, No More Cocoons, Alternative Tentacles Records, 1987, VIRUS 59

8

Interview with Pappy’s, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 29 February 2012

9

For more on this, see William Cook, The Comedy Store: The Club that Changed British Comedy, London: Little, Brown



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and Company, 2001, p. 63; and Roger Wilmut and Peter Rosengard, Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law? The Story of Alternative Comedy in Britain from The Comedy Store to Saturday Live, London: Methuen, 1989, p. 34 10 Even Kaufman’s death is not 100 per cent certain. Although he died from a rare form of lung cancer in 1984, in May 2004, exactly 20 years after his death, somebody posted a website (http://andykaufmanreturns.blogspot.co.uk/2004/05/ im-back.html [accessed 6 June 2013]) claiming to be Kaufman, and it was announced that he would perform a show at Los Angeles’ House of Blues (see Allan Wigley, ‘Pulling Fast One on Death Never Works’, Ottawa Sun, 22 May 2004, Showbiz p. 21). Needless to say, he didn’t turn up for the show, but the fact that he successfully pulled off a number of hoaxes in his lifetime, and had told others of his intention to fake his own death gives a certain limited credibility to the comeback claims 11 For more on this, see Bob Zmuda (with Matthew Scott Hansen), Andy Kaufman Revealed!, London: Ebury Press, 1999, pp. 88–9, 185 12 Quoted in Tom Meltzer, ‘Comedy show puts new slant on dark humour’, the Guardian (G2 section), 8 October 2012, p. 2 13 An Audience with Jasper Carrott, originally broadcast ITV, 22 January 1978. Available on the DVD An Audience with Jasper Carrott, Network, 2011, 7953436 14 Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 215 15 Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 140 16 Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 143 17 Andy Kaufman, Andy Kaufman Plays Carnegie Hall, Paramount, 2000, 839693 18 Bob Zmuda (with Matthew Scott Hansen), Andy Kaufman Revealed!, London: Ebury Press, 1999, pp. 148–9 19 Interview with Mark Watson, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 31 October 2012

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20 Googlewhacking is a game which involves putting two search terms into the search engine Google, and getting just one website in the search results, subject to certain specific rules. 21 Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004 22 Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004 23 Interview with Jimmy McGhie, Whitstable, 30 August 2012 24 Or a ‘toothbrush moustache’ as he prefers to call it – in spite of the show being titled Hitler Moustache 25 Interview with Richard Herring, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 14 February 2012 26 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 27 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 28 The Comedians of Comedy, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2005, DV1510 29 See ‘The Remix’ and ‘The Jokes with Guitar’, Demetri Martin, These Are Jokes, Comedy Central Records, 2006, CCR0044 [CD] 30 See ‘Second Life’, extra feature on Jimmy Carr, Comedian, 4 DVD, 2007, C4DVD10160 31 Interview with Tiernan Douieb, Gulbenkian Café, Canterbury, 17 March 2012

CHAPTER EIGHT

Affection Personality theft You may have noticed that I feature quite heavily in this story. I talk about my own experiences of stand-up – as both punter and performer – and I throw in little anecdotes to illustrate certain points. When I have an opinion, I make it quite clear that it’s my point of view, and I don’t try and hide behind some kind of pseudo objectivity. You’ve probably realised that what I’m trying to do is to simulate the tone of stand-up in my prose style – direct, conversational, and above all personal. The point is that a stand-up’s personality is absolutely crucial to his or her act. It provides a context for the material, it gives the audience something to identify with, and it’s what distinguishes one comic from the next. Popular entertainers instinctively understand how crucial personality is, and nothing illustrates this point better than the lengths they will go to protect it. For example, here’s an amazing fact: in 1938, the Variety Artistes’ Federation tried to bring personality under the protection of copyright law. An international conference on copyright was held in Brussels, and the VAF, the British trade union for light entertainers, put their case to the Board of Trade in a letter which said: ‘[W]e would comment that our particular anxiety is to endeavour to protect entertainers … against unauthorised reproduction of their personalities constituted as self-expression and mannerisms,

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which entertaining value of personality is the greatest asset an entertainer possesses and is the basis of the goodwill on which he earns his livelihood.’1 This might seem a bit paranoid, but there have been real cases of comedians having their personalities stolen. In the 1980s, Woody Allen sued National Video and Men’s World Outlet for using lookalikes in adverts. By making it look as if Allen endorsed their products, the advertisers were exploiting his personality for commercial gain. More creatively, some comedians have employed lookalikes to use in their act for comic effect. At the start of David Cross’s show at the Wilbur Theater in Boston in 2009, an offstage voice announces the comedian on to the stage. A small boy bounces on to the stage, dressed up as Cross – baggy jeans and T-shirt, spectacles, rubber bald wig. The normal applause and whistling that would welcome a famous comedian on to the stage is mixed with laughter, as the audience take in the gag. The kid then goes into a faux-Cross spiel. After a few minutes he pretends to spot somebody illicitly filming the show and acts an egotistical hissy fit. Hearing a child parroting Cross’s style of no-holds-barred cynicism then roundly abusing the audience – all in a highpitched, unbroken voice – is as odd and unsettling as it is funny. ‘Everything I say tonight will be the truth,’ the boy says, which it clearly isn’t.2 This is exactly the sort of thing the real Cross would say, leaving us to wonder how much artifice there is in the way he presents himself, and how truthful the personalities we see in stand-up comedy really are. It’s precisely this kind of question that I’ll be exploring in the following chapters.

We like comedians In 1999, I go to see Lenny Henry at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. For me, the best part of the show is when he

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walks on to the stage at the beginning. I’m not making a cheap jibe – it’s just that I find his entrance an extraordinary moment. I’ve followed Henry’s career since I was a child. I’ve seen him in a sitcom called The Fosters. I’ve been a huge fan of the anarchic children’s television programme Tiswas, which saw him invent a crazy, Rastafarian, condensed-milk-obsessed character called Algernon Razzmatazz and engage in all kinds of custard pie related mayhem. I’ve seen him compère the pilot episode of the alternative comedy showcase Saturday Live, and star in various shows of his own. As he walks on to the stage, a huge wave of affection surges through me, no doubt powered by the memories of all the Lenny Henry things I’ve enjoyed over the years. My excitement is strengthened by the fact that he walks across the stage like a star, aware of the powerful applause that greeted him but making no big show of it. His stride is loose, relaxed and unhurried as he makes his way to the mike. His charisma is very tangible. At the Brighton Dome Concert Hall in 2004, Dylan Moran radiates a different kind of charisma. He comes across as melancholy and shambolic, his hair rather unkempt and his speech slurred as if by alcohol. He is misanthropic, yet philosophical and poetic, capable of producing tender moments. He wanders on at the beginning, and straight away, without any kind of introduction, he starts talking about the town he’s performing in. After a few minutes of this, gruffly and almost as an afterthought, he says, ‘Hello, by the way.’ It gets a big laugh. The joke is all about his personality. His terse ‘hello’ comes across like a glimmer of affection peeping out through the crack in his habitually grumpy façade. It’s as if he’s too shy or awkward to be more openly friendly. The effect is not only funny, it’s also curiously charming. It makes me like him more. Both of these examples illustrate an important truth about comedians: we like them. As well as making us laugh, most stand-ups inspire huge affection. This is something which comedians, critics and others have known about for decades.

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Milton Berle, for example, said: ‘The first thing is that an audience, I believe, have to like you, before they laugh at you.’3 Jack Rollins – who represented Woody Allen when he did stand-up – makes a similar point: ‘In a cabaret … if an audience can sense the personality underlying the comic – if they can make contact with that personality, they’ll enjoy him more.’4 It’s a view shared by Allen himself: ‘[W]hat audiences want is intimacy with the person. They want to like the person and find the person funny as a funny human being. The biggest trap that comedians fall into is trying to get by on material.’5 Sometimes the affection the audience feel for the comedian is very obvious. Victoria Wood had hardcore fans who liked her so much that they would follow her around dressed up as her characters. A South Bank Show documentary shows a bunch of middle-aged women dressed in yellow berets, like the Lancashire girl in Wood’s act who is always looking for her friend Kimberly. They meet Wood at the stage door, where she signs autographs and poses for a photo with them. Wood comments: ‘They think I’m nice and friendly. My husband says they think I’m their best friend, you know. And that’s fine – on the stage, I’m happy to be their best friend.’6 Audiences can also show affection in a more subtle way, in their reactions to a live show. Sarah Millican tells her audience about being in Australia, and Skyping her boyfriend because she’s missing home. She recalls that she was feeling so flat and sad that the first thing she said to him was, ‘You’re too far away.’ The audience give an ‘ahh’ of sympathy, which is much more genuine than a ritualised pantomime response. This sets things up perfectly for the punchline: ‘So he moved the webcam.’ There’s a big laugh and a smattering of applause.7 She’s expertly squashed the sentiment, but the fact that it was there in the first place shows how much they like her. In some cases, there’s a sexual element to the affection. When Dylan Moran used to play my comedy club, the Last Laugh, female punters would often come up to me after the show and tell me how attractive they thought he was – even offering to put him up for the night. In spite of his shabby

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appearance, he was the comic who seemed to inspire the most female lust. In a TV documentary, Alan Davies is onstage doing his act, when a woman shouts: ‘Get your kit off!’ He tries to explain the phenomenon: I think that’s why it’s attractive to audiences. Because they’re seeing somebody really expressing themself and being very, very vividly alive in a way that many people haven’t found a way to be, you know. So those performers become … most amazingly attractive. But it isn’t really them, it’s what they’re doing, they’re just flying, they’re doing the thing that everyone wishes they could do.8 There’s also a sexual edge to Eddie Izzard’s appeal. Ken Campbell notes that ‘all sexes fall in love with him’,9 and this is borne out by the intensity of feeling to be found in fan forums on the internet. Back in 2004, I spent no more than two minutes looking through these before I happened across the following, posted by ‘comic-iris’: ‘Last night I had a dream with Eddie in it. Strangely enough, I was dating him. It wasn’t all hot and bothering type of dream, just a really nice, content feeling dream with the feelings that I usually have with my boyfriend (who I have introduced to Eddie, and he is a fan now).’10 While it’s unlikely that comic-iris will ever actually become Izzard’s girlfriend, the affection audiences feel for comedians can be reciprocated. Bill Cosby, for example, says that he wants his act to get the same response as when he is talking to a table full of people at the dinner table, and Victoria Wood describes playing to the Royal Albert Hall as being, ‘like having two and a half thousand friends round and you’re the funniest one in the room.’11 For some comics, the relationship is even more personal. Sean Hughes says the beginning of a stand-up gig is ‘much like a first date’, and Eddie Izzard reveals that the audience offers him a ‘surrogate affection thing’, compensating for the death of his mother when he was a child.12

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All of this makes the audience-performer rapport in stand-up seem very much like the kind of relationship which grows up between people in everyday life. However irrational it may seem, at one level, we think of the comedian as somebody we actually know, whether a casual acquaintance, a friend or a lover. Establishing a career means forming a seemingly close relationship with the public, and the pressure to do this well is one of the things that makes doing stand-up so terrifying. Victoria Wood puts it this way: ‘If they don’t laugh, I feel they don’t like you. The dangerous path you tread, I think, as a comic, is that it is you. You know, they’re not saying, “Oh well, she was very good but the play was terrible,” they say, “We didn’t like her.”’13

Physical appeal If the relationships we have with comedians are akin to those we have with real acquaintances, then we must like them for the same kind of reasons. Part of the appeal must be physical. We can find ourselves irrationally drawn to a stand-up’s voice, face, body, mannerisms or posture. I remember first seeing Eddie Izzard on the London comedy circuit when I was doing open mike spots at the end of the 1980s. Our paths crossed a number of times, and I was blown away by his ability to generate silly, surreal material, much of it seemingly on the spur of the moment. On a less rational level though, I loved the fact that his voice was so posh. This was tied up with my personal history. I’d gone through my teens as a middle-class kid in a comprehensive school where any trace of middle-classness in the voice, a vowel sound here or a slightly ostentatious word there, would provoke all the kids around you to turn the end of their noses up with their finger and emit a ridiculous aristocratic squawk. I was never terribly well spoken, but fear of the squawk had made me careful about how I talked. Izzard had

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a gloriously and unashamedly posh voice without sounding remotely like an upper-class twit. Hearing him talk was like listening to freedom, unfettered and unselfconscious. I’m not the only one who finds the sound of Izzard’s voice appealing. Alan Davies has said that as with Ken Dodd, Izzard’s voice is just funny in itself. The sonic properties of comedians’ voices clearly have a powerful effect, inspiring colourful prose from critics. Ben Thompson, for example, says Jo Brand’s voice ‘rustles with the beguiling timbre of a freshly opened tobacco pouch’ and that Jenny Éclair’s ‘fag-addled voice rasps like sandpaper on a velvet cushion.’14 Faces can be just as potent. Dan Leno, the music hall comedian whose work paved the way for fully-fledged stand-up comedy, had an extraordinary face, as many of his contemporaries commented. Archibald Haddon, for example, says, ‘Look at his picture now. That mouth, those eyes, those eyebrows, the knobbly bit on the top! Do you feel an inward chuckle – an inclination to smile?’15 Marie Lloyd, another great music hall comic, says that he had ‘the saddest eyes in the whole world’, adding, ‘if we hadn’t laughed we should have cried ourselves sick’.16 Max Beerbohm makes a similar observation in his obituary of Leno: ‘[T]hat face so tragic, with the tragedy that is writ on the face of a baby-monkey, yet ever liable to relax its mouth into a sudden wide grin and to screw up its eyes to vanishing point over some little triumph wrested from Fate, the tyrant.’17 Sometimes, it’s the whole physical package that appeals. In the variety era, Max Miller’s physicality inspired this almost embarrassingly rapturous description from the critic A. Crooks Ripley: Max has physical charm equivalent to that of an attractive woman, or, in vulgar terms, sex-appeal … Radio is not able to convey to the listener a picture of the finely shaped hands, idle, still, falling their full length as he stands, rarely seeking to aid the voice; most, most satisfying in gesture … or the walking movement, strong and limber, elegant,

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authoritative, overwhelming the incongruity of attire. Television in a close-up shot would show the scrumptious expression Max wears in particularly big moments, pinching his teeth with his cheeks as if he were sucking a pungent acid-drop, the yolks of the eyes looking towards heaven through his panama … but it would miss-out the way the expanse of the whites match the collar and white and black shoes.18 Sometimes the aspect of a comedian’s physicality that appeals to the audience becomes very obvious, like when Billy Connolly shaved his beard off at the beginning of the 1990s. Throughout his rise to fame, he sported a long, hippy-style, goatee beard, and when he decided to get rid of it for a while, the event received much media attention. A newspaper critic confided, ‘I’m worried about the beard … It isn’t there any more, and it makes Connolly look younger, saner and unpleasantly professional.’19 Television interviewer Michael Parkinson, an old friend of Connolly’s agreed, saying, ‘I feel it took away that wonderful sort of lunatic aspect of him.’20 Connolly was defiant towards his critics: When I whipped the beard off, a lot of people were quite distressed. People would ask, ‘Aren’t you concerned about your image?’ I gave it a lot of thought, and came to the conclusion that your image is nothing at all to do with you. It’s none of your damn business. People who try to get an image are usually astrologers and other fuckwits on breakfast television with funny pullovers.21 Whether it was any of his audience’s damn business or not, it was an issue he had to address in his act. Footage from the time shows him coming on to the stage beardless, in a shirt tie-dyed in multicoloured stripes. While taking the applause, there are visible signs of embarrassment. After saying, ‘Hello,’ he touches his face, looks to one side, and grunts with good-humoured self-consciousness. Having created a certain

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expectation, perhaps even a little tension, he says, ‘What do you mean, “Who the fuck are you?” it’s me!”’ The audience laugh, and he laughs with them, but he’s still slightly hesitant. He runs his fingers over his chin where his beard used to be, then buries his face in his hands. ‘Whaddya think, isn’t it fucking awful?’22 There’s a big laugh. Showing masterful control, Connolly has brought any tension that might have been generated by his change of appearance out into the open, defusing it so that he can move on. He’s not the only comedian who is aware of the importance of physicality. Ken Dodd is said to have taken out insurance on his teeth, which protrude as a result of a childhood cycling accident. Phill Jupitus is large both in height and breadth. This contrasts nicely with the surprising delicacy of some of his comedy, and he’s aware of how effective this can be: ‘[I]t’s odd to have the juxtaposition of a very large, prepossessing person appearing delicate and subtle, and I suddenly realised that had more visual power to it than me coming on as a big bloke, being a big bloke.’23 Mark Lamarr gives a different kind of testament to the power of physicality. Laughing at his own misanthropy, he explains his preference for comedy albums over videos by saying, ‘I think the things that are annoying about humans are just lessened on tape. You’ve only got their voice to be annoyed by.’24

We hate comedians Lamarr’s comment reveals an interesting point – if we can like comedians for the same kind of reasons as we like people we meet in everyday life, then we can also dislike them for similar reasons. The voice, the face, the body, the attitude, the onstage manner might make us hate the person behind the microphone. It’s certainly true that some comedians, whilst inspiring affection and admiration from their fans, provoke loathing in others. AA Gill writes scathingly about Bob

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Monkhouse, in terms so luxuriously vicious as to suggest a genuine, personal hatred: A deep and fundamental loathing of every syllable and nuance of Monkhouse is one of the cornerstones of my critical edifice. If I ever found I liked Bob Monkhouse, my world would collapse; I’d have to question civilisation as we know it … It’s not that his material is bad; they are jokes as dumb and pointless as contextless jokes invariably are. It’s his delivery that’s like being touched up by a Moonie encyclopaedia salesman. Every mannerism drips insincerity and smarm. No, it’s like having margarine massaged into your hair. No, it’s like wearing marzipan socks.25 Understandably, Monkhouse was unhappy about such attacks. A sympathetic interview written shortly after the Gill diatribe notes that Monkhouse has spent ‘a lifetime irritating people in the name of light entertainment’, with critics using words like ‘despicable’, ‘slimy’ and ‘chilling’ to describe him. Confronted with this, Monkhouse says, ‘What I hate is people like AA Gill who attack me personally and who are blisteringly unpleasant. I inhabit that persona he rejects – and it hurts. In the same way that someone refusing to shake your hand is hurtful.’26 More recently, Jimmy Carr has attracted a similar kind of personal attack. A review of the candidates on the shortlist for the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002 sees Veronica Lee describe him as an ‘inhabitant of the Planet Twat’, saying: Jimmy Carr divides critical and fellow comics’ opinion – you either love him or loathe him – and I am firmly in the latter camp. I’m not a violent person and am fully aware of comics assuming a stage persona, but whenever I see Carr I have to be physically restrained from smacking his smug face.27

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Being disliked isn’t always a sign of comic failure though, and for Alexei Sayle, being dislikeable was a positive choice, which marked him out from the rest: What was unique about me as a comic was that what all comics possibly apart from me are seeking is … affection and love from an audience. I didn’t care about that. I didn’t want their affection. I didn’t wanna be their mate. But I wanted their approval … I had a desperate desire for their approval as evinced in their laughter. But I didn’t care if they liked me. In fact, I liked it if they didn’t like me – but they had to laugh anyway.28 Mark Lamarr – a big fan of Sayle – is scathing about comics who want to be liked: It’s very easy to just charm some strangers, and I think a lot of comedy is merely that … When I watch comics, and they say, ‘All I wanna do is connect with the audience,’ [I think,] ‘Well what’s the fucking point of that? You can connect with people in a cake shop!’ Anyone can connect with people, you just agree with what they say. Lamarr would sometimes make himself deliberately dislikeable as an exercise to test his own ability: [O]ccasionally (and it was probably a little foolish), sometimes when I was really bored, in like an Edinburgh run or something, I would go on and just be as hateful as possible for the first ten [or] fifteen [minutes], as unfunny, and just spiteful and egregious, like till they just couldn’t fucking stand the sight of me, and then I’d go, ‘I’ll make you laugh now.’ And I would do it. And I generally could pull it off. And there was a real sense of accomplishment … ‘Yeah, they fucking hated me … and it must’ve killed them to have laughed at me so hard throughout that.’ And … I don’t know what that is, and I can’t explain it and I can’t

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even justify it ‘cos it sounds really horrible, but it was the case.29 It may be that the gags Sayle and Lamarr told were funny enough to override the audience’s antipathy, but there’s probably more to it than that. If the performer-audience relationship in stand-up is like any other interpersonal relationship, then it must be capable of being just as varied and complex. Hostages can form emotional bonds with their kidnappers. The crazy kid at school who questions the teacher and doles out devastating insults to classmates, or the rebel who bucks the system at work, can be fun to watch from a distance. The people we admire are not necessarily always people we like.

When audiences love too much Two of the most popular stand-ups working today – one British, one American – are also disliked by a significant number of critics and fellow comedians. There’s a curious symmetry to the kind of criticism that’s been levelled at Michael McIntyre and Dane Cook. McIntyre is held to be bland, cosy or even rather conservative. One critic described him as a ‘nice, safe, middle-England comedian’ while another has dubbed him ‘a comic for the [David] Cameron age’.30 Stewart Lee – who has been fingered as McIntyre’s chief critic – argues that, ‘McIntyre’s massively popular and superevolved brand of observational schtick is regarded with baffled ambivalence by many comedians’.31 Onstage, a number of comedians have subjected McIntyre to comic invective. The most widely-quoted example is Lee’s memorable line, in which he accused part of his own audience of sitting at home watching McIntyre on television ‘spoon feeding you his warm diarrhoea’32 – although we’ll come back to this gag later on. Asked by Kirsty Young on Desert

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Island Discs about ‘the envy that is heaped upon you … and sometimes derision’, McIntyre admitted that he was ‘getting used to it, but it did come as a shock at the beginning’. He had been subjected to an ‘amazing amount of hostility’ and was particularly upset by being ridiculed at the British Comedy Awards: ‘[T]he overriding experience was that of, of nastiness.’33 On the other side of the Atlantic there’s Dane Cook, who one journalist described as ‘the contemporary American comic for whom there is the greatest disparity between mass appeal and peer respect’. Again, the criticism centres on blandness. Paul Provenza acknowledges Cook’s ‘talent and gifts’ but feels he has ‘no artistry’. For Doug Stanhope, ‘He acts like there’s substance, but there’s none.’34 Like McIntyre, Cook has spoken about being hurt by the barrage of criticism, building a whole stage routine out of it. He tells his audience what happened when he looked himself up on Google and found, ‘like, 87 “Dane Cook Sucks” pages and four videos about why I should die and all these countless blogs’. By this point, people in the audience are starting to boo and jeer the online abuse which he’s describing. Cook then breaks the feeling he’s built up with a gag, saying, ‘I read for four and a half hours and I finally said out loud, “You know what, this Dane Cook is a douchebag!” [laughter]’35 So why should these comics have attracted such conspicuous opprobrium? It’s been suggested that it all springs from jealousy of their success, but other popular comics haven’t attracted the same level of scorn. Cook has been accused of plagiarizing material from Louis C. K., but close investigation of the routines in question suggest that such allegations are essentially groundless. Even the accusations of blandness and lack of substance don’t really hold water. It’s true that McIntyre has openly admitted he isn’t interested in ‘props, gimmicks and depth’, only being funny36 – tellingly putting ‘depth’ on the same level of worthlessness as props and gimmicks. Nonetheless, McIntyre bases much of his material on acute observations of everyday experiences, taking an

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approach not dissimilar from, say, Jerry Seinfeld – who is revered by fellow comics on both sides of the Atlantic. I’d argue that what McIntyre and Cook have in common is the intensity of their relationship with their fans. The problem is not so much the size of their respective crowds, but more how these crowds behave during the shows. In addition to welcoming them on to the stage with applause, whistling and excitable yelling, these audiences show unusual signs of devotion to their comic heroes. At the O2 Arena, McIntyre goes into a routine about his children, Lucas and Oscar, and the mere mention of their names brings whistles of approval from a surprisingly large number of punters.37 This is a comedian who is so popular that even his children have fans. True, some of the whistling might have been in recognition of previous routines he’s done about them, but my take is that it’s also a sign of the level of affection the audience feel for McIntyre. Through his act, they feel like they know him personally in a kind of pseudo friendship, and as they’re friends he has introduced them to his children – via the medium of stand-up routines. Cook also inspires unusual noises of affection, but in his case from punters who seem to want to be more than just friends. In one of his concert recordings, he tells the audience, ‘I had a one – night – stand recently.’ This unleashes ecstatic whooping and applause from a fair number of female fans, presumably excited at the idea that he’s about to share intimate secrets of a sexual situation. He picks up on their reaction: ‘– with all those chicks you just heard, it was nuts! [laughter]’ Even though he’s joking, the fact he’s suggesting that he might have had carnal knowledge of these women makes them applaud and yell with approval, leading him to comment on what a ‘very sexual crowd’ it is.38 Both comics work to win their audience’s affection. At the beginning of his first live DVD, McIntyre bounds on at the beginning with his trademark skip, apparently bursting with happiness at being with his crowd: ‘Come on! Whoo hoo! We’re here! It’s the Hammersmith Apollo! It’s my show! How

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exciting!’39 At the O2 Arena, he finishes the show by shouting, ‘What fun we’ve had!’ It seems like a spontaneous effusion of mutual joy – celebrating the intensity of what has been shared between performer and audience – although the effect is slightly blunted when he says it again at the end of the encore. He also avoids saying things that might alienate sections of his audience. In an episode of his Comedy Roadshow, he tells the audience in Belfast that he’s a football fan, adding, ‘I don’t want to name my team because it makes people not like me.’40 Cook brazenly plays on the sexual element in his audience’s attraction to him, starting by telling them, ‘We are going to have a relationship tonight.’ There’s some laughter, a bit of applause, and some excitable yelling. ‘I’m gonna go out with you,’ he goes on, ‘we’re gonna date for a while. We’re gonna make sweet, sweet comedy love with each other.’ Some more female whooping. ‘And then suddenly without warning, I’m not even gonna call you guys any more. [laughter]’41 The gag might suggest that he’d be an unreliable lover for his audience, but in fact he faithfully cultivates his audience’s affection offstage, not only through social networking websites, but also, as one journalist noted, he ‘will sign every last autograph after a show and treats his fans with gracious, even unprecedented respect.’42 This respect comes out onstage in a routine in which he tells the audience how being with them helped him deal with the death of both his parents from cancer: ‘I found myself almost every single night after they both passed away onstage because nothing made me feel better than making other people feel good and having a good time with you guys.’43 This statement unleashes a tidal wave of frenzied applause cheering and whistling from the crowd at the Halifax Metro Center in Novia Scotia. There are critics of both comics who have focused more on their fans than the performers themselves. Doug Stanhope has stated, ‘I’m aghast at part of this species. I don’t hate Dane Cook. I hate the people that laugh at Dane Cook.’44 Stewart Lee’s ‘warm diarrhoea’ joke is, in fact, much more complex

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than the simple savage jibe that it suggests when quoted out of context. It’s delivered during a routine in which Lee is deliberately trying to suggest that he’s struggling to get a laugh, and that only part of his audience are going with him. At least part of the joke is that his own core audience – who are clever enough to get what he’s trying to do – have been thinned out by the kind of people who would sit at home and watch McIntyre on TV. In fact, Lee’s audience is likely to be made up of people who consider themselves to be discerning comedy punters, and as such rather above watching the hit comedian of the day. This means the joke works on several levels. It’s partly about Lee pretending his comedy is failing – for comic effect – and it’s partly about his feigned arrogance in blaming the audience for his failure. As discerning punters, the audience can feel safe in the knowledge that he’s only kidding when he lays into them, and also enjoy the jibe at face value – as a gag at the expense of both McIntyre and the kind of people who watch him on television. A later joke from the same show is even more specific in targeting McIntyre’s audience. After accusing his own crowd – who he describes as the ‘fucking liberal intelligentsia of Glasgow’ – of being the kind of people who would harm his DVD sales by illegally downloading material from the internet, he shouts: ‘That’s not a problem Michael McIntyre has with his audience. [laughter] 1.3 million of them queuing up at Christmas to buy his DVD. Like captured partisans digging their own mass grave. [laughter and applause]’45 For comics and critics who look for artistry in comedy, the problem with the ‘part of this species’ that laughs at Cook, or the ‘captured partisans’ that follow McIntyre, is that they love these comedians too much. People who don’t share this love find nothing in the work of Cook or McIntyre to justify it, but perhaps their real talent – perhaps even their artistry – is simply to be able to inspire this affection in the first place. What frustrates their critics is that such affection is essentially

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irrational, but this irrational pseudo friendship is actually a central part of how most stand-up works.

Trying too hard Some comedians reject the idea of trying to make audiences like them. In a 2004 interview, Billy Connolly says: ‘When you’re a comedian, trying to make yourself likeable cancels out what you’re trying to do. There’s a fine line between doing your stuff properly and being liked. I want my audience to laugh, sure, but I don’t necessarily want to be liked.’46 This is a useful point, because just as people who try too hard to be liked in their social circle in everyday life often turn people off them with the slight air of desperation they give off, stand-ups who are overly concerned with being liked can make themselves dislikeable. This is probably what lies behind the hatred Bob Monkhouse inspired in some critics. Words like ‘insincerity, ‘smarm’ and ‘slimy’ suggest they objected to what they saw as his attempts to ingratiate himself with them. Adam Bloom, who delivers clever, offbeat gags in a mildly hyperactive style, likens performing to his relationships with women. He says he tries too hard with women he fancies, whereas he is more relaxed and natural with women he doesn’t, which, perversely tends to make him more attractive to them. Different gigs have a similar effect: Now I think a nice gig is when you drop your guard and you’re just being completely genuine, and you’re not trying to impress them … The thing is, when you’re actually doing a gig where the crowd isn’t sure about you, you try a bit hard to impress them, and then you’re putting on a bit of a front, so desperation’s going to come across.47 Interestingly, Michael McIntyre identifies the point where he started really hitting home with audiences as the moment

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when he lost his ‘air of desperation’ onstage, and stopped trying too hard to be funny.48

Self-expression One of the reasons most comics fear being disliked by an audience is because stand-up is seen as a form of selfexpression. If it is the self that is being expressed, then it is the self that the audience is rejecting. This is why Bob Monkhouse found AA Gill’s attack so hurtful, like the personal rejection of someone who refuses to shake your hand. The more authentic the self-expression, the more comedians reveal their true selves on stage, the more painful it will be if they are rejected. Stand-up hasn’t always been about self-expression, though. Older comics, like the phenomenally successful Bob Hope, did not reveal themselves in this way. Hope paid his writers to come up with comic ‘poses’ for him, and one of them said that he was ‘a manufactured personality, constructed out of jokes’.49 The common view is that Hope never revealed much of himself either onstage or offstage. In the 1970s, Joan Rivers said, ‘Audiences nowadays want to know their comedian. Can you please tell me one thing about Bob Hope? If you only listened to his material, would you know the man?’50 This distance might have made it easier for Hope to cope with hostile audiences. It was the sick comedians who introduced the idea of stand-up as self-expression. Part of what made older comics resent and fear Mort Sahl was that he spoke his mind onstage. Sahl himself said that most comedians were ‘no more than a card file’, whereas he ‘acted like a human being rather than like a nightclub comedian’.51 Some established comedians, like Alan King, saw the new style, realised its potency and adopted it themselves, rejecting a gag-based style in favour of expressing their opinions.

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Today, the idea that the comedian’s act should reflect his or her real personality is commonplace. Comedian-turnedplaywright Patrick Marber argues that stand-up is based on the premise: ‘This is my view of the world, this is my little angle on life.’52 Frank Skinner agrees: ‘I’ve never been so crazy about character-comics. You know, people who just play a part on stage. I know it can be really funny but, personally, I like to know the person who’s up there. I want their opinions and attitudes … If I want characters, I’ll watch a play.’53 Similarly, surreal comic Harry Hill dismisses the working men’s club comedians of the past whose style was based on unoriginal gags: ‘That’s not art, that’s kind of craft, isn’t it? But then I think once everyone started doing their own material, most people are putting over … something about themselves, no matter how hidden it is.’54

Notes 1

‘Copyright in Personality; VAF and Brussels Convention’, The Era, vol.101 no.5207, 21 July 1938, p. 1

2

David Cross, Bigger and Blackerer, Sub Pop Records, 2010, SP883. Note that this is the DVD version of the show that was taped over two shows in one night. The CD version presents a different selection of material, and omits this sequence.

3

Funny Business, BBC Two, 29 November 1992

4

Quoted in Phil Berger, The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, p. 423

5

Quoted in Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 546

6

The South Bank Show, ITV, 15 September 1996

7

Sarah Millican, Chatterbox Live, 4 DVD, 2011, C4DVD10358

8

Stand-Up with Alan Davies, BBC One, 19 June 2000

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9

GETTING THE JOKE See David Tushingham (ed.), Live 2: Not What I Am: The Experience of Performing, London: Methuen, 1995, p.42

10 http://www.livejournal.com/community/eddieizzard/ [accessed 11 October 2004] 11 See Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 567 (Bill Cosby); and Neil Brandwood, Victoria Wood: The Biography, London: Virgin Books, 2002, p. viii (Victoria Wood) 12 See Cynthia True, American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002, p. xv (Sean Hughes); and Garry Mulholland, ‘When Eddie Met Henry’, Time Out, 2–9 December 1998, pp. 22–5 (Eddie Izzard) 13 Quoted in Stand-Up with Alan Davies, BBC One, 3 July 2000 14 See Ben Thompson, Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office, London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004, p. 137 (Jo Brand), p. 139 (Jenny Éclair) 15 Archibald Haddon, The Story of Music Hall, London: Fleetway, 1935, p. 91 16 Quoted in Gyles Brandreth, The Funniest Man on Earth: The Story of Dan Leno, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977, p. 46 17 Max Beerbohm, The Bodley Head Max Beerbohm (ed. David Cecil), London, Sydney and Toronto: The Bodley Head, 1970, p. 376 18 A. Crooks Ripley, Vaudeville Pattern, London: Brownlee, 1942, p. 37 19 Adam Sweeting, ‘It’s the way he tells ‘em – Adam Sweeting on the contradiction that is Billy Connolly’, the Guardian, 13 June 1991, Arts section 20 Quoted in Adam Sweeting, ‘From Big Yin to Big Yank’, the Guardian, 2 December 1992, Features p. 4 21 Adam Sweeting, ‘From Big Yin to Big Yank’, the Guardian, 2 December 1992, Features p. 4 22 The South Bank Show, ITV, 4 September 1992 23 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004

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24 Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004 25 A. A. Gill, ‘The Devil’s Work’, the Sunday Times, 9 August 1998, Features section 26 Nigel Farndale, ‘Insincerely Yours: After Five Decades of Irritating People in the Name of Light Entertainment, Bob Monkhouse Has Finally Been Recognised as a National Living Treasure. Nigel Farndale Tries to Work out Why’, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 13 September 1998, p. 26 27 Veronica Lee, ‘All Present and Politically Correct’, the Observer, 25 August 2002, Review section p. 11 28 Interview with Alexei Sayle, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003 29 Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004 30 Steve Bennett from the Chortle website, quoted in Brian Logan, ‘Boom, boom: They’ve taken over TV, they top the book charts, they appear on Question Time – and now they’re filling entire arenas night after night. Brian Logan on the standup comedy explosion’, the Guardian, 11 November 2010, p. 19; and Paul MacInnes, ‘Michael McIntyre: a comedian for the Cameron age’, Guardian Unlimited, 20 November 2009 31 Stewart Lee, ‘A funny thing happened to comedy … Stand-up shows are now big business. Floating in the stars’ slipstream, Stewart Lee wonders if his art-form can survive such success’, the Independent, 28 November 2010, p. 2 32 Stewart Lee, If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, Comedy Central/Real Talent, 2010, COMEDY01 33 Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 22 July 2011 34 Steve Johnson, ‘The hated Dane Cook wins over at least one fellow comic’, Chicago Tribune, 13 May 2009 35 ‘Haters’ on Dane Cook, ISolated INcident, Comedy Central Records, 2009, COMC30085.2 36 Michael McIntyre, Life & Laughing, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 325 37 Michael McIntyre, Showtime, O2 Arena, London, 27 September 2012

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38 ‘One night stand/DJ Diddles’ on Dane Cook, Retaliation, Comedy Central Records, 2005, 300304, disc two 39 Michael McIntyre, Live & Laughing, Universal, 2008, 8258740 40 McIntyre’s opening routine from this episode is included as part of an extra feature on the DVD: Michael McIntyre, Hello Wembley!, Universal, 2008, 8270608 41 ‘Intro/Riot’ on Dane Cook, Retaliation, Comedy Central Records, 2005, 300304, disc one 42 Associated Press, ‘Is Dane Cook Actually Funny?’, http:// today.msnbc.msn.com/id/15643423/ns/today-entertainment/t/ dane-cook-actually-funny/ [accessed 19 October 2012] 43 ‘Dane Cook – Haters’ available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=h-q5tAlPFts [accessed 22 October 2012] 44 Steve Johnson, ‘The hated Dane Cook wins over at least one fellow comic’, Chicago Tribune, 13 May 2009 45 Stewart Lee, If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, Comedy Central/Real Talent, 2010, COMEDY01 46 Christopher Middleton, ‘Silly Billy’, Radio Times, 20–6 November 2004, p. 34 47 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004 48 Michael McIntyre, Life & Laughing, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 267. Like Bloom, he links this with his personal life, saying that his future wife started taking more interest in him when he stopped trying too hard. 49 Sherwood Schwartz, quoted in John Lahr, Show and Tell, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 203. Also see pp. 210, 213 for more on this. 50 Quoted in Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 22 51 Quoted in Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 94

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52 Quoted in David Tushingham (ed.), Live 2: Not What I Am: The Experience of Performing, London: Methuen, 1995, p. 96 53 Frank Skinner, Frank Skinner, London: Century, 2001, p. 80 54 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004

CHAPTER NINE

The personality spectrum Who is Omid Djalili? British Iranian comedian Omid Djalili is on the stage, talking in a thick Arab accent which separates the word ‘Israel’ into three distinct syllables: Iz-rye-ell. His delivery is rich with cheerful enthusiasm, which excites the audience. Their laughter is energetic and frequently breaks out into spontaneous applause: But of course, ahhh – I am circumcised. [laughter] But I’m having many psychological problem because I’ve had one third of my doo-dah removed, er – [a few laughs] And many people say, ‘You are an Arab, all Arab have one third of doo-dah removed as child,’ I say, ‘Yes, but not the third in the middle, you know?’ [laughter] ‘S a prime example of an Arab knob gag, thank you very much, er – [laughter]’ The laughter comes not just from the joke itself, but also from person telling it, and the fact that he lets the audience know what he is doing by stoking up their laughter with little comments like ‘Of course!’ But the Arab is not all he seems to be: ‘Look, I know I give an impression of being a short, fat, kebab-shop-owning, ahh – [laughter] I know what you are thinking. Er – but inside of me,’ – suddenly, in the space of a

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comma, he changes his voice to that of a well-spoken, middleclass Englishman and continues: there’s an English ponce, erm, screaming – [laughter] screaming to get out, because, erm – Yeah, no, I don’t talk like that at all, ladies and gentlemen, er – And actually, the reason why I’m here is, er – ‘Cos – I’ll tell you something – at the office, they said I was really funny. [laughter] You know what I mean? [laughter continues and erupts into full applause, cheering and whistles. The response dies down, and then there’s another surge of laughter] The audience go mad, because they realise that they’ve been had. The man talking into the microphone does not have the Arab accent with which he started the act, he’s an overenthusiastic middle-class office worker, probably like some of them. They clearly recognise the type: ‘Thought I’d give it a go, and ahh – [laughter] Actually, erm – I’ll be honest, I’m not the funniest bloke at the office, erm – [laughter] I’m the second funniest bloke, erm – ‘Cos Keith is nuts! [laughter]’1 This is a practical joke at the audience’s expense. We have come to expect stand-up to be a form of self-expression, so we tend to assume that the comedians we see onstage are more or less playing themselves. We see an olive-skinned person with the authentically Middle Eastern name of Omid Djalili on stage, so when he speaks with a thick Arab accent, we assume it’s genuine. When the accent switches, the joke is revealed. Our stereotypes have been challenged as we realise how ordinary this office nutcase is, without any of the ethnic baggage that’s been projected on to him. But this is still not the real Djalili. He was an actor, not an office worker, before he became a comedian. It’s another fake persona, which Djalili created to get the maximum comic effect out of the practical joke: Comedy’s all about putting opposites next to each other,



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so I thought … ‘Who would be the most surprising person to do this really loud character?’ and decided [on] the stupid office bloke, you know … I just thought to play off the Arab character, you’ve got to find the most diametrically opposed character … that character then becomes a running gag, because then that’s not me … you merge yourself into it.2 Stephen K. Amos used to play a very similar trick, playing on his own background by starting his act in a heavy Nigerian accent, flirting outrageously with women in the audience: ‘Uhh, look at this pretty lady, don’t fight it, I can tell by your eyes that you want me. Mm? [laughter]’ Then the accent is abruptly dropped – replaced by cooler, more cynical Cockney tones – as he confesses, ‘Oh, fuck it, I can’t keep it up, er –’ Uproarious laughter gives way to applause and cheering, over which he tells them: ‘It’s all a joke. I’ve never left the country! [laughter]’3 For Amos, the idea behind this was to ‘play on people’s perceptions [of] who they think I am.’ He wanted to come out in a character that was totally believable … And see what they’d laugh at while talking as that character … And it was really quite interesting to do that … they buy into that character and then the minute you flip it and go, ‘Actually, I’m one of you, I’ve never been to Africa in my life,’ that was very good, for me. The audience didn’t always see the funny side when he revealed the practical joke he had played on them: [I]n fact I could work quite hard at that because in the early days when I used to do that, some of the audience used to get really pissed off that I had taken them in, and removed a rug from under their carpets, so I had to find a way of doing it that wasn’t so kind of, ‘Yah! See! Got you!’ But more subtle that that.4

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The prank that Djalili and Amos played on their respective audiences is very clever, because it exploits the ambiguity of identity at the centre of stand-up comedy. It’s tempting to see stand-ups as falling into two categories – character comedians and those who perform as themselves. In fact there is not so much of a clear dividing line between the two as a continuous spectrum of approaches, each example subtly shading into the next.

Character comedians At one end of the personality spectrum are character comedians. There’s a clear division between Steve Coogan and the various guises he adopts in his stand-up act: Paul Calf, the drunken, working-class Manchester lad in false moustache and blond wig styled in a way that would shame even a 1980s footballer; Pauline Calf, Paul’s sister, telling tales of promiscuity, in cascading blond curls that reek of trashy glamour; Duncan Thicket, the impossibly crap new comedian in nasty shell suit top and woolly hat; and Ernest Moss, the tedious northern safety officer in boiler suit and hard hat. The separation between comedian and character is clearly signalled by the theatrical costumes, the wigs, the make-up, the names he gives them and the very fact that he appears in multiple identities. The distance between performer and character can be shocking. Harry Enfield, who performed characters in his stand-up act before using them in TV sketch shows, writes about being approached by a man in the street who says, ‘You’re Harry Enfield, aren’t you? I love your characters! Stavros cracks me up and as for Loadsamoney – he’s the biz! But I saw you on Wogan last night – you’re a right prat in real life, aren’t you?’5 Similarly, Bob Monkhouse recalled his shock at being introduced to Rex Jameson, the performer behind the comedy drag act Mrs Shufflewick: ‘[T]he mere idea that this five-foot twenty-three-year-old with a face like a young Buster



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Keaton could have been the dirty old woman I’d seen on the stage of both the Windmill and the Metropolitan, Edgware Road, seemed incredible.’6 Al Murray has enjoyed a hugely successful stand-up career in the guise of the Pub Landlord, a character he developed almost by accident at the 1994 Edinburgh Fringe. He was working on Harry Hill’s Pub Internationale, and on the opening night – when they realised they needed somebody to link the various items – he volunteered to compère the show. The conceit was that the actual MC hadn’t turned up, so the manager of the bar where they were performing had been called on to step in at the last minute. The show was nominated for the Perrier Award, and went on a long tour. By the end of it, Murray had a character he could base an act on. The Pub Landlord is hectoring, boorish and xenophobic, with a cast iron certainty of his own opinions no matter how glaringly illogical they may be. Murray explains that ‘the most obvious thing’ about the character is that: [H]e really is not me, and he couldn’t be any less like me. But he’s a good starting point. I mean the thing is if I had to do me … I literally don’t know where to start. I mean I’m interested in all sorts of diverse and disparate things that I know perfectly well no self-respecting audience is ever going to want me to talk about – and certainly not going to laugh at … the Pub Landlord is an immediate way of dealing with that issue. He goes on to explain how he approaches the role as a performer: I don’t disappear into him. It’s not a Stanislavskian thing. I mean I think a lot of him now has become a tuned reflex … I’m not thinking, ‘What does he have for breakfast? What’s his middle name?’ I have a very pragmatic approach to that which is if his middle name’s funny then I know what his middle name is. If what he had for breakfast is

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funny then I’ll know what he had for breakfast … rather than that Stanislavski or that Method idea that you need to know everything about the character and everything that’s happened to him. The character’s invented backstory – a train wreck of a social life, with a failed marriage and repressed homosexual desires – all serves to underscore the satire, highlighting the ridiculousness of his view of the world. Moreover, the clear distinction between performer and character means that when the Pub Landlord says something offensive or ignorant, this is the character’s opinion, not Murray’s: ‘Every now and again I think, “Oh my God, did I say that?”… And certainly watching videos back and stuff, when I’m in an edit suite I find the whole thing really quite appalling … you know, like, “How am I getting away with this?” But it is the fool’s licence …’7

Exaggerated personas Further along the spectrum are stand-ups who adopt an exaggerated persona but leave the dividing line between performer and persona unclear. Comics like Joan Rivers and Jenny Éclair might have stage names and wear outlandish clothes, but they use both names and clothes offstage as well as on. For the audience, it’s easy to mistake the persona for the person. For the comedian, the dividing line between the two is clearer. Rivers acknowledges that her act is partly autobiographical, but sees her persona as ‘like a party dress I put on’.8 Éclair has divided her wardrobe into sections, one end for her offstage self the other for her stage persona. In her car stereo, she has tapes for herself and tapes for her onstage character.9 Milton Jones is a mid-spectrum act who is probably closer to the character comedian end than the performing-as-himself end. His appearance is plausible but startling. The hair is gelled into weird, spiky shapes. The garish Hawaiian shirts



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and charity shop pullovers he wears are exquisitely unfashionable. His delivery suggests somebody who is endearingly unhinged – the voice slow, rather deep and sonorous, the face sometimes wrinkling as though disorientated, or perhaps breaking into an idiot grin. Jones refers to his onstage self in the third person, calling it ‘the character’. It’s as strange as his material. Here’s a typical excerpt. I’ve split it into lines to suggest the pauses he uses, and noted how long each big laugh is to indicate the efficiency of his comedy: I was walking along today – [a few laughs] And on the pavement – I saw a small, dead, baby ghost. [a few laughs] Although thinking about it – It might’ve been a handkerchief. [laughter: 19 seconds] Before we start – [laughter] I’d just like to say, er – to the old man – Who was wearing camouflage gear, and using crutches who stole my wallet earlier – You can hide, but you can’t run. [laughter and clapping: 10 seconds] Tell me – if you’re an earl, and you get an OBE – do you become an earlobe? [laughter: 9 seconds] You know – when you’re in a relationship – What’s that like? [laughter and a few claps: 8 seconds] Sometimes I think I should settle down and have a mature relationship, but then I think to myself – it’s the middle of the conker season! [laughter: 10 seconds]10 It’s comedy that disrupts normal thought processes: everyday objects are seen in an extraordinary new light; old sayings are reversed, and words moulded into new shapes; an introduction to an observational bit about relationships becomes an admission of loneliness; a grown man is more interested in childhood games than girlfriends. Jones invented the character to provide a context for his mindmashing comedy:

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The character didn’t really evolve for four or five years. And as I began to do that, I put hair wax in and put on a silly jumper … that’s provided more of a signpost for the type of material I was doing. Probably sort of helped me, especially in the harder clubs, you know, Romford on a Monday night or something, where some slightly middleclass bloke coming along and doing slightly wordplay stuff was somehow a bit threatening. Whereas if you stick your hair up and put on a jumper, ‘Oh, ‘e’s mad!’ It’s OK then.11

Exactly as I am At the far end of the spectrum from character comedians are acts where the person we see onstage appears to be an authentic human being, unaffected by the process of performance. Jo Brand says that the person she projects onstage differs from her offstage self ‘hardly at all, to be honest’, chuckling as she qualifies this, adding, ‘I mean hardly at all in public anyway.’12 Margaret Cho argues that her very personal approach separates her from other stand-ups: I think a lot of people, like, are in a performance and [have] really separate identities … I don’t have, like, a character or whatever, to me it’s just kind of the same – what I talk about … and what makes me laugh in life in general makes it into my work in some way. So I think I have less of a … separation between the two.13 For Sarah Millican, ‘the persona is exactly as I am.’ She is aware of the contrast between how she looks and what she talks about in her act – looking like ‘a relatively frumpy sort of woman’ and talking about ‘filth’, to use her own words – but this is an honest representation of herself, rather than an artful construction:



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It was quite organic, it was never: ‘Well I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If I wear something flowery, they’re never gonna think I’m gonna talk about filth!’ It was just that I talked about filth … This is what I’m like in the house. I’m rude in the house and I swear a lot in the house … it was never a conscious decision to look like that and say those things as a contrast. It just so happens that that sort of juxtaposition was quite natural … there was quite a nice quote that I looked like a schoolteacher, but with the mouth of a biker. Almost perfectly sums me up at the time.14 This kind of approach means laying the self bare. As the American writer David Marc puts it: Without the protection of the formal mask of a narrative drama, without a song, dance, or any other intermediary composition that creates distance between performer and performance, without even, necessarily, some remarkable physical trait or ability to gratuitously display, the stand-up comedian addresses an audience as a naked self, eschewing the luxury of a clear cut distinction between art and life.15 Veteran alternative comedian Tony Allen also uses the analogy of nakedness: ‘A raconteur comedian walks on stage relatively naked. He speaks directly to the audience in the first person.’16 Phill Jupitus extends the analogy, likening stand-up to the commercial exploitation of sex: I’ve always had this belief that you have to have something wrong with you to want to do stand-up, because it is putting yourself (particularly as a performer) in possibly the most vulnerable position you can be in, aside from the people that fuck each other in Amsterdam for money, you know. I think it’s really baring and putting yourself out there…17

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For some stand-ups, the self they reveal onstage is actually more naked than their offstage self. Victoria Wood, for example, has said: ‘I used to feel that the real me was on the stage and the rest of me was fumbling to catch up … That when I was on stage it was talking honestly and communicating with people, that I had difficulty doing the rest of the time.’18

The person in the persona But even the concept of a continuous spectrum from character to naked self does not really capture the subtle interweaving of truth and fiction in the onstage identities of stand-up comedians, as Milton Jones points out: I think that…there are two types of comedian in the sense that there are some who are completely the same offstage as they are onstage, and then there are those who are more of an act. And even people who appear to be themselves, it’s a heightened version… it’s like part of them, it’s them on showing off mode or whatever it is. And I think that even my character is a part of me. Feeling slightly outside things sometimes. And so rather than attempt to join in, I’ll accentuate the outsider in me.19 He’s not the only performer from near the character end of the spectrum to feel that the heightened persona presented onstage is actually derived from an authentic part of the self. Johnny Vegas – a shambling, self-pitying, apparently drunken figure who appears onstage wearing an unlikely ensemble of brown leather jacket and old-fashioned gentleman’s trousers turned into flares by having shiny yellow triangles sewn into them – seems to be a creature of pure fiction. This is reinforced by the name. Professionally, he is Johnny Vegas; in everyday life, Mike Pennington.



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The tales of woe with which he wins over audience are wildly implausible. In a northern voice which sounds as if he has smoked 40 a day since birth, he shares his delusions about being a great entertainer and recalls his father sneering at his attempts to become a potter. As he gets into the act, the stories get stranger. He tells of a holiday to Wales, where the locals try to burn him as a witch because his Coco Pops have turned the milk brown, forcing him to escape dressed as a sheep, only to be captured, sexually abused and exhibited as a talking animal oddity.20 It seems cut and dried that Vegas is a purely fictional character, but the truth is not so simple. Pennington shares more than just a voice and a body with Vegas. Just as he says in his act, he really did study pottery at Middlesex, and he really did get a third-class degree. Offstage, Pennington sounds like Vegas, his accent originating from a working-class upbringing in St Helens. Like Vegas, Pennington is not averse to heavy drinking, and enjoys the ambiguity surrounding the apparent onstage drunkenness: ‘My character, Johnny Vegas, drinks on stage, but I think it’s better to maintain some sort of is-he-isn’t-he mystique, a bit like Dean Martin.’21 Harry Hill presents similar ambiguities. Like Johnny Vegas, he is towards the character end of the spectrum. It is difficult to reconcile the well-known fact that offstage he is an ex-doctor called Matthew Hall with the Dadaesque figure that scuttles around the stage in a flamboyant costume, dispensing bizarre non-sequiturs and myriad catchphrases, face and voice twitching with exaggerated mannerisms. It stretches credibility that he is like this in everyday life – walking down the road to post a letter with trademark beetle crushers on his feet, row of pens protruding from jacket pocket, head disappearing into a voluminous shirt collar; screwing up his face and saying ‘mm-mm’ while helping his children with their homework; kicking up his leg and shouting ‘Goal!’ as he opens his bank statement. The gap between onstage and offstage selves starts to yawn when he is interviewed. Appearing on a documentary in 2000,

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we see him in pretty much the full stage costume talking about his comedy calmly and rationally, in the guise of the normal human being that lies behind the persona. There are none of the usual verbal or physical tics.22 Hill prefers the kind of interview he does on the Des O’Connor show. Here, he can fully adopt his stage self because, ‘He asks me a question that leads directly to a gag.’ Appearing as his offstage self is less comfortable: I never wanted to do TV interviews or any of that crap, to be honest … I’ve got forced into it … I kind of can’t be bothered to carry it on … I prefer not to do them really, because I think it spoils it, actually, and I always admired that about Tommy Cooper … I don’t think you ever saw him being serious in anything, you know. Even on, like, Parkinson, he’d just do his act. But if the person is clearly distinct from the persona, this doesn’t mean that there is no point of contact between the two, and Hill explains that the person he becomes onstage is actually an element of his real personality: Normally, I’m quite shy (or I was a shy person, funnily enough, since doing comedy it’s made me more confident), but I think the stage persona is … confident, it’s the kind of show-off … What I love about it is being able to just show off and, you know, do the sort of silly things that you can’t get away with in your private life, basically. It’s a kind of release. It’s like going on stage and shouting. The fact that his persona is rooted in part of his personality, and isn’t just a simple fabricated character, gives lie to the criticism which has been levelled at Hill: that we learn nothing about him from his act, that it is not an outlet for self-expression as stand-up should be. Hill defends himself vigorously from this:



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I think that’s missing the point, really. ‘Cos I think people always say that … [Y]ou could criticise my act by saying, ‘It’s not about anything. You know, it’s just silly.’ But I think it says a lot, actually. Without getting too up-yourown-arse, just about the kind of human condition, really … [W]hat I’m saying, I think, is, ‘Everyone’s an idiot … what is the point? … Everyone’s as bad as everybody else. It’s ridiculous, it’s stupid.’ Sort of.23

Exaggeration Just as there are elements of authenticity in exaggerated personas, so there are elements of exaggeration in comedians who apparently go onstage as a naked self. Andre Vincent, who has an irresistible compulsion for sick jokes, describes his stage self as, ‘Maybe 10 per cent more. There might be a slight switch where I just kind of go, “Whoop!” and I go up one. Just a little bit bolder. But … the evil and spite is there throughout my whole life. It really is.’24 Mark Lamarr also talks about exaggerating negative traits: ‘I don’t really think of it as a persona, it’s a sort of louder, slightly more vengeful version of me. But it is certainly me, and there are very few lines I’ve ever said that I wouldn’t back up …’25 Mark Thomas says his stage persona is defined not just by exaggeration, but also by selection: ‘You edit out the boring bits. You know, and you highlight the interesting bits, and the significant bits and that’s what you do. That’s … what it is. It’s a bigger version of me … a more succinct version of me, without the moaning and the rambling.’26 For many comedians, going onstage brings out the same side of themselves as a social occasion. Rhys Darby, for example, says: I think the onstage self is like an extreme version of the offstage self. So, like, when I’m offstage, I’m normally a bit

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more reserved, a bit more shy, especially around people I don’t know. But if I’m around people I do know, my friends and people like that, if I’m comfortable, then I’ll be as zany as possible, you know, and wacky and what have you, so when I’m onstage, it’s that coming out … I mean, when I’ve been at parties and had a few drinks, or whatever’s going down, I’ve noticed that I’ve become that person.27 Shelley Berman explains that in both stand-up comedy and in social situations, there’s an attempt to impress, but also an underlying authenticity: I think we all put our best foot forward, no matter what. You go to a party, you are your best self, whatever you are. You’re doing your best self … I do hope that I’m always honest. I do hope that whatever self is there is shooting straight and not being affected. But I can’t swear to it. I think that an audience can smell dishonesty a mile away. I swear that audiences can see the imperceptible. I know that they can see it when you’re sweating inside, they can see it if you have a hole in your sock, they can tell, they know it. There’s something about when you’re talking about a large group of people, you’re talking about people who can see something. And, you know, I don’t believe it’s possible to act your way out of it.28 Josie Long acknowledges both authenticity and artifice in her stage persona: ‘It is me and I try to be, like, as earnest as possible with it. Obviously it’s not at the same time, and it is really artifice.’ Onstage, she’s ‘a lot more ramped up’ than she would normally be, and uses the way she jokes around with friends in her act. Interestingly, she suggests that drawing on the energy and humour of her social life in the act has an effect on how she is offstage: ‘[I]t’s funny ‘cos when I’m not performing, like when I didn’t do Edinburgh, I found at parties I was like loads more fun … it’s ‘cos I didn’t have, like, my outlet to calm me down the rest of the time.’29



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Adapting to the conventions John Harrop points out that there’s a crucial difference between the actor who is ‘both present on the stage and yet at the same time absent, replaced by the illusion he or she creates’, and musclemen, Miss Universe contestants and stand-up comedians who are ‘projecting themselves’. However, he qualifies this point by saying that performers who project themselves ‘may be making adaptations to the conventions of the performance’.30 This is a crucial point – however authentic the person behind the mike may seem, the very fact of being onstage must affect the way they behave. I become very aware of this in a gig at Alexander’s Jazz Theatre Bar, Chester, in the late 1990s. I’ve done their Saturday shows before, where the punters are packed in so tightly that the place bulges at the seams, but this is the first time I’ve done their Wednesday night show. I sit there waiting for the audience to arrive, but it just doesn’t happen. When I go on, there are literally only about six paying punters watching the show. I get down off the stage, gather the tiny audience together around one table and sit down with them. I’ve never consciously created a stage persona, and I’m not aware of undergoing any kind of transformation as I make the long walk over to the mike stand, but I find myself having to consciously tone down my delivery so as to avoid alienating them. My normal performance energy would seem bizarre when I’m sitting across a pub table from the people I’m talking to. I force myself into normal conversation mode so that the prepared material sounds even more spontaneous than it usually does. It works – they laugh in the right places. I get to my final routine – a medley of Clash song parodies played on the mandolin – and realise that it just isn’t going to work if I’m sitting on a pub stool. I get back on to the stage and adapt once more to the conventions, cranking myself back up into performance mode.

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Stand-up gigs come in all shapes and sizes, demanding different kinds of adaptation. Phill Jupitus describes how different gigs brought out different sides of him: I think when I did my early telly, I relished in this very boisterous Essex Boy image, which … was just born out of nerves more than anything. The … fear of the crowd, and fear of something new. I would very often hide behind that persona. That was Jongleurs Phill. Jongleurs Phill wore a leather jacket, DMs and told the audience to fuck off. Whereas Phill that did live stand-up shows, on his own, [where] people just came to see him, was a delicate little flower.31 Like Jupitus, Rhona Cameron finds that theatre gigs allow her to be pretty much herself, but when she performed on the male-dominated London comedy circuit, she had to adapt herself because more was demanded of her as a female act: It’s different for men, ‘cos men can go onstage and mumble and the audience accepts it a bit more, but as a women you had to be much better than that. When I was doing it, there was only about two women that would even get booked at the [Comedy] Store … you had to just go there, bang-bangbang, use your punchiest material, which was always hard for me because I didn’t have punchy material, I was like a storyteller. 32 Jeremy Hardy argues that the way comedians change when they get on to the stage is just like the adaptations we make in certain social situations: [T]here’s a persona in as much as we have different personae that we use in our lives, you know, like talking to your mum, talking to the doctor, we adopt slightly different voices … people on stage, usually their accents become more common and they swear more. We swear



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more. Because that’s one of the aspects of ourselves that we project. So it’s not acting in the sense that it’s an observed and learnt and performed character, but it’s acting in the sense that it’s a performance, and you’re having to give the impression that this is what you really want to do at that moment, even though you might have been crying in the dressing room a minute earlier … We’re all kind of performing all the time in a sense, albeit subconsciously, and [stand-up is] just one of the performances that we give. He goes on to admit that he hardly bothers to adapt to the conventions anymore: The performance has kind of gradually gone from what I do … and it gets less affected as I go on, which may or may not be a good thing. It … is pretty much me onstage, talking. And if I’m in a bad mood then that’s visible … That’s probably an abuse of the position, it’s not giving people their value for money, but, you know, I think it’s quite interesting that you go on with the mood that you’re in …33 However small the change though, the fact of performing a stand-up comedy act must require some form of adaptation, if nothing else to adapt to the fundamental convention of being funny onstage. As Mark Lamarr puts it: ‘Jack Dee said to me once that I’m the nearest offstage to what I am on. I mean obviously I’m a lot less funny offstage, because I’m … not needed to be.’34

Notes 1

Various artists, Stand-Up Great Britain, Laughing Stock, 2000, LAFF CD 105, track 9

2

Interview with Omid Djalili, by telephone, 28 June 2004

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3

Live at the Apollo, BBC One, 17 December 2007

4

Interview with Stephen K. Amos, by telephone, 18 September 2012

5

Harry Enfield, Harry Enfield and his Humorous Chums, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1997, p. 6

6

Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993–8, London: Century, 1998, pp. 38–39

7

Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012

8

Quoted in Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 602

9

See Ben Thompson, Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office, London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004, p. 139

10 Various artists, 4 at the Store, BBC Audiobooks Ltd, 2004, ISBN no. 0563523077 11 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 12 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 13 Interview with Margaret Cho, by telephone, 19 April 2012 14 Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012 15 David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, Boston, London, Sydney and Wellington: Unwin Hyman, 1989, p. 13 16 Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of it? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, p. 28 17 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 18 Quoted in Neil Brandwood, Victoria Wood: The Biography, London: Virgin Books, 2002, p. 91 19 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 20 This is a description of a routine featured in ‘Tough Crowd’, an extra feature on Johnny Vegas, Who’s Ready for Ice Cream?, Universal, 2003, 8209129



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21 Quoted in Judith Woods, ‘“Omega 3 Fatty Acids? Fantastic”; The Drink is not a Problem, the Weight Needs to Go and the Smoking is Cher’s Fault. But Johnny Vegas Feels Good, He Tells Judith Woods’, the Daily Telegraph, 26 November 2003, p. 24 22 Stand-Up with Alan Davies, BBC One, 3 July 2000 23 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 24 Interview with Andre Vincent, Central London, 14 July 2004 25 Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004 26 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004 27 Interview with Rhys Darby, by telephone, 30 June 2004 28 Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004 29 Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012 30 John Harrop, Acting, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 5 31 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 32 Interview with Rhona Cameron, by telephone, 19 March 2004 33 Interview with Jeremy Hardy, Streatham, 1 April 2004 34 Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004

CHAPTER TEN

Onstage, offstage The onstage-offstage boundary The key to understanding the distinction between person and persona in stand-up comedy is the boundary between the stage and the rest of the world. Some performers adopt a distinct identity when they cross the boundary, others make subtler adjustments. On the moment of crossing it, the boundary is very visible. Most comedians are visibly nervous before going on. Their faces look taut, and their speech tends to come in short bursts. As they walk out on to the stage, they become the assured, natural person they present to the audience. Their faces become expressive, their speech fluent. However stark the boundary may seem to be, it’s not impermeable. The comedian’s offstage life can easily seep through it and spill out on to the stage. In an essay about popular entertainers, actor and academic Clive Barker points out how a performer’s private life can become incorporated into his or her persona, like Judy Garland’s troubled private life giving her performances an added sense of pathos.1 A classic example of this is the sad case of Michael Barrymore’s attempt at a West End comeback in September 2003. Barrymore, whose act falls somewhere between stand-up comedy and all-purpose light entertainment, had featured in tabloid stories about his homosexuality, drunkenness and

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drug habits for years, and in 2001 the public was scandalised when a 31-year-old man was found dead in his swimming pool. He tried to win his audience back with a show at the Wyndham’s Theatre, but found he was playing to small and hostile crowds, and the critics showed him no mercy. The Guardian’s Mark Lawson wrote, ‘The problem is partly the shadow of that fatal pool party. Legal investigations cleared Barrymore of the more lurid insinuations, but the revelations of his alarming hospitality make the slapstick and silliness of his act harder to take.’2 Barrymore cancelled the show after a few days, reportedly sitting backstage in tears saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I don’t feel like Michael Barrymore out there.’3 Barrymore was vainly trying to wish away the audience’s knowledge of events, but other comedians willingly bring episodes from their offstage life into their acts, no matter how scandalous they may be. In June 2012, Jimmy Carr became a news story when it transpired that he had made use of a tax avoidance scheme. He was criticised by the Prime Minister – keen to seem as if he was taking a hard line on such schemes – and confessed to making a ‘terrible error of judgement’.4 Appearing in Canterbury that September, Carr starts the show by addressing the issue, telling the audience that he’s had a great summer assuming ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity.’ He reflects on how odd it was to have David Cameron breaking off from talks with President Obama just to say, ‘Jimmy Carr’s a dick.’5 In 1980, the great Richard Pryor set fire to himself whilst freebasing cocaine, and even such a traumatic event as this was addressed in his act. Starting a 1981 show by asking for a light, he comments: ‘Gotta be careful with these motherfuckin’ matches! [laughter and applause]’ He goes on to do extended routines about both freebasing and his experience of recovering from his injuries in hospital.6 Just as the offstage life can spill into the act, so the act can spill out into the offstage life. Jack Dee’s comedy springs



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from immaculate sullenness and cynicism. His misanthropic persona is so well established that he can get laughs with the simplest of sentences. In a 1997 show, he comments on a minor TV personality of the time. ‘What about the Gladiators?’ he says, emitting a sneering chuckle – which gets a laugh. He does the snarl and mimed clawing action which was the trademark gesture of a Gladiator called Wolf. There’s a bigger laugh, and Dee smiles along with the audience’s enjoyment of his fun-poking impression. ‘I’m Wolf,’ he says, momentarily taking on the voice of his victim. Then, in his own voice, he replies, ‘Are you?’ It’s beautifully performed. His eyebrows raise themselves but his eyelids can’t be bothered to follow. His mouth remains sullen and down-turned. His voice suggests someone making a tiny effort to be polite, whilst fighting monumental disinterest. There’s a huge laugh, which breaks out into applause, the whole response lasting nine seconds. As it builds, Dee smiles and looks down modestly, as if enjoying the way the audience share his disdain.7 There’s no obvious joke here, but Dee has got three laughs, one of them very rich and full-bodied, simply by inhabiting his persona with skill and subtlety. Dee’s well-established persona can have a similar effect in his private life, whether he intends it to do so or not. He complains that people assume he’s never serious, seeing his behaviour through the filter of his stand-up act: ‘I unintentionally make them laugh because they think I’m being funny when I’m not. No one buys “sincere” from me. They always think I’m taking the piss.’8 Some comedians actively try to live up to the stage image, though. Eric Morecambe, for example, felt a compulsion to adopt his stage persona in any public situation. When he was an up-and-coming comedian, Rowan Atkinson met Morecambe and witnessed him in action: The first thing that struck me was how funny he was in the house … I remember thinking, ‘God, how oppressive to be expected to be this funny all the time.’ My other thought

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was to wonder what it must be like for the family to live with this man … Eric’s family had to live with this ‘act’ all the time, which must have been difficult. I then started thinking about how difficult Eric must have found it to live with himself … what must it have been like when he didn’t feel he wanted to be funny and the pressure remained on him to be so?9 In some cases, living up to the stage image is a conscious form of marketing. This tendency goes back to the music hall. The nineteenth century comedian George Leybourne, took on the persona of a ‘swell’, a well-to-do merrymaker living the alcoholic high life. His most famous song was ‘Champagne Charlie’. In 1868, he entered into an exclusive 12-month contract with William Holland to play the Canterbury Hall for a fee of £1,500. The contract required him to live out the role he played on stage in his private life, stating: ‘George Leybourne shall every day, and at all reasonable times and places when required to do so, appear in a carriage, drawn by four horses, driven by two postillions, and attended by his grooms.’ He was expected to wear his ostentatious stage costume when he made these appearances, and give out champagne to members of the public. The alcoholic drinks which made him a star also contributed to his demise. He died at the age of 42, from liver damage.10

Finding your voice The personas which comedians inhabit in their act don’t necessarily spring into life fully formed the first time they walk out on to the stage. There’s skill involved in presenting the self to a live audience, and it’s a skill which can take time to learn. Comedians tend to call this process ‘finding your voice’. Richard Pryor said that it can take 15 years for a comedian to find his or her voice.11 Lenny Henry was still in his teens when



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he made a successful appearance on the TV talent show New Faces, which quickly led to live touring and further television. He was disorientated by being thrown into showbusiness quickly, and struggled to find his voice: ‘I was famous without having achieved anything. The first ten years were really hard … I didn’t have a personality.’12 For Les Dawson, the process was less gradual. He found his voice suddenly, in response to adversity. Early in his career, he had a week’s engagement as a comic pianist and singer at a grim working men’s club in Hull. After a few days of getting nothing more than contempt from the audience, he got drunk and found himself unable to play the piano. Instead, he gave vent to his feelings: ‘The silence was quite eerie, and suddenly all the depression I felt pumped out of my mouth.’13 He glumly told self-deprecating gags and made fun of the place where he was performing. The audience loved it, giving him ‘a magnificent ovation’. The next night, though more sober, he tried the same approach ‘to see if [he] had “found” a style that an audience would appreciate’, and again got big laughs.14 He had stumbled across the glum persona which would make him famous. Tony Allen has a theory about how the process of finding the voice occurs: Standing on stage in front of a live audience is a situation that appears to trigger a sort of strategic identity crisis. In order merely to survive, various sides of our personality come to our assistance. However idiosyncratic or inappropriate these minority personalities appear to be, they should all be given an audition.15 There’s certainly some evidence to support this idea. It’s slightly spooky hearing Alexei Sayle talking about his stage persona. He talks about it in the third person, and the way he describes it makes it sound as if it is indeed a minority personality which he’s not fully in control of. ‘Well I mean, I always say that, you know, he’s completely different [from

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me] but I write his material,’ he explains. He says that his transformation into this other person was ‘instantaneous’, adding, ‘He was there right from the start.’ In the 1990s, Sayle gave up stand-up comedy, and became a successful author.16 This meant performing at readings in bookshops and literary festivals, and he had to be careful to avoid slipping back into the stand-up persona: ‘The reason I have a lectern is to have a barrier between me and the audience … if I just had a microphone, he would start to reappear, I’m not kidding about that … if I just have a microphone, he starts to come out.’17 In some cases, the minority personality of the stage persona seems to be connected with some kind of emotional trauma or even mental illness. Eddie Izzard has often discussed the effect his mother’s death had on his life and work, talking about ‘a childlike thing that I keep locked in after six, which is when my mother died … There’s a kid there that comes in and plays onstage.’18 Vaudeville comedian Bert Lahr suffered from manic depression. The manic side of his personality came out onstage, the depressive side in his personal life. Roseanne Barr, who was a biting feminist stand-up before starring in her own sitcom, has a minority personality she calls Cindy, which developed in response to a difficult childhood. She once tried to use Cindy as a character in a sketch on Saturday Night Live, but found that ‘the other actors were real scared’.19

Costume Because so much of stand-up comedy is about personality, the clothes comedians wear onstage are extremely important, whether these be items from the performer’s offstage wardrobe or a distinctly theatrical costume. The great variety comedian Max Miller based much of his comedy on double entendre and innuendo. Skirting around the prevailing taboos about sex and marital infidelity was daring, and his cheeky, audacious persona was reflected in his outrageous costume. This clearly



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appealed to his audience. The critic A. Crooks Ripley was just as enraptured by Miller’s costume as he was by his physique: He arrives at the crease as though he were a man come to read the gas-meter, except that he wears a panama and brown and white shoes with red heels, also, his hulk is completely hidden in a polar-coat of crushing, exotic incongruity … this outer envelope removed, he is seen in the plumage of a rampant carp … then after you’ve had your laugh, your smile becomes frozen and you feel a little stupid if you’re honest with yourself, because the raiment is extraordinarily exciting and most becoming; it is also one of the several elements Mr Miller’s imitators have not, as yet, had the temerity to emulate.20 Miller was at the height of his success when wartime rationing and then post-war austerity restricted the clothing choice available to most people, and men’s clothing tended to be particularly drab. In this context, it’s easy to see how coming on to the stage dressed in yards of colourful cloth could so inflame A. Crooks Ripley’s passion. When Eddie Izzard built his audience in the 1990s, his colourful costumes gained much attention for a different reason. As he puts it himself in his book Dress to Kill: ‘Probably I am the only transvestite comedian in the world at this moment …’21 Izzard argues that his transvestism does not involve imitating a woman so much as exercising the freedom to wear clothing society normally denies to men. This is borne out by his stage wear, which sometimes makes him look more like a glam rocker than a drag act. In Definite Article, for example, he wears shiny black trousers and highheeled boots, and a thigh-length, double-breasted jacket made of scarlet crushed velvet. Earrings dangle from his ears, his nails are painted, and his face is prettified with eye make-up, blusher and dark lipstick. Certainly, this is not normal male garb, but neither is it any more feminine than the stage-wear of, say, the lead singer of the Sweet. Indeed, Izzard points out

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that ‘there’s rock stars who’ll put on eyeliner’, giving David Bowie as an example.22 In more recent shows, the costume has been more overtly transvestite. In Sexie, for example, he wears false breasts and a leather miniskirt. The transvestism affects the act in a number of ways. It becomes the source of material – he’s performed a number of routines on the subject. It makes him glamorous and exotic, slightly separating him from the audience, and providing a context for his tangential and often surreal humour. It’s also a good source of publicity. It would be wrong to suggest that Izzard has cynically exploited his sexual orientation, but it has made a good talking point in interviews since he came out to the Observer in 1991, and he looks fantastic on tour posters and video covers. But there’s another important effect, which is not to do with how his audience perceives him, but how being open about his transvestism in his act affects his performance. He has said that he decided to wear skirts on stage because, ‘I should have that freedom.’23 It certainly seemed to free him up, because having made the choice, one critic noted that he seemed ‘so much more physically relaxed’, and that previously, ‘Izzard’s body seemed to be struggling to escape from a stonewashed denim prison’.24 Some comedians prefer more casual clothes than Miller’s or Izzard’s, and this connects with the idea that the performer we see onstage is more or less the same as he or she would be offstage. The notion of stand-up as authentic self-expression may have become firmly established by the likes of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, but the move towards greater naturalness actually started earlier, when comedians started to wear ordinary clothes on stage. In the late 1920s, when Ted Ray was becoming established, it was normal for front cloth comic comics on the variety circuit to wear either formal dress or exaggerated theatrical costumes. Having initially conformed to this, Ray struck upon a startling innovation. He realised that if he wore ordinary clothes – the kind of thing the men in the audience would have



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been wearing – he would be more like them and so could form a closer relationship with them: From the moment I made my entrance I felt a warmth I had never known before. I was one of them. I told my stories casually and intimately as though they were in on the joke. I wore my best lounge suit and, as far as my appearance went, I might have just climbed up on the stage from the front row of the stalls … I got laughs and earned them just by being myself.25 Later, Frankie Howerd took a similar approach to stage wear for similar reasons: I wore an ordinary, far from immaculate, brown lounge suit, since for my act it was vital to attempt to give the impression that I wasn’t one of the cast, but had just wandered in from the street – as though into a pub, or just home from work … Why a brown suit? Because I thought it was a colour that didn’t intrude. It’s warm and neutral and man-in-the-street anonymous … When playing seaside resorts I’d even wear shorts.26 The whole presentation of Howerd’s act was just as informal. This made him extraordinary, but also attracted criticism. He was attacked by a provincial critic for being unprofessional: ‘This man wears no make-up, doesn’t dress, doesn’t even take a bow at the end.’27 When comedians wear everyday clothes on stage, what they wear will inevitably be influenced by the clothing norms of the culture within which they work. In the 1950s, the hungry i’s owner Enrico Banducci advised Mort Sahl to reject a suit in favour of a pair of casual slacks, an open-necked white shirt, and a sweater. Sahl explains the reason for this choice: ‘Well, the hungry i was a cellar. And it cost a quarter to get in, and I really took the uniform of like a graduate student in Berkeley so I wouldn’t look like I took myself seriously.’28

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On the current British stand-up scene, many comedians choose stage clothes which reflect the increasing acceptability of casual clothing. Jeans and a T-shirt have become a common choice, and Mark Thomas is probably one of the most successful comedians to adopt it: ‘It got to the stage where I’d just wear whatever T-shirts were around, and it was just what I’d got in the wash, frankly, what was clean. And I quite liked … the simplicity of just a T-shirt and jeans.’29 Whereas for earlier comedians, dressing casually was an innovation, for today’s stand-ups it is taken for granted. This inevitably means an erosion of the onstage-offstage boundary, as any item of clothing the comedian possesses is a potential piece of costume. Adam Bloom says of his stage wear: It’s whatever I’ve got on, but I’d never wear something in the afternoon of a gig that I wouldn’t wanna wear onstage. Nearly everything I own is clothes that I would wear onstage … And my persona’s very honest, and therefore I’d rather wear just a T-shirt. Ironed T-shirt, because I wanna pay a little bit of respect for the fact that people have paid money to see me … I think if somebody’s wearing a T-shirt that’s creased onstage, what they’re saying is, ‘I didn’t care enough about this gig.’30 Sometimes, the choice of what to wear onstage is political. African-American comedian Timmie Rogers was one of the first black comedians to play to predominantly white audiences. When he started wearing a tuxedo instead of the more clownish clothes black comics traditionally wore, he was making an important point about the dignity of his race. He met with resistance. The owner of the Los Angeles Clover Club fired him. Historically, stand-up comedy has been remarkably male dominated, and this has led a number of female comedians to adopt an androgynous look. Early in her career, Victoria Wood used to wear trousers, a shirt and tie and a blazer. Originally, Jo Brand’s look owed something to punk. A typical



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early costume might have involved a bumper crop of spiked hair, bright red lipstick, black T-shirt, black leggings and Doc Marten boots. For her too, the choice was affected by the sexual politics of comedy clubs, where most of the acts and most of the hecklers are men: I must say that I felt all the black stuff, it was easy, it was kind of slightly androgynous, and I suppose I kind of always felt that, particularly sort of being a female that the less you drew attention to what sex you were, if you were a woman, the easier it would be in some ways, you know.31 The 1960s and 1970s saw elements of the hippy youth culture creeping into stand-up in both Britain and the US. In Britain, the comics who were emerging from the folk circuit tended to have long hair and wear brightly coloured clothes influenced by hippy fashions. Billy Connolly had wild hair and an equally wild beard, and would push the fashions of the time to the extreme, perhaps wearing boots shaped like big bananas, or a shiny orange jumpsuit, flared in both arms and legs. For him, this was a way of distinguishing himself from more conventional comics, and giving him licence: ‘I wanted to have an image that was a bit more than just the mohair suit comedian style, the guy with a bow tie or whatever …Wearing ridiculous clothes you could say what you pleased, because you didn’t represent anything and so you couldn’t be blamed for anything.’32 On the other side of the Atlantic, George Carlin was an established comedian with a clean-cut image when he transformed himself into a hippy. He was very nervous when he first performed in his new identity, his long, straight hair, beard, tie-dye T-shirt and jeans making him unrecognisable to the audience. His act was similarly transformed, with material about drugs and a looser, more physical style. He had found a new, younger audience, and by embracing the counterculture, he was also taking a political stance, rejecting conformity

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and aligning himself with the more radical elements in youth culture. Mark Thomas has used costume in a way that is more tangibly political. He builds the politics of his act into the entire organisation of his shows, with campaigning groups selling T-shirts and other merchandise in the foyers of the venues where he performs. Care is taken to make sure that the clothing sold is ethically produced, avoiding sweatshop labour. Thomas found an easy way to help them shift more products: ‘War on Want …were touring with us and they said, “Can you wear a T-shirt, because we sell more if you’re wearing them?” [I said,] “Oh, all right.” And so … it became a way of generating money for various … causes and campaigns.’33 Footwear might seem to be the most insignificant aspect of stand-up comedy. Audiences probably don’t notice what shoes a comedian is wearing on his or her feet, and in many cases they wouldn’t even be able to see. In a comedy club, the comic’s shoes may be well be obscured by tables or other punters; in big theatres, shoes may be too small for the people in the back row to see. But all stand-up comedians have to have something to stand up in, and for some the choice of shoe is an important practical consideration. Ross Noble, for example, says, ‘I always wear skateboard shoes. Because … they’re flat but they’re sort of bouncy at the same time … ‘cos trainers are too runaroundy, you want something that you can stand flat in.’ This is worth quoting purely for the use of the word ‘runaroundy’, but it also shows how shoes can affect performance energy. The chunky skateboard shoes allow Noble to achieve the extraordinary liveliness of his physical work, whilst also grounding him and offering him control. Together with his long, curly hair (which he describes as ‘heavy’), and the flared shirtsleeves and trousers he wears, the shoes form part of an overall look which he calls a ‘cartoony type thing’.34 Noble isn’t the only one who finds footwear important. Rhys Darby says he wears sneakers, ‘so that I can jump around, you know, because I do a lot of physical stuff’.35



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Phill Jupitus says that changing from heavy boots to plimsolls improved his performance: ‘It did feel different, yeah, it just felt that you could scamper a little bit more … Whereas with the boots, you’d stomp.’36 From the clothes they wear to the shoes on their feet, costume is important to stand-up comedians, helping to form their identity, affecting the way they perform, and sometimes even making a political statement. Yet it seems that costume is rarely something that is consciously decided, often being found through trial and error. There was no conscious strategy behind Ross Noble’s choice of stage wear: ‘Well, it’s one of those things where I didn’t think it out, I just found what worked, and then somebody pointed it out and I went, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’ve done.”’37 Harry Hill’s distinctive costume came about in a similarly haphazard way: I just used to wear suits, you know, ‘60s suits from Oxfam, and then I started wearing a tie in my first gig I did. And that was just too kind of hot. Constricting. So I took that off, and I thought, ‘Well … if you’re in showbusiness, you make a kind of thing of it that you’re not wearing a tie, you know, you shouldn’t be like just a bloke without a tie on’ … so I used to just pull the collar up, really. And then people would say, ‘Oh, that big collar of yours!’ And I was kind of hunched over, so my head would sort of recede into the collar. And then, when people started saying, ‘You’ve got that big collar,’ I had them made, started getting them made big.38 It was a longer process that led Milton Jones to find his bad taste pullovers: ‘I think it was trial and error really, I tried several things, you know, dressing up smart, dressing up rough, dressing up like a tramp, you know, but you want it to be minimal. And just enough to show the way. And not like anyone else.’ He now has a selection of them, getting them from charity shops, always for ‘under a tenner’. The women who sell them to him often assume he’s buying them

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for everyday use: ‘[T]he lady says, “That’s just you, that is.” And I say, “Yes, it is me.”’39 Her mistake may be funny, but it also speaks volumes about the blurring of onstage and offstage identities in stand-up. Adam Bloom had a helping hand in deciding the best choice of clothes: In fact, my sound man in Edinburgh’97 said to me, ‘Adam, you wore a shirt tonight, and last night you wore a T-shirt,’ and he said, ‘I think round neck looks funnier on you.’ And when he said it, I knew exactly what he meant, and I knew he was right. There’s something about, I’ve got quite a funny face, haven’t I? I’ve got big, round eyes, I’ve got quite a cartoony face. A shirt just gives that slightly conformist thing.40 Mark Lamarr tended to wear smart, flashy clothes on stage, his hair slicked into a quiff, with sharp sideburns. For him, this was not a carefully chosen costume, but more an expression of his youth and his working-class background: I mean that was all it was, it was like, ‘Hey, it’s the weekend, I’m dressing up.’ And of course, I worked every weekend of my teenage, you know from 18 to 25, every weekend I ever had was in a comedy club, so that was the only chance I’d get to, you know, dress up for girls, probably.41 For actors, costume is an entirely separate category from their offstage clothes. This may also be true for comedians, but for many the distinction between costume and clothes is less clear cut. What they wear onstage may simply be what they happened to be wearing that day. As a result, the look they become known for onstage can follow them into everyday life – particularly when it involves their own hair. When Wil Hodgson established himself as a comic he sported bright pink hair fashioned into a mohican. This was less an attempt to forge an outlandish stage image, more a



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reflection of his offstage life. A keen fan of punk music, he had his hair dyed pink, and the mohican came about when his mum – a hairdresser – wanted to practice the style David Beckham had just adopted, because ‘she was expecting an influx of lads in Chippenham wanting mohican haircuts. And she asked if she could try doing one on me. And I said, “That’s fair enough,” because I didn’t have any job to go to …’ The look worked well for his act, providing a visual context for his tales of life in the outsider punk and skinhead subcultures in the badlands of Chippenham, but this came at a cost to his everyday existence: It made me stand out more but this is the thing – people don’t realise what a commitment that was … I used to go to, like, Manchester, Liverpool, I couldn’t walk around. I had to be careful where I went in between gigs. I remember getting off the train at Manchester, at Piccadilly, and some fucking twat … just grabs the top of my head and goes, ‘Who the fuck are you??’ Like everyone’s stood there in the street, they’re just fucking laughing along with this …42 When Richard Herring grew a Hitler moustache for his show of the same name in 2009, it was very much a choice made for the stage act. The idea was to explore the taboos surrounding this particular form of facial hair, to reclaim it for comedy – with due respect to Charlie Chaplin – and simply to see how people would react to him in everyday life if he grew one. As with Hodgson’s hair, wearing his show on his face for a long period became a major commitment: [T]he joke rebounded on me, because I thought I was going to do it for a week and I realised I had to basically do it for the show, which then meant I had to have it for a year. And that infects your whole life and actually impacted on my life … It made me quite depressed and I felt judged by people constantly, and worried everywhere I went

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that someone would … punch me, so it was exploring that comedy-as-art but comedy-as-real-life and where the division is, you know.43

Notes 1

Clive Barker, ‘The “Image” in Show Business’, Theatre Quarterly, vol. VIII no. 29, Spring 1978, p. 8

2

Mark Lawson, ‘The Unforgiven: An Evening with Michael Barrymore Was Bizarre and Unsettling’, the Guardian, 20 September 2003, p. 24

3

Quoted in Stephen d’Antal, ‘His Fall From Grace Has Been Well Documented but Now the Shamed Entertainer is Trying to Make a New Life for Himself in New Zealand; Will Barrymore Ever be Able to Run Away from his Past?’, the Express, 24 April 2004, p. 53

4

Quoted in ‘Comedian Jimmy Carr: I’ve made terrible error over tax’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18531008 [accessed 23 October 2012]

5

Jimmy Carr, Gagging Order, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 September 2012

6

Richard Pryor, Live on Sunset Strip, originally released 1982, in …And It’s Deep, Too!The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992), Rhino/Warner Bros., 2000, RS 76655

7

Jack Dee, Live in London, VVL/Polygram, 1997, 0475823

8

Andrew Duncan, ‘Jack of All Tirades’, Radio Times, 21–27 February 2004, p. 22

9

Gary Morecambe and Martin Sterling, Morecambe and Wise: Behind the Sunshine, London and Basingstoke: Pan Books, 1995, p. 177. Also see p. 111

10 Peter Bailey, ‘Champagne Charlie: Performance and Ideology in the Music-Hall Swell Song’, in J. S. Bratton (ed.), Music Hall: Performance and Style, Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, 1986, pp. 50–1 11 Brian Logan, ‘Be Truthful – and Funny Will Come. To Mark



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This Year’s Inaugural Richard Pryor Award for Comedy, We Asked a Group of Comics to Put a Question to the Great Stand-Up. Brian Logan Introduces the Results’, the Guardian, 9 August 2004, Arts pages p. 13 12 Andrew Duncan, ‘Lenny’s New Face’, Radio Times, 12–18 April 2003, p. 26 13 Les Dawson, A Clown Too Many, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1986, pp. 72–3 14 Les Dawson, A Clown Too Many, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1986, pp. 74–5 15 Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of it? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, p. 35 16 Sayle returned to stand-up in 2011 17 Interview with Alexei Sayle, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003 18 Quoted in John Lahr, Show and Tell, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 177 19 Quoted in John Lahr, Show and Tell, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 128 20 A. Crooks Ripley, Vaudeville Pattern, London: Brownlee, 1942, pp. 35–6 21 Eddie Izzard (with David Quantick and Steve Double), Dress to Kill, London: Virgin, 1998, p. 61 22 Eddie Izzard (with David Quantick and Steve Double), Dress to Kill, London: Virgin, 1998, p. 62 23 Eddie Izzard (with David Quantick and Steve Double), Dress to Kill, London: Virgin, 1998, p. 63 24 Ben Thompson, Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office, London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004, p. 103 25 Ted Ray, Raising the Laughs, London: Werner Laurie, 1952, p. 67 26 Frankie Howerd, On the Way I Lost it: An Autobiography, London: Star Books/WH Allen, 1976, pp. 67–8

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27 Frankie Howerd, On the Way I Lost it: An Autobiography, London: Star Books/WH Allen, 1976, p. 68 28 Stand-Up America, BBC Two, 1 March 2003 29 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004 30 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004 31 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 32 The South Bank Show, ITV, 4 September 1992 33 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004 34 Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 35 Interview with Rhys Darby, by telephone, 30 June 2004 36 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 37 Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 38 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 39 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 40 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004 41 Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004 42 Interview with Wil Hodgson, by telephone, 12 September 2012 43 Interview with Richard Herring, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 14 February 2012

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Truth In Eddie Izzard’s show Dress to Kill, there’s an extraordinary routine about Engelbert Humperdinck. After telling the audience that the popular singer was originally called Gerry Dorsey, Izzard imagines the meeting where the change of name was decided.1 He acts it out, showing Dorsey’s managers trying out different possibilities. He has them reeling out a string of bizarre names: ‘“Zinglebert Bambledack! [laughter] Yengiebert Dangleban! [laughter] Zanglebert Bingledack! [laughter] Winglebert Humptyback! [laughter] Slut Bunwallah!” [laughter]’ He brings the sequence to a climax by having one of the managers reading back over the list of ridiculous names he’s come up with – the penultimate one being ‘Engelbert Humperdinck’. Another manager turns round and says, ‘No, no, go back one, go back one.’ There’s a big laugh, and the audience applaud. Then Izzard changes the mood, becoming serious. He announces, ‘But he’s dead now. D’you hear that? Yeah, today, on CNN, I heard, just as I was coming out.’ He builds the moment, adding a few details. The audience laugh uncertainly. He assures them he’s serious, that he saw it on TV before he came out. Then he shakes his hands, shakes his head, and laughs, saying, ‘It’s not true!’ There’s a big laugh. His eyes rise upwards, as if despairing of the audience’s gullibility.

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Then he’s serious again: ‘No, it is true, erm –’ Another laugh. He adds a few more details. Then he shakes his head and smiles again, showing he’s kidding. Another laugh. He continues to repeat this sequence of confirmation and denial six more times. Amazingly, each time he does it, he gets a laugh. There are subtle variations. Sometimes he adds a few words, sometimes he uses gesture alone. He smiles, narrows his eyes and shakes his hand and his head to indicate he’s only kidding. He nods slowly, adopts a serious face and widens his eyes to indicate that he’s serious. The eyeliner he’s wearing makes the wide-eyed look particularly funny.2 There are many things that make this a great stand-up routine, like the childish joy of playing with language and the perfectly judged performance. But what makes it truly remarkable is that it plays with a central idea of stand-up comedy: that it is about telling the truth. When Izzard tells the audience that Humperdinck is dead, he convinces them it’s true, even if their nervous laughter suggests they are not completely willing to believe. The laughter he gets when he admits he was only kidding is fuelled by the outrageousness of lying about as serious a matter as somebody’s death to such a large number of people. By repeating the sequence again and again, he pushes his audacity to the limit. Truth is a vital concept in most modern stand-up comedy because of the idea that it is about authentic self-expression. The boundary between offstage and onstage is blurred, and in many cases, the audience believes that the person they see onstage is more or less the same as the person they might meet offstage. This inevitably means that there’s often an assumption that what the person onstage says about his or her life is more or less true. If comedians say they are gay, or they just went on holiday, or they hate Mexican food, we generally believe them. Some comedians explicitly champion the idea of truth. In a 2004 newspaper article, Richard Pryor was asked whether he used to write to be truthful or just to make people laugh.

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‘Truthful, always truthful,’ he replied, ‘And funny will come.’3 At the Hammersmith Apollo in 2004, Billy Connolly is telling an anecdote when he breaks off to warn us that there’s no punchline because it’s a true story. He followed this up with a line that perfectly sums up the point: ‘Life doesn’t have punchlines.’4 For comics who started before Mort Sahl and the rest of his generation introduced the idea that stand-up was about expressing the self, the idea that truth could be funny without being varnished by fictionalised jokework was unthinkable. The producer of An Audience with Bob Monkhouse argued with the veteran comedian over this. She wanted him to talk about some of the traumatic events he had written about in his autobiography, believing that ‘honesty was important and would be appreciated more than fictional jokes’. Monkhouse disagreed: ‘While I could deliver a truthful lecture on these topics, it wouldn’t be all that comical …’5

Pranking the audience Audiences are so used to taking what stand-ups say at face value – accepting it as more or less the truth – that some performers have had fun by exploiting their naivety. Izzard is by no means the only one to prank the audience by pulling the rug out from underneath their idea of what is true. Lee Mack tells the audience about an encounter with a heckler who claimed to be a judo instructor. Mack recalls trying to best him by asking, ‘How often d’you get attacked by a man in a dressing gown?’ – and the heckler replying, ‘I work in a mental hospital.’ As if to cement what a brilliant true-life anecdote it is, he follows it by saying, ‘You couldn’t write stuff like that, could you? [laughter] Eh?’ Then he pulls a sudden U-turn: ‘Course you could, I did. [laughter]’6 Josie Long plays a different kind of trick with the truth. Towards the end of The Future is Another Place – a show

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full of righteous anger at Britain’s right-wing government – she starts to build to an inspirational climax, telling the audience to find out what’s under threat in our local area and go out and defend it. Summing up, she tells us to, ‘Go out and join the EDL.’ The idea of an endearingly earnest, liberal comedian supporting the far-right English Defence League is such a surprise that it gets a huge laugh, completely defying the image we have of her from the rest of the show – and indeed the rest of her career. We have been led to expect an honest, truthful summing up, but instead she says something which we immediately realise is the very opposite of what she believes. She shares our enjoyment of the gag, laughing along with us and telling us we’ve been ‘punked’.7 In 2007, Brendon Burns built a whole show around a prank on the audience. So I Suppose This Is Offensive Now! sees the Australian comic exploring taboos of sex and race. He spends much of the show playing on the idea that he’s a bit of a loose cannon who might say something appalling at any moment, whilst also thoughtfully examining the roots of the taboos. In the course of all this, he points out an Indian woman, who is clearly not enjoying what he’s doing. Taking this as a challenge, he promises her that within the next hour he’ll make her laugh at something ‘very fuckin’ wrong’. She continues to look unamused and affronted. He keeps going back to her, picking away at her, trying to break down her resistance – and yet only succeeds in making it firmer. At one point, he starts talking to the white man she’s sitting with, suggesting that he’d be laughing if she wasn’t there. About an hour into the show, the situation comes to a head. ‘Some questions are just offensive to ask!’ he asserts, telling the audience it’s OK to ask, ‘Are you Indian or Pakistani?’ but not ‘So which one are you?’ He notices the woman is offended, and so do the rest of the audience. Now she openly challenges him: ‘That’s so racist.’ She points out that he’s been picking on her all evening, but the audience are firmly on his side, not least because he cleverly plays on how awkward her challenge is: ‘You know, the jokes work a lot better if I don’t

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have to explain them. [laughter]’ The argument builds to the point where Burns shouts, ‘Why are you here??’ The audience laugh, applaud and cheer. Still the argument rages on, with the woman starting to bicker with the man she’s with, who is apparently her brother. Burns appears to have genuinely lost his temper, and rants at them both. The man walks out, and then so does she, continuing to shout at the comedian. The audience are clearly exhilarated at what they have just witnessed, and Burns gets some laughs – and even spontaneous applause – by playing on how puzzled he is by the whole thing. He tries to makes sense of it by telling the audience that his hecklers hadn’t set out to be offensive. That’s the cue for an amazing coup de théâtre. The two hecklers suddenly bounce on to the stage with big, idiotic grins on their faces, hands spread out in time-honoured showbiz-style and shout, ‘We set out to be o-fun-sive!!’ As if there were any doubt left that they’ve been in on it from the start, they then join Burns and his dancers in a dance routine. The audience’s laughter is quickly replaced by laughter and cheers, continuing to the end of the routine and beyond. Even when it eventually dies down, there’s still enough admiration at the audacity of the stunt to allow Burns to get a huge laugh simply by saying, ‘Aaaaand relax.’8 Pulling off a prank like this is a remarkable achievement, not least because it required the cooperation of so many people. First there were the hecklers – played by Sajeela Kershi and Steve McNeil – who had to act their parts so convincingly that the audience would believe them to be genuine punters. Then there were the audiences, who were asked to not reveal what happens in the show to anybody else. Even newspaper critics played along, cryptically referring to ‘a real, live twist, as shocking as the shockers in The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense’, or apologising that ‘if I explain what the best element of this show is I will ruin it for audiences to come.’9 The film of the show – which I’ve described here – was made in June 2008, nearly a year after it was originally staged at the

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Edinburgh Fringe, and yet the audience are clearly still taken in by the prank. As well as being impressive, this also demonstrates the extent to which audiences buy into the idea that stand-up comedy is a real and authentic interaction.

Adapting the truth Not all post-Sahl comics are expected to be truthful though, and audiences have no problem accepting material that is obviously fictional if it is fantastical and surreal. For example, it’s hard to imagine that the audiences who watched Woody Allen’s legendary stand-up routines really believed that he had taken an injured moose to a costume party or escaped from a chain gang dressed as ‘an immense charm bracelet’.10 Similarly, Milton Jones’s exaggerated performance and absurdist material mean he’s unlikely to be taken at face value. Having said this, extraordinary as it may seem, there have been occasions where audiences have confused his unhinged persona with his offstage self: ‘I have had people come up to me afterwards and say, “Look, I really think you need help.” … I mean, it tends to be in the less educated environments, but you know [they say,] “You need help, mate, you need to just go and see someone.”’11 Just as the person onstage is rarely exactly the same as the person offstage, in most cases the truth comedians tell flows easily into fiction. Shelley Berman – one of the generation that established the ideal of authenticity in stand-up – had a famous routine in which he recreates a telephone conversation he’s had with his father. In the introduction, Berman recalls being about 18 years old and belonging to a community theatre group. He wants $100 to go to acting school in New York, so he telephones his father, who owns a Chicago delicatessen. We hear only the father’s side of the conversation, which is richly characterised in a thick Jewish accent. Much of the comedy comes from the cultural gap between

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them. The father is shocked that Berman is too scared to ask him for money face to face (‘Did I ever lay a hend on you? In my whole life, did I ever lay one feenger on you? All right, but on those times you deserved it’); he cannot understand his son’s ambition (‘Shakespeare, Schmakespeare, I didn’t understand one word’); and he’s worried about the company he’ll be keeping (‘They are sissy boys, Sheldon, all the ectors are sissy boys’). It’s a touching portrayal of the father, who eventually agrees to give Berman $100 for acting school, and offers him an extra $150 for other expenses, if he’ll work two Saturdays for him in the delicatessen.12 It seems a very revealing, truthful routine, yet it’s well documented that the events which inspired the piece have actually been fictionalized.13 In reality, Berman’s father was rather different from the one in the routine. He was a taxi driver, and didn’t have a Jewish accent. Berman explains the changes he made when turning the actual event into a stand-up comedy routine: In order to create a piece of theatre, especially if one is using himself and his own history, there has to be some licence. So some licence is being taken there. But in fact, in absolute fact, it is not only my father who gave me the money to go to school to study the theatre. It had to be both … It had to be my mother and my father. But I couldn’t play both my mother and my father. That wouldn’t have happened. They both were fearful that there must’ve been something wrong with me, if I wanted to be an actor. I mean, why in God’s name would I want to be an actor, unless I had some weird sexual preference. [he laughs] My father was terrified! But these things, I have to angle this piece of material, and I have to also increase the cultural gulf so that people will understand where this father was and where this boy is. So, yes, one could say, ‘No, it is not absolutely the way it actually happened,’ but – it’s the way it happened. May I tell you, it is the way it happened. It’s not fudging. Listen, it’s a piece of artistry, it’s a piece of

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work. It’s a one act playlet, it can’t be without some focus on the story I’m trying to tell.14 In some cases, the truth and fiction become so intertwined that even the comedian finds it hard to separate the two. Mark Lamarr did a routine about a drunken incident in which he behaved so stupidly, it led him to give up alcohol. After a night out, six men in a jeep, who recognise him from TV, start shouting abuse at him. Being drunk, he decides to take them on (‘Oh, it’s only six blokes in a jeep’). He tries to come back at them with something ‘witty and clever’. They call him ‘wanker’, and he answers: ‘Look – don’t wank me, I’ll wank you, all right, don’t – [laughter] Don’t come round here giving it wank, I’ll wank all six of you separately, I’ll wank you all at once. [laughter] Give me twenty minutes, I’ll wank your jeep, all right, so don’t come round here – [laughter]’ Violence threatens as they get out of their vehicle, but Lamarr is still showing ridiculous bravado (‘And I thought, “Well that’s their first mistake – no jeep”’). Eventually, because he has stood up to them, they start to like him, admiring his guts. One of them still wants to fight, though, and Lamarr says his stupid response to this (‘Look, six – or nothing’) is the reason he gave up drinking.15 Lamarr starts to explain the interplay of truth and fiction in routines like this: ‘Yeah, I mean you sort of invest so much time getting those stories just right, that you do picture them in your mind and they do become real. And I actually can’t remember, there probably is some truth in there still.’ Then suddenly, a realisation strikes him and he says, urgently, ‘No, there is!! Actually, yeah! No, that is very much based on truth!’ He goes on the explain that in the actual incident, he was with some members of the pop group the Housemartins, which he couldn’t mention because ‘it ends up as just, “This is a fucking bloke namedropping.”’ In reality, the men who had abused him were black, which he felt he had to change ‘because of those connotations’. Also, far from ending up as

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an example of his own stupidity, he resolved the situation well, but he realised that ‘you’ve got to lose in this story or it’s not funny’. Having remembered the truth of the incident and the reasons for changing it, he explains: That is a really good example of something that completely transmogrified, from when I first started telling it, [when] it was just how I would tell a story to mates in a pub. And it was absolutely true, and it was a really cracking story. But by the end of it, it’d become almost the opposite of what happened and lots of the important elements that made it really funny in the pub weren’t in there anymore.16 With some comedians truth and fiction don’t intertwine so much as sit side by side, one replacing the other when it better serves the aim of getting a laugh. On a TV appearance in 2004, Jo Brand tells the audience: Now I can tell that a lot of you, you’re sitting there and you’ve got that kind of feel about you: ‘Oh dear, it’s the lesbian off Channel 4,’ right? [quiet laughter] Let me put your mind at rest, I am married. Yes, I know it’s difficult to believe. [laughter] And the papers, for years, have been implying – nay, not even implying, they’ve been overt – and said I was a lesbian. To the extent, right, that I read it so many times about myself, I thought I prob’ly was as well. [laughter] This is pretty much the truth. Brand has been vilified by some sections of the popular press, and there has been a popular misconception that she is a lesbian. It’s also true that she is married. The joke about her starting to believe the newspapers’ comments about her sexuality isn’t literally true, but it’s more exaggeration than out-and-out fiction. Brand goes on to talk about her husband, referring to him by his actual name, and shortly afterwards, there’s a joke about him which is clearly untrue: ‘– a couple of weeks

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ago, right, I had to go and sit in casualty with my husband for seven hours. Whilst he waited to have seventeen stitches removed from his face.’ The audience laugh, uncertainly. ‘That’ll teach him to buy me a sewing kit for my birthday.’17 Now there’s a big laugh. The gag works directly because the punchline is obviously fictional. The set-up is plausible, and describes an unpleasant situation, hence the sense of unease in the audience’s laughter. The laugh the punchline gets is fuelled by the release of this tension, as the audience realise they’re not hearing about real violence, but fictional, cartoon violence. Assaulting her husband with a needle and thread is a gleefully outrageous image, typical of Brand’s work. This mixture of truthful information and pure fiction is not a deliberate strategy: I’m kind of not at all conscious of mixing kind of complete big lies and truth. I mean I’ve always felt … I had a very sort of slapdash approach to comedy. I would just sit down, and I would just try and think of some funny things, you know, and if those funny things happened to be a couple of things that’d really happened, I would put them in, you know. And the other thing I would do is I would mix a kind of true build-up with a false punchline as well. Just maybe to give it a ring of truth, but not consciously.18

The awful truth About 20 minutes into his show Chewed Up, the critically acclaimed American comedian Louis C. K. tells the audience, ‘This is all totally true by the way, this is exactly what happened.’ It’s not a particularly funny thing to say in itself, but it’s an important statement because it puts a finger on C. K.’s strength as a performer – his honesty. The brilliance of what he does is that he is mercilessly honest in the way he comically analyses his own life. This allows him to be

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outspoken whilst also getting laughs out of the contradictions and hypocrisies in his own opinions, and also makes for a very intimate engagement with his audience. However, it’s not just himself that he’s honest about. As he doesn’t live in a vacuum, he can also be merciless about other people he encounters in his life, and that includes close family members. In a routine about his two small daughters, he tells the audience that his five-year-old gave him flu by coughing into his mouth, and that she talks incessantly even though, ‘Nothing that she says matters.’ This is because, ‘They’re selfabsorbed people, they have no ability – no five-year-old ever goes like, “No go ahead and finish, I’ll tell you after, it’s fine.” [laughter]’ His two-year-old causes him problems by making him carry her through New York on his shoulders: ‘She can walk, but she won’t, she’s a bullshitter. [laughter]’ He holds nothing back in the way he talks about them: ‘And I got two of these fuckin’ things, remember that please, two of ‘em. [laughter]’ The routine works by laying bare his exasperation at his children, in a way that wouldn’t normally be acceptable. The laughter comes from the savagery that he secretly feels towards his daughters in certain situations. He fights a chuckle as he confesses that carrying his younger daughter causes him so much pain that he finds himself thinking, ‘You don’t love her, just drop her, she doesn’t matter, just let her die [laughter and applause]’ Most parents can probably relate to the hidden, unexpressed anger which he describes, but it would be hard to come away from the routine thinking he doesn’t love his daughters as much as any father would. As well as being annoyed by his daughter’s chatter, he also acknowledges that. ‘I enjoy the things she says, they’re beautiful and poetic, I love hearing them …’ Nonetheless, as I watch the footage of this excellent performance, I find myself wondering what C. K.’s daughters will think when they see the film of their dad saying these things about them.19 This is a thought that must have passed through C. K.’s mind, and revealingly, the DVD credits give

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thanks to, ‘My two girls who are simply the two greatest people that I know on the planet.’20 His wife, too, might have had cause to object to the honesty he has shown in talking about their relationship in his act. As Chewed Up starts moving towards its conclusion, he tells the audience, ‘My wife and I, we’ve been, we’ve been married for about nine years now, so we’re almost done. And –’ He is rewarded for his surprising frankness by a long extended laugh, and yet his words turned out to be accurate and prophetic. The show was recorded in March 2008, the year he would get divorced. C. K. is not the only comic to reveal personal, family matters in his stand-up act. Marc Maron lets the audience know what to expect in a performance at the Union Hall, Brooklyn in 2010: ‘Right, let’s do an honest sound check. Test, test, one-two, I disappointed my parents, two-two. [laughter]’ As the show progresses he does not disappoint when it comes to baring psychological scars. He tries to explain how his mother’s ‘eating problem’ – which has led to him being ‘frightened of food’ – has affected their relationship: Like, I really think that for about the first twelve years of my life my mother just saw me – as her fat. [laughter] That, that she, I think – Some part of her thought that if, if she just ate less, perhaps I would disappear. [laughter] And she would not have to worry about the fat that was on me, that was somehow connected directly to her. At the end of this painful revelation, one or two people are still laughing, and when it finishes it leaves behind a slightly uneasy silence. Then Maron notices somebody making a sympathetic ‘ahh’ noise. It’s not the reaction he wants, so he corrects the kindly punter by imitating their noise: ‘No, “Ahhuhhah.” [laughter]’ Then he explains how he wants them to see what happened to him: ‘This has to be funny.’ The laughter and applause that greets this simple statement of intent ring out for ten full seconds. In just five words, he’s

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summed up his whole approach to comedy – to share truths with a roomful of strangers that are so emotionally brutal that they might be more at home on a psychoanalyst’s couch. Shortly afterwards he even says that the benefit of including these ‘poetic titbits’ in his act is that he can go to his therapist and say, ‘I think we’re done!’21

Ethics Again, I find myself wondering what his mother would feel about hearing herself portrayed in this way in a stand-up comedy act. Clearly, there is an ethical issue here. It is important for some comedians to tell the truth in their acts, but what right do they have to tell the truth about other people? This is not just a theoretical question. In spite of the fact that most of his routines were clearly fantastical, Woody Allen was sued by his first wife by ‘holding her up to scorn and ridicule’ in his act.22 The person mentioned in the act need not even be somebody close to the comedian to cause potential difficulties. In one routine, Phill Jupitus tells his audience that ‘real life is funnier than anything I can make up’, and talks about tragic stories he’s seen on the news. He portrays himself as a sick voyeur, taking delight in, for example, a story about a man who has broken into the lion’s enclosure at London Zoo. Jupitus impersonates Trevor McDonald announcing the story on the ITN news, ‘Viewers of a nervous disposition may like to turn awa-’ before interrupting in his own, narrator’s voice: ‘This is the point I find myself pressing play and record!’ Most of the routine is about the lions’ reaction. Jupitus characterises them like tedious middle managers, showing them taking time to fully comprehend the situation. The lion leader stands with his back to the audience, saying, ‘There’s a what? [laughter] Oh do grow up, Gavin! [laughter]’23 Little comment is made about the man himself, but using tragic real

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life material to get laughs can still have drawbacks, as Jupitus recalls: ‘[T]he care worker for the guy who came in with the lions came up to me, yeah. And said, “I was the case worker for that guy” (and she gave me his name) “who jumped in with the lions at London Zoo.” I froze, and she went, “– very funny.”’24 For Rhona Cameron, the repercussions were closer to home. On a TV appearance in the mid-1990s, she performs a delicate, beautiful routine in which she reads out a letter from her mother. This is not the stand-up comedy cliché of the string-of-jokes-disguised-as-a-letter-from-home; in this case, the letter is quite real. Cameron stresses this point, repeatedly saying ‘This is true.’ When she takes it out of her pocket at the beginning of the routine, she draws our attention to the fact that it’s a bit shabby ‘because I have had many jokes at my mother’s expense with it over the last few months’. The laughter may be at her mother’s expense, but she is not portrayed as mean or stupid. She comes across as a goodhearted middle-aged woman. Most of the laughs come from the precision and enthusiasm with which she describes the mundane details of a party she has organised. She gives a long list of the food she prepared, and this is funnily precise. One of the items listed is ‘various salads brackets coleslaw not my own close brackets’. She describes trying to get the cream to whip up and set as ‘a nightmare’. Cameron shows considerable skill in breathing comic life into this. The letter probably wouldn’t raise many laughs as a printed text. The comedy it contains is subtle, and it’s really only drawn out by her performance. In fact, she has taken the common phenomenon of grown-up children making fun of their parents and made it work in a more public context. We do not laugh purely because of what her mother has written, but also at Cameron’s amused reaction. The letter mentions decorating the garden with coloured fairy lights, which are described as ‘really very effective’. When Cameron reads this sentence, she lowers the paper for these last three words, stressing ‘effective’ with disdainful relish. She pauses

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for a moment, letting the word sink in, a gleam of a smile shining in her eyes as the audience laugh.25 Like Berman’s routine about his father, this is about a cultural gulf between the generations, and it comes across as a fond, amused portrayal of a parent, not a hostile one. Nonetheless, Cameron now regrets performing the routine, which she sees as the action of a younger, less emotionally mature person: Looking back now I cringe at the thought that I read out my mum’s letter on stage, because it was kind of an awful thing to do, but it seemed effective and I think people knew it was genuinely authentic and that’s why they extra liked it, as well as it having, you know, comedic value. But she wrote me letters regularly and I just thought they were so bizarre … Also, let’s face it, I was looking for some material as well, if I’d had scores of my own material I wouldn’t’ve had to read out my mum’s letter … My mum said, you know, “I’m going to write to you again, but it’s not for stage,” you know. And … oh, I felt so bad when she said that.26 The way comedians handle the ethical dilemma posed by doing routines about people who are close to them differs. John Bishop has agreed to leave certain things out of his act at the request of his sons, telling the Daily Mirror: ‘There’s been a few things happening recently and they’ve said, “Dad you can’t talk about that.” I have to respect that. They are teenage lads now.’27 On the other hand, Margaret Cho creates comedy out of the very act of breaking a confidence. She finishes a no-stone-unturned exposé of her sex life with an ex-lover by recalling him telling her: ‘Whatever you do – don’t talk about this onstage.’ The audience is delighted by the naughtiness of her disregard for his wishes, their laughter breaking out into cheering and applause, the whole reaction lasting 13 seconds. Then she gets another laugh by ironically taking the blame for the slip: ‘My bad.’28

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Who is Stewart Lee? In the Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, Richard Herring is talking about the kind of white lies that are told in relationships. If a woman asks the man in her life whether her bottom is as nice as Pippa Middleton’s, he has to say ‘yes’. So far, this is a reasonably commonplace observation – but then Herring turns it around and suggests what the equivalent question would be for him. What he comes up with cuts to the bone: ‘Who’s funnier, me or Stewart Lee?’29 It gets a huge laugh, because although the routine is about lying to protect someone’s feelings, it reveals what appears to be a startling admission of the truth. We know Herring and Lee used to do a successful double act, and can infer that there may be rivalry between them. We also know that Lee enjoys a higher public profile than Herring, and greater critical acclaim. Herring’s insecurity about all this is probably just a joke, but one that plays on an accurate assessment of the respective reputations of the two comics. Although his audience is dwarfed by the likes of Michael McIntyre and John Bishop, since 2004 Stewart Lee has built a devoted and growing following, and has been feted by many critics. He has become known as a comedian whose work bristles with intelligence, his delivery admired for its exceptional deftness. His work has often been described as ‘anti-comedy’ or ‘meta-comedy’, but I would argue that the aspects of his work that have inspired this description are commonplace in stand-up. What makes him stand out is not that he has entirely subverted the form; rather it is the skill, bravery and inventiveness he has shown in exploring its creative possibilities. The way he has played with the nature of truth in stand-up comedy is a case in point. Like other comics, he has got laughs by breaking confidences onstage. In a very early routine, dating back to 1991, he talks about what a ‘horrible old bitch’ his ex-girlfriend’s mother was, and follows it up with a disclaimer which actually compounds the insult:

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People say to me, ‘Stew, you call yourself a progressive comedian but material like that isn’t a million miles away from the sort of thing that Les Dawson might do about his mother-in-law, is it?’ And I say, ‘No, you’re wrong there. ‘Cos Les Dawson deals in jokes – and I deal in truth. [laughter] Truth is my ex-girlfriend’s mother’s a horrible old bitch. [a few laughs] Her name’s Anne Wilson. [laughter] And she’s a junior school teacher – from Greenwich, in South London. [a few laughs] And that’s true.’ [laughter] Quite funny that one, isn’t it? [laughter]30 For a 23-year-old comedian, little more than two years into his stand-up career, to come up with a joke that so cleverly plays with the notion of truth is a pointer to what Lee has gone on to achieve. The words he speaks are plain enough, and his plain, deadpan delivery does little to add comic varnish. What turns this ‘truth’ into a joke is the thinking behind it. Like Margaret Cho’s gag, the whole point is that it plays on the naughtiness of using stand-up as a tool for personal revenge, but Lee takes the ethical breach further by giving out personal information about the person in question. Originally, the name and the detail about her place of work were absolutely authentic, potentially allowing the audience to identify the real woman. Looking back on the routine, Lee recalls: One night, I was in the Backyard Club that Lee Hurst used to run in Whitechapel, and I said the woman’s name, and a girl in the audience shouted out, ‘What, Polly’s mother?’ And I went, ‘Oh, yeah!’ And I thought, ‘I can’t do that ever again.’ And I had to say a different name. And you know in the ‘90s when you’ve only got half an hour of circuit material and you do it forever – after about a year … her new name that I’d made up felt real to me.31 More recently, Lee has played pranks on the audience like Eddie Izzard and Brendon Burns, but in a way that – I’d argue – leaves even more questions about exactly what the truth is

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hanging in the air. A good example is his routine about the blokey, car-based TV programme, Top Gear. Lee excoriates the bullying humour seen on the show, with its implicit rightwing populism and tendency to pick on unworthy targets, all of it thinly veiled by the justification of being ‘just a joke’. Much of his comic animosity is aimed at one of the presenters, Richard Hammond, who had narrowly avoided being killed a few years earlier, whilst filming a stunt in a jet-powered car for the show. Not long into the extensive routine – which lasts for almost half an hour – Lee says he can imagine that even whilst hanging upside down in the car’s wreckage, Hammond was thinking about writing a cash-in book about the experience. Having made this outrageous suggestion, he pulls back from it, saying, ‘I, I’m not saying he did think that, I’m just saying – there does seem to be an element of cynicism in it, doesn’t there?’32 There’s a little laugh here, but the audience sound uncertain. He goes on to expand on the idea, again pulling back by issuing a similar disclaimer. The laughter he gets comes partly from the harshness of the idea he’s sharing, and partly from the ambiguity he’s created. Does he really think this or not? Shortly afterwards he brings the attack to a head, criticising Hammond for his cynicism in writing a book about the crash, and concluding, matter-of-factly, ‘… and I wish he’d been killed in that crash.’ This gets laughter and applause. He goes on to say he wishes Hammond had been decapitated, and that the next series of Top Gear had been presented by his severed head on a stick. Then, having said that, he reassures us that what he has just said is ‘just a joke, like on Top Gear.’ This time there’s a ten-second burst of laughter and applause, the audience recognising cleverness of the car show’s justification being used against it. Having made the point, he repeats it and then pulls a U-turn: ‘But coincidentally – [extended laughter] as well as it being a joke – [laughter] it’s also what I wish had happened. [loud laughter]’ A bit further into the routine, he pulls exactly the same stunt in relation to another Top Gear presenter, Jeremy Clarkson.

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Starting by berating Clarkson for a gag he had made about the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown being blind in one eye, Lee talks about how difficult it must be for the parents of children who go blind, and builds his moral indignation to the point where he concludes: ‘Now – Jeremy Clarkson has three daughters. And I hope they all go blind. [laughter]’ He repeats his ironic justification, this time shouting it angrily: ‘Come on, it’s just a joke, like on Top Gear!! [laughter]’ He also repeats the U-turn: ‘But again, as well as it being a joke – [laughter] Nah, not really.’ Lee pulls the rug out from under what he’s saying so skilfully and so often that he leaves us wondering what he really does think. Is he really angry enough about this TV show to harbour such vicious opinions about its presenters, or is it just a cool, satirical exercise in irony? Even the comedian himself seems unsure. In a footnote to the published transcript of the show, he confesses: ‘Just to be clear, I don’t wish Richard Hammond had been killed in that crash. However, there is a half-buried and extreme part of me that entertains as true every other aspect of this argument.’33 Some newspapers were less nuanced in their response, taking Lee’s words at face value as a simple rant. The Mail on Sunday, for example, described it as a ‘sick tirade’.34 As a result, when the show is filmed at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow on 15 March 2010, Lee looks straight down the camera and explains to anyone from that newspaper watching the DVD that he ‘was using an exaggerated form – of the rhetoric and the implied values of Top Gear – to satirize the rhetoric, and the implied values of Top Gear. [laughter]’ He then adds: ‘And it is a shame to have to break character and explain that. [laughter] But hopefully, it will save you a long, tedious exchange of emails’ This provokes 11 seconds of laughter and applause. Having already got so much mileage out of walking a tightrope between earnestness and irony, he then plays an even bigger game with the truth. He starts by telling the audience that he went to school with Richard Hammond.

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There’s a small laugh of disbelief, and it sounds like somebody in the audience is scoffing at the idea to the person in the next seat – hardly surprising given the previous shenanigans. The various ways that Lee goes on to overcome their doubts are a testament to his consummate stand-up skills. Firstly, his voice subtly takes on a tone and rhythm that suggests he’s not striving for laughs, but merely giving across factual information necessary to set up the next bit of comedy. Secondly, he directly challenges the audience’s scepticism, telling them he went to Solihull School and both he and Hammond are listed as old boys which they can look up on ‘the Wikipedia’ when they get home.35 Thirdly and most importantly, he throws in enough telling details to give his story a patina of authenticity: members of the grindcore band Napalm Death were also at the school at the time; he went to their third ever gig at Dorridge village scout hut; when he was library monitor, he rescued Hammond from some bullies and took him under his wing; at one point he saved Hammond from his tormentors by blocking the door with a Penguin edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses; the bullies were carrying a copy of a porn mag called Rustler, which had a free flexidisc on the cover. Some of these details are funny in themselves, but others are not. The specificity of his memories and the level of detail he goes into suggests he’s telling the truth, particularly in the context of a stand-up act, where economy is normally so vital and anything extraneous is left out. The story ends with Hammond turning on Lee, hanging out with the bullies and describing his former protector as ‘Some queer bender from the sixth form, who’s always trying to feel me up.’ This bit gets some laughs, but they don’t seem to be enough to act as a climax for an anecdote that’s lasted the best part of ten minutes. The really big laughs comes when he reveals his hand: ‘Now,’ he says, staring at the audience and pausing for nearly five seconds, causing a handful of punters to laugh. ‘That story about Richard Hammond is not true.’ This amazing admission gets a big, sudden laugh that lingers on for nearly

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nine seconds. ‘But I feel that what it tells us about Richard Hammond-’ he continues, getting another big, lingering laugh. He doesn’t need to finish the sentence – the audience is perfectly capable of anticipating that it would end with the words, ‘is true.’36 The punchline focuses on the nature of truth, and its comic point is that Lee’s justification for making all this up is in no way justifiable. If the story is untrue, how can it possibly ‘reveal’ anything about Richard Hammond? To spend so long in manipulating the audience into thinking they’re hearing a true story could be seen as a betrayal of trust, and indeed immediately after confessing, he points out somebody leaving the auditorium, and imagines what he’s thinking: ‘I didn’t pay to hear a twenty-minute fictional story about Richard Hammond. [laughter]’ What makes it all so funny is that Lee is obviously acutely aware of what he is playing with, and the outrageousness of it all. Although his manner is downbeat, there’s a clear sense of fun that comes out in pauses, subtly knowing glances, and moment when his own amusement becomes discernible.37 What makes it particularly interesting is that even having explicitly owned up to fabricating the whole anecdote, some people still went away from the show thinking it might be true. The Mail on Sunday’s ‘sick tirade’ article, for example, reported ‘speculation that their shared school experience may have prompted Lee’s diatribe’ and quoted an audience member who said: ‘He told a joke which he said was made-up, about how he had saved Hammond from some bullies, but you couldn’t help wondering if there was something more to it.’38 Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the myriad ways that Lee conjures with the truth in his act. He approached this routine as an actor might, using actual memories of his school in order to ‘locate the incidents I fabricated in precisely remembered real locations, to almost trick myself that they were real memories.’39 Indeed, this kind of ambiguous interweaving of truth and fiction is there in the persona he adopts for his stand-up act. He explains how this differs from who

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he is offstage, describing it as ‘like an exaggerated form of the adolescent version of me, a kind of puritan, [with] very intense feelings about particular things, but also all dismissively sarcastic, the teenage thing.’ More recently, he has found himself having to adapt the persona: I’m trying to move on a bit from that, because I don’t know if it works that well for a man in his mid-forties, and also it doesn’t work that well for someone who is demonstrably a success on some level. You know, you can’t really do that. It’d become a bit false … It’s a bit more about being an exaggerated version of how I feel now, which you could play kind of resentment of commitment, and being stuck in your life, you know, and also, what can you find to be frustrated about when it’s going so well? You can be frustrated about a really petty thing that it’s not going quite as well as you’d hoped, you know. You really have to exaggerate that because people could quite legitimately go, ‘What is your problem?’ He argues that distinguishing person from persona – which he refers to as ‘he’ – gives him the licence to say onstage more than he could in an everyday context: [I]t’s really clear to me that he would sort of resent Russell Howard for getting credit for doing charity work when like, hour for hour, he doesn’t do as much as me – as much as him … And so I’m sort of surprised sometimes when people are personally offended by things, because it’s really obvious to me that to be true to the character, that’s what he would say. Even though I wouldn’t say it, I might think it, but I wouldn’t say it, you know.40 He makes a point of maintaining this clear separation between the private man and his ‘stand-up character’, but the public statements he has made about it only serves to whip up clouds of ambiguity. In 2010, he wrote: ‘I am sort of in character as

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a smug, stuck-up, politically correct, holier than thou leftie, a character I have researched so fully I often feel obliged to behave like it in my own spare time, sometimes for years on end.’41 In an interview with Kevin Eldon, he said: ‘[W]hen I say the character of me is different to me, it isn’t, and I don’t get into character in any way, and it is me … I say it’s different as a false attempt to sort of distance myself from the things that I do actually think.’42 The idea that Lee’s onstage views might be more authentic than he often suggests is borne out by Richard Herring, who recalls: When we shared a flat he would often say something. I’d say, ‘You should just do that as part of your stand-up.’ He’d go, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wouldn’t have even seen what was funny about it … ’Cos it was really his kind of ridiculous character that was blind to his own ludicrousness, you know.43 Indeed, Lee admits that the character even affects important decisions in his offstage life: ‘But then I’ve also started trying to do things professionally that he would do, right.’44 All of this takes us back to the essential ambiguity of identity at the heart of stand-up comedy. By creating such a complex hall of mirrors around the question of who he is when he’s onstage, Stewart Lee is not breaking the established rules of stand-up comedy, but rather seeing how far they will stretch. He is cleverly exploring the creative possibilities of the fact that the line between person and persona is never absolutely clear. This makes stand-up quite different to conventional theatre, and in order to explain the difference – as unlikely as it may sound – I’m going to invoke the classical myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote of a contest between these two artists. Zeuxis produced a painting of grapes that was so realistic birds flew down towards it, mistaking the picture for real fruit. Parrhasius then produced his own painting, which was apparently covered by a curtain.

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Zeuxis ‘haughtily demanded that the curtain should be drawn aside to let the picture be seen.’45 In fact, it was a painting of a curtain. Parrhasius won the contest because whereas Zeuxis only fooled the birds, he managed to fool a human being, and a fellow painter at that. In straight acting, the boundaries of truth and fiction are fairly clearly drawn. However fine an actor’s portrayal of Macbeth may be, we are unlikely to genuinely mistake them for the actual eleventh century Scottish king. Like Zeuxis’s painting of grapes, we might admire the realism of the acting, but it will not fool us. Stand-up comedy is more like Parrhasius’s painting of curtains. The comedian can fake something so realistically that we believe it to be true – and however distorted or exaggerated the persona, we can still believe it is an authentic, unvarnished expression of the private person. Indeed, as the example of Stewart Lee shows us, the relationship between onstage and offstage selves is a conundrum that even the performer himself may not fully understand. Ultimately, it is stand-up comedy’s ability to play with the truth that makes it so powerful and potent.

Notes 1

In fact, Humperdinck was born Arnold George Dorsey. Gerry Dorsey was his first stage name

2

Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill, VVL, 1998, 0579863. According to John Lahr, Dick Van Dyke was the original subject of Izzard’s fake death announcement routine (see John Lahr, Show and Tell, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 173)

3

Brian Logan, ‘Be Truthful – and Funny Will Come. To Mark This Year’s Inaugural Richard Pryor Award for Comedy, We Asked a Group of Comics to Put a Question to the Great Stand-Up. Brian Logan Introduces the Results’, the Guardian, 9 August 2004, Arts pages p. 13. I emailed Pryor as part of the research for this book, asking for any wisdom he could pass on

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to me. His reply read ‘Always only tell the truth! love Richard’ (received 2 July 2004) 4

Billy Connolly, Too Old to Die Young, Carling Hammersmith Apollo, 29 September 2004

5

Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993–8, London: Century, 1998, p. 66

6

Lee Mack, Live, 2 Entertain, 2007, 2EDVD0029

7

Josie Long, The Future is Another Place, The Horsebridge, Whitstable, 18 February 2012

8

Brendon Burns, Live: So I Suppose This is Offensive Now!, Universal, 2008, 8257671

9

See Johann Hari, ‘Laugh? I nearly cried … Johann Hari toured the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in search of Britain’s funny bone. He left with the feeling that, behind the smiles, as a nation we are dissatisfied with our lives and uncomfortable with each other’, Arts & Book Review, the Independent, 24 August 2007; and Julian Hall, ‘Not a classic Burns’ night Comedy; Brendon Burns: So I Suppose This Is Offensive Now; Pleasance Dome’, Independent Extra, 15 August 2007

10 These routines can be heard on Woody Allen, The Nightclub Years 1964–68, EMI, 1990, ECC3 11 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 12 Track 3 on Shelley Berman, Outside Shelley Berman, Laugh. com, 2002, LGH1115 13 For example, see Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 301; and Phil Berger, The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, pp. 68–71 14 Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004 15 Mark Lamarr, Uncensored and Live, VVL, 1997, 0474343 16 Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004 17 Jo Brand on Jack Dee Live at the Apollo, BBC One, 27 September 2004 18 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004

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19 Not least because he has been known to admit onstage that he prefers one over the other 20 Louis C. K., Chewed Up, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2008, ABD4815 21 Marc Maron This HAS to be Funny, Comedy Central Records, 2011, CCR0122 22 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 531 23 Phill Jupitus, Live – Quadrophobia, VVL, 2000, 0740533 24 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 25 The Stand-Up Show, BBC1, 18 November 1995 26 Interview with Rhona Cameron, by telephone, 19 March 2004 27 Demelza de Burca, ‘The family is all I’ve got to talk about… now my teen lads have gagged me, I have to respect their wishes’, Daily Mirror, 21 July 2012, p. 28 28 Margaret Cho, Notorious C. H. O., Matchbox Films, 2011, MBF019 29 Richard Herring, What is Love, Anyway? Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 14 February 2012 30 ‘Stewart Lee – “Robert the Bruce” (1991)’, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=seTMl6MQ1yw [accessed 23 October 2012] (originally broadcast on the Granada TV series, Stand Up, summer 1991) 31 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 32 All of the quotes from this routine are taken from Stewart Lee, If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, Comedy Central/Real Talent, 2010, COMEDY01 33 Stewart Lee, The ‘If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One’ EP, London: Faber and Faber, 2012, p. 56. Great though this book is, I’ve avoided quoting from the transcript, partly because I wanted to use my own sense of how to punctuate the lines to indicate Lee’s timing, and partly because I needed to include the audience’s reaction

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34 James Tapper, ‘What Prompted Comic’s Sick Tirade Against His Top Gear Schoolmate?’ Mail on Sunday, 30 August 2009 35 Wikipedia does indeed list both Lee and Hammond in its entry for Solihull School, and as luck would have it, Hammond’s name is listed directly under Lee’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Solihull_School [accessed 28 October 2012]). I think Lee adds the definite article to ‘Wikipedia’ to make him sound out of touch with modern phenomena like the internet, as this is a fairly common motif in his recent stand-up 36 Indeed, the published transcript of the show includes these words, thus demonstrating that it’s possible to communicate more succinctly and efficiently in a stand-up act than in cold print (Stewart Lee, The ‘If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One’ EP, London: Faber and Faber, 2012, p. 71) 37 Having pulled this off once, Lee went on to repeat the trick in his show Vegetable Stew (2010), with a routine about being at Oxford with David Cameron. This features the same use of telling details and a practically identical reveal and justification at the end. This routine can be seen in the final episode of Series Two of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (see Stewart Lee, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Series Two, BBC/2 Entertain, 2011, BBCDVD3471) 38 James Tapper, ‘What Prompted Comic’s Sick Tirade Against His Top Gear Schoolmate?’ Mail on Sunday, 30 August 2009 39 Stewart Lee, The ‘If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One’ EP, London: Faber and Faber, 2012, p. 65 40 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 41 Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 100 42 The interview is included as an extra feature on Stewart Lee, If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, Comedy Central/Real Talent, 2010, COMEDY01 43 Interview with Richard Herring, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 14 February 2012

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44 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 45 Pliny the Elder (trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley), The Natural History of Pliny, Vol. VI, London: 1857, p. 251

CHAPTER TWELVE

Working the audience Take the audience away from stand-up comedy and it starts to look weird. In 1960, the rotund American comedian Buddy Hackett released an album called The Original Chinese Waiter. Unlike other records from the time from the likes of Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman, it was not a live recording, but was made in a studio, without an audience. There’s something quite eerie about hearing the insistent rhythms of his gags going down to total silence, an effect the recording engineer seems to have tried to lessen by adding the tiniest bit of reverb to Hackett’s voice. The really strange parts are when he addresses his ‘audience’ directly. The album starts with him announcing, ‘I don’t know about you folks, but I’m very fond of Chinese food.’ The fact that he is obviously saying this to a cold, unresponsive microphone in an empty studio makes it sound rather desperate, an impression which is reinforced by the first line of the final track: ‘Uh, I guess you folks is laughin’ pretty good by now.’1 Hearing this ring out in my silent office more than half a century after the recording was made makes Hackett’s guess sound pretty much like wishful thinking. I’m not trying to put him down, it’s just that stand-up comedy without an audience is only half there. Ben Elton has argued that, ‘It’s a dialogue, it’s just very one way.’2 Without the laughter half of the dialogue, there is nothing. I know this from personal experience. Running through the act without an audience is rather like leaving a message on somebody’s

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answerphone – you need to feel there’s somebody listening at the other end, or it’s difficult to keep up the energy you need to express yourself, and you often end up collapsing into total inarticulacy. As Mark Thomas points out, ‘You can’t do the gig in a vacuum, because it is specifically about the performer and the audience, and it’s specifically about generating the prerequisite number of responses. And they’re very audible responses. And if you’re not getting that, really you should stop.’3

Exchanging energy Kiwi comedian Rhys Darby describes what he does: ‘You become the energy of the whole thing, you just go out there and switch on.’4 Some have compared the exchange of energy between performer and audience that goes on in stand-up comedy with electricity.5 Phill Jupitus paints a beautiful picture of just how wonderful the energy exchange can be: [There’s] this odd dynamic of just a thousand people in a room … I’m the one and you’re the 999. And you’re just like a lightning rod for the feeling in the room, really, as a stand-up … And it’s two way. Because you need them as much as they need you. There’s nothing like a good stand-up gig. There is nothing like a good stand-up gig, for that kind of unique, what-the-hell-just-happened-there? kind of night, you know. It’s like alchemy.6 Funny lines, gestures and mimes flow from the comedian to the audience, and laughter, applause and heckles flow back in the other direction. The audience is energised and bonded into a group by the comedy that flows from the performer, and the performer is filled with the energy that he or she gets from the audience’s responses. Comics must be able to generate energy in the audience, or they will receive no energy in return, and



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there will be nothing to fuel their performance. Dying onstage is a uniquely enervating experience. What comedians learn to do as they gain experience is to read the audience, to understand their reactions, to ensure that they can be properly energised. As Dave Gorman points out, What you do isn’t say those words in that order; it’s play the audience. It’s feeling the consciousness of the room, and when they’re ready to take the dive into the punchline and when they’re not, and when they’re tense, and you can’t feel that unless they’re there creating that atmosphere.7 The exchange of energy is subtle and although comedians develop an instinct for handling it, it tends to defy cold analysis. Sometimes the energy of a show can go wrong. I remember being last on the bill at the Banana Cabaret in Balham in the early 1990s. The second act is an open mike spot, a fourperson black comedy troupe called They Wouldn’t. They generate huge energy between the four of them, and leave the stage after six minutes to the kind of ovation a proper paid act would be proud of. They’re followed by accordion-playing Scots oddball Lindsay Moran, who manages to catch the wave of energy they have created, and ride it even higher. The show has climaxed by the end of the first half. After the interval, the audience are tired, and the comedian who follows Moran can’t rouse them. I am similarly unsuccessful, getting a few laughs, but unable to waft away the stink of anticlimax. I remember seeing Johnny Vegas doing an open spot in a cellar bar called Mulberries in Manchester a few years later, and being similarly unfollowable. James Campbell finds that playing to audiences of children means he has to pay particular attention to energy levels: With an adult stand-up gig, you try and build it and build it and build it until you’ve got people literally rolling around in the aisles with tears streaming down their face. You try

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and do that with a kids’ audience, they get hysterical. And the lid just blows off. So you have to keep calming them down every now and again. So you don’t get that constant build up. You can do it to a certain extent, towards the end, but I mean some of them will literally wet themselves … There is nothing more horrible than the sound of 300 children laughing because you’ve paused. You get that fake laughter, hysterical laughter. They’re just laughing because they’re supposed to be laughing, and they can’t remember why they’re supposed to be laughing. It’s horrible, it’s demonic.8 However difficult it is to handle the exchange of energy between performer and audience, it’s a defining feature of stand-up comedy, and it’s one of the things that make direct address so important. The directness of communication allows the comedian to switch on, to generate electricity, to become a lightning rod for the whole room. This is one of the reasons why many actors find the idea of performing stand-up so daunting. Shelley Berman trained as a classical actor, studying Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare and Chekhov at acting school. When he started as a stand-up, he brought with him many of the practices of straight acting, and took time to adapt to the demands of the new format: I didn’t even address the audience, because I was used to the Fourth Wall. I was really trained to ignore that, you do not penetrate that Fourth Wall unless you are doing a soliloquy… That Fourth Wall was sacred … This was incredible, that I would not address the audience. I was afraid to address them, because it was wrong … One day, Billy Eckstein – the singer Billy Eckstein – said to me, ‘When you get onstage tonight,’ (because I was working with him, I was opening the show for him in Canada), and he said, ‘Will you do me a favour Shelley, just before you sit down and go to your phone, why don’t you just say thank you and good evening to the audience that’s



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welcomed you?’ ‘Well I can’t do that, Billy, I don’t do that.’ ‘Well just try it.’ And he nagged at me, night after night. And one night I tried it, and I got much more laughter. For some reason, the material went over better. And it wasn’t just that one night, I tried it again and I saw that there was something. And then I started softening up and relaxing with the audience, telling them about myself … and I found that they were enjoying me more than or as much as my material … I somehow realised that it’s dealing with the audience that the comedian does, and, you know, I’d better stop being such a snob.9

Energy and space The skill of the individual comedian isn’t the only thing that can affect the exchange of energy. Another big factor is the particular circumstances in which the stand-up show occurs. The time the show starts has an effect. A seven o’clock start might mean a rather formal, reserved audience, whereas a midnight show can be either lethargic or rowdy. In a Friday night show, the audience may be bad tempered or overexcited after a hard week at work; a Saturday show tends to be more relaxed. Space probably affects energy even more than time. The comedy club I used to run was based in a largish pub function room, which in many ways was ideal for stand-up. There was a small stage at one end, and plenty of tables and chairs to seat the audience. The room had its own bar and direct access to toilets, meaning that paying punters would not have the hassle of having their tickets checked if they wanted to fill their glasses or empty their bladders. In spite of this, from very early on in the life of the club, the audience tended to take rather a long time to warm up. In the first half of the show, although they liked the acts, they were not particularly vocal in showing their support. Generally, the laughter was rather quiet until the second half got underway.

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A solution to this problem was discovered by Jacqui, the student who sold the tickets and did front of house for the show. She had a way of arranging the tables which made a tangible difference to the energy of the show, making the audience significantly livelier in the first half. The room was much longer and thinner than it appeared at first glance, and there was a tendency for a large group of standing punters to congregate at the back. This group, which could easily be as much as a third of the total audience, were a long way from the stage. I used to watch the show from the back myself between my compèring spots, and I felt far removed from both the act and the rest of the audience. Jacqui realised that by putting as many of the tables and chairs as close to the front as possible, the standing punters would be brought forward, and the whole audience would be densely packed around the stage. The proximity and density of the audience meant that it was easier for a really efficient exchange of energy to occur. Needless to say, I went on to marry Jacqui.10 I made similar discoveries when I worked with a collective of comedians called Red Grape Cabaret. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we did shows in a motley collection of pubs, students unions and arts centres. College gigs tended to be the worst, often taking place in unsuitable venues, with poor staging and technical facilities. Once we had become confident enough to assert ourselves with the people running the shows, we started to take charge of the situations we found ourselves in. Sometimes this would mean taking obvious steps, like turning off televisions, jukeboxes or one-armed bandits while the show was on. Other times, it would mean rearranging the space, finding the best place for the stage to be set up, adjusting the lighting and rearranging the seating. Usually, this turned an undoable gig into an acceptable one, an acceptable gig into a joy. I don’t ever remember discussing the principles behind our decision to move things around, but I do remember developing a strong sense of how a space and the way it was laid out would affect a show.



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This acquired knowledge made me sit up and take notice when I came across Iain Mackintosh’s book Architecture, Actor and Audience. In a history of theatre architecture from Elizabethan times to the present day, Mackintosh argues that its ‘chief purpose … is to provide a channel for energy’.11 He suggests a number of rules for theatre design to maximise the flow of energy between actor and audience, including the idea that it’s more important for an audience to be densely packed than to be comfortable or have good sightlines, and that the audience should ‘enfold the performing area in a welcoming embrace’.12 This immediately made me think of Jacqui’s table layout, and about the general principles of space and energy in stand-up comedy. One of these principles is that the acoustics of the space are important, and not just to ensure that the audience can easily hear the comedian. It’s equally vital that the space should be shaped to maximise the volume of the audience’s response. William Cook points out that, ‘Comedy works best in basements, with low ceilings and tight crowds.’13 Low ceilings are crucial, because they allow the laughter to bounce back and reverberate through the room, boosting the energy. High ceilings make things much harder. In 1997, I compèred a series of shows at the Barnsley Civic Theatre, a great barn of a room, both broad and long. I found that even with a big audience, the laughter got swallowed up by the high ceiling, allowing the energy to evaporate. Different venues make different demands of a comedian. Variety theatres were laid out in sections, and the comic had to ensure that he or she was achieving an exchange of energy with stalls, circle and gallery. Frankie Howerd would get his sister Betty to sit in each part of the theatre to ensure that there was nowhere he wasn’t reaching.14

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Arena comedy Large venues can have a profound effect on the way the audience experience the show. In September 2004, I go to see Billy Connolly at the Carling Hammersmith Apollo. It’s a big venue, with a seating capacity of 3,719. I’m in seat 76, row Y, on the second to back row of the circle. It’s a long way from the stage. When Connolly comes on at the beginning, he’s a tiny figure. He looks like a digital photo taken on the wrong light setting. The white and grey of his hair and beard blend with the complexion of his skin, making it almost impossible to pick out any features on the bleached-out blob of his face. Any raised eyebrows, knowing glances or comic grimaces are lost on the back rows. However, he’s a superb performer, with vast experience of playing big venues, and his performance works at both short and long distance. People like me in the cheaper seats might miss out on the facial expressions, but Connolly works with his whole body. His long, lightweight hair flaps about comically when he acts something out, and he habitually strokes it back, running his hands down either side of his head. His legs are very expressive – he demonstrates funny walks and struts about the stage when he gets a big laugh. He has great mime skills, for example illustrating how long it takes a man of his age to urinate, finishing off by pretending to wring out his penis with both hands. He also uses the whole stage, occasionally stepping right up to the front of it and lowering his voice to give the feeling of saying something confidential. In spite of all this though, I feel a little distanced from the show because of the way the size of the venue affects the audience. After a punchline, I can hear the wave of laughter rushing through the stalls, but it rarely engulfs me. In my section, there are pockets of laughter or applause from individuals or groups around me, but there are not many moments when we all laugh at once. As individuals,



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we’re more likely to laugh if surrounded by others who are laughing, but on the peripheries of a large audience we’re less likely to be surrounded. There’s no doubt that large venues present particular challenges for comedians, particularly when they move into gigantic arena gigs. Steve Martin has written of the problems he faced as the first stand-up to venture into such huge, unwieldy venues. He found it impossible to retain any subtlety in his act, pointing out that ‘nuance was difficult when you were a white dot in a basketball arena.’15 He also found the audience’s rock and roll attitude affected his delivery: ‘The act was still rocking, but audience disruptions, whoops and shouts, sometimes killed the timing of bits, violating my premise that every moment mattered.’ Furthermore, it was impossible to deal with disruptions because ‘if I had responded to the heckler, the rest of the audience wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.’ With hindsight, he realises that the nature of his performances had completely changed: ‘I had become a party host, presiding not over timing and ideas but over a celebratory bash of my own making. If I had understood what was happening, I might have been happier, but I didn’t. I still thought I was doing comedy.’16 Having grown up in the punk era – with its preference for small, sweaty, intimate venues – and worked as a comic in cellar bars and pub function rooms, I find the idea of stadium stand-up a bit odd, and as a result I attended one for the first time only very recently. On 27 September 2012, I find myself sitting in Block 110, Row E, Seat 282 of the O2 Arena in London, watching Michael McIntyre’s Showtime. It’s a curiously impersonal experience. The audience seem as varied and random as you’d get on, say, a busy railway station. I don’t feel part of a group much more than I would on a station, either. The laughter is a weird, unnatural noise – a kind of distant, disembodied rush that seems to emanate from the centre of the arena. McIntyre has spoken about what it’s like to play arenas: ‘Most of the time, you’re blinded …You don’t see the

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audience. You have spotlights in your face and, behind that, it’s dark. You’re just talking into a black void.’17 The difficulties of connecting with the audience are obvious at the O2. As with any stadium gig, live relay of the comedian is projected on large video screens behind him. He chastises people sitting at the front, telling them it’s ‘rude’ to watch him on the screens rather than actually looking at him. Pointing this out as a breach of etiquette is a good gag and he gets laughs with it, but the fact that he has to tell them off for the same thing later on suggests that deep down he might be a tiny bit frustrated by it. I’m sitting near the front of a block that’s towards the back of the arena, and from where I’m sitting watching the screen is pretty much the only option. The comedian is a tiny figure whose facial expressions are simply beyond my range of vision. I make a conscious effort to try and watch the man rather than his projected image, but I can’t last more than a couple of minutes before my eyes flick back to the screens. Part of the problem is that I can’t see his lips move, so it takes an act of the imagination to believe that the hugely amplified voice we hear through the PA is actually coming from him – it fits much more readily with the image we see on the screens. Before the show, clips from his previous DVDs were projected and largely ignored by the audience as we filtered in. This was weird, as the video images from his past performances looked so similar to the live relay from tonight’s show which we now watch so avidly. Towards the end of the show, people start shouting out – not really heckling, just trying to join in. He deals with it by imitating the noise they make, which does the job in terms of getting a laugh, but it’s really the only option that’s open to him. He tells them he can’t hear what they’re saying – he’d love to play with them, but it would have to be a more intimate show. Stewart Lee is only half joking when he suggests a novel solution for this kind of problem: I don’t know what it’s like for these stadium guys. I mean



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… I don’t know who they think they’re talking to … they’ve got a big monitor with a picture of the comic on it, actually the comic should be looking at a big monitor of the audience. Of, like, individuals, so he can see. That’d make more sense.18 One thing I realise as I’m watching McIntyre is that spontaneous applause – as opposed to the ritual applause that welcomes the comic on to the stage and off again at the end – is almost entirely absent from the show. In most stand-up gigs, this is almost as important a reaction as laughter in showing audience approval. It can be used to reward a particularly clever gag, or an exceptionally deft bit of performance, or perhaps to show they agree with an opinion the comedian has expressed. The lack of spontaneous applause in McIntyre’s O2 show is odd because he’s clearly immensely popular with the thousands of people who have paid a decent amount of money to see him here, and in fact we like him so much that we cheer him back on for an encore. His act has the qualities that normally merit spontaneous applause – there are clever gags, some lovely moments of performance, and he expresses the kind of mainstream opinions that hardly anybody could disagree with. I conclude that problem lies less with the comedian and more with the way the audience is configured. A review of Newman and Baddiel’s show at the Wembley Arena in 1993 points out how difficult it was for the two comics to unify the audience: ‘It was full-ish – but one end was curtained off, the empty spaces acted like fire breaks in a forest, and although it often crackled, it never quite caught fire.’19 It’s nothing like as bad as that at McIntyre’s O2 show, but as with Billy Connolly’s show at the Hammersmith Apollo, I don’t fully feel part of the crowd. I’m never surrounded by laughter, only hearing the laughs of isolated individuals sitting around me. Spontaneous applause requires a kind of agreement spawned by the zeitgeist in the room – but with such a vast, amorphous audience this kind of quasi-psychic consensus is near-impossible.

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Al Murray has an anecdote which shows just how big the yawning gap between performer and audience can be in an arena: I had friends who went to one of [my] O2 shows, [who] said, ‘Oh, there was a fight in front of us.’ You think, ‘I didn’t know that!’ And you’d know that in a 40-seat room, an 80-seat room, 300-seat room. You’d even know that in a 4,000-seat big theatre, you’d know if there was that kind of a disturbance. But in an arena you’ve no idea, and that seems a shame in a way.20

Correcting audience response Part of the skill of being a stand-up comedian is to be able to control the exchange of energy by managing and manipulating audience response. Often this is done so skilfully that the audience will not even realise it is happening. The laughter, the applause and the way that the energy builds through the course of the show all seem to be totally spontaneous expressions of the audience’s will. The subtle cues used to help the punters know when to laugh or applaud – the gestures, timing or vocal inflections – are largely invisible. The technique only starts to show when the audience’s reactions are in some way incongruous. Then the comedian can get laughs by correcting whatever mistake the crowd has made. A common example would be when only one or two people clap, denying the comic the satisfaction of fullblown spontaneous applause. Jimmy Carr deals with this by saying, ‘All together or not at all on the applause. [laughter] Otherwise we’ve got to throw you a fucking fish. [laughter]’ There’s a gentility underlying Carr’s wilfully offensive wit, and having jokingly suggested that the lone applauder is a trained seal, he then politely acknowledges the applause, saying, ‘Thanks very much.’21



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Even laughter in an unexpected place can be sent up as a mistaken response. David Cross is about to launch into the next section of a routine about drugs: ‘And where I live in New York, er, um, eleven blocks from my apartment is a methadone clinic. And, er –’ This is clearly set-up rather than punchline, and methadone clinics are not really know for their humorous qualities, so when this apparently innocuous line gets a laugh from a single punter, he stops sharply, and his head snaps up to look in the direction of the laughter. His face shows puzzled amusement, and the audience laugh with him at the inappropriateness of the response. ‘Ha ha, wh-! Why is that funny?’ he ponders, then imagines the thought process of the person who laughed: ‘“Ahhh, treatment!! Huh huh! [laughter and a smattering of applause] Wha, huh huh. Just pop down the methadone clinic for some gutbusters.” [laughter]’ A couple of lines later, he tries to get things back on track, saying, ‘No but then, all right, so in between, er, my apartment and the methadone clinic, is a park. Tompkins Square Park in, er, in East Village, and um – So, needless to say, there are a lot of junkies in that park.’ There’s another single laugh, and it’s louder this time. Cross pauses and looks down at the stage, apparently annoyed this time. The audience laugh. He feigns bemused disapproval: ‘I don’t wanna – encourage this, er – [laughter] Or we’ll never get outta here, er –’ [laughter]’22

Hostility Although Cross plays this as if his authority is being challenged, in both of these examples the rogue punters’ responses are actually positive. They are, after all, only applauding or laughing. Sometimes, though, comedians can face genuine challenges. Stand-up comedy is shot through with a dark vein of fear and hostility. Comedians tend to fear audiences, afraid of their ability to judge and reject. Speaking to an audience is one of the most popular fears among the general public,

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and many people are horrified by the very idea of having to perform stand-up. Meanwhile, on the other side of the mirror, audiences fear comedians. For most events, venues with unreserved seating tend to fill up from the front, whereas in comedy shows they tend to fill up from the back. Punters fear sitting near the front in case they should get picked on or ridiculed by the act. Stand-up jargon has hostility written into it. Comedians who have done well with an audience say they have ‘killed’; those that have done badly say they have ‘died’. Stand-up has been compared with bullfighting. Comedians say that audiences are ‘the enemy’, that they can smell the comic’s fear. In his influential book On Aggression, Konrad Lorenz argues that humour is a veiled form of hostility, but says it is unlikely to regress into ‘primal aggressive behaviour’. He drives the point home with a memorable line: ‘Barking dogs may occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot!’23 However, there have been incidents in stand-up shows where the fear and hostility that bubbles under the surface has exploded into real violence. Milton Berle once used a couple of standard comic insults on a group of three men sitting at a nightclub table, getting nothing but silence in return. After the show, one of them assaulted him, grabbing him by the tie and sticking a fork into his chin, saying, ‘I could kill you right this minute, you little rat bastard.’24 Hattie Hayridge, an inoffensive comic with a deadpan act based on offbeat one-liners, was assaulted less seriously while she was on stage at the Tunnel Club in East London. The venue lived up to its reputation for crazy, rowdy hecklers as a punter walked across the back of the stage, stood behind her and lifted up her dress. She responded by repeatedly kicking him, so he came back at her by throwing an egg in her face. There have also been cases where violence has been started by the comedian. In an uncharacteristically slapstick move, Lenny Bruce once repaid a heckler by inviting him onstage and pushing a custard pie into his face. Milton Berle could give as good as he took. An anti-Semitic heckler started winding



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him up by shouting ‘Kike!’, ‘Jew bastard’ and ‘Hitler’s right’. Berle leapt off the stage and piled into the man, trying to pass it off as a joke by pretending to dance with him. They were separated by theatre ushers, and Berle was later arrested.25 But arguably, the prize for Most Violent Assault on a Paying Punter should go to Bob Monkhouse. In 1977, Monkhouse was performing in Watford when he was persistently heckled by a young man shouting, ‘Fuck off!’ Eventually, the comedian snapped. ‘No more!’ he said, before walking tightrope-style along the railing that led from the stage to the punter and kicking him in the head, instantly flooring him. The audience cheered the comic, and he went down to much greater enthusiasm after the assault.26 With this in mind, I wonder what would have happened if AA Gill had made the comment about marzipan socks to Monkhouse’s face?

Notes 1

‘The Original Chinese Waiter’ and ‘The Old Army Routine’ on Buddy Hackett, The Original Chinese Waiter, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH1107

2

Face to Face, BBC Two, 12 January 1998

3

Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004

4

Interview with Rhys Darby, by telephone, 30 June 2004

5

E.g. ‘An electric shock shoots around the room when a comic is really cooking.’, William Cook, Ha Bloody Ha: Comedians Talking, London: Fourth Estate, 1994, p. 181; comedian Simon Evans: ‘Laughter is like electricity’, quoted in William Cook, The Comedy Store: The Club that Changed British Comedy, London: Little, Brown and Company, 2001, p. 110

6

Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004

7

Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004

8

Interview with James Campbell, by telephone, 25 August 2004

9

Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004

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10 Really. 11 Iain Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 172 12 Iain Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 128 13 William Cook, The Comedy Store: The Club that Changed British Comedy, London: Little, Brown and Company, 2001, p. 110 14 Frankie Howerd, On the Way I Lost it: An Autobiography, London: Star Books/WH Allen, 1976, p. 67 15 Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 181 16 Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 185 17 Stephen Armstrong, ‘Can You Hear Me At The Back? The main players in comedy now perform to huge crowds of all ages. What if your material doesn’t travel to these vast arenas? Stephen Armstrong talks to the next wave of comics aiming for the big time’, Sunday Times, 19 February 2012, p. 12 18 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 19 William Cook, ‘Funny Turn at the Arena; Newman and Baddiel Strive to Fill Wembley Arena with Laughs’, the Guardian, 13 December 1993, Features p. 5 20 Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012 21 Jimmy Carr, Telling Jokes, 4 DVD, 2009, C4DVD10294 22 David Cross, Bigger and Blackerer, Sub Pop Records, 2010, SP883 [DVD] 23 Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, London: Methuen, 1967, p. 254 24 Milton Berle (with Haskel Frankel), Milton Berle – An Autobiography, New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1974, pp. 132–3 25 Milton Berle (with Haskel Frankel), Milton Berle – An Autobiography, New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1974, pp. 164–5 26 Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993–8, London: Century, 1998, pp. 330–2

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sharing What is interesting about watching James Campbell – whose act is aimed at children – is seeing how many of the normal expectations of a stand-up show are overturned. The expected rivalry between comedian and audience is simply not there, and there’s no question of him having to fight for survival, as the status his adulthood affords him means he will always be more powerful than most of his punters. When he asks them questions, rather than shouting out, the children politely put their hands up. There’s no way he could seriously ridicule an individual audience member as he might in an adult gig, because the battle of wits would be too uneven. It doesn’t bear thinking about – the child, bursting into tears, the parents furiously glowering at him and taking the child out of the theatre, all of the other parents murmuring dangerously. Campbell avoids all of this by treating the children with skilful delicacy. At a show in Tunbridge Wells, he asks if any of the children are evil, and a little girl puts her hand up. He asks her why she’s evil. She says she doesn’t know. This leads him into a flight of fancy about James Bond villains who have no idea what their plans are.1 It’s a funny bit, which directs the laughter away from the girl whose comment inspired it, by focusing not on her but on a fantastical idea. Tiernan Douieb – the regular compère for Comedy Club 4 Kids – explains what it’s like performing for an audience of children:

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[T]he biggest difference I’d say is their enthusiasm. Kids will fill the front row first, and then go backwards. And also they heckle but not heckling, they want to take part. You know, I prefer them to a drunk crowd on a Friday. You get far more interesting responses … There’s a whole sort of territory thing with adults … of somebody who wants to be more impressive than the comedian so they’ll put you down. Kids just wanna take part, it’s so lovely …2 Watching him in action at the Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury, the difference is immediately obvious. Instead of heckling, the kids put their hands up to try and get his attention. Their comments are sometimes sincere – perhaps earnestly telling him about their pets – and often imaginative and very funny. One boy tells him that today was disappointing, and when Douieb asks why, the boy replies: ‘My parents woke up.’ Another boy declares, in a totally serious tone, ‘I kill monsters.’3 All of this gives the comedian plenty of fuel for his comic imagination, and much of the gig is a collaborative conversation, the children making suggestions and Douieb playfully running with them. It’s refreshing to see comedian and audience on the same side, but even normal adult stand-up gigs can be friendly, collaborative affairs. Hostility is by no means inevitable and outright violence is thankfully rare. Dave Gorman argues that it’s a mistake to see the audience as the enemy: People always talk about comedy in combative terms. When one of us doesn’t go down well, people will say they died, and when they go really well, they say they killed. And it makes it sound like only one of us can be the winner. Whereas actually, there’s only two ways for this to go: we all have a good time, or we all have a bad time. There isn’t a middle ground. We’re actually all on the same side.4 I’d argue that sharing is just as important a component of humour as aggression. Laughter is a social activity. Studies

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have found that individuals are much less likely to laugh when alone than when they are part of a group, and that we’re more likely to laugh when we’re surrounded by other people laughing.5 Much of what stand-up comedians do is about sharing feelings and experiences with the audience, to create a sense of community. In some cases, the sharing is quite literal. At the Pavilion Theatre, Brighton in January 2004, Daniel Kitson spends a lot of time talking to a couple of teenage boys in the front row. One of them has been brought along by his father, and Kitson chastises him for bringing his son to such an unsuitable show. He chats to the boys, and goes back to them every so often to ask them more questions. He asks them what music they like, showing his disgust when they tell him they like nu metal bands like Korn and Slipknot. Then, at the end of the show, he gives them two CDs from his own collection, saying that they can now start listening to ‘good music’. Sharing his possessions with the two teenagers is a surprisingly touching gesture, which shows that for all the ribbing, he also feels a real connection with them.

Satsumas, fanzines and badges Josie Long shares things out in her shows in a more organised way. In her show Trying is Good, she tells the audience that, ‘[I]t’s a show about how much I love people who put in the effort. Regardless of how – misplaced that effort is. [laughter] And er, I thought I would reward audience members who put in the effort, so I got, I got these.’ She holds up a net of little oranges, and the audience laugh, appreciating the eccentricity of the offer. ‘And I just thought – if you were a big laugher – you know, or you had a nice face [a few people laugh] then I would throw a satsuma [she starts throwing and catching one in her hand] [laughter] at your head. [laughter]’6 She makes good her promise, occasionally stopping to throw satsumas out to people she thinks have earned them.

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She also wears her DIY ethos on her sleeve, producing little hand-drawn, photocopied fanzines which she personally gives out to punters before her shows. The ‘Official Showgramme’ of her 2011–12 show The Future is Another Place, for example, is chockfull of silly, homemade fun – recommended reading and listening, gags, puzzles and cartoons. She explains the thinking behind this: I’ve always wanted to be closer to the audience and meet people because … even in my first tour my dream was to meet all the creative people in all the towns and see what they were up to, you know. I still feel that way and … I don’t like having that distance, like I much prefer it when I’ve gone round and given everyone a programme for the show, so I can feel what people are like …7 Sarah Millican is another comic who gives out little gifts to her audience, in her case badges with slogans that relate to gags in the show. In her show Thoroughly Modern Millican, she does a routine about people who are cautious and people who enjoy taking risks, labelling them ‘Dodgems’ and ‘Bumper Cars’ respectively – and theatre staff give out badges with one or the other label on it. Millican started doing this early in her career, but has kept it going even now her audience has grown so much larger: I think by the end of this tour we will have sold 200,000 tickets. And we still give out badges. And that’s a lot of badges, but also I’m aware that the tickets are more expensive, I can afford the badges, it’s fine! … But it does mean that the pressure’s on every year because … you have to order the badges. Like, what happened last year before Edinburgh, we had to order 10,000 badges before that bit of material was working! Total panic! I can’t believe we’ve just … designed and ordered 10,000 badges and that bit of material still isn’t working! I was like, ‘Well it has to work,

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I’ve got a shedload of badges.’ And it gradually started to work which was such a relief.8 Sharing out badges is not just about specific material. As with Long, it also reflects the ethos of the act and the relationship Millican enjoys with her audience. She builds routines around audience interaction, asking them questions and playing with their responses. At the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, she asks the ‘Dodgems’ in the audience if they take extra pants away with them when they go away, and having established that they do, she asks them why. A voice from the balcony shouts, ‘In case I cough.’ She has to make the person repeat it a couple of times before she hears what they’ve said, and when she does she cracks up laughing, which gets a huge laugh from the audience. Then somebody asks her if she’s wearing red pants. She says she doesn’t know – which gets a laugh – then walks to the back of the stage with her back to us. She hitches up her dress, and pulls her trousers open so she – but not we – can see, and walks back to the mike. ‘No,’ she reports, simply. There’s another huge laugh.9 She explains how important sharing is in this kind of interaction. She earns the right to ask them intimate questions because of how much she shares about her own life: I always make sure that the audience is as dark as possible so that they have anonymity … and they can shout out whatever they like … I like that because then it gives them more freedom to shout stuff out … I share a lot. I think if I went on and did topical stuff and then said, ‘How many sexual partners have you had?’ they’d quite rightly tell me to sod off. But because I sort of give so much of myself away and tell so much private stuff … there’s so much of me that’s given out that they don’t mind giving it back. Because it feels like it goes both ways.10

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Observational comedy A less obvious kind of sharing is observational comedy, in which the comedian makes an observation about something from the backwaters of life, an everyday phenomenon that is rarely noticed or discussed. For it to work properly, it must be based on shared experience, as Eddie Izzard observes: ‘Your observations need to be something that people can relate to, for the audience to pick up on it.’11 Sharing is built into the very language of observational comedy. ‘Have you ever noticed …?’ was such a common introduction to an observational routine that it’s become a comedy cliché.12 When comedians describe the common experience which they are observing, they often use the second person: instead of saying ‘I do this …’, they say, ‘You do this …’ These linguistic quirks emphasise the importance of sharing, directly asking the audience to compare the comedian’s experience with their own. Observational comedy became popular in America in the 1950s, through the work of comedians like Shelley Berman. In Britain, it was pioneered by the folk comedians and the Irish comic Dave Allen in the 1970s, and further back by Al Read, who based his 1950s radio routines on close observations of northern working-class life, often relying on recognition for effect. The chances are, though, that observational comedy is older than this, and may even have existed in the music hall. Dan Leno, for example, had a routine called ‘The Robin’. It’s delivered in Leno’s usual, rather theatrical style. In singsong tones, he tries to be enthusiastic about Christmas, but what he says acknowledges a harsher reality: Why how beautiful it is on a Christmas morning, when a man walks out into the frost and snow, or the mud and the slush as the case might be, and his coat buttoned up, and his nose a beautiful crimson. He meets a friend. Takes him

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by the hand and he says, ‘Merry Christmas!’ And the friend takes him by the hand and says, ‘Merry Christmas!’ And there they stand, hand in hand, looking into each other’s face, waitin’ to see who’s going to stand a drink first. On one level, the gags are based on the simple premise that Christmas isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but there’s something about the way he says the last line that suggests that he knows he’s striking a chord with the audience. When he describes the experience of meeting a friend in the street and trying to be jolly about Christmas but actually finding yourself in a stand-off about who’s going to stump up the money for a drink, he seems to be uncovering something the punters will have experienced. It’s hard to tell given that this is, of course, a studio recording made without an audience, but my guess is that working-class Victorian punters would have greeted this observation with the laughter of recognition. This impression is reinforced by the fact that as the routine continues, Leno starts using the second person: And then you go home to your Christmas dinner, or other people’s Christmas dinners, other people’s preferred ‘cos it’s not so much expense. And there you sit, with your feet under your friend’s table, and your eyes on the bottles and things, and you have that beautiful feelin’ in your heart as you’re sittin’ and eatin’ – you know you’ve got nothing to pay for.13 The repeated use of ‘you’ anticipates a thousand observational routines, and suggests that the audience are being asked to compare Leno’s descriptions with their own experiences. Later, front cloth comics working the variety theatres would occasionally do something similar. Welsh comedian Gladys Morgan, for example, talks about a seaside landlady who says, ‘Now I want you all to enjoy yourselves while you’re stayin’ with me – get out as much as you can.’ The big laugh that follows might be due to the simple gag of the

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tight-fisted landlady cunningly trying to get her guests to make as little use of her facilities as possible, but Morgan follows it up with a line which suggests she’s describing a shared experience: ‘Ahhh, they all say that, don’t they?’14 Observational comedy is now common in stand-up, and the first thing it needs in order to work is recognition. Dane Cook has an observational routine in which he asserts: ‘There is one person – in every group of friends – that nobody fucking likes.’ This may be a reasonably well-worn revelation, but for this audience it’s both surprising and truthful. They signal their agreement in a prolonged response that starts with laughter and quickly dissolves into cheering, whistling and applause. As he continues, somebody shouts, ‘It’s so true!’ Cook replies, ‘I know, it is so true – and that’s why it’s funny! [laughter]’15 Of course, observational comedy needs more than simple recognition to get a laugh, otherwise comics could get a whole set out of simply describing the venue they’re performing in with plain, factual language. The observation needs to be not only true, but also incongruous. A Michael McIntyre routine perfectly demonstrates this. Talking about how stressful it is to go away on holiday and leave the house unattended, he tells the audience, ‘You feel you have to unplug everything. You think it might blow up.’ As they start to recognise the truth of his observation, a gentle rumble of laughter starts to underscore his words. ‘This is the theory we all have. Despite the fact that many of you will have come out tonight and left things plugged in in your homes.’ The wave of laughter continues to grow, but he doesn’t wait for it to break. ‘But you’re not sitting there going, “The TV could blow up!”’ The wave grows louder still. ‘But when you go away for two weeks, you think your appliances will start to combust!’16 Finally, the wave of laughter crashes ashore. What McIntyre manages to nail is not just that we share this anxiety about potentially explosive household appliances, but also that it’s an inconsistent and irrational fear. The

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audience laugh because they recognise the neurotic thinking he describes in themselves, and they also recognise the silliness of their anxiety. This suggests that in some cases there is a therapeutic element to observational comedy. The situations it describes may involve worry, paranoia or embarrassment, and the act of sharing them allows a release of these tensions. In the late 1950s, Shelley Berman had a routine called ‘Embarrassing Moment’ which contained such gems as: Listen, listen – has this ever happened to you, have you ever been talking intimately with somebody and all of a sudden you spit on them, has that ever happened? [laughter] Now for the person who’s been spat on, it’s embarrassing too, you know, because he doesn’t know whether to wipe it off or forget about it! [laughter]17 There’s a slightly hysterical quality in the audience’s response. The first laugh lasts for nine seconds, the second for eight. As each starts to quieten down, you can hear individual punters hooting, wailing or shrieking. There seems to be something outrageous about drawing attention to such an embarrassing phenomenon as accidentally spraying somebody with a globule of saliva. Some observational gags rely less on the observation itself, and more on what is done with it. Adam Bloom offers a good example of this: ‘I’ve actually spent the day in East London, ha’ we got any Cockneys in?’ There’s a cheer of assent from a few Cockneys in the audience. ‘You lot fascinate me, right, what fascinates me about Cockneys is they always laugh at the end of their sentences – right? Even if what they’ve said isn’t funny, that little cackle.’ This observation doesn’t get a laugh, even though Bloom asks the audience to identify with it by saying ‘right?’ But here, the observation is merely a set-up for what follows: ‘And I’ve worked out what it is. They’re trying to compensate for the aitches they’ve just dropped. [quiet laughter] So a Cockney walks in a pub and goes, “‘Ello ‘Arry,

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‘ow’s it goin’, ‘eard you been on ‘oliday, get us ‘alf a lager, heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!” [laughter and a few claps]’18 It’s a joke that works on more than one level. To start with, there’s the energy and rhythm of the final punchline. Bloom’s Cockney laugh sounds funny in itself, like a jolly machine gun. Then there’s the concept of the gag. The fantasy explanation that Cockneys spew out dropped aitches at the end of their sentences like a broken machine, creates a very funny cartoon image. Bloom sees the gag as typical of his style, offering a slightly warped view of common experiences. He believes his observations are not so much based on asking the audience ‘Have you ever noticed …?’, but rather telling them, ‘You’ve never noticed …’ He describes how he relates to an audience: ‘I’m one of you, but I’m the odd one of you … I was nearly one of you, but something twisted and didn’t work out.’19 Observational comedy is now such an established part of stand-up that some comics parody it. In a twentieth anniversary show at the original Comedy Store in LA, Jim Carrey tells the audience: ‘I’d like to do some observational humour for you now – I hope you can identify with it. Hey – don’t you hate – when you’re in bed with three women – [laughter] and the least attractive one whispers, “Save it for me!” [laughter and applause]’20 It’s a clever subversion of the form, deliberately picking an experience the audience won’t be able to ‘identify with’, while at the same time suggesting that Carrey is a habitual sexual athlete. A joke by Steve Coogan’s character, the dreadful comedian Duncan Thickett, is based on the same idea of observing an unrecognisable experience, but in this case it’s not a fantastical boast, but a glimpse of the grimness of the character’s life. The bespectacled, woolly hat wearing Thickett explains that observational comedy is, ‘where I observe something, right, and you go, “Yeah – that’s true, that”’. Then he goes on to observe: ‘Have you ever noticed, when you’re walking along the streets at night, you’re just walking along the streets, there’s always someone, in’t there, on the other side of the road, that says, at

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the top of their voice, “Hey you, you four-eyed bastard, where d’you get that hat?” [laughter]’ He pushes the gag further by insisting that his observation is a good one, confidently referring to ‘one or two laughs of recognition’.21

Found comedy If observational comedy works by making the audience not only identify with what is described, but also perceive it as absurd, there’s another type of stand-up routine which works in a similar way. The comedian finds something from everyday life – perhaps an object, a newspaper article, or some kind of document – and takes it onstage to present it to the audience, and share its unintentional absurdity. Just as the objet trouvé is defined by the act of designating it as art, so the comedian creates ‘found comedy’ by presenting something not designed to be funny as an object of amusement. When I was working as a comedian, I went through a phase when practically every new routine I came up with worked like this. There seemed to be no end to the things I’d take on stage with me to get laughs: an English-French phrase book; a misleading headline from the front page of The Guardian; the Highway Code booklet; a set of inflatable Spice Girls dolls which came free with a pop magazine; a catalogue full of tacky gift ideas. My favourite was a booklet I picked up in a local government building in Michigan. When I got back from the States, I used it in my compèring at The Last Laugh: I picked up this excellent document called Crack Down on Drugs Colouring Book, right. [laughter] The title, Crack Down on Drugs, no pun intended, obviously. [laughter] And ‘Colouring Book’, but nowhere in this is there a warning not to sniff the pens you’re colouring the pictures in with, right? [quiet laughter] But, aside from that,

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the thing that caught my eye was this first picture. You probably can’t see it, but I’ve thought of that. I unroll a large photocopy of the picture, and the audience laugh as they take it in. It shows a respectable-looking man in casual clothes holding out a handful of pills to a kid in a school playground. Now as you can see, it’s a picture of a drug dealer selling drugs to a kid. Not your, not your stereotypical drug dealer. He looks more like a Jehovah’s Witness, or something. [laughter] And it says, ‘If someone offers you a drug, say no!’ And the kid’s saying, ‘No, I care about myself,’ but he’s actually, if you look closely, already been taking drugs, ‘cos here is a dog in an overcoat – [laughter] and checked trousers, you know. [laughter and a few claps]22 Sure enough, there is a dog in an overcoat and checked trousers in the background, and a British audience, unfamiliar with the American character McGruff the Crime Dog, share my amusement at the hallucinogenic implications of the picture. Of course, found comedy isn’t my own invention, and a much more celebrated example is Jasper Carrott’s 1977 routine, in which he quotes actual statements made on car insurance claim forms: The other man altered his mind and I had to run over him.’ [laughter] ‘I bumped into a lamppost which was obscured by human beings,’ ha ha ha ha – [laughter] Ha – ‘Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I haven’t got.’ [laughter] ‘The accident was caused by me waving to a man I hit last week.’ [laughter] This is a really efficient bit of comedy, with the audience laughing long and loud at each ridiculous statement. The sentences which Carrott reads out are funny in their own

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right, but the fact that they’re genuine is important. Before he starts, he assures the audience: ‘And people say to me, “Surely these are made up”, these are not, these are genuinely what people wrote on their claim forms, when they’d had an accident and sent into this insurance office in London, right, and they’re all true.’ As with observational comedy, the idea of sharing is important. Carrott shows his own enjoyment of the statements, laughing along with the audience, and occasionally throwing in comments like, ‘This is the best one, I think,’ or ‘Tremendous, I love those, I love those.’23 In some cases, found comedy is more political. Mark Thomas reads from a book called The Strategic Export Control Annual Report, 1999, which lists British arms sales. He acknowledges how unpromising this sounds as a basic comedy premise: ‘I know many of you are thinking, “Er – knob gag, please, Mark” [laughter]’ He goes on to pick out some choice facts, building on them by imagining tiny cartoonish scenes: ‘I found out we sold India anti-gravity suits. [laughter] “We shall fight to keep Kashmir!” “How?” “We shall fly above them!” [laughter]’ Like Carrott, he points out the absurdity he likes best: ‘This is my favourite one: “General purpose machine guns” [laughter and clapping] ‘Cos – I thought they were fairly specific! [laughter] “No, general purpose, you can wear it as evening wear, you can kill people with it – [laughter] Says, ‘I’m casual, I’m deadly.’” [laughter]’ The difference is that Thomas is asking the audience not just to share his amusement about what he has found, but also his outrage. He sets up his argument before reading from the book: ‘It’s ‘n incredible link between – it’s not incredible, it’s fucking obvious – between arms sales that we make as a country and asylum seekers and refugees.’ After getting a laugh with the anti-gravity suits, he comes back to this point, saying that India comes ‘in the top 15 of countries of origin for asylum seekers’.24 In a context where asylum seekers are being demonised by the popular press and certain politicians, pointing out the UK’s own culpability by contributing to

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unrest in other countries is an important statement to make between the laughter.

Shared history Another close relative of observational comedy is the type of routine in which comics reminisce about past experiences they share with the audience. Liverpudlian comedian Tom O’Connor provides a classic example. O’Connor built up a loyal following in the working men’s clubs of Merseyside, basing much of his comedy on his understanding of the local culture. Playing the Maghull Country Club in 1975, he talks about the working-class upbringing he shares with his audience: ‘D’you remember years ago – when you played in the street and the women used to shout at yer? “Go on, you! Up yer own end! [laughter] Yer like yer mother you are, go on!” [laughter] Whaddever that meant. And – [laughter]’ The audience laugh, recognising the type of fearsome woman O’Connor describes, and the accuracy with which he has remembered the kind of things she says. As the routine continues, real memories are interspersed with fictional ones, like the game he remembers called ‘forwards-backwardssideways’: ‘You’d hit a kid on the head with a shovel and – see which way he fell. [laughter]’ There’s also comic exaggeration, like the memory of the one posh family in every street, with a mother who ‘scrubbed the step in her fur coat’. But the biggest reactions are won by the memories themselves, particularly O’Connor’s imitations of the way mothers would sing to call their children home: ‘“Ma-ry/ You’re wan-ted!” [loud, extended laughter and applause] With – with some of them, you coulda danced! “Joh-nny/ Yer fa-ther’s gonna/ Ba-tter yer!” [extended laughter]’25 In this way, O’Connor forms a strong, warm bond with his audience, identifying himself very much as one of them. His whole act radiates with Merseyside pride. ‘Round ‘ere we’re

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brilliant,’ he tells his audience. Nostalgia is crucial, and his longing to return to the values of their shared past is explicit: ‘Wasn’ it good, when we didn’t ‘ave any problems like the modern people’ve got?’ In the 1960s, Bill Cosby used shared history in a way that allowed members of his audience to share in racial unity. He would look back at his childhood, choosing memories that were not specific to being black. In one routine, for example, he talks about the milk he used to drink in kindergarten, which had been ‘sittin’ on the radiator for about 80 years’: ‘Nothin’ in the world better for a bunch of five-year-old kids than good old lukewarm curdley milk [laughter] Yes sir, we loved it!’26 By deliberately not mentioning the racism he must have experienced as a child, he allows both black and white Americans in his audiences to enjoy shared memories together. This might seem a rather safe, cosy approach, lacking the edge of, say, Dick Gregory, but it’s important to realise that for a black comedian like Cosby to ignore his own race was a radical step in itself in the 1960s; and to remember that black comics who had come before him had been sacked for not being ‘Negro’ enough.27 The sharing aspect of stand-up is at its most conspicuous when comedians give out little gifts to the audience, or invite them to consider common experiences and memories. However, on a subtler level it can also be found more deeply ingrained into the act, in the references which the jokes and routines are built on.

Notes 1

James Campbell, Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, 1 June 2004

2

Interview with Tiernan Douieb, Gulbenkian Café, Canterbury, 17 March 2012

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3

Tiernan Douieb, Chatback Comedy Club’s Kids Hour, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 17 March 2012

4

Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004

5

See Phillip Glenn, Laughter in Inaction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 26–8, 30, 53

6

Josie Long Trying is Good, Real Talent/PIAS UK, 2008, RTDVD001

7

Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012

8

Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012

9

Sarah Millican, Thoroughly Modern Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012. For any American readers, when she says ‘pants’, she’s talking about underwear (i.e. underpants or panties)

10 Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012 11 Kate Mikhail, ‘Eddie Izzard, Comedian’, Observer Magazine, 22 September 2002, p. 22 12 For example, a comedy preview by William Cook starts off, ‘If you’re sick and tired of stand-ups spouting trite “have you ever noticed?” observation…’ (‘Ealing Live!’, the Guardian, The Guide section, 24-30 January 2004, p. 40) 13 ‘The Robin’ on Dan Leno, Recorded 1901–1903, Windyridge, 2001, WINDYCDR1 14 ‘Gladys Morgan’, various artists, Great Radio Comedians, BBC Records, 1973, REC151M 15 ‘The Friend Nobody Likes’ on Dane Cook, Retaliation, Comedy Central Records, 2005, 300304, disc two 16 Michael McIntyre, Live & Laughing, Universal, 2008, 8258740 17 Shelley Berman, Inside Shelley Berman, Laugh.Com, 2002, LGH1111, track 8 18 Various artists, Stand-Up Great Britain, Laughing Stock, 2000, LAFF CD 105, track 2 19 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004

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20 Various artists, The Comedy Store: 20th Birthday, Uproar Entertainment, 1996, UP 3669 21 Live and Lewd, extra feature on Steve Coogan, Steve Coogan Live: The Man Who Thinks He’s It, Universal, 2000, 902 020 2 22 Oliver Double at The Last Laugh Comedy Club, The Lescar, Hunters Bar, Sheffield, 4 May 1995. A recording of this routine, together with the picture I’m describing, is available here: http://www.oliverdouble.com/page15.htm 23 ‘Car Insurance’, Jasper Carrott, A Pain in the Arm, DJM Records, 1977, DJF 20518 24 ‘Arms and Asylum’, Mark Thomas, Dambusters: Live 2001 Tour, Laughing Stock, 2003, LAFFCD 0136 25 ‘Kids’, Tom O’Connor, Ace of Clubs, North West Gramophone, 1975, NWG 75102 26 ‘Kindergarten’, Bill Cosby, Why Is there Air?, Warner Bros., (no date given for CD release, album originally released 1965), 1606–12 27 See Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999, p. 504 for more on this

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

References The word ‘reference’ is an important item in the lexicon of stand-up jargon, a term that’s widely used by comedians, critics and even discerning comedy punters. References are the basic blocks of knowledge from which the joke is built. In order to understand it, the audience must recognise whatever words, names, places, news stories, songs, movies, TV shows or other cultural artefacts it may contain. It’s a process of shared understanding. Some comedians play it safe by using very broad references, dealing with subjects familiar to audiences across many different cultural boundaries. Because of this, some topics have inspired hundreds of stand-up routines, some of them imaginative and funny, others tired and clichéd. Many comics have done observational routines about air travel or pointed out the differences between cats and dogs, or men and women, for example. Advertising provides a renewable source of references. Anybody with a television will probably be familiar with a prominent new advert, so it becomes a viable subject for joking, with the added benefit of giving the act currency. The downside is that jokes about TV adverts have a relatively short shelf life. Even though the opening routine from Shelley Berman’s 1961 album A Personal Appearance is beautifully crafted and skilfully performed, it loses something for audiences unfamiliar with the napkin commercial to which it alludes.1

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The possibility that the audience won’t pick up a reference is always there. This is something that the makers of a documentary called Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth clearly understand. They use an audio clip of a famous Bruce routine, in which he imagines facing a white racist with a dilemma: You have a choice of spending fifteen years, married to a woman. A black woman – or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing, and hugging, and sleeping real close on hot nights. Fifteen years with a black woman or fifteen years with a white woman, and the white woman is Kate Smith – [laughter] and the black woman is Lena Horne. [laughter] So you are not concerned with black or white any more, are you? [laughter]2 The film was made in the 1990s, and the makers must have realised that a large part of its audience wouldn’t necessarily even have heard of the two singers, and probably wouldn’t hold in their heads the mental image of what each one looked like. To remedy this, when Bruce mentions Kate Smith, they flash up a photo showing her as a fat, wholesome white woman; and when he mentions Lena Horne, we see that she was a slinky, sexy black woman. Without this shared knowledge, the joke makes no sense. The photos are there to make sure the references are picked up. Another documentary, made in 2003, shows what happens when live audiences don’t share the comedian’s references. In Bernard’s Bombay Dream, Bernard Manning – who was notorious for his relentless racial gibes – is sent to perform for audiences in India. The thinking behind this is clear: wouldn’t it be interesting to see how Manning gets on trying to entertain people who are normally the butt of his jokes? Although he does reasonably well at the first venue, the Jazz by the Bay club in Mumbai, he realises he has a problem with his references. In one gag, an Irish working men’s club are having a sweep on a mystery tour, and the driver wins

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£68. The joke dies, and Manning comments: ‘You see, that’s fell on flat ears because you don’t know what a sweep is, do yer? That’s a bet to guess where yer going on this tour, a secret tour, you see.’ But the gulf of understanding is deeper than that. The audience doesn’t understand the literal meaning of the joke, but the nuances are completely lost on them as well. The British phenomenon of working men’s clubs and their cultural baggage is entirely alien to the young, hip Indians watching Manning. A later show at the very refined Gymkhana Club is an outright disaster. A flat joke about Captain Cook is followed with the comment, ‘Now if you remember, Captain Cook discovered Australia, but you’re not fucking bothered, are yer?’ Manning ineffectually tries to explain terms like ‘quid’ and ‘vicar’. Then, after a few painful minutes, he walks off the stage to the hostile sound of an audience starting to mutter to themselves.3 Manning has claimed, ‘[I’ve] never died on me arse in me life.’4 Seeing footage of him doing just that at the Gymkhana Club would bring a smile to the lips of anyone who found his harsh wit distasteful.

Local references Local references – which rely on knowledge of the particular area in which a show takes place – can help the comedian to develop a rapport with the audience. Frank Skinner’s brilliant 20-month stint as resident compère of Birmingham’s 4X cabarets at the beginning of the 1990s saw him making ‘profoundly local’ jokes about such subjects as ‘Bearwood Fruit Market, the mad bloke with the long scarf who hung around the Hagley Road, and the nearby chip shop that sold bright-orange chips’.5 Skinner was a hero to the audience in those clubs, and the extraordinary affection he enjoyed was undoubtedly helped by his authentic Brummie accent and extensive knowledge of the area.

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This kind of thing is not just the privilege of a resident compère. At a show in Sevenoaks in 2004, Jack Dee gets some good laughs by talking about how rough the nearby Bat and Ball is: ‘Why do they always keep their kitchen appliances outside the house? [laughter]’ A few minutes later, he mentions that he was born in Orpington, a town which is close enough for the audience to know. A woman heckles: ‘And you think Bat and Ball’s rough?’ There’s a huge laugh, which Dee rides by smiling sarcastically. Although it might seem like his use of a local reference has backfired, there’s still a sense that the woman’s jibe binds the comedian and the audience together in shared local knowledge. There’s a really interesting example of local references in a 1979 recording of Jasper Carrott. Although performing in Central London, Carrott observes that a lot of the audience are from different parts of the country. In a routine about local radio, a mention of Capital Radio receives a cheer, presumably from the Londoners in the audience. It’s drowned out by booing, presumably from punters from the rest of the country. A mention of Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio inspires cheering and clapping from a single, solitary woman. ‘Oh,’ says Carrott, getting a laugh by drawing attention to the incongruity of this response. ‘There’s always one, isn’t there?’ he adds, getting another laugh. Later, he gets a big cheer when he mentions Birmingham’s BRMB Radio, and gets another cheer just by naming one of the presenters, Tony Butler.6 The prospect of a Birmingham hero like Carrott playing a big venue in the nation’s capital must have attracted a big contingent of Brummies, and by mentioning their local station, he allows them to make their presence felt. In this routine, Carrott finds references which are local to different sections of the audience, allowing them to assert themselves in cheering and booing, showing pride and goodhumoured rivalry. References are not just about understanding, they may also provoke an emotional response, getting cheers

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or boos. This kind of response is part of the sharing, the exchange of energy which is central to stand-up.

Language One of the most basic types of reference is language. Obviously, the audience must be able to understand the words a comedian uses. When the music hall comedian Harry Lauder started performing in England, he replaced his broad Scots with a gentler accent, thus still giving his audience a feel of his ethnicity whilst allowing them to understand his jokes. However, he would still use linguistic local references when playing to a Scots audience, like coming over as exaggeratedly posh by pronouncing every syllable of the place name ‘Strathaven’ instead of using the normal pronunciation ‘Straiven’.7 Linguistic references can be hazardous for Scots comedians. At a performance in Glasgow’s King Tut’s, fearless improviser Phil Kay uses the English word ‘lake’. A heckler corrects him, shouting ‘loch’. Clapping his hand to his mouth to draw attention to his blunder, Kay provokes good-natured booing, before getting a big laugh by intoning a heavily-accented ‘locchhhhh.’8 He plays the situation well, and it’s worth pointing out that his blunder might be deliberate. Certainly, he says the word ‘lake’ twice, slightly stressing it and pausing afterwards as if to encourage somebody to correct him. As both Lauder and Kay show, language can have particular meanings for particular audiences. It can also help to bond the audience in a feeling of cultural or ethnic kinship. Comedians playing to Jewish holidaymakers in the Borscht Belt hotels in the Catskills would sometimes deliver the set-up of the joke in English, and the punchline in Yiddish.9 This allowed those who understood the joke to feel a sense of belonging, exclusivity and collusion, while making it incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

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Pop songs Pop music occupies an important position in many people’s lives, and particular bands and singers can inspire anything from passionate devotion to utter revulsion. As a result, it’s not surprising that pop references often crop up in stand-up routines. Quoting the lyrics of popular songs out of context is a reasonably common joke, and nobody has used it as compulsively as Harry Hill. The references in Hill’s act are part of what makes it unique, and these come in two obsessive strands. On the one hand, there are references which are cosy, old-fashioned and very English – chops and mash for tea, sleeping bags, lollipop ladies, Savlon, his nan. He explains this as being like his own twisted version of the material more conventional stand-ups do about shared history: ‘Well, it’s a lot of sort of childhood stuff, really, isn’t it? It’s sort of childhood stuff, without saying, “Do you remember Spangles?” or you know, “Do you remember chops?”’ On the other hand, he has an almost Tourettic tendency to quote lyrics from pop songs. A five-minute TV spot in 1996 sees him quoting or deliberately misquoting songs by artists as diverse as Mud, Babylon Zoo, the Lighthouse Family, Queen and Ini Kamoze.10 Hill now works with a keyboard player and a drummer, allowing him to actually sing snatches of songs, albeit in an incongruous, old-mannish style. At a show in September 2004, he performs such unlikely recent hits as Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya!’ and The Streets’ ‘Dry your Eyes’.11 He started quoting pop songs in 1991, when Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I do) I Do it for You’ spent umpteen weeks at the top of the UK pop charts. Hill decided to speak the opening line of the song in the middle of his act, throwing it in as a non-sequitur. It got a big reaction, so he developed it as a technique. He explains why he thinks is works: A lot of the time, it’s something that everyone knows about,

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but no-one’s sort of pointed it out to them. And I’m not even saying anything about it, really. I suppose I am in a way. I’m saying, you know, ‘We’ve all seen this, isn’t it annoying,’ I suppose, in a way, but I’m not actually saying that out loud.12 If Hill’s gags are about the inanity and meaninglessness of pop songs, other comics are more celebratory. Richard Pryor had a routine in which he contrasts the coldness and reserve of white churches with black churches where ‘you get a show wit’ your money’. This sets things up for a typically exuberant impersonation of a black preacher. The first laughs come from the character’s convoluted language, and the quirky inflection which Pryor gives him, transforming the phrase ‘inferior mind’ into a growled ‘inferio’ miihhhhhnd’. This leads to a reading from the ‘book of Wonder’, starting with the line, ‘A boy was born in hard time Mississippi’. There’s a laugh, some clapping, and a cheer of recognition.13 The gag is that the preacher has not chosen to read a biblical text, but has instead opted to quote the lyric of Stevie Wonder’s 1973 hit single, ‘Living for the City’. In order to get the joke, the audience must recognise the song, but there’s more to it than this. Wonder is a politically conscious soul singer, and ‘Living for the City’ is an angry indictment of the corrosive effects of racism and poverty. The choice of this reference by a politically conscious black comedian, in a routine which shares experience of black American culture, is no accident. It works as a joke, but also as a celebration of an African American musical hero. Similarly, the way Patton Oswalt uses pop references allows his audience to celebrate their own shared values. In a routine about his teenage years in Sterling, Virginia, he tells them, ‘I grew up ten minutes outside of Washington DC in the ‘80s, fuckin’ Fugazi, and Minor Threat, and Bad Brains were happening.’14 The audience cheer in recognition of these hardcore punk bands, but he corrects their response: ‘Oh, oh no, I didn’t know about any of that shit. [laughter]’ Shortly

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afterwards he confesses the shameful truth about the music he listened to at the time: The first album I bought with my own money? Phil Collins, No Jacket Required, [laughter] that was the first – album I bought, and I would get in people’s faces, I w’s like, ‘Man, this guy fuckin’ rocks, he’s pretty dark! He’s pretty fuckin’dark! [laughter] He’s totally punk rock, he’s got on sneakers with a suit, HE’S CRAZY!!’ [laughter]15 The laughter springs from not just knowing these specific bands and records, but also their shared meaning. It’s about what the names connote as much as what they denote. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Oswalt has made a point of playing to younger crowds in alternative rock venues. A more general audience might not have even heard of cult bands like Bad Brains or Minor Threat, but for their fans they are underground legends who connote coolness, integrity and anti-establishment politics. Phil Collins, on the other hand, represents middle-aged mainstream pop – uncool, unchallenging and musically lame. This understanding must be shared in order to appreciate exactly how funny Oswalt’s youthful faux pas was.

In jokes The American comedian Henny Youngman was famous for a minimalist style based on quickfire one-liners. In a recording of his act, he comes out with the old chestnut, ‘Take my wife – please!’ A laugh starts but is quickly drowned out by cheering, applause and whistles. This reaction goes on for a full 20 seconds, and doesn’t even subside when he acknowledges it by shouting, ‘I love this crowd!’16 Why the strange reaction? The reason is that although the gag has been used by many other comedians, Youngman is

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popularly credited with being its inventor. The recording was made late in Youngman’s career, and the audience isn’t so much cheering the line, as celebrating his comic longevity and his general contribution to comedy. The joke itself has become the reference. This is an example of what comedians can do, once they get established enough in the minds of their audience – use references which are internal to the act. There’s an excellent example of this kind of in-joke near the beginning of Eddie Izzard’s Glorious. He does an impression of God’s mum, using a Scottish accent, then comments, rather hesitantly, ‘His mum was – Mrs Badcrumble.’ As with Henny Youngman’s gag, this gets cheers, whistles and applause as well as laughter. In this case, it’s an even more explicit reference to previous work, referring back to a routine from Izzard’s previous show Definite Article, about an elderly clarinet teacher called Mrs Badcrumble. Presumably, the audience are cheering to show their appreciation of the earlier routine, but they’re also showing they belong to a kind of Izzard in-crowd, united by their knowledge of his comedy. Izzard’s fans clearly have long memories. Glorious was performed just a year after Definite Article, but at the Laughs in the Park comedy festival in St Albans in 2011, Izzard again gets a cheer for a reference to Mrs Badcrumble, a full 15 years after doing the original routine.17 Jasper Carrott relies on a similar sense of insider knowledge with a technique which involves quoting just the punchline of a familiar joke. In a 1983 routine about a trip to Hong Kong, he describes a hair-raising taxi drive from the airport to his hotel, saying that he was a ‘darn sight lighter’ at the end of the trip than at the beginning. He follows this suggestion of involuntary bowel evacuation with the line, ‘Smell it? I was sitting in it!’18 This is a reference to a joke which was in common circulation at the time about a man who smelled a funny smell every time he drove his new car. Unable to get to the bottom of the problem, the mechanic asks the man to take him for a

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drive. The man is a terrifyingly bad driver, and at the end of the trip he asks if the mechanic can now smell the smell. ‘Smell it? I’m sitting in it!’ replies the mechanic For the audience to pick up the reference, they must be familiar with the joke. Unlike the Izzard example, here the audience require knowledge of comedy in general, rather than knowledge of Carrott’s act in particular. This still helps to form a closer rapport, because by referring to the kind of joke that his audience know from the home, the workplace or the pub, Carrott is showing he’s just like them. The path between popular street culture and Jasper Carrott’s stand-up act is not just one-way. In a 1977 routine, he tells the audience about hearing the word ‘zit’ for the first time, explaining ‘it’s American slang for our “spot” or “pimple”’.19 There’s no hint that the audience recognise the word, and the definition he offers is received in silence. In a 1979 TV show, the same routine gets a very different reaction. He segues into it after talking about appearing on Top of the Pops and meeting the cult female dance troupe Pan’s People who, he says, are ‘all covered in zits’. There’s a laugh which quickly breaks out into cheering and applause in recognition of the word. Carrott realises that this means the audience must know the routine from either his earlier tour, the album of it or the previous year’s TV series An Audience with Jasper Carrott. ‘Oh, d’you know about them?’ he asks, with mock innocence, then seems slightly flummoxed: ‘Oh, hur hur hur! [laughter] I think we’d better cut the next ten minutes! [laughter]’ In spite of this, he continues with the routine as planned, which goes down every bit as well as if a large section of the audience hadn’t heard most of it before. There are some additions, like when Carrott tells the audience, ‘I’m trying to introduce a word into the English language’.20 The cheer he gets for his first mention of the word suggests that he’s already been pretty successful in achieving this ambition. It seems likely that he is largely responsible for importing ‘zit’ into British slang. In this kind of way, stand-up draws from street

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culture but also influences it, with material from comedians’ acts spilling out into everyday life.

Alexei Sayle’s intellectual references Lenny Henry was already an established name by the time Alexei Sayle started his career in 1979, but it was the influence of Sayle and others like him at The Comic Strip that led Henry to reject the casual, self-deprecating racism of his early work and develop a more positive style. However, Henry found Sayle puzzling as well as exciting: ‘I thought he was funny, but I thought a lot of his reference points were really weird.’21 This comment was inspired by the intellectual references which Sayle would liberally sprinkle across his act, name checking the likes of Karl Marx and Jean Paul Sartre. A political routine about tower blocks is a classic example. Sayle lays into the architects and town planners who build horrendous concrete estates with the idea of ‘designing the working class the perfect fuckin’ workers society’. He continues: ‘All them fuckin’ estates, all them new towns, they’re all supposed to be somethin’ like William Morris Worker’s Paradise, you know, everybody sittin’ in the tower block, weavin’ their own fuckin’ yoghurt! [laughter] Standin’ in the windswept concrete piazza discussin’ Chekhov! [laughter]’ Then he adopts a working-class Cockney accent to imagine the discussion: ‘“Oh yes, er, I do actually, wiv Chekhov, you know, that erm, ‘is alienating use of naturalism, you know, makes one completely reassess one’s attitude to the Russian bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth Century.” [laughter] “Fuck off, you cunt!” Wallop! [laughter]’22 The basic gag of having working-class people discussing intellectual ideas in highfalutin language had already been used by Monty Python – who showed charladies discussing philosophy – but the Python team were middle-class intellectuals, emerging from the Oxbridge revue tradition. This

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is different. There’s an interesting tension between the Sayle’s sweary, Scouse persona and the references to William Morris and Chekhov’s ‘alienating use of naturalism’. The political point of this is not that working-class people are too stupid to discuss Chekhov, but that middle-class people impose a ridiculous set of idealised expectations on the working class, whilst providing them with poor housing. Sayle’s sympathies are made clear by what he says (pointing out that you don’t catch architects ‘living in any of the shit they’ve been designing for the twen’y years’), but also in the way he says it (his accent indicating his own working-class origins). Sayle explains why he was so keen on intellectual references whilst also hoping to attract a popular, workingclass audience for his comedy: I mean, one of the comedian’s tricks is to pretend to be much more erudite than you are. Lenny Bruce used to do that all the time. He used to find the right name to drop. I don’t fucking know anything about Kierkegaard, it doesn’t matter, I know very little about any philosophy, Sartre, you know, my knowledge is minimal. It doesn’t matter. It is a fake, it’s a trick, but you know, it’s about finding the telling phrase, the right name.23 He rightly argues that it’s wrong to underestimate an audience’s ability to cope with more difficult references, and says that just as he only needed ‘minimal knowledge’ to drop the names, the punters would only need the same to pick them up. However, he also feels that his quirky references held him back: ‘I do also think though in a sense, it’s harmed my career, because people – like, especially journalists and critics – like simplicities.’

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Shared misunderstanding In October 2003, Jim Davidson is doing his Vote for Jim show at the Winter Gardens, Margate. At one point, he imagines himself as prime minister, being interviewed by Jeremy Clarkson.24 Neither he, nor the majority of his audience realise the mistake – that he means Jeremy Paxman (the serious journalist from Newsnight, famous for his no-holdsbarred interviews with politicians), not Jeremy Clarkson (the presenter of Top Gear). In February 2004, Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown is playing the same venue. In a routine about the good old days, he fondly remembers a time ‘when the royal family were roundheads, not fucking dickheads’.25 The gag is based on the premise that roundheads were royals – rather than the republicans who temporarily abolished royalty. In both cases, the references are factually incorrect, but in neither case does it spoil the audience’s enjoyment of the joke. This is because although references require shared understanding to be effective, that understanding does not have to bear any resemblance to the truth. A shared misunderstanding can be just as effective. Sometimes, comedians create comedy which is knowingly based on such shared misunderstandings. Omid Djalili based the accent he opens his act with on that of a distant uncle, a professor of English literature at Oxford, whose voice he had always found funny and endearing. The problem was that the uncle did not have an Iranian accent: He was an Iranian who was raised in Lebanon, so he was actually Iranian but had an Arabic accent. And I just kind of said, ‘Well, people don’t really know the difference between Iranian, [and] Arab.’ … what I was doing was actually against my culture. I mean I was playing an Arab but saying I was Iranian. And most Iranians [would] say, ‘That’s not an Iranian accent.’ I thought, ‘Well look – for now, it doesn’t matter, it’s just funny.’26

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Comics can also create comedy from their own sloppiness in getting the references right. Marc Maron has a hilarious routine about visiting the Creation Museum in Kentucky – a tourist attraction aimed at proving the literal truth of fundamentalist Christian creation myths by showing that humans and dinosaurs once coexisted. He talks about an exhibit showing Noah’s Ark, in which the animals entering two-bytwo include ‘two brontosauruses’. The image gets a laugh, but having made the joke work he goes on to comment about the reference: And some of you are like, ‘There are no brontosauruses, that was not the proper name,’ like I got an email about that. [laughter and some applause] That they’re not called that. And you know what? I didn’t even fuckin’ make note of what they’re really called, because when I was a kid it was a brontosaurus. [a few laughs] And I think we all know what I’m talking about. [laughter] I’m not here to do research. [laughter]27 The laughter springs from the audience’s knowledge of who Maron is and what his audience are like. As an alternative comedian, there’s a nerdy, intellectual edge to his material, and this is reflected in the kind of people his comedy attracts. The idea of somebody emailing to correct him on the name of a dinosaur absolutely fits the audience’s own idea of itself. They know that Maron fans are likely to be the sort of people who would be obsessive enough to do this, and indeed know that the brontosaurus is now properly known as Apatosaurus.

Playing with references A stand-up act might refer to anything from an advert to a Russian playwright, from a slang word to a pop song. Factual accuracy is unimportant. All that matters is that the audience

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share the comedian’s understanding of the reference. This basic principle is so well established that some comedians have even made jokes about it. In a 1961 show, Lenny Bruce tells the audience how hard it is for him to reach people over the age of 40, because his language is ‘completely larded’ with hip, intellectual and Yiddish language, and that for anybody over 45, ‘all I have to do is hit one word that’ll send him off’. He suggests a fantasy solution to the problem posed by his hip references: ‘I’m gonna have a thing where nobody over 40’s allowed to come in to see me. [laughter] Have a sign up, man.’28 Mitch Hedberg plays with the idea of references in a routine in which he describes tripping out on acid while out in the woods with a friend. They come across a bear, which his friend mistakes for Smokey the Bear, the popular cartoon character designed to promote fire prevention in the countryside. Having got big laughs from this premise, he tells the audience: I went to England to tell jokes, and I wanted to tell my Smokey the Bear joke in England. So I had to ask the English people if they know who Smokey the Bear was. But they don’t. Because in England Smokey the Bear is not the forest fire prevention representative. [laughter] They have – Smackie the Frog. [laughter and some clapping]29 The premise behind this gag is only partly factual. It’s certainly true that Smokey is a culturally specific reference, being a popular character in America since its introduction in 1947, but unknown in Britain. Hedberg’s first gag about his hallucinating drug buddy doesn’t mention Smokey by name, so watching the footage as a British person it was difficult for me to get it. Even more puzzling was the reference to Smackie the Frog – something I’d never heard of. Some quick research revealed that there is no such character – Hedberg had made it up for the routine.30 As a joke about translating references, this is a brilliant double bluff. What it actually shows is the

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very untranslatability of the gag, which could only work in America – where they know Smokey and could plausibly believe that the made-up Smackie is a real character. Steve Martin pioneered this kind of messing about with the conventions of stand-up. In his autobiography, he explains that his thinking was changed by a psychology course at college, in which he was introduced to the relief theory of comedy. This probably has its origins in the works of Kant, who wrote, ‘Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.’31 The idea is that the set-up of a joke builds tension in the listener, and this is released – in the form of laughter – by the punchline. Inspired by this, Martin started to think about how he could subvert this pattern: What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.32 He put this idea into action in material like his 1977 routine in which he says that there is a large group in from a plumbers’ convention, and that he is going to do a joke just for them. He warns the audience that ‘those of you who aren’t plumbers probably won’t get this’, before launching into a gag filled with ostentatiously phony technical references, like ‘a Finley sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven inch gangly wrench’ and ‘Volume 14 of the Kinsley Manual’. The ‘joke’ ends with a nonsensical punchline: ‘It says “sprocket”, not “socket”!’ After a sticky pause, Martin puts an anxious question to the stage manager: ‘Are those plumbers supposed to be here this show, or –?’33 There’s certainly an anticlimax at the end of the gag, but whether or not the audience are truly picking their own place to laugh is a matter of opinion. In fact, they seem to be in on

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the joke from the beginning. After each dubious plumbing reference, Martin pauses, and there’s a proper, unified laugh. Unlike Hedberg’s audience, they are totally aware that the references have been made up by the comedian. When the supposed punchline ‘fails’, Martin gives a desperate little chuckle, and his audience laugh again. The actual punchline is his aside to the stage manager, and this gets the biggest laugh. In fact, the joke he’s ostensibly telling is not the real joke; the real joke is the joke’s failure. The fiction is that Martin’s trying to use specialised references to form a closer bond with a particular section of the audience. The reality is that by using silly-sounding references that can’t be picked up by the audience, he unites them in their understanding of the metajoke with which he’s presenting them. The real reference in the gag is not plumbing terminology, but the very idea of references and the need for shared knowledge in stand-up.

The individual and the community In a show at the Horsebridge Centre in Whitstable at the very end of August 2012, Stephen K. Amos makes expert use of references, using shared knowledge to form connections with particular groups or the audience as a whole. Throughout his act he plays directly on various aspects of his own identity, and how these relate to the audience. As a black Briton of Nigerian descent, he points out that he’s the only black person in the room. The audience laugh, delighting in being teased for the general whiteness of our town. In fact, there are a few people of colour in the audience, but they don’t let on and spoil the fun. Later, he explains what it was like to be a black kid learning about the British Empire at school – and through the jokes gently making us aware of the racism he grew up with. As a gay man, he uses the licence of being onstage to flirt outrageously with some of the younger male punters. He also

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asks if there are any gay people in the audience, and after having identified a group of gay men and lesbians at the front, there’s some relaxed chat between them. He lets us in on what it was like growing up gay, telling us what happened when he told his mother about his sexuality. As a famous comedian, he plays on the indignity of playing a venue which is too small for him. We laugh because we know that although the venue really is far smaller than the places he’d normally play, his swanking and superiority is only in jest. ‘I’ve got money!’ he keeps telling us. Going into an anecdote, he tells us he was on a train, then corrects himself, saying, ‘I never go on a train because I have money, but for the sake of the joke …’ As a man of a certain age, he plays to the older punters, sharing memories of growing up in the 1970s – asbestos in classroom ceilings, no mobile phones, not being allowed to use the family telephone without dad staring at you and so on. He plays directly on the idea that the younger punters won’t get these references, and throws something in especially for them. ‘Ain’t nobody got time for that!’ he shouts, referencing the most famous line from a popular YouTube clip.34 The younger punters laugh and cheer the reference, and Amos explains it for the older ones. This is lucky for me, because without his explanation I’d have been none the wiser. All of these tactics help to define who Amos is in relation to individuals, groups and the audience as a whole. His intention is to bring his diverse audience together: I looked at the demographic of the kind of people who come to my gigs and as you saw, people come with their parents, teenagers with their parents, and I’ve had older people as well in the audience. And if you can get a cross section of society who can all laugh at the same things – but we all know that inherently our point of reference may be different, but if we can make everybody laugh and join us all together, that is what I’m striving for really.

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He has also realised that working the audience in this way is ‘all about trying to get respect … there’s nothing beats more acceptance than, you know, a hundred people or whatever it was in that room, sitting there listening to your every word. Wow!’ Partly this is about personal validation, but there is also a political aspect to it. He recalls the comedy he grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s – the ‘mother-in-law jokes, racist, sexist, homophobic jokes, which were all the norm’ – and suggests: I think one of the reasons why I never went to a comedy club when I was growing up is because I just didn’t think it was a place for me. You know, having seen what was on offer on TV … ‘Let’s go to a comedy club and be the only black person there and that be pointed out and be being made to feel … awkward and out of place just for being in a comedy club.’ The same with a young gay or lesbian or transgender person, you know. Imagine being the butt of all jokes.35 The fact that he is now the one making the jokes is a neat revenge for the prejudice he has experienced. All of this illustrates something very important. Stand-up comedy is an individual talking to a community. A lot of it is about defining who the individual is, who the community is and how one relates to the other. Amos used shared references to connect with the audience, but also explains knowledge that they might not already share, particularly relating to the experience of being a member of various minority groups. He plays on the things that unite him with his audience, but also on what separates him from them. What this shows us is that although stand-up can be written off as frivolous entertainment, the politics that lie just underneath its surface are very interesting. As well as confirming the audience’s beliefs, the comedian can also find ways to challenge them.

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Notes 1

‘Introduction/ dinner napkin’, on Shelley Berman, A Personal Appearance, EMI Records, 1961, CLP 1512

2

Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, BBC Four, 3 June 2003

3

Bernard’s Bombay Dream, Channel 4, 26 June 2003

4

Stand-Up with Alan Davies, BBC One, 26 June 2000

5

See Frank Skinner, Frank Skinner, London: Century, 2001, p. 258

6

‘Local Radio’, Jasper Carrott, The Unrecorded Jasper Carrott, DJM Records, 1979, DJF 20560

7

See Albert D. Mackie, The Scotch Comedians, From Music Hall to Television, Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1973, pp. 14–15, p. 41

8

Phil Kay, That Philkay Video, Colour TV, 2000, JW112

9

Stand-Up America, BBC2, 22 February 2003

10 Saturday Live, ITV, 1 June 1996 11 Harry Hill, Battersea Arts Centre, 14 September 2004 12 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 13 ‘Our Text for Today’, on …Is it Something I Said? in 9-CD set …And It’s Deep, Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992) 14 Minor Threat (1980-83) were a seminal hardcore punk band, their DIY politics and musical minimalism influencing many subsequent hardcore bands. Their frontman Ian MacKaye went on to form the more melodic and lyrically oblique Fugazi (1987–2003). Bad Brains are a Rastafarian hardcore punk band formed in 1977, who have always alternated fast, loud punk with reggae and have more recently embraced other musical styles 15 ‘Sterling, Virginia’ on Patton Oswalt, Werewolves and Lollipops, Sub Pop Records, 2007, SPCD 737 [CD] It’s very fitting that this was released by Sub Pop, an important label in the American underground rock scene which bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains helped to establish

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16 Henny Youngman, Henny Youngman Himself, Laugh.com, 2001, LGH 1008 17 Laughs in the Park, Verulamium Park, St Albans, 23 July 2011 18 ‘Hong Kong’, Jasper Carrott, The Stun (Carrott Tells All), DJM Records, 1983, DJF 20582 19 ‘Zits’, Jasper Carrott, A Pain in the Arm, DJM Records, 1977, DJF 20518. According to Jonathon Green, the word has been in usage since the 1950s, and was originally used by American teenagers (Jonathon Green, Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, London: Cassell, 1998, p. 1311). 20 ‘Zits’, Jasper Carrott, The Unrecorded Jasper Carrott, DJM Records, 1979, DJF 20560 21 The South Bank Show, ITV, 5 December 1993 22 ‘Stoke Newington Calling’, Alexei Sayle, Cak!, Springtime Records, 1982, CAK 1 23 Interview with Alexei Sayle, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003 24 Jim Davidson, Vote for Jim, Winter Gardens, Margate, 25 October 2003 25 Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, Margate Winter Gardens, 24 February 2004 26 Interview with Omid Djalili, by telephone, 28 June 2004 27 ‘The Creation Museum’, Marc Maron This HAS to be Funny, Comedy Central Records, 2011, CCR0122 28 Lenny Bruce, The Carnegie Hall Concert, World Pacific/Capitol Records, 1995, CDP 7243 8 34020 2 1, disc one 29 From Hedberg’s Comedy Central special, included on the DVD: Mitch Hedberg, Mitch All Together, Comedy Central Records, 2003, CCR0024 30 See ‘Commenter Of The Day: Smacky The Frog Edition’, Jalopnik, 22 June 2010 [accessed via Nexis, 31/10/12] 31 Reproduced in John Morreall (ed.), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, Albany: State of New York Press, 1987, p. 47 32 Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, p.111

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33 ‘Let’s Get Small’ on Steve Martin, Let’s Get Small, Warner Bros., (no date given for CD release, album originally released 1977), 9 45694-2 34 ‘Sweet Brown’s Cold Pop Escape’, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=udS-OcNtSWo The clip itself had amassed over 7,000,000 hits when I checked [accessed 31 October 2012], but has also spawned numerous other YouTube videos. 35 Interview with Stephen K. Amos, by telephone, 18 September 2012

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Insiders and outsiders In the late 1990s, Phill Jupitus created an entire full-length stand-up show about the film Star Wars. It started off as ‘a Wookiee impression and a joke about Darth Vader’, which he threw into a 20-minute set at the Comedy Store, pretty much on the spur of the moment. This went down well enough for him to develop it further. Every time he watched the film, he thought of more ideas for routines. It became a stand-alone show at the Edinburgh festival, entitled Jedi, Steady, Go, which went on to tour nationally. The last time he performed it, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, it lasted one hour and 55 minutes, almost as long as the film itself. The show was based on the unusual idea of comedian and audience sharing detailed knowledge of this one particular cultural artefact. Without this, the jokes wouldn’t really work, as Jupitus points out: ‘I did have a woman at the Edinburgh show once that hadn’t seen the film. [To] which I’m gonna say, “This is going to be a very dull hour for you.” And it probably was, you know …’ Jupitus was pleased to attract obsessive fans of the film to his show: ‘The front row always had the Star Wars T-shirts. The nerds would come down and, yeah, the geeks loved it.’1 Star Wars fans are notorious for their detailed and pedantic knowledge of the films, and Jupitus would play on this fact, needling the nerds by deliberately mispronouncing things, getting them to tut disapprovingly. By showing a mischievous

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disregard for the insignificant details of the film which were so dear to that audience, the comic was, albeit in a tiny way, challenging their values. The fact that he could create a show based on obsessive Star Wars knowledge indicates how similar he was to the people who were attracted to go and see it; but the fact that he made fun of their obsession shows that he was also different from them. This highlights a basic choice which stand-up comedians face. Bob Monkhouse argues that an audience is ‘not a community’ but a set of ‘individuals who have assembled for a single purpose’. The comic ‘may impose a temporary bonding upon such a throng’ but ‘it vanishes as soon as the people disperse’.2 There’s a certain amount of truth in this, but in some cases, a stand-up audience may be already bound together by some sense of community, even if it’s only a shared love of Star Wars. But Monkhouse was right to argue that the comedian imposes a temporary bonding on the audience. In many cases, this is achieved by the sharing of common experience. Observational comedy, routines about shared history and a well-judged set of references can all help to bond the audience together in temporary feeling of community. With this kind of approach, the comedian is defined as an insider, very much part of the community of the audience. A classic example is Tom O’Connor at the Maghull Country Club in 1975, sharing a common past with the audience, and uniting with them against the debased values of the modern day. However, comedians can also define themselves as outsiders, distinct from the community of the audience. Sometimes, the comedian becomes an outsider against his or her will. In the variety era, the Glasgow Empire was notorious among English comics, because of the rough reception they’d get from a drunken, Scots audience for the second house on a Friday night. In this case, the comedians suffered from a pre-existing hostility based on national rivalry, but in other cases, the comic can become an outsider by making a mistake. In the



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late 1960s, Bob Hope enthusiastically supported the Vietnam War, and firmly aligned himself with Richard Nixon. Playing to GIs in Vietnam, he misjudged his audience, assuming they would share his hawkish views. At a show at Camp Eagle in 1970, an audience of 18,000 American soldiers responded to his act mostly in silence. He got a similar reception at Long Binh in 1971, where he was faced with heckling, walkouts and banners reading ‘Peace Not Hope’.3 But being an outsider doesn’t always mean dying on stage, and some comedians embrace the role. As a Muslim, Shazia Mirza is automatically recognisable as being different from most of her audience: Everybody knows I’m not the same as them, because what I’m saying is so different, you know, I say that I don’t smoke and I don’t drink and I don’t take drugs and I don’t gamble. And I don’t do any of the things that the people sitting in my audience are sitting in front of me doing at that time. So they are all smoking, they are all drinking, and I’m telling them that I don’t do those things, and they know that I’m different. She realised that what makes her different from her audience also makes her different from most comics on the circuit: ‘When I saw other comedians talking about themselves growing up, and I thought’, ‘Oh, well I could talk about something different here, I could talk about my growing up, which would be different to all these white, laddy comedians.’ Her difference became a source of material, as well as affecting the way she relates to her audience, but she points out that she is not entirely an outsider: ‘For some reason, in some way, they do feel as though we have something in common. We do feel that there is some connection between us.’4 Bill Hicks, on the other hand, was not marked out as an outsider by race or religion, but willingly accepted the idea of being separate from the community of the audience. His act lambasted President Bush, the Gulf War and Christianity,

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whilst enthusing about smoking, drugs and pornography, so it was always likely that he would find himself in opposition to audiences in the more conservative parts of America. It was not just his material that separated him from his audience, but also his onstage attitude. Hicks’ performance exuded high status. He took his time over his delivery, he stroked back his longish hair in the pauses, and he seemed totally assured and absorbed in his own train of thought. He would sometimes approach an audience with an attitude bordering on contempt, like when he starts a show at the Funny Bone in Pittsburgh in 1991 by saying: ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I hope you’re doing well tonight, I’m glad to be here, I’ve been on the road doing comedy now for, er, ten years, so bear with me while I plaster on a fake smile and plough through this shit one more time. [laughter]’ Later in the same show, he announces, ‘Y’all are about to win the election as the worst fuckin’ audience I’ve ever faaaced. Ever! Ever! Ever!’5 Hicks clearly feels the audience isn’t appreciating his act, and many stand-ups must have berated their audiences like this as a desperate response to the horror of dying onstage. The difference here, though, is that Hicks isn’t dying. There’s laughter throughout the act, albeit patchy at times, so the antagonism which becomes a running theme is something much more interesting than an expression of comic failure. In shows like this, he’s the polar opposite of Tom O’Connor. But Hicks also enjoyed a following of devoted fans, and sometimes had a less hostile relationship with his audience. Even so, he was never afraid to challenge opinions. Playing to an excitable crowd in Oxford in 1992, he announces: ‘Actually I quit smoking, so er –’ There’s a groan of disappointment from somebody in the audience, and others join in, hissing and groaning. They clearly feel let down by Hicks’ apparent U-turn from his earlier stance, when he was aggressively enthusiastic about cigarettes – but there’s also a pantomime quality to their response. It sounds as if they’re teasing him in the spirit of fun rather than really taking him to



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task. Nonetheless, he’s quick to chide them: ‘This ain’t Dylangoes-electric, chill out, OK? [laughter]’6

Frankie Howerd has nothing against The Establishment Comedians don’t have to be as radical as Bill Hicks to play the outsider role. When Frankie Howerd played at Peter Cook’s fashionable satire venue The Establishment in 1962, he based the entire act on the idea of being a fish out of water. After huge success in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Howerd had gone into a career nosedive, largely thanks to being cast in acting roles in a series of theatrical flops. He was on the point of giving up showbusiness, when Peter Cook saw him give a speech at the Evening Standard Drama Awards, and invited him to appear at The Establishment. Howerd was an odd choice. Cook’s venue was the product of the satire boom which originated in the Oxbridge revue tradition, and was normally the stomping ground of well-todo satirists. Earlier that year, Cook had imported a genuinely dangerous comedian by booking Lenny Bruce to play a controversial season there. Howerd was far cosier. Although inventive and innovative in his day, he was essentially an old-fashioned front cloth comic from the variety circuit. Daunted by the prospect of playing such an unlikely venue even in the midst of a major career crisis, he enlisted the help of big-name comedy writers like Johnny Speight, and Galton & Simpson to provide him with material. From the beginning of the act, he plays on the idea of being out of place and different from his audience: Brethren – before we start this little eisteddfod, [laughter] I want to make a little, er, apology to you, if I may. Well, I say ‘apology’, it’s really, it’s an appeal. Well it’s, no, it’s an explanation. Well no, it’s an apology, let’s be honest.

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[laughter] I may as well be honest, it’s an apology. I’ll tell you why. Because erm – you see, ah – I’d like to explain ‘ow I happened to get here at this place – [laughter] before we start. Because, as you know, if, if, well if you do know at all, I’m a humble music hall comedian, a sort of variety artist, you know, I’m not usually associated with these sophisticated venues, [laughter] and erm – The word ‘venues’ is twisted in typical Howerd style. He pronounces it ‘vunnyews’, finishing the word with a slight, but distinctly camp lisp. Even though he’s ostensibly apologising for being the odd one out, the way he says the word gives a hint that he’s mocking the pretensions of the place he’s playing. He continues: And I, no – Well I mean, a lot of people have said to me, you know, ‘I’m surprised at you going to a place like that.’ [laughter] And it is a – it is a bit different to a Granada tour with Billy Fury, hoh hoh! [laughter] But so I thought if I can explain – I thought if I can explain how I happened to be here, er, it might, er, take the blame off me a bit, you understand, it might disarm criticism a bit, you understand? [a few laughs] And you won’t expect anything sort of too – sophisticated. Now, erm – [a few laughs] Then, responding to the few punters who have laughed at his apology, he uses one of his classic techniques. He reprimands them for laughing, thus making them laugh more: ‘No, please now, please. Now – [laughter] I’ll tell you – No, please. Now please, don’t – this is going to be a rowdy do, I can sense it. [laughter]’ He goes on to tell a fictionalised version of what happened when Peter Cook approached him at the Evening Standard awards, dispensing a number of bitchy jibes along the way. He clearly separates himself from the fashionable satire which is The Establishment’s bread and butter: I find these days, unless you’re sort of, you know, bitter,



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you’re not considered artistic, you know. I’ve always found this, and I mean I’m not that kind of a comedian, I’m more the lovable kind, you know. [laughter] Sort of cuddlesome, you know. [laughter] Don’t take a vote on it! [laughter] Having set himself up as not wanting to criticise, he goes on to say some rather uncuddlesome things about the audience: There’s so much bitterness, in any case, I mean I’ve got nothing against this place. I said, the only – Well I mean, admittedly – [laughter] admittedly, I think – you get some odd people here. I mean, not that I pry, as I say – I keep to – I keep meself to meself, I think it’s best. [laughter] Don’t you? Keep yerself to yerself, that’s what I say, you don’t get – I mean you don’t get into any mischief, do you? [laughter] Unfortunately, [laughter] but I mean –7 Listening back to the show over 50 years after it was recorded, it’s still exciting hearing Howerd establishing and negotiating his relationship with the audience. Defining himself as being outside the community of the audience allows him to be cheeky, catty and cutting, sometimes at their expense, sometimes at his own. There’s no real antagonism or hostility, and you can feel the affection of a younger generation rediscovering the talent of an older star fallen on hard times. The season at The Establishment was a great success, a turning point in Howerd’s career. Whilst working there, he was spotted by Ned Sherrin, the producer of the famous television satire show That Was the Week that Was. Howerd’s satirical spot on TW3 was successful enough to re-establish his reputation.

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A fat, pink-haired man in a leopard-print coat For the first few years of his stand-up career, Wil Hodgson cut an extraordinary figure onstage: shocking pink hair, sometimes fashioned into a mohican; nail polish and eye make-up; tattoos of toys and cartoon characters; and a penchant for leopard-print. This was not an artfully-crafted costume designed to convey a fictional stage character, but an authentic reflection of his offstage lifestyle. Hodgson is a genuine eccentric, a man whose tastes and experiences make him an outsider for most mainstream audiences – a former skinhead and former wrestler who has embraced his feminine side and collects girls’ toys from the 1980s. Many of his early gags addressed such apparent contradictions: If you’re five years old and you’re a boy – and you come into a primary school in Chippenham with Glo Worms, Glo Friends, Wuzzles, Popples – Wild SnuggleBumms, Puffalumps, She-Ra, Catra – [he draws in breath] Y’ave to learn to fight pretty fuckin’ sharpish. [laughter] If only to keep yer collection in mint condition. [laughter] He takes the audience into his world, sharing his passions to them. In one routine, he explains how he goes about collecting his vintage toys by responding to small ads in local papers like the Chippenham News or the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald: They’re always very glad to see me ‘cos what they really wanted for placing that advert – was a fat, pink-haired man in a leopard-print coat with make-up smeared all over his face – stood in their living room, looking at the ponies with a jeweller’s eye glass monocle thing – [laughter] to see if they’re legit. You gotta do that, you’ve gotta bring the air of a crack cocaine deal to these proceedings, if you – [laughter] If you go into a My Little Pony deal with



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any kind of innocence or naivety, they’ll fuck you over [laughter] every step of the way, let me tell you.8 The way he describes himself shows he’s well aware that he might come across as odd or even intimidating – the first laugh comes from the image of such an unusual-looking person turning up in somebody’s own home. However, sometimes audiences have been less willing to laugh, and Hodgson argues that this is because they are not always willing to accept him because he’s an outsider: It’s very much a double edged sword because what it means is … stuff that wins you awards and gets you nice write-ups in The Guardian and … gets you artistically respected, that doesn’t translate … into things like regular bookings and stuff. It means you die a lot when you’re finding your feet, and it means it’s difficult to get booked. I mean I have died some horrible deaths in my time. Horrendous deaths. More recently, Hodgson has changed his look, with closecropped, undyed hair and a beard. He says that he no longer gets so much hostility now ‘because I don’t look like I did.’ In spite of this, he is wary of ‘appeasing people that I maybe shouldn’t want to be appeasing’, which would include casual bigots, and sexist, laddish men who can dominate certain kinds of stand-up audience. He also knows that he appeals to others like him who have become outsiders because of their own lifestyle choices – ‘People who are maybe sort of transgender or have got like elaborate hairstyles, and they’re Goths and they live in places like Dewsbury’ – and worries about ‘moving too far away from them’.9 Clearly, facing the audience as a true outsider is a difficult line to tread.

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Inside and outside Whilst some comedians play the insider and others play the outsider, most play both. In his Vote for Jim show, Jim Davidson spends most of his time identifying with the community of the audience, by pushing populist, right-wing buttons, but not all of his imaginary policies go down well. When he asks why he should have to pay 40 per cent tax on most of his earnings, somebody shouts, ‘Because you’re a rich bastard!’ He’s unapologetic, explaining he deserves to be rich because: ‘I’m more talented than you’.10 Suddenly, Davidson is separate from the audience, a high status outsider. Although he isn’t cheered for what he says, he doesn’t lose the audience. The brazen confidence with which he states his case shows control and asserts his status as somebody to be admired rather than messed with. For Jo Brand, the choice of defining herself as an insider or an outsider depends on the kind of audience she’s playing to. She explains that as she has a family to support and refuses on principle to appear in adverts, she sometimes earns ‘shedloads of money’ by doing ‘these weird corporate gigs with sort of loads of businessmen in them’. In such circumstances – which she describes as ‘just fucking weird’ – her upfront feminism and her penchant for the outrageous clearly define her as being separate from the community of the audience. On other occasions, she can feel part of the community of audiences ‘who are very much politically in tune with me and roughly the same age and all that sort of thing’. Sometimes, though, she finds herself shifting between the insider and outsider roles: I mean you might say to an audience, ‘Oh, isn’t so-and-so a pain in the arse,’ and they’ll all agree with you, and then kind of five minutes later you might find you’ve gone too far, and suddenly you’re outside what’s acceptable with them, so you then have to relate to them on that basis.11



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Surreal comedians have a natural tendency for the outsider role, portraying themselves as exotic aliens with a skewed outlook on the world. Milton Jones uses hair gel and loud shirts to achieve exactly this effect. For Harry Hill, though, playing the outsider is what makes him close to his audience, which he describes as ‘a room full of outcasts’. He believes his audience collude with him as he unleashes his torrents of silliness on them: ‘I think … that the audience know that I’m in on it as well.’12 Ross Noble – whose act is made up of high-energy cartoon images and surreal trains of thought lubricated by the fluidity of improvisation – sees himself as being both like and unlike his audience. Having started in stand-up at the age of 15, he is clearly unlike most of the people who come to see him: ‘I’m different from the people in the audience purely because I’ve never had a job, I’ve never had a normal existence, and all I’ve ever done is stand-up … I don’t live a particularly normal life because I’m always on the road.’ On the other hand, the process of touring, with its days spent wandering around city centres, eating in Little Chefs and getting into conversations with people gives him enough experience of normality to identify with his audience. The combination of the surreal and the everyday has its origins in his upbringing in a new town in the North East: ‘I was in this kind of slightly mundane situation, which meant that my head lived in a slightly more sort of fanciful place.’13

Dividing the audience As well as being an insider, an outsider or a bit of both, there’s also another choice available to comedians – to relate differently to different sections of the room. Dividing the audience up is a basic stand-up skill. A compère may generate energy at the beginning of the show by splitting the audience into sections and getting them to compete about how loudly they

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can shout, cheer or applaud. Comedians playing big theatres may play the stalls off against the balcony, perhaps poking fun at the snobbery of punters who have paid for expensive tickets in the front rows and the tightfistedness of the ones in the cheap seats. Stewart Lee often observes that he’s going down noticeably less well with certain sections of the audience, and points out the divide between those who are going with him and those that are not. At a show in the 1,200-seat Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury in early 2012, he identifies a ‘pocket’ of people on the balcony who are not laughing. He sets up the idea that his audience has grown thanks to his two TV series, and that some of the punters watching him might have been unwillingly dragged along by friends. He talks about only wanting to play to people who’ve seen him before, and suggests that he’ll soon lose these newcomers and it’ll be ‘just us’ again. Pointing out his failure with a section of the audience seems counterintuitive. It’s a risky move that could create real hostility from those punters, and damage the entire audience’s faith in Lee’s comic ability. In fact, it sits well with his overall approach, in which he remains arrogant whilst at the same time feigning comic failure. Carving out a section of punters who are apparently not going with him allows him to gets laughs by reversing the normal etiquette of stand-up. He blames them – instead of himself – for any joke that ‘fails’. When a straightforward topical gag gets a good reaction, he suggests that our reaction means we’re probably Jimmy Carr fans and tells us, ‘Don’t come again. [laughter]’ After making a comment which is clearly ironic, he patronisingly explains it for the newcomers: ‘When I say that, that’s the opposite of what I actually think. [laughter].’14 As well as being a good source of laughter, dividing the audience also fulfils another function for Lee. Ironically, it helps to unite them behind him. To an extent, the idea that there’s a whole section of the audience who are not getting behind the act is fictional. Lee confesses that he’s not really aware of specific sections where the laughter is sparse:



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You can sort of pretend to instigate things, but actually you can’t really tell if they’re happening or not. It’s a reasonable assumption that they are. That there are people feeling particular ways and other ways in a room of twelve hundred. You don’t really know. You just hear a kind of, like, it sounds like the sea. You can’t hear an individual wave. However, by splitting the audience into people who get it and people who don’t, he can persuade more people to follow him into his hall of mirrors: ‘No-one likes to think that they’re in the bit that aren’t getting it. You know, and they always think it’s about other people.’15 In other cases, dividing the audience serves a more political purpose. Jo Brand plays differently to the men and women in the audience, sharing experiences with the women, and making out that what she says will be going over the heads of the men. She imagines the husbands of the women in the audience telling their wives, ‘This is your one treat this year, I’m coming with you but don’t expect me to laugh.’16 Similarly, Richard Pryor would relate differently to black and white people in his audience. At the beginning of Live in Concert, this starts when he notices punters filing to their seats: ‘This is the fun part for me, when the white people come back after the intermission and find out niggers stole their seats. [laughter, cheering, whistles and applause]’ He imagines the reaction of a very square, white punter (‘Er, weren’t we sitting here, er, dear, weren’t we –?’), and the response of a cool, defiant black one (‘Well, you ain’t sittin’ there now, motherfugger!’). All of this is played out to riotous laughter and applause. As Pryor gets into the act, it’s clear that he identifies with the black punters whose experience he shares, not the white punters who have come along for the ride. He asks, ‘You ever noticed how nice white people get when there’s a bunch of niggers around?’ which leads to an impression of a white man grinning idiotically and introducing himself to a bunch of

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black people: ‘Hi, how ya doin’? [laughter] I don’t know you, but here’s my wife, hello!! [laughter]’17 It’s beautifully acted, precisely capturing the ridiculous jollity and underlying anxiety of white people in this situation. Observational comedy may be about shared experience, but in this case, the phenomenon that Pryor is observing is experienced differently by blacks and whites in the audience. For black people, the observation is about the ridiculous behaviour of another group. For white people, it is their own behaviour they are being invited to see as ridiculous. There’s clearly a political edge to this, a chance for a black comedian and black punters to enjoy having the upper hand for once, but it’s not actually hostile towards the whites in the audience. Bill Hicks, on the other hand, would single out certain groups and lay into them without mercy. In one routine, he gets laughter and applause by announcing: ‘By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing – kill yourself.’ He repeatedly rams the point home, saying: ‘Seriously though – if you are, do. [laughter] Ahhhh – [some clapping] No, really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, OK? [laughter] Kill yourself, seriously.’ Of course, it may be that there are no advertisers or marketing types in the audience, in which case Hicks’ violent advice is purely symbolic; but if they are there, he makes sure they can’t wriggle off the hook. He imagines them trying to find ways to join in with the laughter, perhaps by thinking he’s going for ‘that anti-marketing dollar’ or ‘the righteous indignation dollar’. In each case, he cuts their thoughts dead, calling them ‘fucking evil scumbags’.18

With or against the mob? On the face of it, Hicks seems to be doing something very subversive here. He is sticking his comic boot into the advertising industry – which plays a key role in free market



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capitalism – and the laughter and applause which greets his invective seems to unite the audience behind him. On a personal level, any advertisers or marketers who did happen to be in audience would probably feel very out of step with the mood of the room. What appears to be happening is that Hicks – a daring outsider – is comically attacking a powerful social group and by doing so undermining an important ideological idea. This chimes with Hicks’s view of what a comedian is. He saw being an outsider as an inherent part of his job: ‘To me, the comic is the guy who says, “Wait a minute” as the consensus forms. He’s the antithesis of the mob mentality.’19 Other performers have expressed similar views. Rick Overton argues that, ‘To a soul, comics are all misfits … I think out of the box because I was never invited in the box, so outside the box is the only territory I know.’20 Simon Munnery wraps the idea up in a neat quip: ‘When the crowd get behind you you’re probably facing the wrong way.’21 On the other hand, Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves argue that: Comedians are not the kind of people you want to put in charge of protecting minority views. As a breed they’re instinctively with the mob. Far from being fearless mavericks, riding roughshod across popular sensibilities in pursuit of a laugh, most stand-up comics, and most ‘offensive’ jokes, are not taboo-busting at all: they are inherently conservative. By mocking situations that we would otherwise find uncomfortable, by legitimizing our anxieties about people who are different and hard to relate to, these jokes perpetuate the status quo.22 What we seem to have here is two diametrically opposed opinions. Stand-up comedy is subversive or conservative, with or against the majority perspective. In fact, it’s possible to reconcile these two arguments. Richard Herring expresses a popular view when he says, ‘I’ve always felt with comedy

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either it can be bullying, and it can be looking down … or you can be attacking up.’23 There are certainly some comedians who legitimise our anxieties about people who are different, building careers out of mocking minority groups and people less powerful than themselves – thus reinforcing social hierarchies. On the other hand, there are those like Wil Hodgson, who legitimise people who are different and invite us to embrace the outsider; or Bill Hicks, who mocked the powerful. All of this leads us into the walking-through-aminefield question of the politics of stand-up comedy, and the effect it might have on the way an audience thinks.

Notes 1

Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004

2

Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993-8, London: Century, 1998, p. 85

3

See Stephen Wagg, ‘“They Already Got a Comedian for Governor” Comedians and Politics in the United States and Great Britain’, in Stephen Wagg (ed.) Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 252–3

4

Interview with Shazia Mirza, by telephone, 28 June 2004

5

See ‘Intro’ and ‘Worst audience ever’, Bill Hicks, Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 Pittsburgh 6/20/91, Rykodisc, 2002, RCD 10632

6

‘More about smoking’, Bill Hicks, Live at the Oxford Playhouse 11.11.92, Invasion Group, 2003, INVACD 1001. The gag is a reference to the famous incident at a 1960s festival when Bob Dylan was booed by folk purists for playing with an electric rock band

7

Frankie Howerd, At The Establishment Club & at the BBC, Decca, 1963, LK 4556

8

Wil Hodgson, Skinheads, Readers’ Wives and My Little Ponies, Go Faster Stripe, 2008, GFS-10

9

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Interview with Wil Hodgson, by telephone, 12 September 2012

10 Jim Davidson, Vote for Jim, Winter Gardens, Margate, 25 October 2003 11 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 12 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 13 Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 14 Stewart Lee, Carpet Remnant World, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 24 February 2012 15 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 16 Jo Brand, The Stag Theatre, Sevenoaks, 10 May 2004 17 Richard Pryor, Live in Concert, Revolver Entertainment, 2004, REVD1806 18 Revelations, on Bill Hicks, Totally Bill Hicks, VCI/4 DVD, 2001, VCD0162 19 Cynthia True, American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002, p.178 20 Paul Provenza and Dan Dion, Satiristas! Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgarians, New York: HarperCollins, 2010, p. 333 21 Quoted in Stewart Lee, ‘What I really think about Michael McIntyre … and the Daily Mail, too’, http://www.chortle. co.uk/features/2011/07/19/13653/stewart_lee%3A_what_i_ really_think_about_michael_mcintyre#ixzz28KNehi9v [accessed 5 November 2012] 22 Jimmy Carr & Lucy Greeves, The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes, London: Penguin, 2006, p. 192 23 Interview with Richard Herring, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 14 February 2012

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Licence Some comics base their entire output on a kind of joyful offensiveness. Appearing on TV in 2004, Jo Brand delights in creating a series of sexually explicit cartoon images. A vagina is described as ‘the old velvet Tardis’. She suggests The Sun should produce a page three for women, featuring ‘a bloke, with his pants on, with a little cheeky testicle poking out the side’. She talks about having a bra fitted by the company which supplies the Queen with underwear, and asking whether the monarch has ‘pink nipples or brown ones’. Brand completely subverts conventional ideas about femininity. In an anti-matter universe she would be the epitome of ladylike. Her behaviour – as described in the act – is hilariously bizarre and disgusting. She pisses in an estate agent’s briefcase, breast feeds her husband in a café and eats her children’s leftover meals out of the bin. She reverses the classic image of an ideal wife: I’d like to say I’m very happily married. Er, my husband’s not, unfortunately, but fuck him, you know. [laughter and applause] And the thing I find difficult about marriage is that bit where all the nice sort of love and all that’s worn off – and you’re just left with some twat in your house, [laughter] d’yer – d’yer know what I mean? Announcing that she’s become a parent, she imagines the

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audience’s reaction: ‘And I know you’re looking at me, going, “I don’t think you had sex with your husband for your children. We think, as a group, that you used a turkey baster.”’ There’s a big laugh, mixed with audible groaning. The sound of the groans suggests not disapproval or hostility, but a pure reaction to the grotesqueness of the image. She pushes it further: ‘“Or perhaps you got a gay friend of yours to get very drunk and turn you against the wall,” well no!’ There’s a big laugh, and some people clap. She picks up on this: ‘People are clapping that, now that’s an interesting reaction, isn’t it? “We want you to have done that, and we want to hear more about it, please.” [laughter]’1 She explains that she’s always had a penchant for outrage: I’ve always been like that. I mean, again, it’s that old cliché of saying, like, ‘Bum’ during assembly when you’re at primary school … I just always wanted (rather sadly I suppose) to kind of shock people, and I just very much enjoyed … the result when I did. Funnily enough, in some ways, I’m not really that sort of person in my personal social life. I am when I’m pissed (you know, well I suppose we’re all a bit like that when we’re pissed), but there’s always a bit of me that’s wanted to be like that, you know. So I suppose it’s that bit of me that does the stand-up, really … If I actually thought seriously about some of the things I said onstage, I probably wouldn’t do it, so I just don’t think about it.2 When she picks up on the audience’s clapping at the joke about being taken from behind by a gay friend, she is bringing into the open the idea that the audience expects her to say outrageous things. In this sense, she is licensed to shock. It could be argued that this blunts the subversive edge of her full frontal assault on notions of femininity – that the role of comedian gives her a special licence, but also safely contains her outrageousness, stopping it from spilling out into the wider world.

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There are certainly comic theorists whose ideas would tend to support this interpretation. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, for example, argues that the joker ‘appears to be a privileged person who can say certain things in a certain way which confers immunity.’3 She allows that ‘All jokes have [a] subversive effect on the dominant structure of ideas’,4 but goes on to say that they offer only a ‘temporary suspension of the social order’ because ‘the strength of [their] attack is entirely restricted by the consensus on which [they depend] for recognition.’5 It’s certainly true that some stand-up comedians do express consensus and work within the boundaries of what is considered acceptable. When Bob Hope talked about politics in his act, he usually kept the gags mild and neutral, aiming them at both parties. He did this because, as he puts it, ‘I’m usually selling a product everybody buys and I don’t want to alienate any part of my audience’.6 Observational comedy and material about shared history is usually about establishing consensus within the audience, although Richard Pryor’s observation about how white people behave in a crowd of black people shows that this isn’t always the case. However, when Douglas talks about consensus, she is not implying that all joking has to be conspicuously safe and inoffensive, but that ultimately it is prevented from playing with subjects which are commonly held to be inappropriate: ‘Social requirements may judge a joke to be in bad taste, risky, too near the bone, improper or irrelevant. Such controls are exerted either on behalf of hierarchy as such, or on behalf of values which are judged too precious and too precarious to be exposed to challenge.’7 This means that, ‘the joker is not exposed to danger … He merely expresses consensus. Safe within the permitted range of attack, he lightens for everyone the oppressiveness of social reality …’8 The clear implication is that comedy is always toothless and conservative. Rather than challenging the status quo, jokes merely let off steam and allow us to live more comfortably with the restrictions which society places upon us. Interestingly,

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there are certain comedians who have put forward similar arguments, albeit with an important twist. According to Stewart Lee, ‘By reversing the norms and breaking the taboos, the clowns show us what we have to lose, and what we might also stand to gain, if we stand outside the restrictions of social convention and polite everyday discourse.’9 Similarly, Billy Connolly has argued that: The biggest favour we do for people is to release them. Society, culture, puts them in jail – and we let them out. The rule-makers, whoever they are, decided a box you’re going to live in. We need to be reminded that you can step out of the box – and you can go right back in again if you want, too.10 Both comics imply that rather than just relieving pressure, comedy also has the power to suggest how things might be different.

Too near the bone It’s obviously true that some subjects are deemed unsuitable for joking, but the problem with this is that the consensus on what’s suitable and what’s not can change. Stewart Lee argues: When you talk about it in anthropological terms, you might be thinking of some little village where there’s a clown and he does something every year, and everyone’s the same in that village … but actually in a big multicultural society, there’s all sorts of different people … We’re not a village any more …11 Consensus can shift and change from moment to moment, and location to location. Audience attitudes may be very different from one night to the next even in the same venue. Indeed,

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many stand-ups build an act out of daringly pushing at the edges of consensus. A common technique in contemporary British comedy clubs is to follow an edgy gag which gets a big laugh with the comment, ‘I think I’ve found your level.’ Similarly, after an outraged laugh, the comic will often say, ‘I think I’ve gone too far.’ Bill Hicks had lines which he could pull out if he was in danger of losing the audience. After a particularly obscene gag, he would say, ‘My mother wrote that one’ or ‘I am available for children’s parties’. On the other hand, if he felt his audience was getting bored with his political rhetoric, he would say, ‘Let me assure you right now – there are dick jokes on the way.’12 Then there are sick jokes, which gleefully play about with forbidden subjects. During Billy Connolly’s show at the Carling Hammersmith Apollo, I witness a very pure example of a sick joke. He starts talking about Ken Bigley, the 62-year-old British engineer who has been kidnapped by a terrorist group in Iraq. Just broaching the subject makes a hush fall over the auditorium. This is a big news story, and a horrible one. The terrorists are threatening to behead Bigley if their demands are not met. Connolly skilfully identifies the unease he’s provoked, imagining the audience thinking, ‘Oh God, what’s he going to say?’ This punctures the tension for a moment, but he pumps it up again by continuing to talk very seriously about the issue. He mentions that earlier in the evening, he’s seen on the news that the terrorists have released more video footage of Bigley. This makes the story even more current, even more risky. Having built the tension, he walks to the very front of the stage and asks, in a hushed voice, whether we, like him, listen to the news hoping that Bigley has been beheaded. The theatre is filled with the sound of the audience going, ‘Ooooo!’, in a wave of disapproval that rushes towards the stage, but before it can crash over him, Connolly defiantly shouts, ‘Fuck off!’, transforming it into a big laugh.13

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Regardless of the morality of joking about such a thing, it’s a beautifully performed piece of taboo surfing. Connolly manipulates the audience with extraordinary control. Like all sick jokes, his comment derives its power from the fact that it’s about a subject deemed inappropriate for joking. It rebels against the expected emotional reaction to the Bigley case, replacing horror and sadness with laughter. It’s a pure sick joke, in that it has no real motivation other than to play with the tension surrounding a current news story. Connolly is not really telling the joke at Bigley’s expense, he’s honestly revealing a prurient part of himself that secretly yearns for horror in a news story with which he has no direct connection. What is truly shocking is the feeling that he might be right in suggesting that many of us share his secret prurience. Initially, it seems as if Connolly can make this work because, like Brand, he enjoys a licence to say outrageous things in his act. On 3 October, a few days after I see the show, the Mail on Sunday publishes a five-star review which says: ‘When he provocatively mentions hostage Ken Bigley, he crosses the threshold of respectability, knowing full well he’ll get away with it by comedic daring, by force of personality, by reputation.’14 But a few days later, the tide has turned. A number of newspapers report that Connolly has been booed and heckled for the joke. A headline in The Express screams, ‘Audience Jeers Connolly’s Sick Joke about Iraq Hostage; That’s Just Not Funny, Billy’. Bigley’s brother, understandably upset, is quoted as saying, ‘I don’t like his humour anyway.’ The Muslim Council of Britain, which has tried to negotiate Bigley’s release, says, ‘This is the time when everyone needs to be showing solidarity with Ken Bigley’s family, to work for his release. The jokes can wait.’15 A few days after that, the fury provoked by Connolly’s joke is swept away by the genuinely disturbing news of Bigley’s death. Clearly consensus is more transient and complicated than Douglas’s argument suggests, and social requirements can shift even in the course of a few days. This is important

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because in some cases sick jokes can go beyond simple outrageousness and say something profound. Bill Hicks provides a classic example of this, in a routine which starts with him talking about how much he enjoyed the special effects in the film Terminator 2. He says he thinks they will never be able to better those effects, then uses a single word to qualify his argument: ‘Unless – ’ There’s a small laugh, anticipating that something good is coming. He continues: ‘They start using terminally ill people –’ While the audience laugh, he looks at them quizzically, as if puzzled by their not taking him seriously. ‘Hear me out,’ he says, getting another laugh, before finishing his idea: ‘– as stuntmen in the movies.’ There’s some laughter at this, which lasts a few seconds. During this, he looks at the audience again, biting his bottom lip, as if eagerly trying to see if they approve of the idea. ‘OK, not the most popular idea ever,’ he concedes, getting another full laugh. So far, so good. Like Connolly, the way he plays with the audience’s reactions to the horrific idea he’s suggesting is masterful. Now he takes the routine to another level. He says the audience probably think it’s a cruel idea, then answers back: ‘You know what I think cruel is? Leaving your loved ones to die in some sterile hospital room, surrounded by strangers. Fuck that! Put ‘em in the movies.’ There’s a big laugh, and applause. Now he sounds exasperated with them: ‘What? You want your grandmother dying like a little bird in some hospital room, her translucent skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its way down her blue vein? Or you want her to meet Chuck Norris?’ There’s another big laugh and more applause.16 Talking about how dying people are treated is far more than a thin justification for a sick routine. The description of the grandmother has a kind of dark poetry which is rare in stand-up. He holds the moment, using his hand to subtly suggest the passage of the blood down the vein, a pained look on his face. It’s a daring piece of performance. He’s facing his

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audience with a true horror, one that may well await each one of them. He’s making an important point about the way our culture treats the sick and elderly. At the heart of a truly grotesque sick routine there’s real tenderness and passion.

The permitted range of attack Stand-up can be restricted by unspoken rules about what constitutes an acceptable subject for comedy, but there’s a long history of comedians who have erased these rules, expanding the possibilities of the form by tackling supposedly unsuitable subjects. Some have broken taboos of obscenity. Frank Skinner, for example, has joked so enthusiastically about heterosexual sodomy that he has been dubbed ‘the Billy Graham of anal sex’.17 Others have joked about subjects which might seem too esoteric or dull for comedy. In 1990, Tony Allen’s act included routines on the financial markets, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the horticultural habits of rainforest tribes.18 Dave Gorman had an extensive routine about pure maths, which was inspired by reading about Fermat’s Last Theorem: I found myself being fascinated. And I just thought, ‘I wonder if I can convey this to people.’ ‘Cos I’m fascinated and I really like this, and I know you’re not supposed to, ‘cos it’s maths, but if I can convey that, then I think people will find just that funny.19 There are also comedians who deal with subjects which might be considered too tragic or uncomfortable for joking, particularly their own physical afflictions. Adam Hills talks about having a metal foot.20 Paul Merton did a show about his spell in a mental hospital.21 On his final tour, Richard Pryor joked about the multiple sclerosis that was forcing him to retire.22 The acclaimed 2002 Edinburgh Fringe show, Andre Vincent

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is Unwell dealt with the fact that the comedian had been diagnosed with cancer. Vincent decided to tackle the subject precisely because it was unsuitable: [P]eople were saying, ‘You can’t talk about it,’ [and] that really became the moment for me where it was like, ‘I won’t be told that. I won’t be told that, because it’s me. It’s me, and I’m a comedian. And I talk about what I know and what I see. And at the moment I’ve got cancer, so I’ve got to talk about it.’ He started talking about it immediately: And on the very day that I was told I had cancer, I was doing Southampton Jongleurs, and just before bringing on the second act, somebody heckled me, and I went, ‘Don’t heckle me, I’ve got cancer!’ And it got sort of like a laugh and an ‘Oo!’ And [to] the people that went, ‘Oo,’ I went, ‘What are you oo-ing about?’ And one of them said, ‘You shouldn’t say that, that’s not nice.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I have.’ And there was a real lull in the audience. I went, ‘No, I just found out today, I got cancer of the kidney.’ And there was no material at that point, there was nowhere for it to go. And bless him, to this day, George Egg, who I brought on next, still never lets me forget about the fact that I brought him on to an audience who were just going, ‘That poor bloke’s got cancer!’ He went on to find ways of dealing with the subject more successfully. The Edinburgh show includes gags about the absurd things that have happened to him in the course of dealing with the disease, like the questions he’s asked about his urine in the process of being diagnosed: ‘“Does it smell or taste different?” I’m like, “What?? [laughter] Taste??” [laughter]’23 He also commentates over the top of actual film footage of his operation. The show was a big critical success, but perhaps understandably, it still provoked unease among audiences:

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But even though … it was doing so well, it still made people kind of go, ‘Oo, I’m not sure this is right.’ On the Friday of the first weekend, The Times gave me a five-star review, it was the first five-star review that they’d given out. I was on the front page, and there was a full-page interview. It was just brilliant. Couldn’t get better coverage. I still only had 18 people in that night. This kind of unease only made him more determined to continue talking about cancer in his act: ‘I wanna talk about it now. I wanna talk about it. Fuck ‘em! I’m not gonna go with the norm. I will talk about it. And started playing more and more with it. And now I just don’t give a fuck about it.’24 Sometimes there is a deeper political purpose to going outside of the permitted range of attack. Doug Stanhope’s scattergun satire is aimed at worthy and undeserving targets alike, but he’s completely open about his willingness to offend anybody. Those he offends are likely to heckle him, so he tells his audience: ‘If nobody gets thrown out tonight, that’ll increase our streak to – one.’ On his 2012 UK tour, his first big routine is a comic evisceration of the Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who had criticised Tony Nicklinson – a man who was suffering from locked-in syndrome following a stroke – for pursuing a legal battle for the right to die. Stanhope’s tactics range from low and common abuse to reasoned argument, but the riskiest moments come when he launches into a lengthy anecdote about helping his mother to end her life when she was dying from emphysema. He goes through the details of how he ‘catered’ her suicide by supplying her with White Russians to wash down the overdose of morphine tablets. She is surrounded by her family as she waits to die, and they ‘roast’ (i.e. tease) her, telling her ‘Mom, they found a cure’, to which she replies by sticking up her middle finger. He tells us that he made sure other people weren’t around to see this because they wouldn’t find that kind of thing funny – and then suddenly refers this back to us, in this theatre, pointing out that we probably don’t

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find it funny. In fact, he manages to get big laughs from this distinctly unlikely comic premise. On a technical level, he’s taking a significant risk by joking about a subject that’s so serious and laden with emotional weight. He’s also taking a personal risk, publicly confessing to behaviour which verges on illegality. For all his bad-boy comic bluster, he has managed to construct a convincing and sensitive case for the right to die. Even in his act, he shows that he’s aware that it’s the licence which stand-up comedy affords that allows him to speak so freely. He tells us about getting into a public spat with Pearson, and claims that she has publicly asked for his employers to sack him. ‘My employers is comedy,’ he says. ‘How am I going to get the sack for that? I’ve been trying for the last 15 years.’ He also points out that his audience is actually his employer – ‘and you’re not going to sack me.’25 If stand-up offers the possibility of a free space within which comedians can transcend the bounds of acceptability and explore unconventional ideas, I’d argue that nothing tests this freedom as consciously as Stewart Lee’s show 90’s Comedian. This comic tour de force was created in the aftermath of a public furore over Jerry Springer: The Opera, which Lee had written with the musician Richard Thomas. When the musical was televised by the BBC in 2005, the show was targeted by right-wing groups like Christian Voice, who picketed theatres where it was appearing. Christian Voice threatened the BBC with a private prosecution for blasphemy, and the most extreme protestors even issued death threats against the executives who had commissioned the televised version. 90’s Comedian takes the audience on a carefully crafted journey on the way to an outlandish conclusion. Lee tells them that after the woes inflicted on him by evangelical Christians, he went to recuperate at his mother’s house in Worcestershire. This builds to a poetically grotesque tall tale in which he drinks too much barley wine in a nearby pub, and is accompanied back to his mother’s house by a stranger who turns out to be

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Jesus. After getting back, he starts vomiting up improbable amounts of sick, to the point where the downstairs toilet and washbasin are overflowing. Not knowing where to throw up next, Jesus offers his own mouth – and then even his anus – as a receptacle for the apparently never-ending vomit. It’s hard to imagine anything more spectacularly blasphemous than this, and the fact that Lee can take the audience with him, getting laughs at each outrageous escalation of the imagery demonstrates his supreme artistry. Film of the routine shows individual punters wincing or covering their mouths in disbelief amongst the laughter. What’s particularly odd is that there’s almost a spiritual dimension to the story, as Christ has willingly offered himself up as a receptacle in order to help a man who has suffered at the hands of his followers. The idea that Lee is testing the limits of the freedom that stand-up offers is absolutely explicit. Before going into the routine, he draws a chalk circle around himself and explains that he’s following the example of the bouffons in Languedoc who make themselves safe to make fun of the church by drawing a shape around themselves so that they are ‘protected by the magic spell of comedy’. Later, the anecdote concludes with Lee’s mother discovering Lee standing over the vomitfilled Christ and advising him not to recount these events in his act unless he has a good reason to do so. He then articulates three reasons why it was important for him to say all of this, the third of which is: [I]f you attempt to apply limits to freedom of expression – either through legislation or intimidation or threats – what will then happen – is that reasonable people, often against their own better judgement [quiet laughter] will – feel obliged to test those limits – [laughter] er, by going into areas they don’t feel entirely comfortable with. [quiet laughter] I – personally haven’t enjoyed the last half hour at all, I do it – [laughter] I do it only – to safeguard your liberty. [laughter and applause]26

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Irony Comedians may enjoy the freedom to stretch the limits of acceptability, but doing so is not necessarily a political act, or even one with a clear meaning. In the last few years a number of comedians, on either side of the Atlantic, have made deliberate offensiveness a central plank of their stand-up style. They trample on all sensibilities – particularly liberal ones – but resist straightforward interpretation by shrouding their gags with irony. Jimmy Carr is an excellent example. His quips are short, clipped and supremely well-crafted, their neatness offset by their tasteless subjects, which typically include rape, paedophilia, disability, scatology and sexual disgust. The act plays out like an elaborate game, in which the idea is simply to persuade the audience to laugh in spite of their better judgement. ‘I should warn you this isn’t a show for the easily offended, it isn’t even a show for people that are quite difficult to offend,’ he declares. ‘Essentially this is a show for people without a moral compass. [laughter]’ He goes on to play with their reactions, revealing ‘the rules of the gig’ which are that they have to choose between laughter and disapproval: ‘What you can’t do is laugh, applaud, then look round and go, “Oooh!” [laughter] I’m not having that.’27 At another show, he finds somebody in the front row who claims he will not be offended by anything and takes this as a challenge, reeling off a string of increasingly tasteless jokes, culminating in an Auschwitz gag.28 Carr might come across as misogynistic, anti-gay and prejudiced against the disabled, and although a number of jokes seem to support this, the fact that he’s playing a game actually tends to render them blank and meaningless. At times, the gap between what his gags suggest and what he actually believes becomes visible. In one routine he criticises a tabloid newspaper’s outing of a gay footballer for its ‘demeaning’ treatment of homosexuals, explaining, ‘It’s only a joke, jokes are fine. Proper homophobia isn’t fine.’29

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He offsets his offensiveness with a surprisingly genteel demeanour. He can be outrageously rude to individual punters, but will often follow this with a polite comment which suggests an underlying respect for his audience. Indeed, the gap between the appalling things he says and his hardworking, middle-class professionalism is so wide, there’s almost an avant-garde quality to his act. Frankie Boyle’s comedy is much more straightforwardly obnoxious. An aggressive, bespectacled Scot, his eyes gleam with malevolent disdain as he dispenses gags about paedophiles, necrophiliacs or any recent news story that offers up the possibility of a depraved comic angle. He lacks Carr’s respect for the audience – even telling them that his show is ‘for scum’ – but shares the sense that the offensiveness is all part of a game that he’s playing with them. After a gag about the racing driver Lewis Hamilton’s brother having cerebral palsy, he assures them that, ‘The show doesn’t sink any lower than that. [laughter] Oh no, wait a minute, it does. [laughter] Quite often. [laughter]’ At that point, he laughs himself, giving out an evil, hooting guffaw. When a punter is reluctant to tell him what he does for a living, he explains, ‘You just tell me what you do. I make a joke about how it’s a shit thing to be doing. [laughter] We all get on with our lives. [laughter]’ Then he turns to the rest of the audience and says, ‘Sorry, have I ruined the magic for anybody there? [laughter]’ Unlike Carr, there is a hint of a moral purpose behind Boyle’s comic bile, a feeling that he might be motivated by genuine anger at the horror of the world. His reaction to coming across a stockbroker in his audience is to sneer, ‘You evil cunt!’, which gets laughter and applause. He then asks, ‘Do you invest in ethical stocks, or is it largely – landmines to Somalia? [laughter]’ On finding out that the punter actually has traded in guns, Boyle asks, ‘D’you ever think about buying a gun and blowing your own fucking head off? [laughter]’30 With Sarah Silverman, the game is different and the sense of purpose more clearly defined. In a typical gag, she tells

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the audience, ‘I was raped by a doctor. Which is, um – you know, so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.’ This gets laughter and a smattering of applause. As well as joking about a serious subject like rape, she’s also playing to a stereotype of Jewish people as incongruously obsessed with social status in general and doctors in particular. She may deal with unpleasant subjects and flirt with racist attitudes, but her game is about more than simply persuading the audience to laugh at the unacceptable. What she says is contextualised by how she performs. As an article in the online magazine Slate puts it: She delivers even the most taboo punch lines with almost pathological sincerity. It looks like her face isn’t in on her own jokes: Her nostrils flare, her mouth cocks meaningfully to one side, her teeth (of which there seem to be a few extra) hide and reveal themselves in strategically earnest formations.31 It is precisely this unawareness that creates the comedy. Silverman is slim and pretty, and adopts an airheaded persona who has no real understanding of just how awful the things she says are. She tells the audience about a clearly fictional type of jewel she likes, which is ‘only found like on the tip of the tailbone of Ethiopian babies’. She grimaces, showing her big, white teeth, as she explains, ‘They de-bone the babies.’ She then grins gauchely and attempts to justify herself: ‘I know that sounds so bad when you say it out loud! [laughter] But no, if you saw it! [laughter]’ She closes her eyes and holds up her hands, fingers splayed, as if trying to visualise the jewel. ‘So worth it, so worth it! [laughter]’ Here the distance from the material is provided by the ‘acting’ of the persona, which is exquisitely detailed – there’s kind of a satirical point in that she’s making fun out of the kind of vacuous, selfish attitude that would allow somebody to justify the fantastical cruelty which she describes. Later, the satire hits even closer to home as she sends up the cowardice

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behind a stand-up act based on wilful offensiveness. She recalls an earlier gig in which she dropped the word ‘nigger’ from a routine because she had noticed some black people sitting on a front table: ‘And then you gotta ask yourself, is that, er – an edgy joke or is that a racist joke? You know, and I didn’t do it because I was afraid of them. [laughter] You know. I didn’t. And I ended up changing that joke to Chinks. [laughter]’ It seems clear that Silverman’s audience is in on the joke. She tells them, ‘If I based my material on stereotypes that would be messed up, it would. But I don’t. OK? I base it on facts.’32 The joke is that the audience understands that it’s actually the other way around – the act is based on ignorant stereotypes rather than facts – and their laughter underlines this point. However, meaning can be slippery in stand-up, and there is always the worry that whatever the comedian’s intention, the audience might interpret things differently. The Slate article argues that Silverman is playing ‘a dangerous game’, adding, ‘If you’re humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.’

Al Murray’s cosmic prank Part of the problem is that there’s a lack of clear distinction between Silverman’s stage persona and private self, which means that the ridiculous views expressed in her act might be mistaken for her own. Even an act like Al Murray’s – in which the Pub Landlord is clearly a fictional character with views quite unlike those of the comedian – has been accused of being misinterpreted. An article in the Sunday Herald provides a typical example: There’s a strong argument that the only real difference between Murray and repugnant right-wing comedians of old is that they meant it and Murray doesn’t. That’s a

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significant difference but, without wanting to patronise any of the thickos in the crowd, it’s more than probable that critics and fellow self-satisfied sophisticates laugh because they see each joke as a negative, the opposite of itself, while others are taking all this at face value. At what point does the casual subversion of a particular sensibility become a celebration of it …?33 The Pub Landlord character is sexist, homophobic, patriotic and xenophobic, frequently ranting about the French and the Germans. He is also anti-intellectual, and hates those whose jobs might impinge on his trade, like tax inspectors and the police. The idea that Murray’s audience take all this at face value is fairly common, and I’d argue that it’s the way they behave at his shows that’s fuelled this opinion. The Pub Landlord frequently banters with individual punters. When a woman tells him her husband’s name is Klaus, there’s disbelief in his voice. ‘It’s Klaus??’ he says. This gets a massive reaction. There’s laughter, whistling, clapping, booing and jeering, and the uproar lasts for 12 seconds.34 This might look like an explosion of rampant anti-German sentiment, but I’d argue it’s more playful than that. The audience seem to react in this way because they recognise the parameters of the character, and play along with the fiction. When the Landlord comes across a police officer and a VAT inspector, each of these is booed. It seems unlikely that there are enough punters who have direct experience of VAT inspectors to produce an audible burst of disapproval like this. It seems to be more like the ritualised booing of a pantomime villain than a genuine expression of animosity. Significantly, in each case they only react when the Landlord has repeated what they have said to him, his disdain cuing their reaction. The way the show is built invites the audience to play-act as enthusiastic supporters of the Landlord’s ludicrous views, starting with a ritualised call-and-response: ‘Let’s hear it for the beer! [cheering] All hail to the ale! [cheering] And welcome

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the wine for the ladies.’ At the beginning of a show at the London Palladium in 2007, he extends this interactive riff: Pint for the feller, glass of white wine – fruit-based drink for the lady. Those – are the rules, and if we didn’t have rules, where would we be? [audience: ‘FRANCE!’] That’s right! [laughter] Where would we be? [audience: ‘FRANCE!!’] If we have too many rules, where would we be? [audience: ‘GERMANY!!’] That’s right! [laughter]’35 Again, the fact that the audience play along might suggest that they accept the stereotype of France as ill-disciplined and anarchic and Germany as regimented and highlyordered. In fact, they’re being cued to respond, and the fact that they shout when they’re asked to may have no more significance than a panto audience shouting, ‘Oh no you’re not!’ or, ‘He’s behind you!’ Crucially, they don’t laugh at the idea that France has no rules and Germany has too many. The real joke is that the Landlord believes these things and confirms their approval, and they only laugh when he says, ‘That’s right!’ Murray is aware of how his audience play-acts to join in with the fiction of the Pub Landlord, and points out that the particular dynamics of this change depending on where he is performing: [T]he audience perform, they join in, they get it … If I perform in Scotland, we get into a whole essentially ritualised performance of them calling me an English prick and me calling them Scottish bastards, and at the end of it everyone’s happy. You know, that’s a rehearsed and performed thing. Even so, he admits there may be some punters who take the act at face value – as a celebration of the character’s absurd views – but rather than be horrified by this, he relishes the irony:

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An audience’s reaction to a character like mine, it may well be that they think they agree with what the Pub Landlord says, but half of what he says is hallucinatory mental bollocks. If they do agree with it, then the joke’s on them … the bloke who doesn’t get it, the bloke who’s being mocked to his face and has bought a ticket so I can mock him, wow, what an amazing cosmic prank that is! You know, result! Jackpot!36

Going too far If the way comedians like Carr, Boyle and Silverman play with irony and taboo is a game, it’s one that carries distinct risks. All of them have told jokes which have crossed the line between joke outrage and actual outrage, attracting censure and criticism from the press. In a television interview with Conan O’Brien in 2001, Silverman talks about trying to get out of jury duty. Her friend advises her to ‘write something, like, really inappropriate on the form, like “I hate Chinks.”’ The audience’s laughter is uncertain, with a sense of shock. She goes on to explain that she doesn’t want people to think she’s racist, ‘so I just filled out the form – and er, I wrote, “I love Chinks.” [laughter]’37 The point of the joke is clearly about her persona’s stupidity – she hasn’t managed to avoid the charge of racism simply by reversing the sentiment, because she’s still using the racist slang for Chinese people. Nonetheless, Guy Aoki from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans complained to NBC, arguing that, ‘It’s not constructive to use such a hateful word and play off it for laughs. It just gives people permission to continue to use it.’38 The joke is about the very unacceptability of the word ‘Chinks’, but for Aoki it is too sensitive to use even in that context. Similarly, in a show at the Hexagon theatre, Reading, in April 2010, Frankie Boyle delivered a routine about Down’s

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syndrome. Asking a front-row punter called Sharon Smith why she was talking, she reluctantly told him that her daughter had Down’s syndrome and she was finding his jokes upsetting. According to Smith, he went into a long justification of his ‘vicious’ approach to comedy, and confessed that this was ‘the most excruciating moment of [his] career’.39 What both of these cases show is that while the comedian may see a gag as a game with taboo or even an attempt to send up prejudice, anybody directly affected by the issue might view it differently. Down’s syndrome or the word ‘Chink’ have enough taboo qualities to create the discomfort needed for a shocked explosion of laughter, but these taboos are not neutral. It is perfectly reasonable for a parent of a child affected by the condition, or somebody who has been at the receiving end of a racial slur to see these matters as too serious or sensitive for jokes. Sometimes though, regulation of subjects suitable for joking is, as Mary Douglas suggests, exerted on behalf of hierarchy. In October 2009, Jimmy Carr kicked up a storm of press outrage when he told the following joke at the Manchester Apollo: ‘Say what you like about servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a fucking good Paralympic team in 2012.’ Conservative MP Patrick Mercer said that such subjects should be ‘off limits’ for stand-up comedians, adding, ‘It’s not funny and his career should end right now.’40 Defence secretary Bob Ainsworth argued that, ‘Our brave Armed Forces put their lives on the line for all of us and deserve our utmost respect.’41 What’s interesting about this is that unlike many of Carr’s other jokes, there is nothing derogatory in this one. Rather than denigrating the disabled, he is celebrating them, suggesting that they’ll make ‘fucking good’ sportsmen. Nor is he undermining the institution of the military. The clear implication is that servicemen are heroically resilient, showing how undeterred they are by the tragedy of losing limbs by becoming Paralympians. Furthermore, this kind of gag is typical of the dark humour which servicemen share among

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themselves, as Carr would probably be aware, having visited injured troops in rehabilitation centres. What the joke reveals is the true cost of war. Perhaps simply drawing attention to the fact that people are coming back from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan with limbs missing was what really needled politicians like Mercer and Ainsworth, particularly given the bitter public disputes over the justification for these wars. Typically, Carr’s played down the gag’s satirical bite in favour of the idea that it was only a joke: ‘I’m sorry if anyone was offended but that’s the kind of comedy I do. If a silly joke draws attention to the plight of these servicemen then so much the better. My intention was only to make people laugh.’42 Probably the biggest scandal in recent stand-up history was a racist outburst by Michael Richards at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood in 2006. Prior to this, Richards was best known for playing the part of Kramer in the sitcom Seinfeld, but the incident was so notorious that it will follow him around for the rest of his career. Unlike the other examples, what he said was not a joke but a furious spontaneous tirade against some African-American hecklers. Once upon a time this might have been quickly forgotten, but footage of it was posted on the TMZ website. Apparently filmed on a punter’s mobile phone, it shows Richards incandescent with rage as he shouts, ‘YOU CAN TALK, YOU CAN TALK, YOU CAN TALK! YOU’RE BRAVE NOW, MOTHERFUCKER! THROW HIS ASS OUT, HE’S A NIGGER!! HE’S A NIGGER!!! HE’S A NIGGER!!!!’ There’s an audible stirring in the audience but it’s not laughter, and a female punter can clearly being heard saying, ‘Oh my God!’ ‘A NIGGER, LOOK, THERE’S A NIGGER!!!’ he continues, and when the audience greets this with an apprehensive ‘ooo’, he mimics this back at them. What follows is largely incoherent. He seems to try and distance himself from what he has said, as if it was a deliberate demonstration of outrage: ‘All right, you see? This shocks you, this shocks you, you see?’ At one point, his

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confusion is all too clear as he yells, ‘I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T KNOW!!!’ He gets into a shouting match with the hecklers – understandably upset by his racist aggression – and they swap insults. Finally his voice drops and he says, ‘You see? There’s still those words, those words, those words.’ Then he simply wanders off the stage, clearly befuddled.43 The furious press reaction and public outrage sparked by what happened at the Laugh Factory clearly shows that although stand-up comedians enjoy licence, this can be revoked if what they say genuinely upsets people. The ambiguous fog of irony and the fuzzy line that divides performer from persona make it possible for comedians to get a laugh from things which would often offend, and for Jimmy Carr this provides a distance between what he jokes about and what he actually believes. However, when Richards spewed out racial insults at his hecklers, what seemed to be happening was that his anger caused him to crack open and show the unpleasant attitudes that lay beneath the surface. It revealed the belief that often stand-up comedians believe what they say – and what they say has a relevance than can spill off the stage and into the real world.

Notes 1

Jo Brand on Jack Dee Live at the Apollo, BBC One, 27 September 2004

2

Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004

3

Mary Douglas, ‘Jokes’ in Implicit Meanings (2nd edition), London: Routledge, 1999, p. 158

4

Mary Douglas, ‘Jokes’ in Implicit Meanings (2nd edition), London: Routledge, 1999, p. 150

5

Mary Douglas, ‘Jokes’ in Implicit Meanings (2nd edition), London: Routledge, 1999, p. 158

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6

John Lahr, Show and Tell, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 213

7

Mary Douglas, ‘Jokes’ in Implicit Meanings (2nd edition), London: Routledge, 1999, p. 152

8

Mary Douglas, ‘Jokes’ in Implicit Meanings (2nd edition), London: Routledge, 1999, p. 159

9

Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 241

10 Paul Provenza and Dan Dion, Satiristas! Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgarians, New York: HarperCollins, 2010, p. 6 11 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 12 See Cynthia True, American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002, p. 82; and ‘Worst Audience Ever’, Bill Hicks, Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 Pittsburgh 6/20/91, Rykodisc, 2002, RCD 10632 13 Billy Connolly, Too Old to Die Young, Carling Hammersmith Apollo, 29 September 2004 14 Mark Wareham, ‘Sick with Laughter’, Mail on Sunday, 3 October 2004, FB section p. 80 15 Myra Philp, ‘Audience Jeers Connolly’s Sick Joke about Iraq Hostage; That’s Just not Funny, Billy’, the Express, 6 October 2004, News section p. 15 16 Revelations on Bill Hicks, Totally Bill Hicks, VCI/4 DVD, 2001, VCD0162 17 Ben Thompson, Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office, London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004, p. 128 18 See Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of it? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, pp. 165–81 for a full transcript of his extraordinary act 19 Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004 20 See Live Floor Show, BBC Two, 8 February 2003

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21 Merton originally toured with this show in the late 1990s, but his experience also inspired a section of a show which toured in 2012 (Paul Merton, Out of my Head, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 24 April 2012) 22 See ‘M.S.’ on Richard Pryor, … And It’s Deep, Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992), Rhino/ Warner Bros., 2000, RS 76655 23 Hurrah for Cancer, BBC Three, 28 October 2004 24 Interview with Andre Vincent, Central London, 14 July 2004 25 Doug Stanhope, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 24 March 2012 26 Stewart Lee, 90’s Comedian, Go Faster Stripe, 2006, GFS-1 27 Jimmy Carr, Comedian, 4 DVD, 2007, C4DVD10160 28 Jimmy Carr, Gagging Order, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 September 2012 29 Jimmy Carr, Comedian, 4 DVD, 2007, C4DVD10160 30 Frankie Boyle, Live, 4DVD, 2008, C4DVD10161 31 Sam Anderson, ‘Irony Maiden: How Sarah Silverman is raping American comedy’, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2005/11/irony_maiden.html [accessed 28 August 2012] 32 Sarah Silverman, Jesus is Magic, Warner Music Entertainment, 2006, 5051442978520 33 Stephen Phelan, ‘Lager than Life’, Sunday Herald, 27 October 2002, p. 10 34 Al Murray, The Pub Landlord Live: My Gaff, My Rules, Universal, 2001, 8208892 35 Al Murray, The Pub Landlord, Live at the Palladium, ITV DVD, 2007, 37115 26373 36 Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012 37 Originally broadcast 11 July 2001. ‘Sarah Silverman – ‘Chink’”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bYOWVLWybk [accessed 7 November 2012] 38 ‘Slur wasn’t funny, Chinese tell O’Brien’, Edmonton Journal, 19 July 2001, p. C3

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39 Peter Walker, ‘Mother stands up to comic over Down’s syndrome joke: Theatre confrontation with Boyle is Twitter sensation. Stand-up routine criticised as childish and ignorant’, the Guardian, 9 April 2010, p. 5 40 Victoria Ward, ‘Carr Crass: calls for comic to quit after joke on Forces’ amputees’, the Mirror, 26 October 2009, p. 7 41 Camilla Tominey, ‘TV comic’s slur on amputee soldiers; Fans stunned as Jimmy Carr insults our Afghan heroes’, the Express, 25 October 2009, p. 1 42 Quoted in Victoria Ward, ‘Carr Crass: calls for comic to quit after joke on Forces’ amputees’, the Mirror, 26 October 2009, p. 7 43 ‘Michael Richards Spews Racial Hate -- Kramer Racist Rant’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoLPLsQbdt0 [accessed 7 November 2012]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Politics In a show recorded in 1960, Mort Sahl says, almost as an afterthought: ‘I’m really not interested in politics as much as overthrowing the government. [laughter]’1 The audience laugh, because he’s clearly joking. The idea that a humble stand-up comedian could be using his art to foment revolution is ridiculously hyperbolic, and anyone who seriously put forward this idea could be written off as fanatic or a fantasist. But the joke didn’t spring from nowhere, and Sahl’s comedy was fuelled by genuine political anger: I had a basically rebellious nature, you know I always act like, ‘Well, I’m not gonna fold,’ but I hit the nerve when I began to talk about the things that really bothered me. You have to conquer your timidity and talk about what people really hate – like, ha ha ha, the government and the police.2 He is by no means the only comedian with political intentions. Margaret Cho, for example, acknowledges that. ‘I have a more of a personal-as-politicalised duty, I think, than just performance.’3 Josie Long’s recent work is openly hostile towards the UK’s Conservative-led coalition government, but she argues that she has always been a political comic: ‘I’ve had so many interviews with people of late where they’ve been like, “You’ve just started being political,” and I’m like, “No, I think what I’ve done has always been like political

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with a small P because, like, DIY culture for me is deeply political.” She believes her DIY ethos promotes self-determination, creativity and lifelong learning, and ‘all of these to me are, like, deeply political concepts’4 Mark Thomas has clear aims for his work: ‘You want to engage people, you want them to walk out having made them change their minds about something or seen something differently, or feel differently about something.’5 This is clearly the highest ambition any politically radical comedian can have – to change minds. The question is, is it possible to do so?

Preaching to the converted The oldest and most damning accusation that can be levelled at political comedy is that it just preaching to the converted. Its critics argue that only people who share the comic’s beliefs will be attracted to their shows, so however radical the material might seem, in Mary Douglas’s terms, it ‘merely expresses consensus’. It seems likely that stand-ups who wear their political beliefs on their sleeves will attract likeminded audiences, and I’ve certainly been at shows where this became quite tangible. In her show The Future Is Another Place, Josie Long lays into George Osborne’s cowardly attitude towards the banks, a Lib-Dem spin doctor she encountered while filming a TV show and the tax-dodging rich, but as ever her style is far from confrontational. She apologises to any Tories in the audience who might not like what she’s saying – albeit in a jokey, backhanded way – and the fanzine she gives out before the show even includes a word search for them to do if they feel bored or offended. In fact, she’s perfectly serious about not wanting to offend people: That’s why doing this show about politics has been quite tricky actually because I hate the fact that sometimes people

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get really offended because I’m going, ‘The Conservatives are cunts and if you like what they do, you’re wrong.’ Like, it does upset me to offend people because I do think, ‘Well under different circumstances I’m sure we could do something positive.’6 There aren’t too many Conservatives in evidence when I see the show in Whitstable.7 In fact, I’m struck by the tangible signs of assent from the punters around me. I hear people saying ‘yes’ under their breath, and a woman in front of me nods in agreement at many of the points Long makes as she moves towards her conclusion. For the comedian, there was a real value to doing comedy for people with similar opinions to her own on her Alternative Reality Tour: I just wanted for people who felt how I felt to know they weren’t alone and to know that their anger was justified and to feel that like comfort a bit. And I actually think that that’s not pointless, that means they can fight another day. [I]t’s like, ‘Oh thank God, yes! Oh!’ and then being like the next day, ‘What can I do that’s positive, what can I actually do?’8 Margaret Cho attracts a liberal-minded gay audience, and when I see her perform at the Leicester Square Theatre in October 2012, I’m hit with the refreshing realisation that as a straight man, I’m probably in the minority here. As Cho explains, her shows reverse the normal position of the gay community: ‘[I]t’s an outsider culture but to be inside of it is really a wonderful experience. So, you know, because we’re so used to being outsiders that it feels really glorious and honourable to be inside – for a moment, you know?’9 The feeling that the audience is dominated by gay men and lesbians is confirmed by her use of gay-specific references, which she doesn’t feel the need to explain for us. There are gags about ‘bears’, ‘twinks’ and the geosocial networking app, Grindr.10 A lot of the material observes and celebrates

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gay culture, but some of it is more overtly political. She jokingly suggests that Republicans like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan – who oppose gay marriage – look like they might be closet homosexuals. There’s booing from the audience when she mentions Michelle Bachmann, and it’s a much angrier boo than the one Al Murray’s audience aimed at the VAT inspector.11 Having never heard of Bachmann this puzzles me, and it only makes sense when I discover she’s proposed legislation to prevent the state from recognising gay marriage. Cho believes that reaffirming the values of her audience is: [A] reinvigorating thing, a kind of a reinforcing thing … sometimes we need kind of encouragement … in America it’s kind of like there’s a lot of anti-gay rhetoric and there’s a lot of anti-gay sentiment, and then you really feel like a sense of hopelessness and kind of a sense of real fear about what is going to happen. What if you’re going to be against the law some day? Or your way of life is going to be outlawed … So I don’t think of preaching to the choir as a negative thing.12 Cho uses the American version of the phrase, talking of preaching to the choir rather than the converted, and this strikes me as a less accurate description. It implies that the choir can be guaranteed to share the priest’s convictions, but the general congregation cannot. As a former churchgoer, I’d argue that anyone who’s made it into the church is likely to be on your side, and if anything the choir might be less convinced, perhaps only coming along to sing the nice hymns. In any case, the point of the phrase is that preaching to the converted is a useless activity, because they’re already converted. This ignores the fact that a sermon is partly about sharing and celebrating common beliefs to send the flock out into the wicked world with strengthened faith. In his 1972 album Class Clown, George Carlin points out ‘the sexual side’ to the Vietnam War: ‘But they’re always afraid of pulling out, that’s their big problem, you know?

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[laughter and some applause]’ A couple of lines later, he uses the same analogy to make an even harder political point: ‘Because that is, after all, what we’re doing to that country, right?’ This time, there’s only a smallish laugh, but it quickly turns into a huge surge of applause, cheering and whistling.13 Having recently embraced the counterculture and reinvented himself as a hippy, the chances are that the audience who came along to this show would have shared Carlin’s anti-war sympathies. This suspicion is cemented by the fact that they cheer and applaud more than they laugh at his suggestion that America is ‘fucking’ Vietnam. But I’d argue that to allow an audience to publicly express their anger about the war, and to send them out from the show energised and bolstered in their beliefs at a time when America was so bitterly divided over the issue, is distinctly subversive.

Uncovering For me, the most exciting moment in Michael McIntyre’s O2 Arena show is the reaction he gets when he does a routine about booking fees. The basic joke is that it’s stupid being charged a booking fee when you book tickets online, because you’ve done all of the work yourself – if anything you should charge them a fee. When he says this, he gets more than just laughter. We applaud and cheer the idea that booking fees are a rip off, to the extent that he seems genuinely surprised and amused by our reaction. He assures us that none of the previous audiences on this tour have reacted like this. He teases us, saying the gig has become a ‘political rally’, and imagining us demanding that ‘the government’ should stop booking fees. It’s a potent situation, because the issue is very close to home. My ticket cost £35, but I also had to pay a £4 booking fee and £2 to get it posted out to me – thus adding over 17 per cent to the overall price. The quips about turning into

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a political rally get laughs, but they don’t really address the situation. It’s not the government which charges booking fees, it’s companies like Ticketmaster, and as pretty much everyone in the venue will have paid them to be at the show, they are probably aware of this. Furthermore, this is McIntyre’s gig, and although he has no control over Ticketmaster’s charging policies, he could be seen to share the responsibility for the fees imposed. At around the time of this show, Sarah Millican announced that she would not be appearing in Ambassador Theatre Group venues because, ‘I don’t agree with the extra charges ATG put on top of the face value ticket price to you the customer’.14 However, McIntyre never brings this lurking awareness out into the open, perhaps fearing the audience’s anger might turn on him. His affable, uncontroversial style would make it hard to address, so he never directly relates the booking fees issue to this particular gig. It’s conspicuously ignored, like the elephant in the arena. I relate this because it highlights the important fact – that one of the most subversive things stand-up can do is to uncover the unmentionable. Comedians can joke about subjects which are difficult or impossible to discuss in everyday conversation or the broadcast media. Observational comedy is a form of uncovering. As well as being about shared experience, it derives its power from the fact that the comedian has noticed something which the audience previously haven’t. Stand-up allows a special kind of frankness. It’s not unusual for male comedians to discuss their masturbation habits. For some reason, making such confessions to an audience of strangers is acceptable, whereas telling them to a single stranger would be excruciating. This kind of uncovering comedy can be extremely powerful when it uncovers an important taboo. Chris Rock’s 1996 HBO Special Bring the Pain includes a routine called ‘Niggas vs. Black People’, which had an extraordinary impact. In the routine, he tells a black, working-class audience in Washington DC about a ‘civil war’ between different types of black people,

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the criminal, antisocial ‘niggas’ and the honest, hardworking ‘black people’. He stalks up and down the stage, smiling broadly, his eyes gleaming with what could be amusement or fury. His voice is loud, abrasive, high-pitched. He punches his consonants percussively. He talks about how niggas ruin things for black people, in a series of razor sharp barbs which are greeted with laughter, applause and cheering. He says that niggas always ‘want some credit for some shit they supposed to do’, like taking care of their kids. He imagines a nigga saying, ‘I ain’t never been to jail’, to which he replies, ‘What do you want, a cookie?’ He talks about the way niggas hate education, coming out with the memorable lines ‘Niggas love to keep it real – real dumb’; and ‘Books are like Kryptonite to a nigga’. He also aims some of the jokes at himself, admitting that he failed a black history class at community college: ‘That’s sad. ‘Cos you know fat people don’t fail cooking.’ The routine ends with the shocking observation that Martin Luther King, who was against violence, is now remembered as a street name: ‘And I don’t give a fuck where you live in America, if you on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there’s some violence going down.’15 Context is crucial here. Performed by a white comedian, this would be grotesquely racist. As it is, Rock delights his audience by acknowledging problems which they recognise but might find difficult to discuss openly. Although the live audience at the show’s recording at the Takoma Theatre were predominantly black, when this was shown on TV, it was seen by a wider, racially mixed audience. The central thesis of On the Real Side, Mel Watkins’ impressively detailed history of African-American comedy, is that black people have always tended to joke differently behind closed doors than when in the company of whites. Watkins argues that comics like Richard Pryor and Chris Rock are remarkable because they take that private humour and present it publicly. Fellow black comic Dave Chapelle has said of this routine, ‘It’s the kind of thing that black people say in their living room to one another all the time. All over

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America. But that’s the kind of thing that you never would say in front of a white person.’16 Others have been more critical. Russell Simmons, the producer of the early 1990s black stand-up showcase Def Comedy Jam argues that the routine confirms the prejudices of conservative whites. Rock is unafraid of the disapproval his daring comedy attracts: ‘If I don’t get somebody going “boo”, I’m not doing my job.’ Bring the Pain, and especially ‘Niggas vs. Black People’, made Rock a comedy superstar, but the routine got so much attention that he has found it difficult to escape its shadow, complaining that it makes him look like ‘a one-joke wonder’.17 If the impact of a single routine shows how powerful uncovering can be, Shazia Mirza makes the point even more strongly, causing an enormous stir with a single one-liner. Mirza started out in stand-up wearing traditional Muslim dress on stage. Less than a year later, the world was changed by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. Initially, she was worried her career was over because of the fear and suspicion which Muslims faced in their wake. She cancelled all her gigs for a week, and when she started performing again, she found people afraid to laugh. Two weeks later, she found a way to uncover the paranoia that was in the air. She went onstage and started her act by announcing: ‘My name is Shazia Mirza – at least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence.’18 The audience got to their feet and applauded, but the reaction could not be contained by the walls of a comedy club – it was a joke that rang out around the world. A LexisNexis search using the terms ‘Shazia Mirza’ and ‘pilot’s licence’ carried out on 28 October 2004 reveals 78 articles which mention the joke, from a list of countries including the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and India, in publications as diverse as the Yorkshire Post, The Times Educational Supplement, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and the St John’s Telegram, Newfoundland. A review in the Independent even found it

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worth mentioning that she had not performed the gag in her 2003 Edinburgh Fringe show.19

Shifting consensus According to Mark Thomas, this process of uncovering hidden truths is where stand-up’s ability to change minds resides: In comedy, in a club night or on a tour night or what have you, you do have the chance to rewrite the rules. You create a forum where … the normal rules of behaviour and perception are abandoned. So you can say things through the prism of knowingness that would be outrageous and that you’d be strung up for if you said them in normal everyday polite society. There is a kind of licence and that’s what’s always happened, that there’s been a licence to misbehave. And to come up with the unsayable or to come up with ideas which…wouldn’t normally be accepted. And so when you do that, what that means is that you actually create a space where you can challenge ideas.20 As previously argued, consensus is shifting and negotiable, and by shifting it, political comedians are capable of changing their audience’s preconceptions. In America, black comedians used to be prevented from talking directly to an audience, either by precedent or direct instruction. Dick Gregory points out that when he first moved out of the Chitlin Circuit in the early 1960s, the very act of a black comedian addressing a white audience was extraordinary: ‘Black comics was never permitted to work white nightclubs. The racism that existed in America would not permit a black person to stand flat-footed and talk. You could come out as a Sammy Davis and dance, but you could not come out as a human being and talk.’21 Even if some of the whites in his audience had enlightened views about race, it stretches belief that all of

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them did. His first white audience at the Playboy Club in Chicago in 1960 included a large contingent of Southern businessmen, and when this was discovered, the club’s management were so worried that they sent a message to Gregory telling him he didn’t have to go on. However, Gregory had strategies to win over potentially hostile white punters. He realised that he could make them secure by using jokes about himself to puncture the tension they might feel at being addressed in this way by a black man. He also looked at white humour and seeded his act with what he saw as white jokes. Having won them over, he could then present them with a black perspective. An early routine describes how he has recently moved into an all- white neighbourhood in Chicago. A new neighbour meets him for the first time when he’s shovelling snow on his front path. Mistaking him for a servant, the neighbour asks him, ‘Whaddya you get for doin’ that?’ Gregory replies, ‘Oh, I get to sleep with that woman inside.’ There’s a huge, outraged laugh and some applause. Then Gregory asks the neighbour’s husband, ‘Hey baby, you want me to do yours next?’ The husband declines with a frightened, ‘No’. There’s another big laugh.22 The story shows a black man outwitting two whites by using their own prejudiced expectations against them – and it also hints at interracial sex. For it to get such a good, strong reaction to it from a white audience in 1962 shows how skilful Gregory was. It suggests that he was able to shift the consensus of the audience. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that comedians have managed to affect the way that individual punters think. George Carlin talked about people telling him, ‘You really changed my point of view about things’ or ‘Boy, you turned me around with what you did on the show.’23 Similarly, Bill Maher has reported, ‘Well, I’m chiefly out to get laughs, no doubt about … but honestly, in the last few years too many people have said to me, “I’ve changed my mind. You convinced me.”’24 Omid Djalili gives a specific, detailed

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example of how he affected the attitude of not just individual punters, but a whole audience. When he appeared at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal in 2002, he did two shows with a very famous American comedian, at a time when the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are still fresh in people’s minds. In a show at Club Soda, playing to an audience of about 500, the American makes a series of racist jokes, asking if there are any Arabs in the audience and pretending to take photos of them, and saying that the ‘towelheads’ should have to remove their turbans on aeroplanes. He gets big laughs. When Djalili follows him, he also gets laughs, but the fact that he’s Middle Eastern clearly makes the audience uneasy. The following night, they perform to an audience of 2,500 in the main gala, but this time Djalili goes on first, and it’s the American who suffers. Djalili recalls: [Y]ou could see the panic in his eyes when he came out with this stuff which had been killing for the last two or three months: ‘Why are they not laughing now?’ He didn’t even realise there was a Middle Eastern act on … in the first half. And I took that as a very big personal triumph, you know … Of course, people are gonna do what they wanna do in reaction to events, but there is some kind of comedy which is not really coming from a more humanitarian space, that, you know, will be exposed if you present them with something else. And I showed them a more human face. This is not even a year after 9/11, and still things are a bit raw. It was the first Montreal Comedy Festival where they were dealing with it. I took that as a huge personal triumph when they clicked into me, and already it meant their minds had changed. Already, the audience had a shift about Middle Eastern people in general, you know. And … that’s why they didn’t accept what he said, half an hour after I’d been onstage. Whereas the night before, half an hour before I’d gone onstage, they were absolutely loving it.25

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The old charge of preaching to the converted might be valid in some cases, but sometimes it is demonstrably not. When Mort Sahl told his infamous joke about the McCarthy jacket with the zip over the mouth, he divided the audience. According to the hungry i’s owner, Enrico Banducci, some people laughed, some stayed silent and some booed. Clearly, the ones who booed or stayed silent weren’t among the faithful. Mark Thomas has often been accused of preaching to the converted, but his 2009 show It’s the Stupid Economy revealed that his audience’s opinions were far more varied than this lazy charge would suggest. The basic format involved asking punters to submit policies for a manifesto, and at the end of the show Thomas got the audience to vote for their favourite, with the suggestion that he would then campaign to make the policy a reality. Suggestions would range from the heartfelt and sincere, to the plain daft. Indeed, Thomas recalls that sometimes the audience would mischievously support silly policies to see how he would react: That audience that you saw also kind of played with me. It was very funny … I don’t know if you remember this, but the policy that won [at the Canterbury show] that was MPs should have their expenses published in a local newspaper every two months, and we should vote on whether they’re approved or not, and the policy that nearly won was to disguise leopards as foxes to fuck up the gentry. And because I said I would campaign on some of these, you could see part of the audience thinking, ‘Let’s fuck him up.’ What was particularly revealing was that the more serious suggestions didn’t take the kind of leftist stance which might have been expected from an audience of the converted. Thomas remembers people seriously arguing for bringing in the stocks as a punishment for drunkenness, and calls for the reintroduction of capital punishment at every single show. The fact that this kind of vengeful right-wing populism came out into the open allowed him to challenge it directly:

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I remember the first night we did the show touring it was in Huddersfield and one of the suggestions was that we should sterilize people who got under five GCSEs. And I said, ‘Who put that forward?’ and this bloke said, ‘I did.’ I said, ‘What do you do?’ He said, ‘I’m a teacher.’ I said, ‘Great! So rather than say you’re fucking shit at your job, you wanna say well it’s their fault for being thick. And that thickness is genetic. And therefore we should sterilize them rather than actually, you know, you do your job and teach them.’ And … it was an amazing moment and when I’d slagged this bloke off, the fucking crowd just sort of like erupted on it. That actually, you know, [he’d] put forward this stupid idea, and so you get to strip away ideas like that. And sort of challenge those ideas …26

Keeping comedians under control Nothing speaks more eloquently of the power and potency of comedy than the reactions of those who are the butt of the joke. Jo Brand may be licensed to say outrageous things, but this doesn’t defuse the challenge she poses to sexism. Certainly, men fear her. She has been persistently and scathingly criticised by Bernard Manning and right-wing tabloid journalist Garry Bushell. She also gets strange reactions from men she meets: ‘I’m always surprised when people kind of go, “Oh, you know, I’d better not talk to you ‘cos I’m a bloke, and you know, you might do something.” But like what? Punch them? … Ridiculous.’ She even inspires fear in her actual shows. At a performance in May 2004, she gets a huge laugh just by saying ‘Oh, hello’ to a couple filing in late to seats near the front. The audience laugh because they expect her to mercilessly make fun of them, but in fact, she leaves them alone and quickly moves on.27 She explains, ‘People will say to me, “Oh, I’m not heckling you” … as if I can somehow, like, completely destroy them by

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what I say, which again is, like, utterly ridiculous really.’ All of this suggests that what she does in her act makes people see her as having dangerous, almost magical powers. As she puts it, ‘The feminist female comedian is a sort of, you know, a witch in some ways.’ She believes that this kind of reaction is based on a fundamental misreading of her work, because it is sexism, not men, that she is attacking: ‘It’s got nothing to do with hating individual men, it’s got to do with kind of social roles, you know.’28 In some cases, the targets of satire will step in and actively try to stop jokes being told at their expense. The fearless Mort Sahl ran into trouble after the election of JFK. He had campaigned for Kennedy, but believing that the role of the satirist was to tell jokes about the government, he continued to do just that, aiming his jokes at the new regime. Kennedy’s father, Joseph, was so incensed at Sahl making fun of JFK’s government that he threatened the comedian’s career, putting pressure on Enrico Banducci not to book him at the hungry i. Ironically, after JFK was assassinated, Sahl moved back to supporting the Kennedy camp, pitching his weight behind the investigation into the supposed conspiracy. This led to his career being damaged, as he believes he was blackballed for talking so much about the Kennedy assassination in his act. Even when not actively trying to silence comedians, governments and other forms of authority tacitly recognise their power by subjecting them to regulation and control. On radio and television, stand-up comedy is hemmed in by censorship and broadcasting regulations. During the 1980s – before writing musicals with Andrew Lloyd Webber and compèring the Royal Variety Show brought him mainstream respectability – Ben Elton’s TV appearances felt distinctly edgy. In amongst observational routines and heavyweight scatology, there were scathing attacks on the Thatcher government and the consumerist culture it promoted so aggressively. Performing such material in a live show had its hazards, as he recalls: ‘I used to have to do my act to a lawyer … each

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Saturday, which was a horrible experience because the lawyer never laughed.’29 Albums and videos provide fewer problems, and on his classic 1972 album Class Clown, George Carlin performs possibly his most famous routine, ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’. Here, he specifically addresses the restrictions posed by television, talking about the importance of words, and then listing the seven unsayable ones in a glorious, obscene, rhythmic stream: ‘You know there’s seven, don’tcha, that you can’t say on television? “Shit”, “piss”, “fuck”, “cunt”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker” and “tits”, hunh?’ There’s a laugh which mutates into rapturous applause, lasting for ten seconds.30 The sense of release is palpable. Even so, when a later version of the routine was broadcast by the Pacifica radio station WBAI-FM the following year, it led to a complicated series of legal proceedings which continued right through to 1978. Even without being broadcast, there are still some restrictions that apply to albums and videos. In 2001, Robert Newman put out a video called Resistance is Fertile, in which he does comedy routines about neo-liberalism and globalisation, intercut with real footage of anti-capitalist carnivals, the Seattle protests and the Zapatistas. At one point, he suggests his own ‘ethical foreign policy’: ‘What we do is we ban imports of Nike, Disney, Reebok, Tommy Hilfiger and The Gap until they stop sweated labour.’ Then he starts having fun with the legal restrictions he’s working within: ‘Cos it’s a video, I can’t say “children” and “slaves”, but they do. I could say “until they stop using children as slaves – although they don’t”.[laughter] And then – but then if I went –’ He wiggles his fingers as if to secretly indicate that he’s being forced to lie, getting a laugh, then continues: ‘– that would be libellous, and I’d have to go into court, and say, “Repeat the gesture.”’ He wiggles his fingers again and gets another laugh. Then he imagines the judge saying: ‘“No, as you did it before.”’ This time, he wiggles his fingers, with a sheepish look on his face. Another laugh. He continues with the theme, speaking rather

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haltingly to show he’s taking great care with his words, before concluding: ‘Can you feel it, this is corporate power, you can feel it in the room. [laughter]’31

Bill Hicks and Lenny Bruce have their careers damaged Some stand-ups have been seen as such a challenge to the status quo that the efforts made to shut them up have seriously damaged their career. In the comedy boom of the 1980s, Bill Hicks’ agent Sandy DiPerna found it hard to get him bookings. More clubs meant more competition, and many venues would give out free tickets for shows early in the week to ensure an audience. A non-paying audience is harder by definition, as people who have got in for free have no investment in listening carefully and joining in. In this context, a comic like Hicks, with an intellectual edge and a compulsion to jab at taboos, must have looked like trouble to club owners. But it was TV that posed real problems. On his third appearance on David Letterman’s Late Night show in February 1986, Hicks had the end of a joke about a televangelist and a reference to a wheelchair edited from the broadcast, rendering both gags incomprehensible to the viewers at home. Worse was to come. In 1993, Hicks’ final Letterman appearance was cut in its entirety from the broadcast. His set included routines about homosexuality, pro-lifers and an imaginary game show in which celebrities are hunted down and killed – and had gone down well with the studio audience. After the show, its producer Robert Morton phoned to tell him that CBS’s Standards and Practices department had forced them to cut the act from the transmission. Hicks was angry and upset, particularly when they refused to send him a tape of the act. In a bizarre twist, it turned out that the decision to cut the act had not been made by CBS, but by the show’s producers, who had been nervous about how Hicks’ jokes

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would have gone down with the viewing public in middle America. Lenny Bruce’s career was harmed in a more devastating way. Bruce’s willingness to cross the boundaries of acceptability was extraordinary, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he was at the peak of his career. Talking about sex, religion and racism was commonplace for him. He used obscenity very effectively. In one routine, he announces: ‘If you’ve er – ever seen this bit before, I want you to tell me, stop me if you’ve seen it. I’m going to piss on you.’ It takes him ten seconds to say this, but the outraged laugh he gets with it goes on for around twice that long.32 He also spoke candidly about illegal drugs. In a 1960 routine, he imagines the dialogue for a radio advert that will never be made. It starts with a grumpy voice: ‘I don’t know what the hell it is, Bill, I’ve been smoking the pot all day and I still can’t get high on it!’ There’s a laugh in which you can pick out a female punter shrieking with delight. Then he adopts a calm, reasonable voice to reply: ‘What kind are you smoking?’ Surprised, the grumpy-voiced character replies: ‘Well, all marijuana’s the same, isn’t it?’ The calm voice comes in more assertively with the punchline: ‘That’s the mistake a lot of people make!’ There’s a big laugh and applause.33 Bruce massively expanded the possibilities of stand-up, but his boundary-exploding approach brought him trouble. In 1961, he was arrested for possession of drugs, although he had a prescription for the offending substance. The real reason for the bust was that he had refused to bribe a corrupt official. Five days later, he was arrested after a performance at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, after using the word ‘cocksucker’.34 It occurs in a routine about Bruce being asked to play in a club which has changed its policy. He asks the owner, ‘Well what kind of a show is it, man?’ After hedging, the owner replies that ‘they’re a bunch of cocksuckers’ and it’s ‘a damn fag show’. Bruce is apparently nonplussed by this: ‘Oh – well

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that is a pretty bizarre show, er – [laughter] er – I don’t know what I could do in that kind of a show. [laughter]’35 Bruce was tried for obscenity and after an extensive court case, the jury took nearly five and a half hours to decide he was not guilty. He went on to talk about the case in his act, using the phrase ‘blah blah blah’ in place of ‘cocksucker’ in order to be able to talk about it without being arrested again. It’s a very funny routine. He says it’s bizarre that ‘blah blah blah’ was interpreted as a homosexual word, because it relates to ‘any contemporary chick I know or would know or would love or would marry’. Later, he acts out the court case with the judge, the lawyers and court officials repeatedly saying ‘blah blah blah’ in shocked tones. He finally makes a realisation: ‘Then I dug something. They sorta like saying “blah blah blah”. [laughter]’36 Sadly, there was more trouble to come, and Bruce could not joke his way out of it. On Tuesday 4 December 1962, he did a show at the Gate of Horn in Chicago.37 The recording of the performance shows that he wasn’t on his best form. Some of the routines are saggy and he sometimes sounds confused. However, there’s an amazing bit in the middle of the show where he takes on the character of Adolf Eichmann, describing the workings of a concentration camp with chilling coldness. At the end of this, he has Eichmann say, ‘Do you people think yourselves better, because you burn your enemies at long distances with missiles?’ Snapping out of the character, he argues that if the Allies had lost the war, President Truman would have been strung up ‘by the balls’, with mutants left behind after Hiroshima paraded as evidence of his crimes. The audience is deathly silent throughout the routine. Bruce is clearly pushing the boundaries as far as he can, and during the show he draws attention to punters walking out, presumably in disgust. The end of the performance is extraordinary. In the middle of a routine, Bruce makes a realisation: ‘OK! It’s the first time they made a bust right in an audience!’ As police officers approach the stage to arrest him, he tries to keep joking,

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pretending he’s going to make a daring escape: ‘It’s Superjew!’ The cops make the arrest. They literally stop the show. The use of the word ‘balls’ in the devastating Eichmann routine was one of the reasons given for the bust. Bruce was found guilty of obscenity and received the maximum penalty of a $1,000 fine and a year in prison. He never actually had to serve the sentence, but got caught up in a series of legal difficulties from which he could not escape. He was arrested 15 times in less than two years. In addition to this, most clubs would not risk booking him. As a result of his arrest, the Gate of Horn had its liquor licence suspended. Clearly few promoters would want the scandal or economic damage which Bruce’s show could bring down on them. His earnings plummeted to about 10 per cent of what they had been. A second engagement at The Establishment in London was cancelled when he was refused entry to the UK on the technicality of failure to obtain a work permit. The Home Office issued a statement saying that ‘it would not be in the public interest for him to be allowed in the United Kingdom’. To make matters worse, the few performances Bruce could give were marred by his obsessive ranting about his legal problems. He died of a morphine overdose in 1966, 18 months before his guilty verdict was overturned. As a final insult, police allowed photographers to take photos of his corpse.39 Clearly, Mary Douglas’s assertion that ‘the joker is not exposed to danger’ is wrong in this case. Bruce had gone far outside of the permitted range of attack and although this had made him very successful for a time, he eventually had to pay a very heavy price. Nonetheless, he left behind an important artistic legacy, inspiring the generations of comedians that followed him to have the courage to go beyond merely expressing consensus.

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Notes 1

Mort Sahl, 1960 or Look Forward in Anger, Verve Records, 1960, MG V-15004

2

Stand-Up America, BBC2, 1 March 2003

3

Interview with Margaret Cho, by telephone, 19 April 2012

4

Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012

5

Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004

6

Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012

7

Josie Long, The Future is Another Place, The Horsebridge, Whitstable, 18 February 2012

8

Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012

9

Interview with Margaret Cho, by telephone, 19 April 2012

10 ‘Bears’ are large, hairy gay men. ‘Twinks’ are slim, boyish, good-looking gay men. Thank you, Wikipedia 11 Margaret Cho, Mother, Leicester Square Theatre, London, 29 October 2012 12 Interview with Margaret Cho, Leicester Square Theatre, 29 October 2012 13 ‘Muhammad Ali – America the Beautiful’, George Carlin, Class Clown, Eardrum Records/Atlantic, 2000, 92923-2 14 ‘Sarah Millican in ticket fees boycott. Comic won’t play expensive theatre chain’, http://www.chortle.co.uk/ news/2012/09/16/16152/sarah_millican_in_ticket_fees_boycott [accessed 8 November 2012] 15 Chris Rock, Bring the Pain, Dreamworks, 2002, 0044504009 16 Dave Chappelle quoted in Stand-Up America, BBC Two, 15 March 2003. Also see Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999, pp. 32, 34, 38, 581 17 See Stand-Up America, BBC Two, 15 March 2003 (Russell Simmons); and ‘Chris Rock Interview’, extra feature on Chris

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Rock, Bring the Pain, Dreamworks, 2002, 0044504009 (Chris Rock) 18 Dominic Cavendish, ‘Muslim Makes Bin Laden a Laughing Matter; Dominic Cavendish Reports on a Stand-Up Comedienne in Demand on Both Sides of the Atlantic’, the Daily Telegraph, 18 October 2001, p. 11 19 Julian Hall, ‘Edinburgh Festival 2003: Comedy: Shazia Mirza and Patrick Monahan, Gilded Balloon, Teviot 00999’, the Independent, 21 August 2003, Comment section p. 14 20 Interview with Mark Thomas, by telephone, 1 May 2012 21 Stand-Up America, BBC Two, 1 March 2003 22 Dick Gregory, Talks Turkey, Vee Jay/Collectables/Rhino Entertainment, 2000, COL-CD-7163 23 Paul Provenza and Dan Dion, Satiristas! Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgarians, New York: HarperCollins, 2010, p. 344 24 Paul Provenza and Dan Dion, Satiristas! Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgarians, New York: HarperCollins, 2010, p. 298 25 Interview with Omid Djalili, by telephone, 28 June 2004 26 Interview with Mark Thomas, by telephone, 1 May 2012. For a more detailed analysis of this show and Thomas’s work in general, see Sophie Quirk, ‘Who’s in charge? Negotiation, manipulation and comic licence in the work of Mark Thomas’, Comedy Studies, vol. 1 no. 1, 2010, pp. 113–23 27 Jo Brand, The Stag Theatre, Sevenoaks, 10 May 2004 28 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 29 Face to Face, BBC Two, 12 January 1998 30 ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’, George Carlin, Class Clown, Eardrum Records/Atlantic, 2000, 92923-2 31 Robert Newman, Resistance is Fertile, Laughing Stock, 2001, LAFFV 0123 32 ‘I Just Do It and That’s All’, Lenny Bruce, To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb, Knit Classics/Douglas Music, 2000, KCR-3019

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33 ‘Commercials’, Lenny Bruce, The Lenny Bruce Originals, Volume 2, Fantasy, 1991, CDFA 526 34 See Paul Krassner, ‘The Busting of Lenny’, Index on Censorship (The Last Laugh edition), vol. 29 no. 6, November/December 2000, issue 197, p. 80 35 ‘A Pretty Bizarre Show’, Lenny Bruce, To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb, Knit Classics/Douglas Music, 2000, KCR-3019 36 ‘Blah Blah Blah’, To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb 37 In Albert Goldman (from the journalism of Lawrence Schiller), Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce!!, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, Albert Goldman says the show stared at 12.30 a.m. on 6 December, but on the recording of the show, the compére can be clearly heard announcing the date as Tuesday, 4 December 38 ‘War Criminals’ and ‘The Bust’, Lenny Bruce, The Historic 1962 Concert when Lenny Bruce Was Busted, Viper’s Nest, 1992, VN178 39 The documentary Lenny Bruce – Without Tears includes stills and film footage or Bruce’s corpse, as discovered by the police, and very chilling it is too. It’s available on the DVD Lenny Bruce, Ladies and Gentlemen … Lenny Bruce, VDI Inc./Best Medicine Comedy, 2006, 304327

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Recorded live It’s February 1979, and I’m 13 years old. I’m watching a stand-up show on ITV, by a Brummie comic called Jasper Carrott. It’s actually being broadcast live as he performs it. Soon after coming on to the stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, he capitalises on this, saying: ‘People said, “No, it’s not really live is it?” and it is live, it is live, ‘cos look, look –’ He turns on a large television set placed on a stool, to show the programmes being broadcast on the three channels that exist at the time. When he turns it on, the audience in the theatre take a couple of seconds to take in what the TV is showing, and then there’s a really big laugh and some applause. Carrott laughs along, sharing their enjoyment of the gag. Then he changes the channel, announcing: ‘That’s er, that’s BBC One.’ There’s another big laugh and more applause. This time, the laughter keeps going, coming back in pulses at the audacity of his daring to show what’s on the other main channel. Carrott hoots along with them, before commentating on what they’re watching: ‘It’s a, it’s a really boring film. [laughter] It’s got Lauren Bacall in it, and er, actually, she, she isn’t a housewife, she’s in fact a Russian spy, and she’s the murderer. [laughter] So if you’re thinkin’ of switchin’ over, forget it, right? [laughter]’ Seeing this on TV is a moment that has lived vividly in my memory ever since. What was it that so delighted me?

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I think that a lot of the appeal was the sense of mischief. In the late 1970s, there was much greater rivalry between ITV and the BBC, and newspapers gave big coverage to stars like Morecambe and Wise defecting from one channel to the other. In this context, the idea of showing what BBC One was broadcasting whilst performing on an ITV programme feels very naughty. Much more than this, the fact that it is being broadcast live creates a feeling of total freedom that borders on the dangerous. Carrott plays on this in the show: ‘The thing is, see, it’s live, I can do whatever I wanna do, I can say anythink. [laughter]’1 Ultimately, the gag with the television works because it create a vivid sense of immediacy for the audience watching at home as well as the punters in the theatre. What Carrott demonstrates is the intense feeling that what he is doing is happening right now, in the present tense.

Stand-up comedy in a box Before the recent success of shows like Live at the Apollo, there was a general perception that, as Harry Hill puts it, ‘[S]tand-up doesn’t really work very well on TV’.2 The feeling seemed to be that it’s incredibly difficult to capture the essence of the live experience on video. The problem with this is that stand-up has actually enjoyed a long history as recorded entertainment. Comedians have worked on radio since its earliest days, and the fact that audiences could hear acts like Fred Allen and Jack Benny for free on their wireless sets rather than paying to see them in theatres probably contributed to the decline of vaudeville. In Britain, the variety theatres were so afraid of competition from radio that in 1927, the three main circuits, Moss, Stoll and GTC, launched a campaign against the BBC. Later, radio co-existed more happily with variety, as theatres realised that radio stars could draw a big live audience, and



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comedians realised that radio success could bring them more fame than years of touring. Frankie Howerd, for example, first toured the variety theatres in 1946 as a newcomer at the bottom of the bill in a show called For the Fun of It. Later that year, he made his first broadcast on Variety Bandbox. His radio appearances quickly made him famous, so that when he went back to the theatres he was topping the bill. When television arrived, stand-ups soon moved into the new medium, discovering that it could transform their careers just as effectively as radio. In the late 1940s, Milton Berle was already an established act, but by getting his own TV show at a time when ownership of sets was mushrooming, he became a huge star. American TV stand-up was revolutionised in the 1970s by the growth of cable. In 1975, Home Box Office made its first broadcast of a stand-up concert, with a film of Robert Klein at Haverford College. Simple economics made the cable channels very keen on comedy concert films. HBO found that it got similar rates of viewer satisfaction from a stand-up show which cost $75,000 to make and a movie which could cost as much as $1 million. A successful HBO special still has the ability to rocket a comedian to the big time. Stand-ups have also benefited from putting out commercial recordings of their acts. Mort Sahl at Sunset, recorded in 1955 at the Sunset Auditorium in Carmel, California is often cited as the first stand-up comedy album, but it certainly wasn’t the earliest commercial live recording of a stand-up act. As long ago as 1938, HMV issued a three-record set of 78rpm discs, containing a recording of Max Miller’s act at the Holborn Empire on 7 October of that year. They went on to release recordings of five more live shows between 1939 and 1942, and in 1957 issued a 33rpm 10” LP of a performance at the Metropolitan Theatre of Varieties. Comedy albums became hugely popular in America in the 1950s and 1960s, and the people who bought them were encouraged to imagine that listening to them was as good as being there for the live show. The sleeve notes to Shelley Berman’s first record read: ‘This album is a recording of

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Shelley Berman actually doing one of his nightclub acts. It’s a new idea in records … Take “Inside Shelley Berman” home, put the record on your gramaphone [sic.], turn the lights down low and there you are – a do-it-yourself night club, with guaranteed laughs.’3 Berman released his first album in 1959, and by 1963, he had produced three gold records. He recalls how this helped his career: It was a friend of mine, another comedian by the name of Mort Sahl, who had recorded for Verve, and he talked me into doing mine on record. And at first I resisted. I said, ‘But people will know my material, what good is that?’ [He said,] ‘Yes, well, let’s see what happens.’ So I did, and the people didn’t care if they knew my material. They just wanted to see me do it, and they were with me. So these records were making a lot of money for me, but more important, they were bringing me to the public, and I was pretty happy about that.4 Bob Newhart owed the very fact of becoming a stand-up to his first comedy album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. When he came to the attention of record company executives, he had some clever routines, but had never performed them to a live audience. The record company arranged for him to play three nights at a club in Houston, recorded his performances, and edited the results into the album. His first recording session was also his stage debut. The result was the first of a series of hit records that made him famous and allowed him to embark on a successful career as a live stand-up. Audio recordings of stand-up occupy a less important position in the market than they did in the heyday of the comedy album, but there’s still an incredibly diverse range available on CD and download. Some of the most interesting are the warts-and-all private recordings made by comedians on reel-to-reel tapes or even low quality formats like audio cassette, which have been bought up by record companies and cleaned up for release. Some of Lenny Bruce’s home-made



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recordings turned up on the box set Let the Buyer Beware.5 A double CD of Linda Smith’s private recordings from throughout her career was released after her death.6 There has even been a commercial release of Stewart Lee’s first stand-up gig, his own sleeve notes confessing, ‘The material Stewart Lee performs here, at the age of twenty … is undeniably poor.’7 In recent years, audio has been overshadowed by video, and in the current British stand-up boom DVD sales have rocketed. As Ross Noble points out, stand-up DVDs sell particularly well in the run-up to Christmas: ‘There’s an interesting statistic that 40 per cent of all DVDs are sold at the very end of the year – from the middle of November to December. So they’ve replaced socks as the thing you get your dad, you know. There you go, DVDs are the new socks.’8 Those looking for an unimaginative gift will find plenty of choice in the racks – 45 of them were released in the festive season of 2010 – and many of them have little stickers on saying, ‘New for 2012!’ presumably to help avoid buying dad the same one you got him last year. An article in the Sunday Times revealed that in 2011, Peter Kay sold over a million DVDs, John Bishop sold half a million and Sarah Millican nearly a quarter of a million.9 As in music, alongside the big companies, there are now a number of small independent labels releasing comedy CDs and DVDs. Cardiff’s Go Faster Stripe is a good example. Since 2006 they have filmed shows by comics like Stewart Lee, Wil Hodgson and Richard Herring at the Chapter Arts Centre and issued the results on DVD. As Herring explains, this has allowed him to document his work in a way that would not previously have been possible: I’ve done all these Edinburgh shows that just disappear into the ether … I’ve gone back and done Christ on a Bike so I can have the DVD of it … It just feels like you haven’t lost something. Whereas I was doing all these Edinburgh shows and you feel you’ve lost something and no-one knew and you go, ‘Hold on, that was a really great show, but no-one

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will ever know it was a great show.’ So you still feel like it’s there as a record if in five years’ time … Plus it adds a little bit of revenue to things as well, so it adds an extra layer to making live work work.10

Recording reshapes stand-up Inevitably, recording a form of live entertainment which relies on happening in the here and now changes its nature. When a comedian appears on radio or TV, the act the audience at home sees will be different from what they would experience in a theatre or a comedy club. This is a lesson I learned the hard way – by appearing on the lunchtime magazine programme Pebble Mill.11 I had seen other comedians I knew on the show, and when I heard they were holding auditions, I thought I’d go along and give it a try. I prepared my audition piece carefully. Someone told me that a gentle, surreal comic whose act I thought would be perfect for a family audience had been rejected just because he’d used a couple of rude words when he was auditioning. I was amazed that the producers hadn’t seen beyond the bad language – you could easily take the swearing out of his act and most of it would still work. This presented a problem for me, because I knew that much of my act was unsuitable to TV, particularly this kind of bland daytime fodder. I had heard that the studio audience tended to be made up of old aged pensioners, so I’d also have to take out anything which relied on a knowledge of youth culture. That left me without enough material to fill the three-anda-half minute slot, so I had to start going through old routines to find enough stuff. The act I eventually assembled was a lumpy ragbag of bits that didn’t really fit together properly. I turned up to the audition which, bizarrely enough, was held in the Frontier Club, formerly the Batley Variety Club. I did the act I’d crudely stitched together to a huge concert



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room sparsely filled with other hopefuls: comedians, a circus performer and a bad rock band. A few damp laughs echoed around, and I got the gig. On 20 April 1994, two days before my 29th birthday, I arrived at the Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, and after an excruciating camera rehearsal doing the act to the unlaughing producer and cameramen, I had time to enjoy the novel experience of being around TV people and minor celebrities. The programme was being broadcast live at about 11.30 a.m., which meant performing before noon – an unnatural hour to do stand-up comedy. My time came, and I went out to face the audience. It was the weirdest crowd I’d ever seen. There were two seating blocks, each of which had about 50 people sitting in it. In the right-hand block, they were all pensioners as I’d anticipated, but to the left, they were all teenagers. It was like playing to two different audiences. Each side reacted differently to different gags. If this was a real stand-up show, I could have a lot of fun by commenting on the peculiar age segregation in the audience, but with only three and a half minutes to play with, I had to just plough on through the set as quickly as possible. Watching the footage back today makes me writhe with embarrassment. It’s one of the only records of my act, but it’s nothing like what I actually did in the comedy clubs. The material is different, and the way I approach the audience is completely hemmed in by the cameras and the timeslot. Worse still, even though I knew this was a meaningless appearance on an obscure show, I can still see myself trying too hard. I seem too cheerful, I smile too much, and when the show’s host, Ross King, thanks me at the end, I stand there clapping him like an idiot, not knowing what else to do. I look like a puppy in a pet shop window, begging the passers-by to buy me. If appearing on Pebble Mill can change an act so profoundly, the effect of a truly important show, a potential big break, must be enormous. For many American stand-ups, an appearance on one of the big talk shows has long been the crucial step

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which leads to fame and success. This makes the hosts and producers of such programmes extremely powerful – they are effectively the gatekeepers of the big time, deciding who gets through and who doesn’t. From the 1960s to the 1990s, The Tonight Show’s host Johnny Carson was probably the biggest gatekeeper of all, as Bob Zmuda recalls: If Carson liked your act, at his whim you were invited to the next level, which was to cross the stage and actually sit and chat with His Excellency. If you finished your act and didn’t get the wave-over, that is, if Johnny just applauded and thanked you but made no attempt to speak to you, you probably should have considered the insurance business as a new career before you even left the stage.12 A 1992 British TV documentary follows the path of American comic Al Lubel as he prepares for his first appearance on Carson. He feels the pressure keenly: ‘I’ve got eight years invested in, like, one six-minute appearance with The Tonight Show, and The Tonight Show is almost like a final exam. This is where you find out if you can really make it in showbusiness.’13 Building up to the filming, we see him performing at a comedy club in Vegas. He’s wearing comfortable clothes – a T-shirt under his jacket, and trainers on his feet. His delivery is just as comfortable. He’s relaxed and in control, as if talking to friends. Towards the end of the film, we see his Carson spot. He’s transformed. His clothing is neat and formal, his T-shirt replaced by a smart white shirt and a tie. His delivery is taut and keen. Just like me on Pebble Mill, he smiles too much, as if he’s meeting the parents of his future spouse for the first time. Although Lubel is still a working comic today, this clearly wasn’t the big break he’d hoped for. Comedy albums and videos place fewer restrictions on stand-up than television. Comedians often have a reasonable amount of artistic control over the recorded products they put out. Jo Brand, for example, remembers the process behind her



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last video: ‘I went down … and sort of sat in the editing suite for as long as I could stand it … and said, “Can we put that bit in, can we take that bit out, blah blah blah.” … How people are editors, I don’t know, it takes so bloody long!’14 Similarly, Harry Hill says his production company, Avalon, ‘give you all the control that you want.’15 Unlike radio and TV, albums and videos aren’t particularly restricted by censorship, and in fact, that’s part of their appeal. They often contain forbidden fruit, jokes too juicy for the broadcast media. In 1950s America, Redd Foxx’s albums gave the buying public the chance to experience the thrill of listening to uncensored black comedy. In the early 1990s, the American music industry was coming under pressure from Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center to introduce warning stickers on albums with controversial content, and Bill Hicks responded to this by putting a label on his debut CD Dangerous which said, ‘Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books should be sold and what we may buy?’ In spite of this act of defiance, Hicks acknowledged that warning stickers on albums probably helped sales.16 The comparative lack of restrictions means that albums and videos don’t draw stand-up comedy’s teeth in the way that radio and TV often do. However, they can still have a powerful influence on the art form, albeit a less negative and more interesting one. When comedy albums were at the height of their popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, they probably affected the way that many American stand-ups shaped their acts. Some albums, like Lenny Bruce’s The Carnegie Hall Concert, contain what appears to be one entire performance, even if some edits have been made.17 Others, like The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, are made up of various routines, which are presented as a series of individual bits, clearly separated by silence.18 In both cases, the live recordings are usually presented like music albums, with the routines named and listed as if they were songs. This meant that when audiences went to see a comedian, they would often ask for bits they had heard on an album,

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as if they were requesting a song at a music concert. Shelley Berman remembers: ‘People would come in and they would request certain routines, and of course I had a little joke for them, I would say, “I’ll make up my own damn show if you don’t mind.”’19 Lenny Bruce was even less happy to do bits from his LPs, and on the album of his legendary Carnegie Hall concert, you can hear him tell the audience: ‘People say to me, “How come you don’t do all the bits on the records?”… As soon as it becomes repetitive to me, I can’t cook with it any more, man.’20 Thinking of routines as if they were songs meant that stand-up shows became like a series of individual items rather than a flowing, seamless whole. Bob Newhart would introduce each routine as if it were a song, explaining the basic premise and finishing by saying that the situation he’d described would go ‘something like this’. Shelley Berman used a similar structure. Here’s how he introduces one of his routines: Anyway, after a particularly terrible experience in New York in dealing with a department store, I wrote this particular piece of material. While the bit is rather extended, a little elaborate, I think you’ll get the point I’m trying to make of the difficulty you may encounter in phoning a department store.21 He emphasises the last two words, as if to indicate that this is the title of the routine, and indeed this is the title as it appears on the album Inside Shelley Berman.

The illusion of a genuine event Whatever reservations comedians may have about whether stand-up works in the recorded form, its long history on radio, 78rpm discs, television, comedy albums, and the modern panoply of CDs, DVDs and downloads would suggest it



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must retain at least some of its appeal. Certainly, it survives the recording process much better than conventional theatre, which is exponentially less likely to be issued commercially. With stand-up, it is not just the performance on stage that’s being recorded, but the total event. The intensely present situation of the gig is recorded and preserved, the momentary and ephemeral becoming permanent. As Ross Noble puts it, ‘It’s a record of what happened on that night.’22 In the opening track on Henning Wehn’s CD My Struggle, we can hear the German comedian in the recording studio contextualising this particular show for us: ‘This is a recording from the Edinburgh Festival in August 2010, where I did perform the show at the Caves, proper caves, oo scary!’ That fact becomes relevant on the second track when we hear Wehn coming on to the stage and announcing, ‘Welcome to my bunker. [laughter]’23 Like most of his work, this plays on self-aware German stereotypes – with its reference to Hitler’s final destination – but without the knowledge that the show was taking place in a cave, it wouldn’t really work. However, it doesn’t necessarily matter if a recording leaves something to the imagination of the listener. Steve Martin’s unprecedented success as a live stand-up act was partly fuelled by sales of his comedy albums. His debut, Let’s Get Small was released in 1977 and sold 1.5 million copies. The recordings it contained included visual gags, but the fact that these didn’t work for the listener at home wasn’t a problem, as Martin explains: ‘The uninitiated heard clanks and spaces that brought forth laughs, and this minus turned into a plus, as the transitions seemed more surreal than they already were. Audiences were intrigued to see live what they could only hear on the album, and the theatres filled.’24 A recording captures not just the comedian but also the audience, and the interaction between them. As long ago as the 1930s, an American survey found that 61 per cent of listeners felt that radio comedy was improved by hearing the laughter of a studio audience.25 When we listen to recordings made decades ago, something about the way the comedian

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connects with the audience we hear laughing preserves a sense of immediacy. This is particularly true when the recording captures a two-way interaction between the comic and an individual punter. On Patton Oswalt’s Werewolves and Lollipops, we hear the comic trying to build a delicate moment of expectation and being interrupted by someone making a noise like a manic chicken. This inspires a fantastical rant, which includes Oswalt taking on the character of his interrupter and shouting, ‘I’m ’oin’ be a douchebag forever! [laughter] I’m being burned on to a CD for eternity being a douchebag! [extended laughter and applause]’26 The sense of immediacy is heightened when comedians draw attention to the recording process, having fun with the creative possibilities it presents. Jasper Carrott’s routine with the portable television set was typical of his approach. In his debut TV series the previous year, he frequently got laughs by playing on the fact he was being filmed. At the beginning of episode three, he starts with a gag about the fact that they are filming more than one show in front of the same studio audience: ‘Well, what a coincidence, it’s the – same audience as last week. [laughter] They’re gonna cotton on, you know. [laughter] They’re not daft you know. [quiet laughter] Can’t you move seats or something? [laughter]’27 This kind of playfulness is common, and commercial audio and video releases often include references to the recording process. Demetri Martin’s These Are Jokes includes a routine in which he invites his friend Leo Allen on to the stage to describe the visual elements of the joke that may be ‘lost on the CD’. For example, Martin does some physical business showing somebody having trouble trying to drink through a straw, and having got a laugh from the live audience, Allen adds his commentary: ‘Through the art of mime, Demetri made it look like he was struggling with the straw. [laughter] Which caused us to emotionally connect to the joke. [laughter]’28 On Mitch All Together, Mitch Hedberg plays on the fact that he’s being recorded for a CD all the way through the



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show. It’s the first thing he mentions when he enters the stage, adding ‘You won’ even wanna buy it ‘cos you’ve already seen it, so – [laughter] this is not the target market. [laughter]’ He commentates on the audience’s response, suggesting someone with a distinctive laugh should be miked up, and after what he takes for a disappointing response to a gag says, ‘Maybe they can add some laughs to that joke. [laughter]’ At one point, he announces out of the blue, ‘Track number five will not be – chainsaw juggling. [laughter] H-ha! No! It will be this one. [laughter]’ On the CD, this joke is actually on track 3, which is entitled, ‘Not track five, not chainsaw juggler’.29 On Eddie Izzard’s DVD Sexie, there’s a routine about Greek mythology in which he does an impression of the Sirens, the joke being that they sound like different types of siren. He then shows Odysseus going past, commenting, ‘Someone’s trying to break into that island.’ Realising that the way he has acted this out makes it seem as if Odysseus is going past in a speedboat, he goes on to show alternative versions of the same moment, involving different modes of transport: a sailing ship, a bicycle, water skis. In each case, he finishes with the same line. Then he gets a big laugh and a round of applause by explaining, ‘This is for the DVD, you see – different endings.’30 By playing to the live audience about the recording process, such gags actually highlight the importance of actually being there. Jasper Carrott’s audience get his joke about being the same as last week, because they are there and the fact that they have already watched one show being recorded is immediately obvious to them. Demetri Martin’s audience can enjoy the visual gags and the humour of Leo Allen’s deadpan deconstruction of them really relies on having seen them in the first place. For those of us experiencing the performances via the recordings, these gags are a puzzle that can only be solved by thinking our way back into the situation the original audience were in, and filling in the blanks. When I do this, this act of the imagination somehow makes me feel closer to the original event.

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The fact remains, though, that actual punters in the venue are the elite few, destined to be far outnumbered by the people who will eventually see or hear the recording. In his TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, Lee brings this potentially uncomfortable fact out into the open. Having mercilessly sent up some popular television shows, he fixes his unforgiving gaze right down the camera, pushing his face close up it to and saying, ‘What is it that you want, the public? It’s easy – to blame programme makers and schedulers for these things, but – you’re complicit – in watching them, aren’t you?’ Shortly after making the accusation, he turns back to the audience in the venue and says, ‘Not you. You’re good people, you’ve come out – to live entertainment, but’ – now he turns back to the camera – ‘you people, [laughter] you people at home. [laughter continues]’31 He plays a similar trick in Stand-Up Comedian, with a gag which not only openly divides the live audience from the audience watching the DVD, but also highlights the superiority of the actual show over the recorded version. He gets into a dispute with a woman over whether Abu Hamza has one or two hooks for hands, and eventually tells her he will go away and check: Er, if it’s factually inaccurate – I can remove it from this video. [laughter] As I can everything you’ve said. [extended laughter and applause] So I’ll just look like a 60-minute stream – of uninterrupted success. [laughter] Although ironically – I may consider leaving this part in – to give the illusion of it being a genuine event. [laughter] What d’you think of that – viewers at home? [laughter]32

Notes 1

‘Muppets’, Jasper Carrott, The Unrecorded Jasper Carrott, DJM Records, 1979, DJF 20560

2

Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004



Recorded live

3

Shelley Berman, Inside Shelley Berman, Laugh.Com, 2002, LGH1111

323

4

Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004

5

Lenny Bruce, Let the Buyer Beware, Shout! Factory, 2004, D6K 37109

6

Linda Smith, I Think the Nurses Are Stealing My Clothes: The Very Best of Linda Smith, Hodder & Stoughton Audiobooks, 2006

7

Stewart Lee The Jazz Cellar Tape, Go Faster Stripe, 2011, GFS-33

8

Interview with Ross Noble, Leicester Square, London, 25 August 2009. A published version of this interview is available: Oliver Double, ‘Not the definitive version: an interview with Ross Noble’, Comedy Studies, vol. 1 no. 1, 2010, pp. 5–19

9

The precise figures given are: Peter Kay – 1,025,000; Lee Evans – 911,000; John Bishop – 502,000; Sarah Millican – 241,000 (Nicholas Hellen and Cal Flyn, ‘Rock on – comics rake in millions; Peter Kay Heads A New Breed Of Comedian With Tour Earnings That Match The Giants Of Pop’, Sunday Times, 12 February 2012, p. 3)

10 Interview with Richard Herring, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 14 February 2012 11 Broadcast BBC One, 20 April 1994. I hope nobody ever gets the clip of my act out of the archive – it’s pretty dreadful. No, really 12 Bob Zmuda (with Matthew Scott Hansen), Andy Kaufman Revealed!, London: Ebury Press, 1999, p. 91 13 ‘A Stand-Up Life’, Funny Business, BBC Two, 29 November 1992 14 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 15 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 16 See Cynthia True, American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002, pp. 141, 166 17 Lenny Bruce, The Carnegie Hall Concert, World Pacific/Capitol Records, 1995, CDP 7243 8 34020 2 1

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18 Available on Lenny Bruce, The Lenny Bruce Originals Volume 1, Fantasy Records, 1991, CDFA 525 19 Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004 20 Lenny Bruce, The Carnegie Hall Concert, World Pacific/Capitol Records, 1995, CDP 7243 8 34020 2 1, disc one 21 ‘Department Store’, Shelley Berman, Inside Shelley Berman, Laugh.Com, 2002, LGH1111 22 Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 23 Henning Wehn, My Struggle, Laughing Stock, 2010, LAFFCD 0200 24 Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, pp. 173–4 25 Hadley Cantril and Gordon W Allport, The Psychology of Radio, New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1935, p. 100 26 ‘I Tell a Story About Birth Control and Deal with a Retarded Heckler’ on Patton Oswalt, Werewolves and Lollipops, Sub Pop Records, 2007, SPCD 737 27 Jasper Carrott, An Audience with Jasper Carrott, Network, 2011, 7953436 (originally broadcast 22 January 1978) 28 ‘These Jokes’ on Demetri Martin, These Are Jokes, Comedy Central Records, 2006, CCR0044 29 Mitch Hedberg, Mitch All Together, Comedy Central Records, 2003, CCR0024 30 Eddie Izzard, Sexie, Universal Pictures Video, 2003, 8208905 31 Episode 2, ‘Television’ on Stewart Lee, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, 2 Entertain, 2009, BBCDVD3010 (originally broadcast 23 March 2009) 32 Stewart Lee, Stand-Up Comedian, 2 Entertain, 2005, VCD7210

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The present tense One of stand-up’s defining features is that it is firmly and conspicuously rooted in the present tense. As Tony Allen puts it, ‘The “Now” agenda defines stand-up comedy.’1 That’s why I adopt the present tense when I’m writing about specific stand-up routines, even when they were performed decades ago. Straight drama depicts events from another place and another time, but in stand-up the events happen right there in the venue. It’s normal for stand-up comics to incorporate the here and now into the material of the show. Lenny Bruce starts his Carnegie Hall concert by talking about the prestigious venue in which he’s performing. He fantasises about coming on with a violin and playing Stravinsky for an hour, then splitting without saying a word. He imagines this is a secret gig that the venue’s managers don’t know about it, that he’s set it up with the help of a corrupt janitor (‘All right, but don’t make no noise, and clean up after you finish, all right?’).2 A Ross Noble show in Dartford, Kent, in June 2004 coincides with an important England match in the European Championship. With extreme topicality, Noble plays on this, saying that all the theatre staff are watching the match on a portable TV backstage. He asks if anyone in the audience is videoing the match, hoping to not to find out who’s won the match before they watch the tape. A number of voices shout, ‘Yeah.’ After the interval, he plays with these punters,

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announcing a fictitious half time score – before admitting he’s only kidding. The stand-up comedian has an unwritten contract to address the here and now. If something unexpected happens during the show, whether it’s a heckle, a dropped glass or the ringing of a mobile phone, the comic must react to it. As Milton Jones puts it: ‘You learn early on … that if you don’t react to something that happens in the crowd, the audience lose faith in you.’3 The present tense is built into the language of stand-up. When comedians tell stories about past events, they’re still related in the present. They say, ‘I’m walking down the road …’, not ‘I was walking down the road …’ Even self-contained shows, like Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure – which are entirely based on telling the story of a particular set of events that happened in the past – are still told in the present tense, as Gorman explains: [E]ven though I’m telling you something which has happened and everyone knows I’m telling it, this is six months ago … the grammar of what I use is kind of, ‘So, I’m on the train, and –’, and I try to make it feel present tense. I try not to tell it with hindsight, so that it feels immediate.4

Bertolt Brecht, stand-up comedian As we saw with recorded stand-up, the intense immediacy of live performance is reinforced by the fact that comics often draw attention to their own processes, making the audience aware of exactly what they’re doing. As Bertolt Brecht might have said, they show that they are showing.5 Phyllis Diller, a dispenser of short, self-contained jokes strung together in loose narratives, sets up a joke by complaining that the venue is filthy and advising the audience ‘don’t ever eat here’: ‘I ordered a steak rare, are you ready? [laughter] With a little care, this



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thing coulda recovered! [laughter]’6 The key phrase here is ‘are you ready?’ By asking the audience if they’re ready for the punchline, she’s drawing attention to the strict set-up/punchline formula which she uses so heavily. She’s making them aware that she’s not describing a real steak she really ate, she’s just telling a fictional gag. She’s showing them exactly what she does, like a magician giving away how the trick is done. At the end of the first half of a show in Brighton, Dylan Moran points out that comedians are supposed to end on a big laugh, but brazenly admits, ‘I can’t be bothered.’ At the end of the second half, he talks about how ritualised encores are, suggesting that the audience should just applaud the show without him having to go to the trouble of going off and coming back on again. They duly oblige.7 He has pointed out and subverted the conventions of how stand-up shows are framed, in a manner that befits his charmingly shambolic persona. Even mistakes can be pointed out and played with. Daniel Kitson constantly draws attention to the sloppiness of his own technique, making it funny – and thus paradoxically showing how razor sharp his technique is. Someone heckles him halfway through a joke, and after answering them, he says he can’t go back and finish it because it’s all based on rhythm and the rhythm’s been broken. Then he relents and finishes the joke anyway, and his honesty is rewarded. Having been let in on his dilemma the audience appreciate the joke for what it is.8 Richard Pryor stumbles over his words at the start of a routine about dating. ‘And you know, when you want some pissy –’ he says. He has fun with the fact that he’s failed to say the word ‘pussy’ correctly: ‘“Pissy”? H-huh – [laughter] “When you want some pissy.” [laughter] That’s a new thing, h-huh. [laughter] I hope to get some soon – some pissy. [laughter and a smattering of applause]’9 Again, stumbling over delivery might seem like a sign of weakness, but the ability to get laughs by drawing attention to the mistake is anything but.

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Failing to get a laugh can be played with in a similar way. Eddie Izzard has a standard technique for dealing with gags which don’t get the response he’s hoped for. After a small laugh, one hand becomes a notebook, and the other mimes writing on it, noting his comic failure with a phrase like, ‘Should be funnier.’ He even draws attention to this technique, following it by miming another note: ‘Why am I writing on my fingers?’10 Like so many aspects of stand-up, the technique of drawing the audience’s attention to the performance process can be traced back to music hall. Little Tich is best remembered for his big boot dance and his physical size. He was only about four feet tall, and the word ‘titch’, meaning somebody who is very small originates from his stage name. His famous dance involves a series of sight gags using boots with enormous soles, and J. B. Priestley – who had seen Tich’s act – eloquently described how he would draw attention to what he was doing: He would suddenly take us behind the scenes with him, doing it with a single remark. He would offer us a joke and then confide that it went better the night before. He would drop a hat and be unable to pick it up, because he kicked it out of reach every time, and then mutter, half in despair, “Comic business with chapeau”.11 Stewart Lee has made the trick of drawing attention to form central to his comic style. There’s an excellent example in the 2011–12 show Carpet Remnant World, in a routine about his young son asking him about a Muslim woman wearing a veil. Lee tries to explain that it’s because it’s her religion and she believes God wants her to dress like that, but he’s stumped when his son asks why. He confesses that when faced with a question he can’t answer, he’d normally just say, ‘Because I say so,’ but says this wouldn’t work in this context. We all work out where he’s going with this, but he acts it out anyway. Quite deliberately, he takes a few steps to the left to play his son saying, ‘Why?’, then walks back to show us how



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he replied. Before delivering the inevitable line, he turns his face towards us to acknowledge what he’s doing, and there’s a big laugh – and another when he actually says, ‘Because I say so.’12 That tiny gesture – the knowing look at the audience – says so much. Like Tich’s joke from 100 years earlier, it takes us behind the scenes with him. It lets us know that he knows perfectly well that we understand the comic structure he’s using, and thus how the joke’s going to play out. Lee explains how this kind of gag works for his audience: They don’t realise how much they understand about art forms. But they do subliminally understand them and then when you pull it out for them, they’re suddenly quite pleased with themselves. They go, ‘Yeah, I realised that’s what happened and I never knew.’ So it’s nice that they come out thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I see how things work.’ … the problem is it then spoils other stuff for them a bit! As well as showing that he is showing, Lee is also doing something else Brechtian here. He defines his particular approach to constructing a joke: ‘You tell them what you’re gonna do. And do it anyway. To take the surprise out of it and make them enjoy the process.’13 This is strikingly similar to the way Brecht would use projected scene titles to let the audience know what was about to happen so that, ‘The actor would have to find a different way of drawing attention to those incidents which had previously been announced by the titles and so deprived of any intrinsic element of surprise.’14

Fake spontaneity Appearing on The Comedians in 1971, Duggie Brown is telling a joke about a plumber talking – unbeknownst to him – to a parrot which is lurking behind the door of the house where he’s supposed to be doing a job. The parrot keeps

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screeching, ‘Who is it??’ and the plumber keeps replying, ‘It’s the plumber, I’ve come to mend your pipes.’ As the sequence is repeated, Brown starts to sound uncertain and hesitant. Then he comes clean, getting a big laugh by announcing, ‘I’ve forgot the end!’ Trying to remind himself, he talks through the set-up to the joke, going through the characters and what they say. The audience laugh along with his confusion, and laugh more when he gives up and goes on to another joke. Eventually, he comes back to finish the parrot gag, saying, ‘I ‘aven’t forgotten,’ and explaining where he’s gone wrong. When he finally delivers the punchline, he gets a huge laugh and a big round of applause, probably a much better response than the joke deserves.15 It seems like an extraordinary moment. On national TV, a comedian is potentially messing up his big break by forgetting the gag, then winning out over adversity by getting laughs from his mistake. But all is not what it seems. This is not genuinely spontaneous. The joke – complete with mistake – is a set piece, which is so strong that Brown uses it to conclude his stage act. A book written in 1971 gives an account of the sequence performed at the Batley Variety Club, and it’s played out almost word for word as it is on The Comedians.16 I recall this moment not to criticise Brown for his deception, but rather to praise his ability to pull it off. When he acts as if he’s gone wrong, he’s so convincing that the audience don’t have to suspend their disbelief – they really do believe him. This is a very good example of what happens in almost every stand-up comedy act: the pre-planned is passed off as the spontaneous. As Dave Gorman puts it, ‘Although most stand-ups pretend to have an air of casualness about it, you are, on the whole, saying the same words as you said the night before.’17 This might seem like a dark secret, but the fact is that what comedians say to their audiences doesn’t flow fresh and unfettered from the source of their comic genius, different every show, every word a laugh-getting gem. Inevitably, some planning is involved. It might seem naïve to think any



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different, yet even experienced comedy critics can be fooled by faked spontaneity. William Cook recalls being ‘gobsmacked’ by seeing Ben Elton repeat an apparently ad-libbed response to ‘accidentally’ spitting on someone in the front row. Cook cites this as an example of what he calls the ‘illusion’ that ‘what is actually painstakingly prepared is inspired banter’.18 Former Independent on Sunday comedy critic Ben Thompson, on the other hand, seems to see the illusion of spontaneity as a form of cheating. He squirms at the idea of comics like Paul Merton or Robert Newman repeating material, whether on TV or in a live show, and has a particular dislike of comedians slipping bits of material into TV interviews.19 On the other side of the fence, comedians can feel rather sheepish about the fact that apparently spontaneous material is actually planned. Ellen DeGeneres says that ‘the whole secret’ of stand-up is that the audience ‘really think it’s something that is brand new’, and finds the idea of people seeing her over and over again and hearing the same jokes ‘really scary’.20 In a tour programme, Eddie Izzard is defensive about people saying ‘it looks like it’s improvised but it isn’t’, pointing out that he’s never claimed his work is entirely improvised.21 Tony Allen attributes his own inconsistency as a stand-up to the fact that he ‘couldn’t hack the fundamental deceit’ of fake spontaneity.22 By contrast, Bill Hicks was daringly candid, and would break the illusion on stage. Raring up for a routine about why women are attracted to serial killers, he mentions an article he read about women at Ted Bundy’s trial trying to give him love letters and wedding proposals. ‘Does anyone remember readin’ this fuckin’ article?’ he says. A few people show they do by clapping or shouting, ‘Yeah!’ Then he lays his process bare: ‘That’s enough to continue the bit, now – [laughter] If no-one’d applauded, I’d still be doing it. How? We don’t know. [laughter] You have to rationalise on your feet. [laughter] All I know is I got a script, and I’m headin’ towards the ending. [laughter and applause]’23

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Given that spontaneity can be so convincingly faked, the big question is how much do stand-up comedians make it up as they go along, and how much of their acts is scripted? Clearly, the answer will vary from comic to comic. Woody Allen was quite dismissive of improvisation, and it’s been claimed that he ‘never improvised a syllable onstage’.24 In most cases though, while much of the act will be decided in advance, there’s still some room for spontaneity. Tony Allen argues that, ‘An honest stand-up comedian will admit that the moments of pure improvisation account for less than five per cent of their act.’25 Lenny Bruce – who championed the idea of improvising – once estimated that about eight minutes of his forty-five minute act would be ‘free-form’.26 Leaving the security of pre-planned routines seems to be something that comes with experience, and it’s difficult to learn. Alex Horne says, ‘I think that was the thing I found hardest, was to … leave the script, and just react.’27 Rhys Darby agrees: ‘It takes a long time between you being yourself and you doing your orchestrated stuff that you worked out, and finding that bit in between where you can naturally be funny and be relaxed enough onstage to muck around.’28 For Milton Jones, his exaggerated persona made it particularly hard to break out from the script: I think it took so long because the style is quite honed, and it was very hard then to go into improv that was equally honed. Because it felt like changing character. But I think I’ve actually got better at that. And just staying in character and having a number of bullets in my gun that are in character should I need them … gives me the security to venture out and to talk nonsense.29 But if leaving the script behind is difficult, it also brings the comedian satisfaction. As Andre Vincent points out, it relieves the potential drudgery of repetition: ‘I mean I suppose the material is a frame that you sort of like hang it off. But to make it interesting for yourself, you’re looking for those other



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things, you know, otherwise it’s just there every night.’30 Adam Bloom argues that the genuinely spontaneous moments are what bring both comic and audience the greatest joy: [M]y favourite moment of any gig is always an improv moment. Because firstly, you’ve surprised yourself with your own, you know, speed of thought or whatever. To make yourself laugh onstage is beautiful, as long as the crowd are laughing too. The biggest laugh of a night will always be an ad lib, I think.31

Planned spontaneity In Pittsburgh in 1991, Bill Hicks starts working the audience. This is a process in which the comedian starts talking to individual punters, perhaps asking them their name, where they come from, what they do for a living. It’s a way of making the conversation of stand-up comedy a little less one-way, allowing the audience to make a bigger contribution. It also lets comedians show off how quick-witted they are, getting laughs from the spur of the moment. If a gag arises directly from something somebody in the audience says, surely it must be truly spontaneous? With typical daring, Hicks uncovers the less romantic truth of the situation. ‘Whadda you do for a living?’ he asks a woman. She’s slow to respond. He tells her that answering more quickly would ‘really help the timing of the show’, then admits that he already has ‘pre-planned comedy answers’, adding, ‘Sorry to pop the spontaneity fuckin’ bubble.’32 In fact, working the room involves a mixture of the planned and the spontaneous, as Al Murray explains: [S]ometimes I use standard beats, but all too often I don’t because … you can’t think of everything, so you don’t bother. And certainly for the first sort of year I was doing

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jobs, I did rely on standard things but I’ve broken out of them, although of course, like anyone who works in a spontaneous kind of environment, you reserve the right to repeat the spontaneous thing you said before if it worked really well. And sometimes you get offstage, you think, ‘I’d better save that one because when that comes up again, that’ll be really, really useful.’33 Performing in Kent in early 2004, Murray picks on punters in the first five rows, asking their names and what they do for a living. His Pub Landlord character gives this an interesting tension, as we know his incongruous conservatism will make him react in particular ways to particular types of people. If somebody says they’re a student, he’ll be able to make fun of them for lazing around at the taxpayer’s expense. If someone says they’re a pub landlord, he’ll be able to ask them some esoteric question about their trade, accusing them of running a wine bar – a pet hate of his – if they give an unconvincing answer. The laughs he gets from these people could be premeditated, involving responses recycled from other shows – but some punters give him answers which couldn’t be anticipated. One of the students he picks on tells him she is studying ‘contemporary witchcraft’. He bubbles with scorn and incomprehension, and his response is every bit as funny as those he gives to the more predictable answers he gets from punters. He weaves the spontaneous and the semi-spontaneous together with planned routines quite seamlessly, frequently reincorporating the punters he has talked to so that they become characters in his show. In other cases, interaction with the audience can be almost entirely pre-planned. Harry Hill made a ‘conscious effort’ to talk to individual punters after watching Frank Skinner doing it very effectively, and realising the benefits it can bring: ‘I always used to shy away from audience participation. I used to think it was cheap. Which it is. But it’s a brilliant thing for kind of breaking the ice.’34 Hill found ways of interacting



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with his audience which completely fitted his style: surreal, involving cosy childhood references, and with a delicious hint of menace. Taking out a tub of flying saucers – the old fashioned rice paper and sherbet sweets which newsagents sell for a few pence each – he picks out a punter in the front row and says, with the slightly patronising manner of an indulgent uncle: ‘Hah – Go on then. I know you’ve been – I know you’ve been eyeing ‘em up! [laughter] Ooo, I know you want one!’ He walks forward and offers the tub to a woman in the front row. His voice gets softer, encouraging her gently: ‘Go on then, flying saucer, go on. [laughter] Go on madam, help yourself, there we are. Go on, flying saucer. There you go. Ha ha!’ She takes one of the sweets, and he pauses for a moment. Then his manner changes with a snap, and he’s suddenly cold and businesslike as he says: ‘Two pee, please. [loud laughter and applause]’ In another bit, he asks ‘Why do they put the little tiny holes in the top of the biscuits, though, hm?’ He spends some time explaining he means the holes in bourbon and rich tea biscuits (‘Yum yum!’), and not the big hole in jammy dodgers, then repeats the question: ‘Why do they put the little tiny holes – in the top of the biscuits, though?’ Rather than going into some surreal explanation of his own, he suddenly points to a punter in the front row and with formidable sternness commands: ‘You!! Go and find out!’ There’s a big laugh. Nearly ten minutes later, he comes back to the punter and sternly demands: ‘What news on biscuits?’ There’s another big laugh.35 Hill admits that the audience interaction he does is ‘very prepared’, and both of these bits are cleverly designed because while they allow him to talk to individual punters, the way those punters respond is almost entirely irrelevant to the way the gag plays out. It’s quite unlikely that somebody would refuse to take a flying saucer from the tub, and even if they did, it would be easy enough to find another punter who would oblige. The biscuit joke is even more self-contained, not needing any response at all from the person he picks out.

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Perhaps the most striking example of planned spontaneity is Howard Read’s double act with Little Howard. Read was inspired to create the act when somebody told him about a comedian using some very tired pre-planned audience interaction gags at the Comedy Store, which led Simon Munnery to quip, ‘One day, all this will be done by machines.’ This led Read to build an act based on the question, ‘Is it possible to mechanise improvisation?’ Little Howard was just a projected image of a computer animated boy, and his movements and dialogue had to be painstakingly put together in advance, but the act was designed in such a way as to allow him to interact with the audience. As Read explains, this was a conscious attempt to highlight the artifice behind apparent improvisation: Everything Little Howard said originally … was pre-recorded. And there would be an ‘any questions’ section. So people could ask any question at all, and Little Howard would answer it, and it was all pre-recorded. And for me it was an intellectual exercise and a sort of a slightly highbrow, snooty poke at people who pretended to improvise … No-one just improvises an entire set. People think we do and that’s why people think we’re brilliant, [whispers] but we’re not.36

Notes 1

Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of It? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, p. 28

2

Lenny Bruce, The Carnegie Hall Concert, World Pacific/Capitol Records, 1995, CDP 7243 8 34020 2 1, disc one

3

Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004

4

Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004

5

The opening line of a poem on acting by the great communist



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playwright Brecht starts, ‘Show that you are showing!’, ‘Showing Has to Be Shown’ in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956 (ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim), London and New York: Methuen, 1987, p. 341 6

‘Don’t Eat Here’, Phyllis Diller, The Best of Phyllis Diller, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH1112

7

Dylan Moran, Monster II, Brighton Dome Concert Hall, 28 April 2004

8

Daniel Kitson, Brighton Dome Pavilion Theatre, 30 January 2004

9

‘One Night Stands’ on Here and Now in the box set Richard Pryor, …And It’s Deep, Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992), Rhino/Warner Bros., 2000, RS 76655

10 Eddie Izzard, Sexie, Universal Pictures Video, 2003, 8208905 11 J. B. Priestley, Particular Pleasures, London: Heinemann, 1975, p. 190 12 Stewart Lee, Carpet Remnant World, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 24 February 2012 13 Interview with Stewart Lee, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 14 John Willett (ed. trans.), Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen, 1978, p. 44 15 Duggie Brown on various artists, Laugh with The Comedians, Granada TV Records, 1971, GTV 1002 16 David Nathan, The Laughtermakers: A Quest for Comedy, London: Peter Owen, 1971, pp. 228–9 17 Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004 18 William Cook, Ha Bloody Ha: Comedians Talking, London: Fourth Estate, 1994, pp. 181–2 19 See Ben Thompson, Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office, London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004, pp. 65, 94, 107 20 Quoted in Franklyn Ajaye, Comic Insights: the Art of Stand-Up Comedy, Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2002, p. 98 21 Tour programme for Sexie, 2003

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22 Tony Allen, A Summer in the Park: A Journal of Speakers’ Corner, London: Freedom Press, 2004, p. 93 23 ‘Pussywhipped Satan’, Bill Hicks, Arizona Bay, Rykodisc, 1997, RCD 10352 24 See Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 532 25 Tony Allen, A Summer in the Park: A Journal of Speakers’ Corner, London: Freedom Press, 2004, p. 93 26 Quoted in Albert Goldman (from the journalism of Lawrence Schiller), Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce!!, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 312 27 Interview with Alex Horne, by telephone, 6 July 2004 28 Interview with Rhys Darby, by telephone, 30 June 2004 29 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 30 Interview with Andre Vincent, Central London, 14 July 2004 31 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004 32 ‘Vs. the Audience 2’, Bill Hicks, Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 Pittsburgh 6/20/91, Rykodisc, 2002, RCD 10632 33 Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012 34 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 35 Harry Hill, ‘First Class Scamp’ Live at the London Palladium, VVL, 2000, 9020192 36 Interview with Howard Read, by telephone, 17 August 2012

CHAPTER TWENTY

Conversation It’s September 2012, and Holly Walsh is headlining at the Horsebridge in Whitstable. She frequently breaks away from what she’s saying to talk to individual punters. Most of these conversations are quite brief, giving the act a sparkle of spontaneity, adding freshness to well-honed routines, and lending the comedian an air of charm and affability. One interaction, however, goes on longer than normal. One of the regulars at the club is all too willing to chat, telling Walsh about anything from a bout of food poisoning she once suffered to the breakdown of her marriage. Walsh humours the woman, resists the temptation to go for the comedic jugular, and moves on with her act. I’m compèring the show, and I feel it’s my job to maintain order and to get laughs by commenting on how the whole thing is going. After Walsh has finished and she’s taken her applause, I start to explain to the audience how stand-up comedy is built on the model of a conversation, albeit a very one-sided one. The comedian does most of the talking, and the audience’s side of things mostly consists of laughter and applause, but it feels very conversational because of the direct interaction. ‘But,’ I say, ‘you mustn’t forget that it’s only a pretend conversation, not a real one.’ I make eye contact with the food poisoning woman, and mock-sternly say, ‘OK?’ The laughter builds as the audience gradually cotton on to my camouflaged put-down, and the woman looks a bit sheepish.1

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What I said here about the conversational nature of stand-up is more than just the set-up to a gag, and the woman’s mistake – if she made one at all – was to treat the conversational performance model of stand-up like an actual conversation, perhaps thinking that her own contribution would be as interesting and valuable as that of the comedian. In an ordinary conversation it might well have been, but here it feels a bit like attention seeking, and the rest of the audience acknowledge this by laughing at my quip. In a sense I’m being unfair, because the unwritten rules of stand-up allow for individual punters to contribute to the show, and in this case she’s responding to a direct question. However, punters don’t always wait to be asked before shouting their opinions at the comic.

When cousins marry Nothing brings stand-up comedy as inescapably into the present tense as heckling. Exchanges with hecklers give substance and solidity to the illusion of spontaneity. When somebody shouts something, whether hostile or supportive, the comedian is under an obligation to respond, and as the heckle could not have been anticipated, it must be dealt with on the spur of the moment. Heckling is not exclusive to stand-up. It certainly happened in music hall, and can even be traced back to Elizabethan theatre, where clowns like Richard Tarlton would respond to hecklers in rhyme.2 Perhaps the reason why heckling is so strongly associated with stand-up is because it relates to some key features of the form. It brings the underlying hostility to the surface, it makes the directness of communication even more intense, and it involves spontaneity. In reality, the way comics deal with hecklers is not always as spontaneous as it seems. There are a number of standard lines which are used to respond to hecklers, and even on the British comedy circuit in which stealing material from other

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acts is a taboo, these are seen as common property. Standard heckle put-downs include: ‘Isn’t it a shame when cousins marry?’ ‘Never drink on an empty head.’ ‘Sorry? [the heckler repeats what he or she said] No, I heard you the first time, I’m just sorry.’ ‘Just to think, out of millions of sperm, you had to get there first.’ And: ‘I remember my first pint.’ In some cases, comics may invent anti-heckle lines of their own, perhaps designed to fit their style. Steve Martin claims to have originated the ‘first pint’ one early in his career – his version being ‘Oh, I remember when I had my first beer’3 – and given the influence he’s had on comedians either side of the Atlantic, he’s probably right. Whether standard or original, a pre-planned line is not spontaneous, even if the comedian can’t know in advance exactly when it will have to be used. More experienced acts tend to avoid such lines, preferring to react to hecklers in the moment. For Mark Lamarr, this is a matter of principle: ‘I never, ever used stock putdowns. And I hated that … it would never be cousins marrying and all that business ‘cos I always found that fucking agonising (after the first time you’ve seen it, when it’s like the greatest thing you’ve ever seen in your life).’4 Dealing with a heckle is a test of the comedian’s ability. To ignore it is to seriously undermine the audience’s faith, and if the comic ploughs on relentlessly with material rather than responding, the illusion of spontaneity is broken. On the other hand, to see a comedian deal brilliantly with a heckler can seem like magic, and can win over an audience that was cold or hostile before the heckle happened. This effect certainly existed in music hall. In 1892, Jerome K. Jerome recalled how

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the singer Bessie Bellwood dealt with a heckle from ‘a heftylooking coalheaver’: For over five minutes she let fly, leaving him gasping, dazed and speechless. At the end, she gathered herself together for one supreme effort, and hurled at him an insult so bitter with scorn, so sharp with insight into his career and character, so heavy with prophetic curse, that strong men drew and held their breath while it passed over them, and women hid their faces and shivered. Then she folded her arms and stood silent, and the house, from floor to ceiling, rose and cheered her until there was no more breath left in its lungs.5 It’s not possible to read without desperately wondering exactly what it was she said to the offending coalheaver to get such an extraordinary reaction. Presumably, you just had to be there.

Hostile heckling As Bellwood’s case makes clear, heckling can be a hostile act. It’s a battle for status between heckler and comedian, and to this extent there’s an element of contest to it. Jack Dee provides an excellent example of this in a 1994 show at the London Palladium. In a quiet moment, a heckler has fun with the fact that Dee was appearing in a series of John Smith’s bitter adverts, asking him, ‘Where’s your widget?’ (the widget device in the beer can being a focus of some of the ads). Dee gets a good laugh simply by repeating the question in his usual weary, sarcasm-drenched style. He follows it up by saying, ‘Oh, you could be very sorry you said that. [laughter]’ The audience’s reaction shows they realise Dee is capable of making mincemeat out of the heckler and recognise that his high status is under no real threat. He confirms this by talking to them directly: ‘I’ll look away, and he’ll think I’ve finished with him. [laughter]’

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Then somebody else heckles, with a reference to the animated ladybirds that featured in one of the adverts. Dee replies, ‘Eh? Where’s my ladybird? It’s in the dressing room. [quiet laughter] Why, where’s your self-respect?’ This gets ten seconds of laughter, applause and cheering, the audience acknowledging that Dee has scored a match point against his opponent. The heckler takes a bow as if to defy the fact that he’s lost, but Dee is quick to disillusion him: ‘I know you – took a bow there, but I don’t think they were applauding you. [laughter]’6 Here the contest remains largely good natured, but the heckler’s hostility can be less jokey, and reveal deeper social tensions. For black comedians like Dick Gregory in the early 1960s, playing to white audiences inevitably meant the risk of racist heckles, and dealing with them was hazardous in that knife-edge context. Gregory found his own way of coming back at racists. If somebody shouted ‘nigger’, he would tell them that there was a clause in his contract which gave him $50 more every time he heard the word. Then he’d ask the whole audience to yell it.7 A recording of Richard Pryor performing at a club called PJ’s in Hollywood in May 1968 captures a slightly more veiled form of racism. Pryor is talking about how the white man has used religion to assert racial superiority over black people, and throws in a subtly barbed disclaimer: ‘And when I say “white man”, I don’t mean everybody, you know who you are. [laughter]’ He’s pointing out that some white people are enlightened, but he’s also implying that some are not. As if to prove the point, somebody heckles him, sounding distinctly unamused: ‘You’re lucky I got a sense of humour!’ It’s a potentially ugly moment, but Pryor doesn’t back down: ‘I’m lucky you have too, because I know what you white people do to us. [laughter and applause]’ Not content with winning the status battle, he then widens his attack, making it more explicitly political by asking the audience as a whole: ‘Can I ask you – why are y’all afraid of Black Power? Why?’ He turns back to the heckler and says, ‘You seem to be

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the spokesman for the bigot group, why are you – ? [laughter and applause]’8 Given that the heckler sounded slightly tetchy in the first place, I imagine that his mood was not improved by being called a bigot, but he doesn’t make any more trouble for Pryor, and the rest of the audience are audibly delighted by the put-down. In a sense, comedians and hecklers are motivated by the same thing – a craving for attention. An exchange with a heckler is a battle for the attention of the audience, and there’s a delicious example of this kind of tussle on the recording of Frankie Howerd’s act at The Establishment. Kenneth Williams – another camp comic of the same generation as Howerd – is in the audience, and draws attention to himself using the most unusual of heckling techniques: ostentatious laughter. Williams was famous for his dirty laugh, and it is unmistakable as it blasts out like an effeminate machine gun with a blocked-up nose. On and on he laughs, for twenty seconds. The audience quickly tune into his laughter, and as it goes on they respond with two strong laughs of their own. Howerd is left floundering, saying things like, ‘Oo, Gawd ‘elp us!’ to try and win the attention back to himself. Just when it seems like he’s succeeding, Williams pushes his laugh up into a higher register and gets another laugh from the audience. Finally Howerd asserts himself, and very effectively at that: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to watch this sight, of one comedian laughing at another one, [laughter] it’s very rare. Very rare. [some clapping] And of course, writing it down at the same time. [laughter]’ A couple of minutes later, Williams is at it again, inspiring the following exchange: Williams: Hahahahahahahaha!! Howerd: Shuuut up, you! [laughter] Anyway listen. Listen – Williams: Yeees. Howerd: ‘Yeees.’ [laughter and clapping] Is ‘e trying to steal the act? Is ‘e trying to steal the limelight, do you think? [laughter]9

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Listening to the recording, it seems perfectly clear that Williams is trying to steal the limelight, but he makes no mention of this in his diary, simply remarking that Howerd’s act was ‘v. good’ and complaining about ‘an awful woman who kept shouting and interrupting him’. However, Williams’s diaries do suggest that there was some rivalry between the two men after this incident. They competed over parts in the Carry On films, and after lunch with Howerd, Williams wrote, ‘He is undoubtedly a very boring man.’10 When I first started doing stand-up, I lived in fear of the heckler, believing that he – and it often was a he – was always lurking somewhere at the back of every gig, waiting to strike. With experience, I realised that hostile heckling is relatively rare, that dealing with it was largely a matter of showing the audience I was unruffled by it, and most of the time, it was reasonably easy to cope with. As a result, I rarely worried or even thought about being heckled. However, the one thing that did unsettle me deep down was that because I knew what heckling felt like from my side of the fence, I also knew how easy it would be for a determined heckler to destroy me. A funny heckle can be a dangerous thing. I once saw a comic valiantly struggling to win over a small, cold audience in a cellar bar in Manchester. As he started to look desperate, somebody shouted, ‘Have you got any albums out?’ On another occasion, a female comic at the Last Laugh was trying to use the standard anti-heckle line, ‘What do you use for contraception? Your personality?’ Sadly, she didn’t get to the end of it. When she said, ‘What do you use for contraception?’, the punter answered, ‘Your jokes.’ If a heckler gets a bigger laugh than anything the comedian has got all evening, the comic’s authority will often be badly dented. On the other hand, heckles don’t have to be funny to be destructive. ‘Say something funny’ and ‘Boring’ are neither funny nor original, but they’re so blunt, predictable and damning that it’s difficult to come back at them inventively or positively. The key to making an unfunny heckle really hurt is persistence, timing, or a combination of the two. I’ve seen

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a comedian blowing routines through poor concentration and repeatedly putting down an apparently harmless punter sitting at the front, much to the audience’s bemusement. Asking him about it afterwards, he explained that the punter had given him a non-stop barrage of insults too quiet for anybody else to hear. The malevolent persistence of the hushed-voice heckler was what broke the comic’s nerve. I’ve faced audiences where a persistent unfunny heckler is supported by a table full of cheering friends. However much I put him down, he kept coming back for more, to the point where the rest of the audience was simply bored with it. By that point, I’d lost. Timing is also crucial to effective heckling. The most destructive time to heckle is towards the end of a long routine. Even if the comedian puts the heckler down well, the chances are that the end of the routine will have to be abandoned. As Jeremy Hardy puts it, ‘[I]f you are trying to take someone into a world of your own, somebody at the back shouting, “Show us your tits,” kind of breaks the moment.’11 A steady series of well-timed heckles can destroy an act. The fact that this kind of determined, destructive heckling is so rare shows the extent to which most stand-up audiences have at least a modicum of goodwill.

Real conversations Heckling used to pose a problem for Harry Hill, because responding to it with naked hostility would not suit his style: ‘I always suffered with hecklers when I started off, because I didn’t really have a kind of way of dealing with them. Because you can’t just say, “Fuck off,” you know.’12 With experience, he found suitably surreal ways of answering hecklers, like telling them, ‘You heckle me now, but I’m safe in the knowledge that when I get home, I’ve got a nice chicken in the oven.’13 As this shows, heckling isn’t always about hostility. Phill Jupitus argues:

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I think … a heckle says a lot more about what they’re trying to say to the people they’re with than about your act. They are establishing themselves within their social group… And drunk girls on hen nights, you know, who just are like car alarms. Quite often, you don’t need a put down so much as a mute button.14 Ultimately, heckling highlights both the nowness of stand-up comedy, and the fact that it’s a performance genre which takes the form of a social interaction. Comedians are able to instigate real, two-way conversations with individual punters as much as hecklers are, but the American comic Margaret Cho argues that they’re less likely to do this in her own country: British comedy is much more about being a social instigator than it is about spectacle. Because American comedy is really like, ‘We’re gonna show you what we’re gonna do and we’re gonna have these jokes, and it’s gonna be like this.’ But in British comedy there’s really a dialogue happening between the audience and the performer. They have to appeal to the audience in a way that is like, ‘I’m present, I’m here for you, and I’m gonna help you communicate with each other and with me.’ But American comedy’s not like that, so that’s what I’ve learned from coming here and that’s why I come here, because I want to be better at that …15 Many British comedians find conversations with punters incredibly valuable. Al Murray started building them into the act to stave off boredom: ‘[I]t became more spontaneous because I was getting bored. Right, and I figured I was in for long-haul theatre runs, and repetition I find extremely boring … I want it to be different every night so I’m not bored so it stays fresh so the audience can carry on liking it …’16 For Sarah Millican, talking to punters is fundamental to being a stand-up:

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The bits when I talk to the audience are the bits when I feel like a proper comedian. I feel like a proper funny person as opposed to somebody who pre-prepared a show and is now reciting it for your pleasure … And also they’re the bits that just make me awake and make me feel like … my feet are pedalling underneath, I love those bits. And they’re my favourite bits and without those I don’t think I could do tours this length … because it would just do my head in. So they’re the bits that sort of keep me alive.17 Bill Bailey is onstage at the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End in October 2003, and he asks the audience if anybody has had a bad experience with marijuana. A man on the balcony shouts out that he has. Interested, Bailey asks him what happened. The man replies in a deep, clear voice, apparently unaffected by the pressure of having to talk with a theatre full of people listening in. ‘I was on a houseboat on a frozen lake in Kurdistan,’ he begins, and as the story unfolds, the audience laugh at both what the man says and how Bailey responds.18 By avoiding the temptation to make fun of the man, and being generous enough to let him have his say and share the audience’s attention for a few minutes, the comedian creates a moment in the act where it feels like anything might happen. While the exchange is going on, we don’t know how it will play out or when it will end. We know that what’s happening is unique to this matinee performance – it didn’t happen last night, and it won’t happen tonight.

Notes 1

Horsebridge Comedy, the Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 28 September 2012

2

See Peter Davison, Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1982, pp. 38–40.

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It would be lovely to revive the idea of answering hecklers in rhyme: ‘Thanks for that but let me be blunt/Your comment was rubbish and you’re …’ 3

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 84

4

Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004

5

Morwenna Banks and Amanda Swift, The Joke’s on Us: Women in Comedy from Music Hall to the Present Day, London: Pandora Press, 1987, p. 15

6

Live at the London Palladium, in the box set, Jack Dee, Live Stand-Up Collection, Universal, 2006, 8246871

7

See Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999, pp. 496–7

8

‘Black Power’ on disc one of Richard Pryor, Evolution Revolution: The Early Years (1966-1974), Rhino, 2005, 8122-78490-2

9

Frankie Howerd, At The Establishment Club & at the BBC, Decca, 1963, LK 4556

10 See Russell Davies (ed.), The Kenneth Williams Diaries, London: HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 198, 309, 312, 358 11 James Ellis, ‘60 Second Interview: Jeremy Hardy’, Metro, 12 March 2002 12 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 13 Quoted in Ben Thompson, Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office, London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004, p. 175 14 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 15 Interview with Margaret Cho, Leicester Square Theatre, 29 October 2012 16 Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012 17 Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012 18 Bill Bailey, Part Troll, Wyndham’s Theatre, 18 October 2003, 3 p.m.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Improvisation While filming a live video at the Wilde Theatre in Bracknell in 1997, Mark Lamarr notices a beetle crawling across the stage. He crouches down to look at it, and some of the audience laugh, seeing what he’s doing. Then he starts having fun with it: No, it’s all right, I was just trying to talk and this beetle started walking across the stage, [laughter] and he’s got, ah – he’s got all fluff on his back and he’s having a hard time. [laughter] And, but the thing is, I feel like he’s really bored with the show and he’s trying to fuck off, so that’s – [laughter]’ He gets back on his feet to imitate the beetle, scuttling about the stage: ‘He just keeps wandering around and going, “I’m not into this menstrual stuff, I’m not really,” [laughter] and he just – he’s got fluff on him, he’s just wandering around in circles, and I know exactly how he feels at the moment. [laughter]’ Now he goes back to the beetle, crouching down again: He’s not like a sacred, er, beetle from this part of the country is he, like not one of you brought in the Sacred Bracknell Beetle? [quiet laughter] And if I get, you know, if I say anything out of turn, he just – goes into a really big beetle

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and hits me, or something like that? That’s – [laughter] I know it’s fairly unlikely, isn’t it, I’m just musing here, but – You know what, I’ve noticed that I’m – I’m wasting your time, aren’t I? [laughter] You lot are all staring at me, going, ‘He’s got some great beetle stuff coming up, I’m sure he has,’ but no, [laughter] I’m just – That’d be so sad, wouldn’t it, if I said to the stagehand, “Let the beetle on now, I can do me beetle stuff!” [laughter]1 Before going back into prepared material, Lamarr has filled up more than a minute of stage time and got at least 11 laughs by taking the audience with him on his flight of fancy. He’s taken them through twists and turns, creating an imaginary scenario, acting it out, pulling back from it, replacing it with another, commenting on what he’s doing. He even reflects on the process of improvisation in stand-up, jokingly suggesting the whole beetle incident might have been an example of desperate planned spontaneity. In some ways, Lamarr is modest about his ability to improvise, saying that being able to do it in the high pressure environment of a video shoot is a ‘bare minimum’ for him. On the other hand, he’s aware that to be able to pull off a bit like this is something that’s hard won by experience: ‘People have said to me, “Oh, you were lucky there, weren’t you,” and I [say], “No, what’s lucky? What, lucky I worked my arse off to be good at doing this?”’ He explains exactly how experience can help: [W]hen you’re ad libbing, a lot of times it’s not quite an ad lib, it’s sort of just remembering, you know, and I’ve noticed I’ve got a lot better at it as the years go by, because someone’ll say, you know, ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken,’ and you’ll think, ‘Oh, I was working on a bit about that about ten, fifteen years ago,’ and something’ll come out of it, often something you’ve never used before, but … thought you had. And a lot of it, it is obviously immediate spur of the moment, but a lot of it comes with experience.2

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Nonetheless, the beetle routine seems more genuinely spontaneous, playing on something that was visibly happening just at that very moment and probably couldn’t have been anticipated. Such improvisations happen when the comedian is very alive to the possibilities of the present moment, and confident enough to take a chance on being able to make something funny out of it. They allow anything that happens in the venue – no matter how unexpected – to become part of the act. This has happened throughout stand-up comedy’s existence, and can be traced back to its roots in music hall. R. G. Knowles, a Canadian comedian who regularly played the British halls from the 1890s to his death in 1919, was known for his quick wit. On a show at the Star in Bermondsey, he is said to have been interrupted in mid-flow by a latecomer noisily taking his place in the audience. Knowles turned to him and said, ‘Brother, you’re very late; but never mind, you’re just in time for the collection.’ At another show at the same hall, he did two encores, but even after five songs, the audience still wanted more. ‘I only get paid for three, you know,’ he said. ‘If I do another, they won’t give me any more money.’ ‘Why don’t you send the hat round?’ shouted a heckler. ‘Good idea,’ Knowles responded, ‘but if I did I wouldn’t get it back.’ On yet another occasion, he was interrupted by the theatre cat wandering across the stage, leading him to comment, ‘This is a monologue not a catalogue!’3 Shortly after World War II, whilst performing in Blackpool, Reg Dixon was inspired to improvise by something more internal – a painful boil in his nose. In the middle of his act, he decides to tell the audience about it: ‘I dunno what you’re laughing at. I don’t feel very well. I’m poorly. I’m proper poorly. Have you ever had a boil? I bet you’ve never ‘ad a boil where I’ve ‘ad a boil. ‘Ave you ever ‘ad a boil up yer left nostril?’ It’s a moment of pure spontaneity. On the spur of the moment, Dixon shares what’s on his mind and gets some big laughs. The idea of him suffering from some minor ailment fits with his gentle loser persona, which means he’s struck comedy

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gold with his off-the-cuff comment. ‘Proper poorly’ becomes his catchphrase, or as he put it, his ‘big gimmick’. This is either one of those magical moments where the comedian gives free rein to his or her imagination creating something unique and special, or it’s a good story Dixon invented for publicity purposes. A less successful comic called Roy Barbour also used the ‘proper poorly’ catchphrase, and also claimed to have invented it.4

Jonathan Winters works with his audience Improvisation is so central to the work of some stand-ups that it becomes what they are best known for. Jonathan Winters – part of the generation of sick comedians – is a classic example. Winters started working as a comic in New York in the early 1950s, playing venues like the Blue Angel and Le Ruban Bleu, and became well known when he was picked up by TV, appearing on shows hosted by Jack Paar, Garry Moore and Steve Allen. He was a major influence on Robin Williams, and would later go on to play the part of Mork’s son in Williams’s breakthrough sitcom Mork and Mindy. This was part of an eclectic career, which has included voiceover work for animated films, his own syndicated TV show, live performances and a series of comedy albums. In some of his shows, he adopts a simple format in which the audience suggest routines for him to improvise. They might ask, ‘I wonder if you could characterise a male elephant wrapping a present for his girlfriend?’ or, ‘Whaddya think about hippies?’ He then repeats what they’ve said – a vital part of the grammar of stand-up, ensuring that everyone in the audience has heard it. Having done so, he either answers the question, making a few witty comments, or more typically he acts out the requested scene. A woman asks him to do his impression of a doctor

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carrying out his first heart transplant, and Winters conjures up a surprisingly rich sketch, with a large and varied cast of characters. A stiff-voiced doctor talks to a gibbering patient before his operation, telling him they’ve had trouble finding a suitable heart, but assuring him, ‘We do wanna get you a goodie!’ A wobbling anaesthetist makes an appearance, turning out to be unashamedly drunk. A flirtatious nurse comes in (‘I’m twen’y three!’), and informs the doctor that all she has managed to get is a fox terrier’s heart. When the patient comes round, in front of the eager cameras of the world’s press, he is asked for a comment. ‘Arf! Arf!’ he replies. In some cases, merely giving flesh to the suggestion given is enough. A man asks, ‘Could you do a sergeant in the marine corps that is interviewing a gorilla that has been drafted by mistake?’ Winters takes on the gruff, gravel voice of a drill sergeant, and shows him running through the list of names: ‘Here’s a guy – I guess he’s tryin’a be some kinda clown. [laughter] ‘S just puddown “gorilla”. [laughter] That you, fella? [laughter]’ Realising there’s been a mistake, the sergeant tells the gorilla: ‘You don’t have to go to the rifle range today. [laughter] But I would shave. [laughter and applause]’ The fact that the audience collaborate in the creation of the show means that as well as giving it great immediacy, it is also one of the most intense forms of sharing that exists in stand-up. Winters has a warm and generous relationship with his audience. Sometimes, their requests get laughs in themselves, and there’s no hint that he is jealous of the punters when this happens. Indeed, he sometimes laughs along. He’s enthusiastic when he gets a particularly appealing request, saying, ‘Oh yes!’ or ‘God bless your heart!’ – which gets a laugh in itself. Occasionally the warm rapport breaks out into flirtation. Before starting to improvise a routine, he asks the woman who made the request how old she is. She tells him she’s twentythree. ‘Perfect!’ he replies, getting a laugh. He goes on to chat her up a little, finishing the conversation by saying, ‘We’ll talk about that later! [laughter]’ On another occasion, the flirtation

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is initiated by the woman making the request, who says, ‘I’d like you to do an imitation of you asking me for a date.’ Questions have been raised about how much Winters’s live shows are prepared in advance, and whilst he is reasonably cagey about his methodology, he does admit to sketching out his ideas beforehand. However, the range and quirkiness of audience requests which kick off his routines mean that however much he prepares, he must have to improvise a great deal. Having said this, Winters act is not pure free-form and there’s plenty to ensure that it has shape. To start with, there’s the basic call-and-response format of request and improvised bit, which automatically gives structure and rhythm to the show. Winters also comes prepared with a whole set of tricks up his sleeve. He has a repertoire of running characters, like the crazy old lady Maude Frickert, and a six-and-a-half-year-old boy called Chester Honeyhugger, and audiences often ask to see these characters in a given situation. Then there are the sound effects he produces himself. Using just his mouth, he can produced a rapid series of wet clicks to imitate a squirrel storing nuts in its cheeks, the ffffffffftkk!! of an arrow being fired into a tree, or the deep, slow, drunken mechanical voice of a talking toy. The sound effects are an important crutch. When asked to do a piece with a motorcycle, he chides himself for not having the relevant sound effect in his repertoire.5 The characters and the sound effects give him a series of comic readymades which he can pull out of the bag to fit together spontaneously during a show.

Ross Noble sings Dire Straits Improvisational stand-ups vary as much as any other kind of comedian, and Ross Noble is a very different kettle of fish from Winters. I first came across Noble in the early 1990s, when he played the comedy club I compèred, the Last Laugh

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in Sheffield. At the time, the club was being run by someone else, so the acts always came as a surprise to me. Noble seemed like a very ordinary sort of act, distinguished only by the fact that he juggled as well as doing gags. A couple of years later, control of the Last Laugh had reverted back to Roger Monkhouse and me, and we started a short-lived second venue. The idea was that it would be a place to try out newer acts to see if they were ready for the Last Laugh, so we put them on in another pub on a Monday night, charged a pound to get in, and called it Cheap Laughs. Noble headlined one of the shows and he was extraordinary. He looked different, the T-shirt replaced by a suit, and the longer hair making him bear a slight resemblance to Steve Coogan. But the real change was in his comedy. His material was fresh and offbeat. He talked about listening to what he thought was a really hardcore rave station for ten minutes before he realised he was actually listening to a badly tuned-in BBC Radio 2. There was a new fluidity to the act, allowing him to move easily from material to playing the situation. Conversations with punters led to bizarre flights of fancy, which were interwoven and incorporated into existing material. One of the frosted glass dividers which separated the side of the stage from one of the tables became the window of an all-night garage, and every so often he would try to buy a Mars Bar from the person sitting on the other side of it. Crucially, he was much, much funnier, filling the small pub room with so much laughter and applause that it nearly burst. As we watched him work, Roger and I kept exchanging glances. After the show, I was astounded when Roger told me that Ross was only 18 years old. That would have made him just 16 when he I’d first seen him. Having started performing stand-up at the age of 15, he has now been doing it for more than half of his life, and his improvisation seems effortless. The simplest things can spontaneously take him down the strangest paths. He has fewer safety nets than Winters when he lets his imagination fly. Rather than using a request-response format, his ad-libbed

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routines arrive more spontaneously, inspired by something in the venue, somebody’s clothes, a heckle, some casual banter with an individual punter. He also lacks the handy bag of running characters and vocal sound effects. On the other hand, he has developed a style that has allowed him to interweave improvised routine with prepared material so seamlessly that it’s hard to see the joins. He confesses it hasn’t always been like that: ‘It used to be really clunky. It used to be the sort of thing where I’d be improvising and people go, “Wurr, he’s improvising this,” and then it’d be a real sort of clunky kind of gear change, of like, “Oh, he’s not making this up any more.”’ The answer was to make even the prepared material flexible and changeable: A lot of the times, I take stuff that I’ve improvised and then sort of play around with the idea. And … even an idea that I’ve used the night before, rather than just doing it … I’ll keep playing with it … I just try and keep it as fluid as possible, in terms of like, halfway through I might start talking about something else … So it never becomes set … you never go, “I’m gonna say this, this and this,” you go, “I might say that, but I might do that.” … And that way, then there’s never a line between this-is-improvised, this-isscripted, because then your scripted stuff … it’s kind of like it’s sort of scripted but it isn’t, you know.6 He starts a show at the Assembly Hall, Tunbridge Wells in October 2012 by picking out a particularly enthusiastic punter at one end of the front row and somebody at the other end who’s reluctant to clap. These become his way of judging the maximum and minimum level of audience reaction, and he refers back to them throughout the show.7 It soon transpires that the enthusiastic one has a ridiculous, high-pitched, whooping laugh, which unleashes a flurry of comic possibilities from Noble. He hears it as the keyboard riff from Dire Straits’ ‘Walk of Life’, then as the Bee Gees’ falsetto vocals, allowing him to do extended silly impressions of these

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bands. Then the laugh becomes an animal mating cry on a wildlife documentary presented by Bill Oddie. He picks out a 17-year-old a couple of rows back who’s apparently befuddled by all this, and finds out he doesn’t know who Dire Straits are. He plays on the indignity of having to explain references which the kid is too young to get, and he makes this a running theme, coming back to it at the mention of Status Quo, or the Goodies, or Back to the Future. He also returns to the crazy laugher, at one point even forming a makeshift musical duo with him, in which Noble sings the lyrics of ‘Walk of Life’, then leaves a gap for the punter to fill in the keyboard riff with his yodelling guffaw.8 Another riff is kicked off by a conversation with a carpet fitter sitting near the front, in which Noble struggles to find the right word to describe wooden flooring. A woman further back tries to help him out by shouting, ‘Hard!’ – rather too vociferously. Even such a tiny cue leads him to postulate that she’s reading Fifty Shades of Grey on her Kindle and has accidentally shouted one of the words out. Later, she tries to help out again by supplying the word ‘porn’, inspiring him to create an off-the-cuff routine about an imaginary Women’s Institute bring-and-buy sale, in which she’s on the stall selling jam and pornography in knitted covers. Similarly, after the interval, he returns to the stage to find that somebody’s left him a bandana with a picture of a wolf on it. This leads him to suspect that the man who left the gift is sexually attracted to wolves and masturbates when he sees documentaries about them on TV, his seminal fluid forming a hard layer on his carpet, like peanut brittle or crème brûlée. A colourful description of the sperm as ‘man goop’ leads to the creation of an Indian servant of the same name – acted out as the kind of dignified, respectful figure seen in dramas set in the days of the Raj. Soon afterwards, Noble flings together a quick excerpt from a made-up Status Quo song called ‘Spunking All Over the Stage’. This is typical of his comedy, which plays with the

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unseemly as much as the whimsical. He’s as likely to talk about religion, wheelchairs or interspecies sex as he is about monkeys, muffins or pieces of meat glued to the face. This is perhaps unsurprising given his daredevil approach to free association. There’s a feeling that anything might come out of his mouth – no matter how uncomfortable – when, as he puts it, ‘your brain’s spinning and … ideas are colliding’.9 When a taboo subject pops up, he makes a game out of it, playing with the audience’s reaction, perhaps chiding us for laughing easily at one thing when we’ve previously disapproved of something palpably less outrageous. He’s far from being a Jimmy Carr or a Frankie Boyle, though. In spite of being willing to plunge into lewd or touchy areas, he comes across as perfectly benign, guided by silliness rather than malice. Interviewed in 2009, he explains why he thinks he’s generally not seen as offensive in spite of what he talks about onstage: It’s about intent and it’s about the attitude behind what you’re saying … I’m quite a positive person, and I don’t mean anybody any harm, I don’t want to offend anyone … if you can talk about everything, and you can just be open about things … I can joke around with my dad … and we can joke about the fact he’s in a wheelchair, but … he doesn’t think I’m picking on him … I think that’s what it is, you know, you can have a laugh but without it being … mean spirited.10 This positivity and openness make for some interesting encounters with punters. Somebody on the front row has gone to the toilet during the second half of the show, and he decides to play a prank on them by getting somebody else to sit in his seat while he’s out. The seat-stealer shouts, ‘He’ll get freaked out when he finds out I’m a tranny!’ Noble talks about how gutsy the transvestite punter is for being so open, refers to him as ‘she’, asks her name – it’s Suzie – and says she looks good in her frock. Admittedly, there are some laughs at

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her expense, but the exchange is friendly and he even tells the rest of the audience off for laughing at her. Essentially, the fact that Suzie’s a transvestite is treated no less respectfully than the fact that another punter is a carpet fitter. Towards the end of the show, Noble gets talking to an ex-serviceman who, it transpires, has a broken back, a false leg, an eye that doesn’t work, and may be about to lose his arm. He plays on having stumbled upon this unpromisingly grim information (‘Comedy!!’), but remains unembarrassed and argues that, having been in the Forces, this man could probably ‘kick the shit out of’ another punter. He manages to joke about the guy’s physical state without scoring comic points at his expense, and when the rest of the audience show doubt about whether it’s OK for him to be making comedy out of his disability, he points out that the man himself is laughing. This easy willingness to treat this punter’s physical injuries lightly arguably shows him more respect than pussyfooting about and awkwardly avoiding the topic. As with Winters, the fact that Noble collaborates with the audience in the creation of the show makes for a warm, collusive rapport with them. I’d argue that this is the lynchpin of his ability to weave pure daftness out of his carnivalesque array of outrageous topics. He’s able to have a laugh about them without being mean spirited because of the way he negotiates the boundaries of what the audience is happy for him to say, by taking information from them both collectively and individually, and by constantly commenting on their reactions. I witness an amazing example of this at the same Tunbridge Wells venue three years earlier, in his show Things.11 The word ‘AIDS’ is mentioned in passing, and Noble notices a particular punter reacting to this with incongruous enthusiasm. He has fun with this, acting out a quick scene in which the punter starts cheering every time he says, ‘AIDS’. The problem is that now the punter feels licensed to cheer the word AIDS every time he says it, and it soon starts to spread, with other people joining in. He plays on the way it’s all going out of control,

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telling us off in a way that also encourages us to take it further. Soon the whole audience is shouting ‘AIDS’ to his cue, and he uses this to put together a messed-up version of the old spiritual ‘Kumbaya’: Ross Noble: Kumbaya my lord, I’ve got – Audience: AIDS! Through all of this, we’re increasingly aware of the inescapable wrongness of joking about something so sensitive and deadly serious, and it’s precisely this that makes it so painfully funny. It’s one of the very rare occasions when I’ve been helpless and hysterical with laughter at a stand-up gig, physically doubling over and feeling the tears rolling down my cheeks. All around me I can see people doing the same, and there’s a feeling of utter disbelief that this can really be happening. It’s an explosion of comic catharsis, and it produces a tangible sense of elation. Noble has managed to create a space within which for a few moments we can refuse to respect the undeniable dreadfulness of this horrible disease and instead laugh at it like anything else. In the cold light of day I feel slightly uncomfortable about committing this to paper. To somebody that wasn’t there, it probably sounds appalling, possibly even a direct insult to anybody whose life has been torn apart by AIDS. On the night, the redrawing of boundaries made sense. It was about both spontaneity and collusion, with a strong sense of understanding between everybody present. It brings to mind what Billy Connolly said in the wake of his notorious Ken Bigley joke. He complained the newspapers had misquoted him, but refused to say what he actually did say: I won’t tell anybody what I said because you would have to be in the room with 4,000 people when I said it. It becomes a different thing when you print in the cold light of day

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what you thought I’d said, or what you’d heard I’d said. It becomes a different thing altogether.12 Once again, what it all boils down to is the presentness of stand-up comedy. In order to fully understand – in the words of the old cliché – you just had to be there.

Notes 1

Mark Lamarr, Uncensored and Live, VVL, 1997, 0474343

2

Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004

3

See S. Theodore Felstead, Stars who Made the Halls: A Hundred Years of English Humour, Harmony and Hilarity, London: Werner Laurie, 1946, p. 106; and Roy Hudd, Roy Hudd’s Book of Music-Hall, Variety and Showbiz Anecdotes, London: Robson Books, 1994, p. 108

4

The story is related in a Pathé News interview (entitled ‘Reg Dixon Hometown’) dating from 1950–9, available via www.britishpathe.com, and in Roger Wilmut, Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety, 1919–1960, p. 169. In the Pathé interview, he claims the incident happened in his first radio broadcast in Blackpool. In Wilmut’s book, he claims it happened at the Palace Theatre, Manchester. The quotes from Dixon are from the Pathé interview, the excerpt from the act being as remembered by Dixon. Also see Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993–8, London: Century, 1998, p. 189 (on Roy Barbour)

5

All examples from Winters’s act taken from Jonathan Winters, Stuff’n Nonsense, Laugh.com, 2001, LGH 1059 (esp. see ‘Male Elephant Wrapping a Present’; ‘Hippies’; ‘Heart Transplant’; ‘Gorilla Drafted into the Marine Corps’; ‘Astronauts Going to the Moon’; ‘Chester Honeyhugger as an Elevator Operator’; ‘Chester Honeyhugger Asking for a Date’; ‘Maude Frickert on a Motorcycle – Asking for a Date – Funshirt’; and ‘Unusual Sounds’)

6

Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004

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7

Ross Noble, Mindblender, Assembly Hall, Tunbridge Wells, 1 October 2012

8

By coincidence, the crazy laugher is a drama student from the University of Kent, who was a regular punter in the previous year’s Monkeyshine shows (featuring students on my stand-up course). There he’d become a regular character, his mad musical chuckle leading one of the stand-up students to christen him ‘Weepy Man’

9

From the extra feature ‘Ross Noble Interviewed by Oliver Double’ on Ross Noble, Nobleism, Universal, 2009, 8250595

10 From the extra feature ‘Ross Noble Interviewed by Oliver Double’ on Ross Noble, Nobleism, Universal, 2009, 8250595 11 Ross Noble, Things, Assembly Hall Tunbridge Wells, 3 April 2009 12 Alan Franks, ‘Sorry: the one s-word you won’t hear from me’, The Times, 3 November 2004, Times 2 section p. 4

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Timing The secret of great comedy is – wait for it – timing. Ask anybody what you need to be a good stand-up comic, and the chances are that they’ll mention timing. The problem is that nobody seems very clear exactly what they mean by the word. Definitions of ‘timing’ come in all shapes and sizes. Variety performer Valantyne Napier wrote a reference book of showbusiness jargon, in which she calls timing ‘the most misused and misunderstood term’. For her, it means ‘being able to anticipate the audience reaction to a line … and wait to deliver the next laugh … until just the right time when the laughter or applause starts to fade … The laughter … is often lost when cut off by the next line. On the other hand there should not be any discernible pause.’1 Lupino Lane – who also worked in variety – defines the term by describing bad timing: The use of too many words, taking too long to get to the point, making a bad entrance or exit, a gag too much, and too many choruses to a song, all help to put the timing wrong … Jumping in and interrupting before the sense of the line has been got over, is another fault; being too late with the interruption will also spoil the tempo. Speed is important, not necessarily speaking too fast, but getting to the big laugh.2

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Tony Allen’s definition is more lyrical and succinct, describing timing as ‘an intuitive state of grace that has to be discovered, an elusive abstract lubricant that exists in the eternal now’.3 Neal R. Norrick is dryer and more academic: ‘The overall tempo of the performance, the ebb and flow of given and new information highlighted by repetition and formulaic phrasing along with rhythms of hesitation and more fluent passages all co-determine timing.’4 Clearly timing means different things to different people. Various themes run through these diverse definitions. Firstly, there’s structure. As Lane points out, individual jokes and the act as a whole must not be cluttered up with the unnecessary. Secondly, there’s pace and tempo, which both Lane and Norrick identify. Thirdly, there’s a sense of being responsive to the audience. For Napier, timing is the straightforward matter of waiting to deliver the line just before the previous laugh finishes. For both Lane and Norrick, control of information is important, and the comedian must have a sense of when the audience have understood enough. Finally, there’s the idea that timing is a state of mind in the performer, a point which Allen makes so eloquently. One of the classic definitions of comic timing centres on the idea of striking at the right moment. In Simon Critchley’s words, timing is ‘a careful control of pauses, hesitations and silences, of knowing exactly when to detonate the little dynamite of the joke.’5 For Joan Rivers, it’s ‘the right moment to pause, the instant to hit a line like punching a button to detonate laughter’.6 Both of these imply that timing is – as the word suggests – a simple matter of time. If a pause is exactly the right number of milliseconds long, and the punchline is delivered at exactly the right number of milliseconds afterwards, it will get the optimum amount of laughter. I’ve always disliked the argument that stand-up is entirely based on timing, and this simplistic definition is particularly annoying because it reduces the comedian to a glorified metronome. I think timing has become such a popular explanation of comedy because people see something extraordinary

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happening when they watch a comedian at work. The comic seems to talk like a normal person, and laughter appears as if by magic, sparked off by a simple word or even a pause. It’s easier to attribute the laughs to some kind of mysterious atomic comic clock in the comedian’s head than to make sense of the whole complex process of what’s going on behind that word or pause to make it funny. I may have been unusual, but when I did stand-up I was never, ever aware of timing, and was always puzzled by what it was supposed to mean. I didn’t consciously adjust pauses or wait to strike with the punchline to ensure it came in at exactly the right moment. When I was at my best, I was no more conscious of time or tempo than in everyday conversation. In fact, at my best, I was generally less self-conscious than usual. Of course, I had some understanding of rhythm. As I broke new material in, I would learn the best way of pacing and phrasing a key line, and this would become fixed so it was roughly the same at every gig. However, in the act of performing this practised phrasing, I would be thinking more about the content of the line than the minutiae of timing and rhythm.

What’s so great about Bob Newhart’s timing? The problem with timing as a concept is not that it has no bearing on how stand-up works, but that it’s such a loose, ill-defined term. It refers to several things – not just one – and some of them aren’t even connected with time. To illustrate the point, take Bob Newhart, who has been widely praised for his timing. There are a number of aspects of his performance which might have inspired this praise. First, there’s his beautifully relaxed manner. The old fashioned term for this is ‘stage repose’, which means a quality of ease, assurance and control, and an avoidance of tell-tale

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signs of a lack of confidence like unnecessary fidgeting.7 Johnny Carson has a neat definition: ‘When you stand there doing nothing and it’s funny, that’s repose.’8 Second, there’s the tempo. Newhart’s delivery is slow and unhurried, something which undoubtedly enhances his stage repose. Third, there’s the careful way he unfolds the information in his routines. He subtly gives the audience enough clues to understand each gag, but leaves them a bit of work to do. For example, in a famous routine from his first album he plays a driving instructor who remains calm almost all of the time, no matter what dangers he faces. All of the other characters, including the dangerously inept woman he is instructing, are implied by what the instructor says. At one point, the woman has driven the wrong way down a one-way street, and after a pause filled by the audience’s laughter from the previous joke, he says: ‘Er – same – same to you, fella! [extended laughter]’9 The joke relies on what Newhart doesn’t say. The audience don’t hear the man in another car shouting an angry insult, they infer it from the instructor’s response. This brings them the pleasure of solving a puzzle, as well as popping a mental cartoon of the altercation into their heads. There’s a similar example in a routine about Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco to civilisation. The basic conceit is that Raleigh keeps sending his discoveries from the New World back to England, but the people back home don’t appreciate their importance. Newhart plays somebody back in England, who talks to Raleigh on the telephone and – as in the driving instructor routine – Raleigh’s contributions to the conversation are merely implied. Newhart’s character nicknames Raleigh ‘Nutty Walt’, and can hardly conceal his amusement at what he sees as his crazy ideas. He is puzzled about why Nutty Walt is sending him 80 tons of leaves: ‘This er – this may come as kind of a surprise to you Walt, but er – come fall in England here, we’re kind of up to our, er – [laughter and applause]’10 Again, the joke is in the gap. Newhart stops before finishing the sentence,

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making the audience fill in the blanks for themselves (‘up to our necks/ eyes/ asses in leaves’). Both jokes involve pauses, so their success might be attributed simply to timing – but in both cases, the pause is built into the structure of the joke, so that it’s as much about writing as it is about delivery. Having said that, the way the line is delivered is exquisite, and this leads to a fourth aspect of Newhart’s performance that might come under the category of timing – his acting. Most of his routines, including these two, are performed in character, and although his characterisations are normally fairly close to the stage persona he uses in the introductions to them, there are fine nuances of tone, pace and punctuation which not only bring the situations he evokes to life, but also show the character’s reactions to these situations without spelling them out in words. The ‘same to you, fella’ in the first example has the same mild, calm tone as the most of the rest of the routine, but there’s the merest whiff of the exasperation he must be feeling in there too. Sometimes, Newhart’s acting is so delicious that the particular way that he says a word is all that’s needed to bring out the flavour of the joke. In one routine, he plays a policeman trying to talk somebody down off a ledge, by following the advice of a new manual on the subject. In the introduction, Newhart summarises the manual, which advises the police to wear plain clothes in such situations, and talk casually to the potential jumper. The policeman, he says, ‘slips into his sports jacket’, lights a cigarette, and walks out on to the ledge. There’s a pause as he lights up to play the policeman, then he says his first line in character: ‘Oh, hi!’11 There’s a huge, uproarious laugh, which is enhanced by a little clapping. It goes on for more than ten seconds, and individual laughs can be picked out – barking male guffaws, female shrieks. What makes these two simple, innocuous words so funny is the way he says them. He manages to fill them with the forced brightness of fake surprise. It suggests somebody trying to pretend they have just casually wandered out on to the ledge of a skyscraper to enjoy a cigarette, and

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being pleasantly surprised to find somebody else up there with him. He captures all of this perfectly in his tone of voice, and by doing so highlights the absurdity of the situation in one powerful comic flash. What Bob Newhart’s performance makes absolutely clear is that timing is not one thing but many. The fact is that stand-up performance is infinitely subtle and multifaceted, and all too often, words are inadequate at explaining why a particular moment of delivery is so wonderful. As a result, trying to fit all of its many aspects under the leaky umbrella term of ‘timing’ is probably not a good idea.

Duh-d-d-dum-d-dum-d-durr Rhythm is probably as important to comedy as it is to music, but in comedy it’s much harder to identify and notate. Stand-up’s backbeat pulses to and fro between performer and punter, the comedian’s line followed by the audience’s response, a joke-laugh-joke-laugh-joke-laugh rhythm that speeds and slows throughout the show. This is a beat that can be easily dulled by background noise. When I compèred the Last Laugh, sometimes I would forget to turn off the air conditioning fans before I went on at the beginning. Although I’m sure the audience weren’t consciously aware of this, my opening routine would feel like wading through blancmange, and I couldn’t get the joke-laugh rhythm crisp and clear. One time I realised what was happening while I was on stage, and asked for the fans to be turned off. Suddenly, the blancmange was gone, and the joke-laugh beat started ringing out more clearly straight away. I’m not the only one who has experienced this effect. Shelley Berman once found himself distracted onstage by the noise of a refrigerator motor. Comic rhythm can work almost like magic. Stand-ups talk about ‘getting on a roll’, which Jo Brand defines as the

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‘glorious’ moment when ‘the audience seems to laugh continuously throughout the whole performance, and as the laugh dies down from one joke or remark it starts to build up for the next bit. Not only do they laugh at punch lines, they laugh at the build-up to jokes as well.’12 Milton Berle once swapped the punchline of a joke for an unfunny one that didn’t even make sense. The insistent rhythm of the gags was such that when he threw in the nonsensical, unfunny punchline, the audience laughed anyway.13 There are strong links between musical and comical rhythm. Mort Sahl’s delivery has been compared to a drum solo. Similarly, Lenny Bruce had a routine in which he rhythmically spills out the things people say to each other after sex, which he compares to ‘a big drum solo’. To make the point more audible, he adds real percussion instruments, following the rhythms of his own speech on drums and cymbals.14 Harry Hill has a drummer and a keyboard player on stage with him, and as well as accompanying him in songs, they often chip in to routines, adding sound effects, particular during bits of physical business. Sometimes comic rhythm is about repetition. In a routine about childhood, Jerry Seinfeld sums up his main motivation as a child as, ‘Get candy, get candy, get candy, get candy, get candy, get candy.’ He goes on to imagine a candy-obsessed child in an encounter with a candy-proffering stranger, and each moment of the child’s reasoning is punctuated with the phrase, ‘Get candy, get candy, get candy.’15 The insistent repetition of the three syllables gives the routine a relentless forward momentum, heightening the feeling of obsession. For Harry Hill, repetition goes hand-in-hand with economy: ‘When writing gags, I think you should use the least number of words. Even though you can repeat the first line over and over again, which is so often what I do.’ Hill laughs, and admits a more prosaic reason for the repetition: ‘To fill it out!’ In some of his jokes, though, there is a more practical reason to repeat something:

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[I]f you have got a gag which is a bit obscure, or is not immediately obvious, it is useful to spell it out a couple of times. So I mean I had this gag which was, ‘You know the white plastic doll’s house garden furniture that you get free with the home delivery pizzas?’ Right, that is a real mouthful, right? There’s a lot of things in there, contained in there. That’s the minimum amount of words you can use to say this gag. ‘I keep getting the table,’ that’s the punchline … So what I do is, I say, ‘You know the white plastic doll’s house garden furniture? That you get free with the home delivery pizzas?’ … You say it a few times. And then they’re really kind of keen to know what the answer is. You know, so you can do the next bit, and you know they’re all sort of going to be on top of it, pretty much.16 Hill also sees the myriad running jokes which punctuate his act as a kind of rhythm, and it’s the feel of this rhythm, rather than a fixed running order, which allows him to structure his act. Perhaps the subtlest rhythms at work in stand-up are those contained in the sound of the words that make up key lines. The music made by the patterns of vowels and consonants which a spoken sentence can contain often holds the key to why it gets a laugh. For Milton Jones, this music is crucial: ‘[Y]ou must have the duh-d-d-dum-d-dum-d-durr rhythm worked out, even if means including an extra word that’s grammatically questionable. The rhythm is more important.’ However, knowing this is not the same as knowing exactly how rhythm works, which is instinctive and does not yield easily to cold analysis. Jones doesn’t claim to fully understand this kind of rhythm, but he has some interesting ideas: I dunno what rhythm does, it must be some deep subconscious thing. I mean obviously, it’s to do with timing, and I guess facial stuff as well. Because it’s not unconnected to what you’re doing with your face. You can even move from

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vocal to physical rhythm, the last face being the last beat of the rhythm, if you see what I mean.17

The rule of three By contrast, the simplest rhythm in stand-up is the rule of three. The classic version of the three-part list joke has been defined as ‘Establish, Reinforce, Surprise!’18 A lot of comedy works by deviating from an expected pattern. The first part of the list establishes the pattern, the second reinforces it, and the third subverts it. Jo Brand’s early work provides a couple of fine examples, which I’ve laid out so as to emphasise their tripartite shape. At the beginning of her act, she apologises for looking ‘a bit shit’, and explains: I’ve ‘ad flu recently, and I forgot to wash my T-shirt, and er – [quiet laughter] my parents weren’t very attractive, so er – [laughter]19 In another performance, she’s talking about how she’s been thinking a lot about body image: I read that book Fat Is a Feminist Issue. [quiet laughter] Got a bit desperate halfway through. And ate it. [laughter]20 In the first gag, she gives two legitimate reasons why she’s looking ‘shit’ at this particular moment, and a third one which is so permanent and self-deprecating that it doesn’t really follow. In the second gag, she has two sentences which set up the simple narrative about reading a classic feminist text, and a third which gives the story a surprise ending. Not all three-part gags work like this, though. Omid Djalili has a joke which goes: ‘Also, I know that some of you, you associate the Middle East, er, with, er, oil. And phlegm, and

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halitosis, er – [laughter and clapping]’21 In this three-part list – oil, phlegm, halitosis – the normal structure is inverted, because the expectation is subverted after the first item. In some cases, the three-part rhythm isn’t integral to the structure of the joke at all. In other cases, separate jokes may be grouped together in threes. Andy Parsons used to have a joke about Tony Blair getting elected by applying marketing principles and rebranding his party as New Labour. Parsons wonders what they’ll come up with next, and makes three suggestions of his own: New Improved Labour. [laughter] Labour Ultra. [laughter] Or maybe, ‘I Can’t Believe it’s not the Tories’. [laughter and applause]22 The crucial thing with clustering three jokes together is to put the strongest gag last, to create a sense of climax. The audience reaction to the third joke here shows Parsons has got them in the right order. One reason for this might be that the rhythm of three is intrinsically pleasing in public speaking. In his book on political oratory, Max Atkinson shows how politicians use three-part lists to elicit applause from their audiences, and provides plentiful examples to prove his case. He points out that they have ‘an air of unity or completeness about them’.23

Those terrible syllables ‘er’ and ‘um’ Whilst most of the tips Lupino Lane gives in his 1945 book How to Become a Comedian would be pretty useless to anyone wanting to start out as a stand-up today, it does give a useful snapshot of stage practice in British theatres in the mid-twentieth century. The advice he gives on delivery suggests a very formal approach. He advises comedians to

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undertake ‘a short study of elocution’, warns against ‘the continual use of phrases such as: “You see?”, “You know!”, “Of course”, etc.’, and commands, ‘Avoid those terrible syllables, “ER” and “UM”.’24 Although he suggests that front cloth comedians should appear to be ‘speaking in ordinary conversation’, he actually makes it clear that they should speak much more crisply: Patter doesn’t come all at once. Go into an empty room and practice on your own, listening to the sound of your own voice … Watch your inflections and see that you do not drop your voice at the end of a sentence or the audience will lose interest. You must learn to speak with clear diction, always see that you pitch your voice so that the people who are farthest away in the audience can hear you.25 Listen to recordings of the comics of this era, and you’ll tend to hear diction that’s clear as a bell. Ted Ray may have worn an ordinary lounge suit onstage to make it look as if he was just one of the audience, but in spite of wanting to appear as natural as possible, his delivery was polished and formal. He grew up in Liverpool, but there’s no trace of a Scouse accent. The northern u sound is gone, so that ‘umbrella’ is pronounced ‘ambrella’, not ‘oombrella’. The a sound is rather affected, so that ‘chap’ becomes ‘chep’. The consonants are sharp and punchy, and there’s none of the mess of ordinary conversation.26 By contrast, Mort Sahl’s delivery was so much like ordinary conversation that, as Woody Allen observes, ‘you thought he was just talking.’27 Sahl’s comedy is often misrepresented. In 1960, Time magazine did a piece on him which quotes some of his finest one-liners, and this is often reproduced as a way of giving a flavour of his style.28 One-liners suggest a honed, minimalist delivery, but Sahl’s is nothing like this, and the killer lines which Time quotes often emerge from a swamp of conversational messiness.

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Sahl is no stranger to the terrible syllable ‘ER’. He is perfectly comfortable to emit fragmented sentences as he tries to find the best way of explaining something, or to go off at a tangent, and return to the original theme by way of a quick, ‘Anyway –’. His speech is punctuated with the kind of phrases Lane warns against: ‘You know?’; ‘See?’; ‘So, now –’; and ‘What else?’ Sometimes, he punches a gag home with a short, staccato, ‘Ha ha!’29 Arguably, Sahl’s greatest achievement – in a whole series of great achievements – is that he showed that everyday speech could be just as effective as elocuted stage speech, if not more so. Certainly, when I listen to recordings of his act from 50 years ago, I can’t get most of the topical jokes or pick up a lot of the cultural references, but the ‘UM’s and ‘ER’s make it sound fresh and immediate.

Mark Watson drops the accent In August 2002, Mark Watson won the Daily Telegraph Open Mic Award with a set in which he told the audience, ‘I’m from Wales. Don’t clap that. That’s a fact.’ One of the judges, Dave Gorman, said, ‘[W]hat was really impressive about Mark was that it felt like he was being himself.’ In fact Watson grew up in Bristol and the Welsh accent he used to deliver his material was faked for the stage. ‘It’s a sort of fabrication,’ he admitted. ‘There’s something charming about the Welsh character, and instinct for self-deprecation I find appealing.’30 Some were totally fooled by the accent. When he came second in the So You Think You’re Funny competition that same month, the Mirror reported that he came from South Wales.31 Of course, adopting a fabricated accent raises the usual questions about the ambiguity of identity in stand-up comedy. Looking back on it, even Watson himself seems unclear exactly how the Welsh accent changed who he was while performing his act:

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It’s a kind of complex question when it comes up because it wasn’t exactly a persona, because it was basically pretty similar to my personality. But it was a bit more than just putting on an accent as well because just in the act of putting on an accent you do sort of start behaving slightly differently. So I suppose essentially it was a persona, but a persona not very far removed from [me]. You certainly couldn’t call it a character. It was more just a little bit of an extension of myself, a kind of more hyper version of myself … What makes it more complicated is that my family is Welsh, so I’ve got a natural sort of lilt in the voice anyway, so it wasn’t like it was any sort of effort. I barely noticed I was doing it. In the last few years, he has dropped the Welshness because of the identity problems it posed: I had to eventually phase it out because the gap between my real self and it had become a bit of a problem, just in practical terms. Like I’d be on the radio talking like this in my normal voice because you can’t really fake an accent for a normal interview. And that’s the thing, where do you draw the line? I couldn’t fake an accent in the car home with the other comedians either, so basically it became known that I was faking it to some extent. Having performed with the accent for so long made it difficult to get rid of: ‘[I]t was basically like a reflex … I would’ve done several hundred gigs where I just snapped into that voice as soon as I came onstage … So it felt very exposed the first time I didn’t do it.’ Aside from the question of identity, the Welsh accent gave him a distinctive delivery, and a quirky sense of timing. He explains: Certain words just lend themselves to it. You draw them out. And if you get used to doing a joke or a story with a particular emphasis on a word, like drawling a particular

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word, then you find you do it. Even now, there are certain words onstage … that I still basically say in a Welsh accent just because it comes so naturally. Even performing – as he does now – in his everyday English accent, his timing is indelibly stamped by his former adopted Welshness: ‘I can’t really change that, because that’s sort of the pace that I go at… I think that Welsh accent initially gave me those rhythms, it gave me the sort of energy that my set has, that all comes from that initial persona.’32 Eyes wide and gleaming, eyebrows raised, his speech is breathless and hyperactive, babbling out long strings of words. Received wisdom has it that economy is all important in comedy, but Watson’s relentless garrulousness flies in the face of that. He directly alludes to this at the end of his first DVD, telling the audience at the Bristol Hippodrome: That’s one thing. I d-, I’m well aware that I talk fast. I do believe that when this DVD comes out there will be – very few DVDs on the market that contain – so many words. [laughter] If nothing else, people will be going, ‘W-was it funny’ ‘Not exactly funny, but fuck, he says some words, I’ll give him that.’ [laughter]33 I’ve used hyphens here to indicate the pauses which divide his sentences, which tend to come in unusual places. Like Sahl, his speech is full of ordinary conversation messiness – a word started but abandoned here, a hint of a stutter there. He does stop after a funny line, to give the audience the merest hint that it’s time for them to laugh, but this only creates the tiniest of pauses. With both of the laughs in the above extract, he starts speaking his next sentence at pretty much exactly the same time as the audience start laughing. Clearly this goes against Valantyne Napier’s warning that ‘Laughter or applause is often lost when cut off by the next line.’ Watson has shown that – counterintuitively – it is possible to ‘tread on a laugh’ (as the old showbiz jargon

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has it) without stifling it. In fact, his rhythms give his act a compulsive forward momentum, a headlong energy and an enthusiasm that’s part of his distinctive charm. What he shows is that there are no hard and fast rules about timing, because each comedian will have an individual sense of how it works.

Notes 1

Valantyne Napier, Glossary of Terms Used in Variety, Vaudeville, Revue & Pantomime, Westbury: Badger Press, 1996, p. 54

2

Lupino Lane, How to Become a Comedian, London: Frederick Muller, 1945, p. 124

3

Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of it? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, p. 19

4

Neal R Norrick, ‘On the Conversational Performance of Narrative Jokes: Toward an Account of Timing’, Humor, no. 14, vol. 3, 2001, p. 256

5

Simon Critchley, On Humour, Abingdon: Routledge, 2002, p. 6

6

Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 596

7

See Lupino Lane, How to Become a Comedian, London: Frederick Muller, 1945, p. 15

8

Quoted in Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993–8, London: Century, 1998, p. 107

9

‘Driving Instructor (Pilot for a New TV Series)’, Bob Newhart, ‘Something Like This…’ The Bob Newhart Anthology, Rhino/ Warner Archives, 2001, R2 76742

10 ‘Introducing Tobacco to Civilisation’, Bob Newhart, ‘Something Like This…’ The Bob Newhart Anthology, Rhino/ Warner Archives, 2001, R2 76742 11 ‘Ledge Psychology’, Bob Newhart, ‘Something Like This…’

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GETTING THE JOKE The Bob Newhart Anthology, Rhino/Warner Archives, 2001, R2 76742

12 Jo Brand, Can’t Stand Up For Sitting Down, London: Headline Review, 2011, p. 54 13 See Phil Berger, The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, p. 39 14 ‘To Come’, on Lenny Bruce, To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb,, Knit Classics/Douglas Music, 2000, KCR-3019 15 ‘Halloween’, Jerry Seinfeld, I’m Telling You for the Last Time, Universal Records, 1998, UD-53175 16 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 17 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 18 Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of It? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, p. 42 19 ‘Tory MPs’, Jo Brand, Jo Brand Live, Laughing Stock, 1993, LAFFC 21 20 Friday Night Live, Channel 4, 26 February 1988 21 Various artists, Stand-Up Great Britain, Laughing Stock, 2000, LAFF CD 105, track 9 22 Various artists, Stand-Up Great Britain, Laughing Stock, 2000, LAFF CD 105 23 See Max Atkinson, Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics, London and New York: Methuen, 1984, pp. 57–73 24 See Lupino Lane, How to Become a Comedian, London: Frederick Muller, 1945, pp. 14–15, 71 25 Lupino Lane, How to Become a Comedian, London: Frederick Muller, 1945, p. 71 26 This description comes from listening to the opening monologue of an episode of Ray’s a Laugh, originally transmitted 8 November 1949, on Ted Ray, Ray’s a Laugh, BBC Radio Collection, 1990, ZBBC 1117 27 Quoted in John Lahr, Show and Tell, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 8

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28 For example, the Time piece is quoted in Albert Goldman (from the journalism of Lawrence Schiller), Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce!!, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 228; and in Lisa Appignanesi, Cabaret: The First Hundred Years, London: Methuen, 1984, p. 175 29 This description comes from listening to Mort Sahl, 1960 or Look Forward in Anger, Verve Records, 1960, MG V-15004 and Mort Sahl, At the hungry i, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH 1122 30 Dominic Cavendish, ‘Welshman who is not Welsh wins Telegraph’s stand-up award’, Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2002, p. 8 31 Brendon Williams, ‘2 Funny for the Festival’, the Mirror, 24 August 2002, p. 7 32 Interview with Mark Watson, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 31 October 2012 33 Mark Watson, Live, 2 Entertain, 2011, 2EDVD0645

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Delivery Deadpan Today, although many stand-ups follow Mort Sahl’s example by adopting everyday rhythms of speech, some still take a more stylised approach. Deadpan comedians are a classic example. The word ‘deadpan’ suggests an impassive, expressionless manner, with voice, face and body giving away little hint of emotion. Many stand-ups start their careers by adopting a deadpan delivery, because it offers something to hide behind. Jo Brand, for example, says: The way it evolved was just because I was very nervous, and that’s how it naturally came out, I didn’t plan it like that, it was just the first few kind of open spots that I did, I found myself talking like that. And I didn’t really even notice it until people started taking the piss out of it, you know. I got all this stuff about reading the football scores and all that kind of thing.1 Dave Gorman took a similar approach, for similar reasons: I was very deadpan when I first started. Which was largely a defence mechanism … I’ve seen so many other people starting in the same way since, where you think, ‘If I appear

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not to care, then if it doesn’t go very well, it hasn’t hurt me. But if I appear to care about this, and it doesn’t go very well, then I’m fucked.’2 Shazia Mirza was the same, being ‘very deadpan’ because she was ‘very scared’.3 All three comedians realised the limitations of the style they had adopted. Brand says: ‘If you do a series of very deadpan one-liners … it’s impossible to keep that up for any longer than about 20 minutes without the audience getting bored shitless, to be honest. Because there’s something about that rhythm that’s slightly sort of narcoleptic.’4 Gorman agrees, saying, ‘deadpan acts find it hard to get beyond the 40 minutes’. He slowly realised that ‘caring about it makes it go better anyway … showing them you care about it means you’re less likely to die.’5 Mirza changed her delivery because she felt it was inauthentic: ‘The deadpan wasn’t me, the gags weren’t me and the material wasn’t personal. Now that I’m very relaxed onstage and I’m more myself … how I am offstage is exactly how I am onstage. And that’s exactly how I think it should be.’6 For Brand, dropping the deadpan was an important move, and she took concrete action to achieve it: I just felt that I had to loosen up a bit and be a bit more conversational and have a few more strings to my bow, rather than just going de-der-de-der-de-der at people. So the way I did that was I deliberately asked people to put me in as a compère. So that I knew that I would have to sort of talk to the audience, and I would have to kind of be more spontaneous than just doing my set.7 Harry Hill, on the other hand, liked deadpan comedy but found he was incapable of doing it. When he started on the London comedy circuit, he admired deadpan comics like Stewart Lee, Jack Dee, Norman Lovett, Arnold Brown and Jo Brand:

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[T]here’s something I do love about that, because it is so dependent on the kind of delivery and the quality of the gags, you know, there’s no kind of frills – moving around, you know, pulling funny faces, none of that. So when I started off, I wanted to be like that. In an endearing admission, he explains why he never achieved the deadpan style: ‘I mean my problem with being a deadpan comedian was I used to smile a lot. I’m a bit too pleased with myself, so, you know, I would laugh at my own jokes.’8 For some comics, deadpan is more than a mask to hide behind, and it becomes the style they adopt for their whole career. Jack Dee is widely known as a deadpan comedian, but having said this, his delivery is by no means expressionless. He’s probably been given the label because of his miserable, surly, cynical persona. Unlike many stand-ups, he never seems to be making an effort, and rarely shows any obvious sign of warmth towards his audience. His delivery is calm, slow and quiet. His eyes seem cold, his lids slightly lowered. When his face is in repose, the corners of his mouth turn down. But this is only his neutral state onstage – he often moves out of it. Sometimes, his eyes will gleam, or he will smile or maybe even laugh. He screws his face up, or impersonates other people. The laughter he gets from the way he says ‘Are you?’ in his Gladiators routine gives a strong indication of the range and skill of his expression. The subtlety of Dee’s performance suggests that for him, deadpan hasn’t been adopted as an artificial style, but is a natural form of expression extending out of his offstage self. Steven Wright is a very different deadpan. He started performing in American comedy clubs in the late 1970s, and has perfected possibly the most minimalist style in the whole of stand-up comedy. He delivers a series of short jokes – one after another – which give a jarringly bizarre view of reality, like: ‘I got up the other day and everything in my apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.

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[laughter]’ Or: ‘It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t wanna paint it. [laughter]’9 His voice is deep, slightly croaky, and it sounds as if overwhelming weariness has robbed it of all expression. There is none of Dee’s range – but even here there is still inflection and rhythm, albeit incredibly subtle. He points out that because he is so deadpan, ‘everything is magnified’, so that even the way he takes a sip of water, or the exact moment he puts his glass back on the stool can make a difference: ‘You can take the pause in jokes right to the edge – almost of boredom, and in doing so you create a tension which is palpable.’10

The range of expression In reducing expression to a minimum, what Wright does is to highlight how much of it other comedians use. One of the difficulties of describing a moment of stand-up is that there’s so much going on, more than any formal system of transcription could take in, no matter how scientific or precise. There are infinite subtleties of tone of voice, pace of delivery, facial expression, hand gesture and whole body movement. Pretty much the whole of a joke’s funniness can be contained in the merest gleam of an eye or the quirky way a particular word is pronounced. Steve Martin has written about the pleasure he found in the physical, non-verbal aspects of his performance: ‘Some nights it seemed that it wasn’t the line that got the laugh, but the tip of my finger. I tried to make voice and posture as crucial as jokes and gags.’11 Some comics really explore the full range of human expression. In a performance in the late 1990s, Bill Bailey suddenly forms his hands into beak-like mouths, turning them into puppets. His hands engage in a quickfire argument, the right apparently a dog, the left a cat: ‘“Rruff!” “Mew!” “Rruff!” “Mew!” “Rruff!” “Mew!” “Rruff!” “Mew!”’ The right hand starts slightly higher than the left, and as the

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argument continues, he forces the left further down. Bailey’s face takes it all in, staring with eyes wide. Suddenly the left hand leaps up and springs open, fingers splayed, and the voice Bailey gives it changes from a squeaky ‘Mew!’ to a loud, deep, guttural, ‘BLUUUURGGHH!!! YUURGGH!!’ The dog hand mutters a muffled, ‘Oh my Gawd!’ and bounces off, apparently terrified. The cat hand reverts to its normal shape with a ‘Bip! Zzhhhhh!’ – and chuckles to itself. Bailey lowers his hand, and looks at the audience. His eyes gleam with self-satisfaction and expectation, as if to say, ‘Well that’s given you plenty to think about – what did you make of it?’12 There are small waves of laughter as the sequence starts and these build as the argument between the hands heats up. There’s a full laugh when the dog hand runs away, and another when the left hand transforms back from monster to cat. When Bailey looks at the audience at the end, there’s a big round of applause. It’s amazing how effective a naked hand puppet show can be. At the Orchard Theatre, Dartford, in June 2004, Ross Noble generates a huge amount of energy onstage, sweating through his shirt by the end of it. He demonstrates what it would be like to be a puppet, being controlled by someone else. Putting his whole body to work, he flops about the stage, and whilst he may lack a formal training in mime, he’s surprisingly convincing in suggesting that he’s being manipulated by an external force. In another routine, he starts punching and karate kicking an imaginary panda with real gusto. In yet another, he flops his long, curly hair over to one side of his head and pretends it’s a squirrel.13 As well as taking pure silliness into the realms of art, such routines raise one of the hoary old questions people ask about stand-up: ‘Which is more important, material or delivery?’ Of course, it’s an impossible conundrum. The ideal is that the two are inseparable and indivisible, working together in perfect synthesis. In fact, there are some primarily verbal or conceptual jokes which would survive well on the printed page, and other

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examples where the entire gag resides in the way it’s performed – even if it contains words. Al Murray provides an excellent example of the latter, in a routine in which the Pub Landlord argues that anything sounds suspicious in a German accent, adding: ‘Somewhere in the background you can hear the whine of bomb bay doors opening, yeah? [laughter]’ To illustrate the point, he recites the nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, with a stereotypical German character­isation which is clearly drawn from an interrogating SS Officer in a war movie. He starts in a staccato shout: ‘TVINKLE!! – TVINKLE!! LIDDLE SCHTAAAAARRRGH!!! [laughter]’ Now he marches slowly and deliberately across the stage, his arms and legs straight and rigid, making the audience laugh all the way across. He stops, points his finger at his mouth as if to indicate mockpuzzlement. His voice becomes slower, calmer, more sing-song, with an almost obscene lilt: ‘How I vundaarr – [laughter]’ Giving a dismissive, almost camp little wave: ‘Vot you are. [laughter]’ Snapping back to full-volume staccato, starting at an absurdly high pitch: ‘UP ABOVE!! [laughter] THE VORLD! SO! HIGH!!’ Making a diamond shape with his hands: ‘LIKE A DIAMUNT! IN THE SKY!!’ Pushing the mania to boiling point, the words twisted almost beyond recognition: ‘DVINGLE-UH! DVINGLE-UH! LULULULIDDLE SCHTAAAAARRRGH!!! [laughter]’ Now he relaxes and mimes sucking on a cigarette, as if post-coital. This gets a big laugh, and one or two people clap. He runs the two fingers holding the mimed cigarette slowly along each eyebrow, and his voice becomes slow and lilting again: ‘How – I vundarr. [laughter]’ Miming another drag on the cigarette: ‘Vot you aaare. [laughter]’14 Obviously, delivery is everything here. The material is just a nursery rhyme – a well-known text, not normally thought of as comical, which the Pub Landlord himself describes as ‘devoid of content’. I’ve found the challenge of trying to conjure up this routine for the reader a bit like creative writing, and although I might have succeeded in giving a hint of what’s funny about the actual performance here, I realise that I’ve missed a lot of the nuance and detail that makes it work. As Murray explains,

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the richness of what he does here was discovered by developing the routine night after night in front of an audience: [F]our or five shows in it was getting bigger and more extravagant and you’d find new things … I mean I did sit down and write, ‘How about doing nursery rhymes in a German accent? That would make them sound fishy, wouldn’t it?’But I never thought, ‘Well I’ll act it out like this, and at that point I’ll do this, that and the other.’ That all came directly from performance – because there’s no way of knowing actually what an audience is going to go for in that.15

When comedians laugh When I was a kid, I remember being told that only bad comedians laugh at their own jokes. I don’t know what the thinking behind this was. Maybe the idea was that it makes the comic look conceited? Or perhaps it was seen as a sign of desperation? Certainly, it was a ridiculous thing to say, given the number and variety of highly skilled, successful comedians who do actually laugh at their own jokes, including Gladys Morgan, Tommy Cooper, Ken Goodwin, Billy Connolly, Phyllis Diller, Eddie Murphy and Bill Hicks. In fact, the phenomenon predates stand-up. In music hall, performers like Billy Williams and Randolph Sutton would use a kind of laugh-singing technique, chuckling in a slightly forced way between the verses and even while they sang the lines.16 There are plenty of good reasons why stand-ups laugh onstage, but conceit and desperation aren’t among them. In fact, laughter can become a key part of the overall delivery, creating a number of different effects. First of all, when the comedian laughs, it signals that something is particularly funny. Billy Connolly often laughs in anticipation of what he’s going to say, and this creates great expectation in the audience. After all, if Connolly’s laughing, it must be pretty

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funny.17 When the comic laughs after the punchline, it creates a lovely moment of sharing – performer and audience are united in their enjoyment of a funny idea. Laughing onstage also suggests authenticity. It implies a moment where the comedian loses control and seems to allow us a quick glimpse of the real person behind the façade of the stage persona. I was never a habitual laugher when I was a stand-up, but there were times when I cracked up onstage, and they were among the most glorious moments I experienced. Laughing is always a pleasure, but to experience that moment of joy and unselfconsciousness in such a public context – and for my laughter to boost the audience’s – felt like a very special kind of acceptance. Particular comedians put their own laughter to more particular uses. Phyllis Diller, for example, had an amazing laugh that veered from an uncontrolled gurgle to a raucous bark. For her, the laugh was part of her eccentricity, something which glued together the gags and the persona. Her comedy revelled in grotesqueness – both her own and that of the world around her – and the laughter was outrageous enough to fit in perfectly. Its sonic properties were such that sometimes simply hearing her go, ‘Ah ha ha ha ha ha!!’ was all that was needed to make the audience laugh. She also used the laugh as punctuation, adding beats to get the rhythm of a line perfect: ‘But we still have a lot of fun in here every night, one woman nearly died laughing, ha ha! But I’m all right now. [laughter]’ The ‘ha ha!’ adds an extra clause to the set up, giving the sentence a three-part structure. It also cements the idea that Diller is celebrating her own success – thus sharpening the contrast with the downbeat delivery of the punchline.18 Eddie Murphy’s laugh is a kind of catchphrase. By the time he made his 1983 concert film Delirious, his laugh had become his trademark, thanks to appearances on Saturday Night Live and a starring role in the previous year’s movie 48 Hours. At the end of a long routine in which Murphy plays a man drunkenly accusing a female relative of being a Bigfoot, there’s a big response from the audience and as the

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cheering, whistling and applause dies down, somebody shouts something. Murphy replies, ‘Do that shit again?’ and does the laugh. It’s a salvo of deep, rasping inhalations, bringing to mind an asthmatic walrus. Just hearing this familiar sound makes the audience laugh, cheer and whistle.19 Bill Hicks has a very different kind of laugh – a thin, bitter ironic one. Whereas most stand-ups use laughter to highlight how funny something is, Hicks uses it to emphasise how unfunny something is. Sometimes it’s a way of demonstrating his bitterness, like when he recalls his girlfriend leaving him and taking the TV, the bed and the VCR with her. Other times it’s a way of introducing apparently unpromising subject matter, like abortion. ‘Let’s talk about mass murder of young, unborn children, see if we can’t coalesce into one big, healthy gut laugh,’ he says, and lets out a chuckle so mirthless it’s almost demonic.20 What he says might suggest he opposes abortion, but in fact he goes on to make a scathing comic attack on so-called pro-lifers. The point of talking about ‘mass murder of young, unborn children’ is to really ram home how unsuitable the subject is for stand-up. By laughing at the very idea of this, Hicks does the opposite of sharing amusement with the audience. When his laugh finishes, there’s just silence. It’s as if he’s emphasising how different he is from the people he’s playing to, showing that what he finds funny is very different from what they find funny. Or it could be a joyless admission of how unfunny the world can be. Either way, it’s a very unusual strategy for a comedian.

Notes 1

Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004

2

Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004

3

Interview with Shazia Mirza, by telephone, 28 June 2004

4

Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004

5

Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004

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6

Interview with Shazia Mirza, by telephone, 28 June 2004

7

Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004

8

Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004

9

Both examples from ‘7’s and Museums’, Steven Wright, I Have a Pony, WEA Records, no date, 7599253352 OMCD 1150

10 John Hind, The Comic Inquisition: Conversations with Great Comedians, London: Virgin, 1991, p. 53 11 Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 141 12 Bill Bailey, Live: Cosmic Jam, Universal, 2005, 8236484 13 Ross Noble, Noodlemeister, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 14 Al Murray, The Pub Landlord Live: My Gaff, My Rules, Universal, 2001, 8208892 15 Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012 16 For example, see Billy Williams, ‘When Father Papered the Parlour’ (various artists, Gems of the Music Hall, Flapper/ Pavilion Records, 1993, PAST CD 7005), and Randolph Sutton ‘My Girl’s Mother’ (various artists, Music Hall Alive: Edwardian Stars Recorded on Stage 1938 & 1948, Music Hall Masters, 2003, MHM022/3) 17 Tony Allen makes this point well in Attitude: Wanna Make Something of It? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, pp. 29–30 18 See Phyllis Diller, The Best of Phyllis Diller, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH1112 (esp. ‘The Way I Dress’ for an example of Diller’s laugh making the audience laugh; and ‘Don’t Eat Here’ for the quoted joke). Diller herself acknowledged using her laugh as punctuation ( see Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, p. 231) 19 Eddie Murphy, Delirious!, CIC Video/Eddie Murphy Television, 1983, VHR 2162 20 See ‘You Can’t Get Bitter’, Bill Hicks, LoveLaughterAndTruth, Rykodisc, 2002, RCD 10631; and ‘Pro Life’, Bill Hicks, Rant in E-Minor, Rykodisc, 1997, RCD 10353

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Instant character There’s something that occurs so regularly in stand-up that anybody who has spent any time watching it will recognise it. The comic is telling a gag, recalling an anecdote, talking about a particular person or describing a fantasy, and in the course of this, he or she lapses into acting it out. This is different from a formal character piece signalled by a change of costume, like Victoria Wood’s yellow-bereted Lancashire girl or Stacey Leanne Paige, her hilariously savage parody of cruise-singer-turnedcelebrity Jane McDonald. The kind of acting out I’m talking about involves an instant transition from narrator to character, achieved through tone of voice, posture or facial expression. There’s a huge variety of characters a stand-up can momentarily become, from the stereotyped Irishman of the formulaic gag, to a celebrity or a politician or just a particular type of person. Even animals and inanimate objects can be characterised. This is an incredibly common mode of performance in stand-up, and most comedians use it in their acts. Eddie Izzard calls it ‘the motherlode’.1 Yet it has so rarely been discussed that it doesn’t even have a standard word or phrase to describe it. American comedian Judy Carter calls it ‘mimicking’.2 Tony Allen has labelled it ‘snapshot characterisation’.3 The phrase I coined myself – when working on stand-up with students – is ‘instant character’. The roots of instant character can be found in the kind of acting that takes place in everyday conversation. A book

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published in the 1920s notes how shop girls often amuse each other by imitating the customers, in a way which ‘would delight the heart of a vaudeville audience’.4 Some comedians have directly cited such everyday performance as an influence. George Carlin, for example, recalls how his mother would act things out: ‘She’d come home from the bus and tell a story about something that just happened, and she could do all five characters.’5 In his classic essay ‘The Street Scene’, Bertolt Brecht discusses how witnesses to a traffic accident act out what they saw to explain it more clearly, and sees this as a ‘basic model’ for his epic theatre. In a footnote, he also talks about comical instant character in everyday conversation, for example when a next-door neighbour takes off ‘the rapacious nature of our common landlord’. He notes that such characterisations can be linked together with ‘some form of commentary’, a description which strongly suggests a stand-up routine. He also remarks how this kind of characterisation is inflected with the performer’s attitude: ‘The imitation is summary or selective, deliberately leaving out those occasions where the landlord strikes our neighbour as “perfectly sensible”, though such occasions of course occur. He is far from giving a rounded picture; for that would have no comic impact at all.’6

Attitude This is a great description of how instant character tends to work in stand-up – the comedian’s attitude is perfectly clear in the way he or she performs a characterization, and a lot of the humour flows from this. In a routine from the early 1990s, Jack Dee imitates his politically correct neighbour, who wears a badge which says, ‘You smoke – I choke.’ Dee adopts the neighbour’s voice to say the words on the badge, making it sound infantile and slightly croaky. When he’s said the words, to make the point more clearly, he characterises the



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neighbour’s face. The eyes become exaggeratedly sincere, the brow wrinkles with concern, the mouth turns further down at the corners, and he moves his head about slightly to suggest excessive earnestness. It gets a laugh. He continues: ‘“You smoke, I choke. [laughter] ‘S my cause, that is. [laughter] You smoke, I go ahcuh hugh huh huh!” [laughter]’7 This last bit is Dee’s impression of his neighbour’s coughing. He curls up his upper lip, screws up his eyes, and emits a pathetic, squeaky cough which sounds like crying. The whole characterisation is shot through with the contempt which Dee feels for this person. It’s reminiscent of a school bully imitating somebody to make fun of them, generating a hilarity born of cruelty. In this case, the attitude encapsulated in the characterisation is a kind of personal, disgruntled cynicism, but in other cases it’s more political. In his 2001 Dambusters show, Mark Thomas chronicles the successful prank-laden campaign he helped to run against the Ilisu Dam project, which would have wreaked environmental havoc in Turkey and devastated the local Kurdish population. One of the characters which Thomas brings to life in the story is Lord Weir, the chairman of Balfour Beatty PLC, the company contracted to build the dam. Weir is introduced with a compact verbal sketch: ‘He reeks of alcohol, he carries a stick, he is a ball of gout with a mouth. [laughter]’ When Thomas makes Weir speak, he gives him the stereotyped voice of a patronising aristocrat. A few jokes down the line, he cranks the characterisation up a few notches into the realm of pure caricature: That man should just be followed by a bloke playing the organ, everywhere. [laughter] ‘Hello, my name’s Lord Weir!’ bam-bam-bam-baaaam! [laughter] ‘Hurr ha ha harr! I’m a little bit camp, but I’m very frightening!’ bam-bambam-baaaam! [laughter] ‘My name’s Lord Weir, I was touched as a boy, it hurt me, but I liked it!’ bam-bam-bambaaaam! [laughter]’8

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It’s a cartoon melodrama, with Thomas imitating both the villain and the bam-bam-bam-baaaam! of the organ. The Lord Weir voice has become irresistibly funny, with a gleeful, gloating tone and a fabulously evil laugh. Thomas points out that his characterisation of Weir is based on actual meetings with the man, but acknowledges his own bias: You know, both him and I would see each other in very, very strict cartoon terms … Actually I think I said … you couldn’t have got better if you’d put him in a top hat and given him a cigar, you know. When you say that, you’re not only describing him, but you’re also making an admission of actually how you’re seeing him.9 Both Dee and Thomas do what Brecht’s next-door neighbour did when imitating the landlord: they present a selective characterisation which shows their particular view of the people they are imitating. Interestingly, Thomas acknowledges Brecht as an important influence: I’ve come at it from a slightly odd angle [of] someone who, you know, studied theatre arts and has always had this kind of eye on Bertolt Brecht … He was one of the most inspirational and influential writers that I ever encountered – and thinkers on theatre … That as much as, you know, Lenny Bruce and Dave Allen has influenced what I’ve done.10 While Dee’s neighbour could well be a generic, fictional liberal do-gooder, Thomas’s Lord Weir is a real person, and this takes us back to the ethical question of how stand-ups deal with the real world onstage, and particularly how they represent other people. Dambusters also features Thomas’s friends and colleagues, like Nick Hildyard of campaigning organisation The Corner House, and Kerim Yildiz, a Kurdish human rights campaigner and former prisoner of conscience. Unsurprisingly, Thomas’s characterisation of these people is far more sympathetic than his sizzling cartoon of Lord Weir.



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He acknowledges onstage that representing people he loves and finds inspirational is ‘really fucking odd’.11 However, as Thomas points out, even Nick and Kerim are not characterised with literal exactitude: They were very funny, because they’d bring along their friends, and their friends were the most interesting things, because they’d say, ‘Oh – that was Nick!’ Do you know what I mean, even though Nick said, ‘It doesn’t sound like me!’ I said, ‘Well, your accent’s quite hard, Nick, but you know, it’s actually not about sounding like you. It’s about getting what you’re like and what you’re like in that moment and conveying it. And it doesn’t matter that I don’t enunciate the words exactly the same as you. It’s a thumbnail sketch that’s there to kind of quickly show people roughly what you’re like.’12 Thomas’s version of Kerim bears a slight resemblance to Harry Enfield’s 1980s Greek-Cypriot kebab shop character Stavros, and comes complete with a catchphrase, ‘Was hilarious!’ This is liberally deployed in Kerim’s anecdotes about his abuse at the hands of the Turkish authorities, his cunning attempts to outwit them and the problems he experiences with British immigration officials who keep mistaking him for Saddam Hussein. At the end of the first half of the show, Thomas describes how he felt when the real Kerim first saw the impersonation. Asking, ‘What right have I got to tell his stories?’ he recalls how nervous he felt about facing Kerim, and hearing how he would react to the way he was represented. He brings the moment to a head by giving Kerim’s reaction: ‘Was hilarious!’13 In fact, Thomas’s portrayal of Kerim is steeped in affection and respect which transmits to the audience: We did a couple of gigs in Edinburgh, to raise money for Kurdish human rights. And we did a panel afterwards and I introduced Kerim, and he got this amazing round of

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applause, you know, because they knew him, they felt they knew him, and in many ways they did.14

Techniques of instant character Instant character works not by representing people, animals or objects with literal exactitude, but by doing just enough with the face, voice and body to paint a picture in the mind of the audience. This makes the stage extraordinarily pliable, capable of being filled with a whole universe of characters, events and sound effects – all conjured up at the comic’s command. Some stand-ups act out whole scenes, which can be extremely rich and nuanced. In a 1968 routine, Richard Pryor shows a theatre company visiting a prison, portraying a whole cast of characters to do so. He becomes a gruff-voiced guard introducing the company to the prisoners, then a pretentious actor with a pseudoEnglish accent who explains that the play is about ‘a young, southern girl who falls in love with a black’. Hearing this, the prison guard tries to stop the play, complaining it is ‘a little too controversial’, but the actor explains, ‘It’s quite all right, the nigger gets killed.’ Then Pryor enacts a play-withina-routine, playing all the characters: a white patriarch; his son; his daughter; and Jim the blacksmith, an outrageous stereotype of a subservient southern black man. The play ends with Ben telling the son that he is going to marry his sister, but instead of the expected lynching, the son accepts Ben as his future brother-in-law, explaining, ‘We’ll be the first in the South to know true freedom and true love.’ Outraged at this, the prison guard interrupts the play, demanding the ending he was promised: ‘Nobody leave, I wanna dead nigger out here!’15 There’s an amazing complexity in the levels of fiction in this routine, and the fact that Pryor can become a whole cast of identifiable characters shows his outstanding technical



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excellence as a performer. In a later routine, he talks about hunting in the woods, creating a set of images which range from the delicate to the slapstick. Observing that snakes are so frightening that they make you run into trees, he brings this to life by quickly turning his body and walking into his hand, which he has raised to head height to indicate the tree trunk. ‘Pah!’ he says, voicing the impact of face against wood, and the audience laugh at the knockabout image he’s created so simply. Later, he shows a deer drinking water by bending his body forward, side on from the audience and lapping with his mouth. For an instant, he becomes the hunter again, making the leaves crunch as he steps forward. Then he’s the deer again, snapping upright, facing the audience and staying absolutely still. His frightened eyes move from left to right, and there’s a big laugh and some applause at the accuracy of the image. He extends the moment, getting waves of laughter by making the deer narrow its eyes suspiciously, look behind itself and tip its head to one side with a suspicious look on its face.16 What makes this so effective is that he does so little to create such a vivid comic image. Just as in the acting that Brecht envisaged, the performer is just as clearly present as the character he is representing, with the picture of the deer superimposed on Pryor’s body. The scope of the scenes which comedians act out in their stand-up acts is increased by the fact that modern audiences are familiar with cinematic convention. This means they are easily able to cope with a sudden scene change. Lenny Bruce would directly refer to the language of cinema when acting out his routines. In his appearance on The Steve Allen Show, 5 April 1959, Bruce performs a routine about a boy building a model aeroplane and getting high on the glue. He exclaims, ‘I’m the Louis Pasteur of junkiedom!’ and plans to exploit his discovery. Then Bruce changes the scene: ‘Cut to the toy store.’ In the toy store, we see another child asking for various items before getting to what he’s really come to buy – two thousand tubes of airplane glue. The simple device of using

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the cinematic term ‘cut to’ allows an easy transition. His next routine is a parody of a Hollywood issue movie, and he uses a similar device, switching between scenes with the phrase, ‘Now we dissolve to the exterior of the schoolyard.’17 Today, audiences are so familiar with the idea of instant character scenes in stand-up that such obvious devices are no longer necessary to effect a transition. Ross Noble describes how he works when he’s acting something out: [Y]ou’re actually making people visualise what’s happening, obviously with your own physicality … Setting up things on the stage, and then obviously sort of playing around with people’s perspective of what’s happening … Like when I was doing … the Jesus thing … One minute, Jesus is on the ground, looking right up … to that guy up the top there … and then by just standing and, like, looking down, instantly the people watching the stage go from there, all of a sudden … the camera’s gone up there.18

Functions of instant character Sometimes, stand-ups create running characters which take on a life of their own, reappearing in show after show – thus helping the comic to build a familiar rapport with the audience. In Richard Pryor’s 1983 concert film Here and Now, he finishes a routine then wanders over to where the microphone stand and the stool are. The expression on his face changes, and he starts to talk in a different voice: ‘You know – when I first –’ He pauses, chewing imaginary tobacco. The audience applaud cheer and whistle. This response might mystify anybody unfamiliar with Pryor’s earlier work, but the audience are showing their recognition of a familiar character. Mudbone – an old southern black man with a penchant for tall tales – was brought into Pryor’s act in the 1970s, and unlike, say, Victoria Wood’s



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running characters, he is conjured up without the aid of a costume change. A hesitant, barking voice, an infirm posture and a chewing motion with the mouth is all that it takes, and by the time Here and Now is filmed, the audience can recognise him from the smallest cues. Similarly, Jim Davidson has a named running character which he produces with just a change of voice. Davidson’s character is also supposed to be black, but unlike Mudbone, Chalkie is very much a white person’s crude stereotype. His voice is instantly recognisable – a cartoonish West Indian accent, in a strangulated tone with a pitch slightly higher than that of Davidson’s normal voice. As well as cropping up regularly in Davidson’s act, Chalkie may have had a life beyond it. Certainly, Jimmy Jones – another comic who emerged from the working men’s clubs – used exactly the same Chalkie voice when he imitated West Indians in the 1970s.19 Tony Allen remembers seeing many acts doing similar characters when he made forays into the club scene at the end of that decade.20 Another very useful function of instant character is to allow the comic to comment on how he or she is being received by the audience. Bill Hicks does this in his savage routine in which he asks people who work in advertising and marketing to kill themselves. He takes on the character of the ad men he imagines are in the audience, and voices their responses to his suggestion. Ben Elton uses a similar technique. After a rude word or an obscene reference, he puts on an uptight voice with a poshed-up northern accent – which vaguely resembles that of Mary Whitehouse – and protests: ‘Well Mr Elton, frankly that was a lovely observed piece of satire and suddenly you had to bring your penis into it, [laughter] I don’t know why!’21 Mark Thomas does much the same thing after a brief reference to ‘fistfucking’, but in this case, he imagines different kinds of reaction, using first a posh, uptight voice, then a shaky, slightly seedy one: Ha ha, there’s some of you out there, just going, ‘I, I didn’t know it was going to be like this, darling, I really – [laughter]

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Fistfucking in the first two minutes? Marvellous!’ [laughter] And then there’s half a dozen of you in there going, ‘I’ve got a website that I need to tell ‘im about,’ [laughter] so the, um – 22 Voicing the audience’s thoughts is a common technique, and it’s useful in various ways. It allows comedians to anticipate and neutralise any potential bad reactions to what they’re saying. It’s another way of drawing attention to their own performance processes – an effective trick in stand-up. Also, by showing that the comedian understands how the audience might be reacting, he or she demonstrates control of the situation, as well as strengthening the rapport between stage and auditorium. A third function of instant character is simply to allow the comic to show off. Acting out different scenes, performing simple mime and demonstrating a range of voices and vocal sound effects allows comedians to show the range of performance they’re capable of. If a particular characterisation is performed with enough energy and panache, it can get a round of applause in its own right, regardless of the gag or comic idea it’s tied to. Examples of this range from African-American comedian Jimmy Walker demonstrating for the white punters the way the MC at the Harlem Apollo would introduce him; to Lenny Henry doing a full verse and chorus of Prince’s ‘Kiss’ on the slender pretext of this being what he felt like doing when he played the Mandela concert at Wembley Stadium; to Al Murray’s crazed impression of a Frenchman repeatedly shouting ‘I call myself Marcel!’23 In each case – while there are laughs along the way – it is the sheer chutzpah which has the biggest impact. The comic pushes and pushes the characterisation, driving the energy up, and when the piece ends, the audience explode into an unavoidable round of applause.



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Emotional range Perhaps the most extraordinary use of instant character is when comedians act out painful, traumatic or terrifying experiences. At the Laughs in the Park festival in St Albans in July 2011, Tommy Tiernan presents the crowd – who are presumably at an open air comedy gig to have a straightforward, uncomplicated good time – with a routine about being gathered around a relative’s deathbed. In a powerful, hushed voice, interspersed with long pauses, he slowly, masterfully ratchets up the tension. Even with all the potential distractions of performing out of doors, he manages to summon up pure, rapt silences. He talks about the dying relative’s dying breath – ‘It’s called the death breath’ – and imitates it in a chilling rasp. He leaves a daringly long pause, during which it seems the relative has finally expired – then imitates another breath. Now he adds his own comment: ‘However much you love that person – [laughter] you think, “Oh for fuck’s sake!”’24 What makes this such a audacious bit of comedy is that the build-up to the final, incongruous exasperation is properly imbued with the emotion of the upsetting situation he’s portraying. On a technical level, the performance skills he employs in acting the scene out are formidable. Billy Connolly re-enacts an incident from his childhood, on holiday in Rothesay. Connolly becomes his father, instructing his younger self to take a family photograph on the Box Brownie camera. Then he becomes himself as a child, small and vulnerable, but canny enough to know what will happen if he messes it up. Frozen by the pressure, the young Connolly struggles until his father beats him around the head. It’s a brilliant piece of performance. The father is a rounded character, not a two-dimensional monster. His first words are kind and paternal, and the bad temper and violence emerge bit by bit. Connolly’s recreation of his own childish wailing is a hilarious yodel, which gets gales of laughter in its own right. As he gets more upset, this changes to ‘Buddhist chanting

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mode’, a guttural, rhythmic grunt: ‘Mm-nm-ng-mn-mn-nmningh-nun-yun-nggh-nn-naiyayyyy-deewaydutt!!’ This draws out more big laughs.25 It’s the detail of the acting which does most of the work. The scene Connolly paints with his voice and body is vivid and upsetting and – as with Tiernan – it’s a testament to his skill that he transforms it into something which the audience can laugh at. Richard Pryor effects a similar transformation by re-enacting his heart attack. Twisting his right fist in the centre of his chest, he makes his heart talk in a fierce, threatening voice: ‘Thinkin’ ‘bout dyin’ now, aintcha?’ His own voice is a frantic, panic-stricken falsetto: ‘Yeah, I’m thinkin’ ‘bout dyin’, I’m thinkin’ ‘bout dyin’!! [laughter]’ The angry heart replies: ‘You didn’t think about it when you was eatin’ all that pork! [laughter]’ ‘Pork’ is emphasised with another twist of the fist, and Pryor keels over from his knees to his back, writhing on the floor, his eyes wrinkled hard shut, his mouth wide open in a silent scream. It’s a truly amazing moment, because while Pryor recreates his agony across the floor of the stage, the audience’s laughter erupts into a storm of applause and whistling.26 A man is reliving a physical trauma that could easily have killed him, and the audience is ecstatic. The ability of comics like Tiernan, Connolly and Pryor to present something so naked and raw, to act it out so well, and to turn it into something funny is truly remarkable. Stand-up comedy is thought of as merely popular entertainment, but I defy anybody to find anything more daring and profound in the realm of theatre and performance than in routines like this. Clearly, stand-up can have an emotional range that goes far beyond just getting laughs. Sometimes comedians can provoke unexpected responses. Phill Jupitus has a bit where he talks about his fear of spiders. Obviously, this is not in the same league of trauma as being beaten as a child or having a heart attack, but Jupitus still conjures up an evocative scene. He talks about helping to move some furniture in the cellar with



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his father-in-law and encountering an enormous arachnid. At one point, the father-in-law picks it up. Slowing the pace for dramatic effect, Jupitus says: ‘The legs of this spider –’ Then he splays the fingers of both hands, and slowly intertwines them, staring intently at what he’s doing. There’s an audible groan, as the audience anticipate the unpleasant image he’s going to create. He clenches the fingers of his left hand, and wiggles the fingers of his right. The audience laugh, acknowledging how vividly his simple mime is showing the wriggling legs of the spider emerging from his father-in-law’s fist. Then he finishes his sentence: ‘– stickin’ out from ‘is knuckles.’27 The groan is as interesting as the laugh, because it shows that Jupitus is doing more than just amusing his audience. He remembers: ‘I did have a woman burst into tears and run out of the show in Edinburgh when I did that bit.’28 One of the things Mark Thomas likes about doing shows like Dambusters is that they allow him to explore a bigger emotional range: ‘I’ve found the nice thing about doing kind of longer shows, like two-hour shows, is that you get a chance to go through all sorts of different moods. You can take audiences into places they didn’t expect to go.’29 The end of that show certainly takes the audience to such a place. He talks about going to a restaurant in Turkey while he was working on the campaign against the dam. On the next table are a judge, a prosecutor and an intelligence officer, all of whom he knows are important in helping to carry out the Turkish state’s persecution of the Kurds – even though they are dressed like golfers. He realises that he can’t confront these people without endangering the people he’s with. This makes him start to remember all of the Kurds he’s spoken to, and the stories they have told him. It’s an urgent, furious rant, detailing appalling human rights abuses: Each and every one! From the mothers of the disappeared who sit there in Ankara – Women – who have all their crime – is to stand on the street, with photographs of their

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loved ones, who have been disappeared – as in Chile, as in Argentina, as in El Salvador – and they will tell you – how the police beat them – each and every week when they stand there with their photograph. And you sit there, and you go, ‘Fuck, that’s incredible!’ and they lift their shawl, and you can see – their necks and their shoulders are black and blue! The list continues, going through torture techniques, Kurds forced to walk across a minefield by the Turkish authorities, and women raped by the military. It’s a terrible, gut wrenching experience hearing the real stories Thomas has been told, and his anger takes him to the verge of tears as he gets to the end. ‘And I wanted to kill those golfers!!’ he shouts. ‘I’m a fuckin’ pacifist and I wanted to kill those golfers!’ He briefly describes a revenge fantasy with a woman emerging from the fountain in the middle of the restaurant and shooting them dead. Then his anger is spent. In the aftermath, he is quiet and shaken. The show ends with him imagining the woman from the restaurant telling him to go back to Britain and ‘tell them everything.’ ‘And I haven’t even really touched the surface,’ he admits, his voice aching with regret. Throughout this whole sequence, there’s a taut silence in the audience, which stretches across the long, long pauses he takes.30 Achieving this level of anger at the end of the show was important to Thomas: Just from a performance point of view, every night, there are two things that I did. And one of them was to re-jig that kind of long list of atrocities. So I’d remind myself of things that I might not have mentioned the night before, and kind of include them, and just kind of put them in my mind, that they would be there.31 Crucially, there is nothing to relieve the anger. There’s no gag to let the audience off the hook, to release the tension in a huge, relieving laugh. The only relief comes from the resounding applause. When I saw the show in Canterbury, the



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people pouring out of the theatre at the end looked subdued or shaken. The political effect of choosing to end the show in this way is clear – the issue is left burning in the minds of the audience, making it difficult to forget. The artistic effect is to prove once again how elastic the boundaries of stand-up comedy are, and show how far it can go beyond its basic remit of getting a laugh.

Notes 1

Stand-Up with Alan Davies, BBC One, 19 June 2000

2

Judy Carter, Stand-Up Comedy: The Book, New York, Dell Publishing, 1989, p. 77

3

Tony Allen, A Summer in the Park: A Journal of Speakers’ Corner, London: Freedom Press, 2004, p. 73

4

Frances Donovan in The Saleslady, 1929, cited in Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, pp. 150–1

5

Franklyn Ajaye, Comic Insights: the Art of Stand-Up Comedy, Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2002, p. 84

6

John Willett (ed and trans.), Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen, 1978, p. 123; also see p. 121

7

Jack Dee Live, Channel 4, 13 October 1995

8

‘Lord Weir and Mike Welton’, Mark Thomas, Dambusters: Live 2001 Tour, Laughing Stock, 2003, LAFFCD 0136

9

Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004

10 Interview with Mark Thomas, by telephone, 1 May 2012 11 ‘Eric, Nick and Kerim’, Mark Thomas, Dambusters: Live 2001 Tour, Laughing Stock, 2003, LAFFCD 0136 12 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004 13 ‘Fluffy Action’, Mark Thomas, Dambusters: Live 2001 Tour, Laughing Stock, 2003, LAFFCD 0136 14 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004 15 ‘Prison Play’ on Richard Pryor, …And It’s Deep, Too! The

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GETTING THE JOKE Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992), Rhino/ Warner Bros., 2000, RS 76655 (disc one)

16 Richard Pryor, Live in Concert, Revolver Entertainment, 2004, REVD1806 17 Included in the documentary Lenny Bruce Without Tears, available as an extra feature on Lenny Bruce, Ladies and Gentlemen … Lenny Bruce, VDI/Best Medicine Comedy, 2006, 304327 18 Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 19 Jimmy Jones’s West Indian accent can be heard in various routines on Jimmy Jones, All the Breast: Best from Jimmy Jones, JJ Records, 1979, JJ0002 20 Tony Allen mentions West Indian impressions on the working men’s club scene in Attitude: Wanna Make Something of It? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, p. 83. In private conversations, he’s told me that many of the comics who did the impressions would use the name Chalkie 21 Ben Elton, Live 1989, Laughing Stock, 1993, LAFFC 16 22 ‘Farewell to Knobgags’, Mark Thomas, Dambusters: Live 2001 Tour, Laughing Stock, 2003, LAFFCD 0136 23 See ‘The Apollo’, Jimmy Walker, Dyn-O-Mite, Buddah Records, 1975, BDS 5635; Lenny Henry in Lenny-Live and Unleashed, BBC One, 27 December 1990; Al Murray in Live Floor Show, BBC Two, 15 March 2003 24 Laughs in the Park, Verulamium Park, St Albans, 23 July 2011 25 Billy Connolly, Two Bites of Billy, VVL, 1995, 6362523 26 Richard Pryor, Live in Concert, Revolver Entertainment, 2004, REVD1806 27 Phill Jupitus, Live: Quadrophobia, Universal, 2011, 8285413 28 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 29 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004 30 ‘Dinner with the Murder Machine’, Mark Thomas, Dambusters: Live 2001 Tour, Laughing Stock, 2003, LAFFCD 0136 31 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Magic Stand-up comedy happens by magic. Comedians are born with a fully developed comic talent, and the first time they ever perform in front of an audience, they are greeted with gales of laughter. There are different theories to explain this. Some people believe that the comic emits psychic beams which cause involuntary laughter in anybody they pass through. Others think that stand-ups have a symbiotic relationship with miniature, invisible beings, or ‘Comedy Pixies’, which fly around the auditorium tickling the entire audience. Or maybe I’m exaggerating for comic effect? What certainly is true is that many comedians believe they are born with their talent. Woody Allen says he learnt the basics of stand-up very quickly because of instincts he was born with. Jerry Seinfeld believes he was born with the ability to find potential material in his everyday experiences. Dan Aykroyd has argued that Richard Pryor was born with his talent, that it is in his chemistry, in his blood. Ken Dodd has implied that his own comic ability is a gift from God, and his career as a comedian part of a divine mission: I get absolutely wonderful reactions from people, you get some marvellous feedback from the people you’ve entertained, and you think, ‘Good God,’ and I mean Good God, ‘Did I really, was I really able to help that person?’… that

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makes me feel … perhaps I’ve got a reason then, I’ve got a purpose in life, I’m not just a dot, not just a speck.1 Alexei Sayle has fun with the idea that comedy comes from a magical ability in his graphic novel Geoffrey the Tube Train and the Fat Comedian. There’s a footnote about a fictional music hall comic called Albert “Oo wants to see me luvverley cockles” Magoogle, who lost his ability during a performance at the Bristol Hippodrome, when ‘a small pink light was seen to exit from his right ear.’2 In spite of this, though, Sayle still believes there is ‘something which is indefinable’ about comic ability, and argues that some comedians have ‘funny bones’ and others don’t.3

Superstition It’s also true that comedians tend to be superstitious, and the phenomenon of lucky clothes seems to be very common. Bill Bailey says he has done all his best gigs in the same black shirt: ‘It’s falling to bits, but I’m loath to let it go. It’s got my superpowers in it.’4 When he first started, Mark Thomas used to wear a ‘crap suit’ in a ‘subconscious homage to Alexei Sayle … And it was really rank, it was really bad. But I couldn’t do the gig unless I was wearing the suit.’5 Rhona Cameron still likes to wear suits, which is the latest stage of an ongoing relationship with lucky clothes: I used to have certain clothes I could never deviate from in the early years. I’ve never been able to, lately, ever go on stage without a suit. I would find that unbearable. I’ve only just progressed to a different type of shoe. I used to have, in all the years of the circuit I had, like, the one pair of socks I’d wear, I’d rinse them out at night and wear them again the next night. And the same with pants as well.6

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For Andre Vincent, it’s more a question of what he must avoid wearing: I went through a point where I seemed to really stink a room up if I wore green … years ago, really early stages … I had these really lovely green silk trousers … really lovely Italian pleated green trousers, and they looked great. I did two gigs in ‘em. Just died on my hole. And I got a bit sort of like, ‘It’s green, it’s green, it’s gotta be green.’ … every now and again, you know, if I’m wearing green … and something doesn’t get a laugh, that’s where my head goes. My head goes, ‘It’s ‘cos you got green on.’ And it’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous.7 Sometimes, superstitions attach to something other than clothing. I once died horribly when I was on with a particular comedian, and I was never at my best whenever I shared a bill with him after that. I thought of him as a jinx. Rhona Cameron would always write out her set list before every show, even though the material hadn’t changed, and keep it in her pocket as a ‘security blanket’: ‘And [I] would often even set out the page in a certain way and I would rarely deviate from it, because I think you do think you end up being attached to kind of mini forms of compulsive disorder, and ritualistic stuff, because it’s comforting.’8 The most superstitious comedian I’ve talked to is Jo Brand, who impressed me with the number of superstitions she’s had (including touching wood, an obsession with numbers and lucky socks), and the specificity of one of her rituals: [W]hen I first started, I had a really storming gig one night, and I just happened to have a bit of green toilet paper in my pocket, and of course after that I just thought that I’ve got to have some wherever I go. And then of course if I couldn’t find any green, it was like, ‘Arrgh! … I’m gonna die. It’s gonna be awful.’ … it was green toilet paper, there were nine bits, right, like nine sections, so I thought that’s what

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I had to have, so I did that for ages, you know. Probably for a couple of years. Always had some in my pocket. Religiously. And then I think one night, there was just no way of getting any green, so I used white, and it seemed to work all right.

Why the rituals? Brand realises that this kind of behaviour was ‘irrational’ and that she had to wean herself off it. She eventually succeeded: ‘I have to say … now it’s become more like a job, I don’t feel quite so much that I have the need to … cling on to those sort of magical crutches in the way that I used to.’9 Rhona Cameron came to a similar realisation about her clothing ritual: ‘[T]he one time you break it, you realise it’s nothing to do with that.’10 Sarah Millican was another who weaned herself off such superstitions: I had a lucky bracelet once … It was like 50p from Top Shop … it wasn’t a quality bracelet, but it was just a little elasticated bracelet … I wore it quite a long time for gigs and it was blue. It didn’t even go with everything. But it was my lucky bracelet. And then I lost it. And was genuinely nervous about performing. Stupid! I’m quite intelligent, I don’t believe in shit like that but anyway, I did. And I performed – and it went really well and I realised it was just jewellery!11 Comedians become attached to rituals and superstitions because what they do seems to work almost like magic. They have the ability to get up in front of a large group of strangers, and conjure up laughter – a very tangible response which is largely involuntary. What gives the idea of comedy-as-magic weight is that funniness is not an inherent property. It’s elusive, slippery, difficult to pin down. While we can identify

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certain structures in a joke that make it work, ultimately it’s only funny if you find it funny. The thing that transforms an ordinary incongruity into a joke is faith. The audience must believe it is funny. Given that laughter is driven by something as invisible and delicate as faith, it is not surprising that those who have to get laughs for a living surround themselves in mystique, perhaps possessing a mysterious genetic or God-given power. However, there is a counter-argument. Tony Allen has called the ‘natural gift’ behind the comedian’s art a ‘myth’.12 For Jeremy Hardy, successful stand-up is based on learned techniques: I do think stand-up is excessively revered. I think it’s just talking. I think it’s part of the oral tradition, it’s the same skills as a Hyde Park ranter or a barrister or a teacher, lecturer, priest, seanchai as it’s called in Irish. It’s platform speaking, and that’s a skill, but it’s a skill that’s needed in lots of occupations. There’s all kinds of tricks in stand-up, but I don’t particularly respect them because they are tricks.13 Lupino Lane was making a similar argument as early as 1945: If there is such a thing as a born comedian, why, for instance, does a brilliant person like Leslie Henson have to spend hours creating comic ideas and gags? Why does my old boyhood friend Charles Chaplin take months to make a picture? … Surely, if these were naturally born comedians, they wouldn’t have to worry: it would just happen to them.14 Arguments against the idea of comedy-as-magic reveal something important, that often tends to get lost in the mystique – that there is some kind of process behind what we see onstage in a stand-up comedy act. While it may be true that what distinguishes a great comedian from a competent

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one is indefinable, and there must be an element of native talent involved, there is also a methodology at work, which has been learned by experience. The next two chapters are a whistle-stop tour through the processes that lie behind a stand-up comedy act.

Notes 1

In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, BBC Radio 4, 19 August 1987

2

Alexei Sayle and Oscar Zarate, Geoffrey the Tube Train and the Fat Comedian, London: Methuen, 1987. There are no page numbers in this book, but the footnote comes at the bottom of the first full page of comic strip

3

Interview with Alexei Sayle, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003

4

Andrew Harrison, ‘This Much I Know: Bill Bailey, Comedian and Actor, 39, London’, Observer Magazine, 5 October 2003, p. 8

5

Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004

6

Interview with Rhona Cameron, by telephone, 19 March 2004

7

Interview with Andre Vincent, Central London, 14 July 2004

8

Interview with Rhona Cameron, by telephone, 19 March 2004

9

Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004

10 Interview with Rhona Cameron, by telephone, 19 March 2004 11 Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012 12 Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of it? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 2002, p. 27 13 Interview with Jeremy Hardy, Streatham, 1 April 2004 14 Lupino Lane, How to Become a Comedian, London: Frederick Muller, 1945, p. 12

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Material Very rarely do comedians deliver a whole act off the top of their head. Some preparation is involved, and the jokes have to come from somewhere. Once upon a time, there was no real expectation for comedians to write their own material. Those who could afford to employed writers, those who could not would beg, borrow or steal their gags. In both vaudeville and variety, small time comics would steal material from each other, from the better-known acts or from humorous magazines and comic joke books. Once the material was assembled into an act, the same act could be performed for decades. Indeed, vaudeville managements were fearful about comedians trying out new gags, preferring them to stick to tried and tested routines which were guaranteed to get laughs. On the other hand, in Britain, George Black – who did so much to prolong the life of the variety circuit – took comedians to task for stealing jokes or refusing to spend money on new material. Some comics did pay scriptwriters. At the bottom end of the market were writers who provided books or sheets of jokes. Further up, there were small-time comedy writers like Bill McDonnell, a Scots maths teacher who, between 1941 and 1953, sold 725 items to acts like Alec Finlay and Suzette Tarri. The items he sold included complete acts with song and patter, or sets of individual gags, and the rights for these

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would differ according to whether they were to be used on radio or for live performances. In America, top comedians like Bob Hope would employ teams of writers. Over the years, he employed 88 of them, keeping as many as 13 in his team at any one time. Towards the end of his life, his staff writers earned between $150,000 and $250,000 a year, but the terms of employment were such that the gags they produced became Hope’s intellectual property. He continued to employ a couple of writers even when age and infirmity stopped him from performing, and he has left behind a massive archive, containing about a million jokes. When the sick comedians started breaking through in the 1950s, they promoted the idea that comics should create their own material. For Lenny Bruce, performers whose material was provided by writers were ‘fine comedy actors’, but only those who write their own gags could be called comedians.1 Even today, some stand-ups still work with writers. Jack Dee, for example, writes his material in collaboration with writer Pete Sinclair, and Jo Brand sometimes writes with Mark Kelly. Nonetheless, many contemporary comics come up with their own jokes and routines. The way they go about doing this differs from comedian to comedian.

Making jokes Any joke starts with an idea. It can flash into the comedian’s brain fully formed or, more likely, hover around as a possibility – a whiff of something that’s odd, kooky, incongruous, a feeling that something doesn’t make sense, or a new way of looking at something that flips it on to its head. The pressure to produce new material never completely goes away, so stand-ups are constantly searching for those little miasmas of comic possibility.

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Often, the hunger for ideas invades their entire life, and any everyday interaction can be checked to see if it can be mined for potential material. For Josie Long, this grows from her desire for authenticity and honesty: [B]ecause I do try and write it about what I genuinely have been thinking and feeling … my whole life becomes really hypersensitive to it, so like every conversation I have I’m like, ‘Oh, I might use that, actually,’ and like everything that I see or do or think suddenly becomes really relevant.2 Sarah Millican makes a note of anything funny she says in conversations with friends, partner or parents: ‘And it’s awful because you end up going, “Ha ha!” and everybody laughs, and then you … go and write it down on your pad or text it to yourself.’3 What she says here suggests acknowledges the awkwardness of bringing out the tools of her trade in the middle of a conversation, to note something down which she might use onstage. Jimmy McGhie is candid about how corrosive this kind of thing can be: ‘It’s horrible really to go through your life almost sort of constantly thinking that what you’ve said is worthy of going onstage, but sadly that is just how it is.’4 Marc Maron even jokes about it in his act. In one routine, his father says something awful to him and he replies, ‘Let me get my notebook.’5 The audience’s laughter acknowledges the incongruousness of raiding the personal life for material. Assuming the idea doesn’t arrive fully formed, it must then be honed, crafted and worked into an actual workable joke. For Jimmy McGhie, this is the hardest stage of the process: The thing I think I’m most aware of being the most difficult part of generating material is to get those scribbles and actually work on them. There’s a middle bracket. There’s ‘generate the idea, have the little idea’, you know. And then there’s the final sort of ‘doing an actual bit where you’re performing it’. But the middle bit [is] where you take your

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scribble and you try and turn it into a piece of performable material with a point, or with a central comic conceit rather than just an idea.6 Milton Jones explains how he takes the raw idea and works it into one of his killer surreal one-liners: ‘I get a feeling that there’s a gag or something somewhere, like a pig sniffing out a truffle … whether it’s a word that means the same thing or an image or something – and reverse engineer [it] …’ Giving it form means developing it so that the audience is taken through a particular mental process: Ideally, if a one-liner really works, you’ve misdirected the listener/seer into looking at the wrong side all the way through, and so they’re smacked between the eyes by the punchline in the end … So usually you want the reveal or whatever it is to be at the end. I think I succeed when I put silly cartoons in people’s heads that surprise them. He has a sophisticated understanding of how jokes work, but even so he recognises that writing relies more on trial and error than cold, calculation: It sounds very scientific as if I’m in a laboratory with lots of flip charts and pictures, but actually, you know, I do a lot of new material nights and it is more a case of throwing mud at a wall, unfortunately. Even 20 years on, I’m always really surprised what works and what doesn’t.7

Writing it down Having come up with the idea, there’s then the problem of how to write it down. There’s no fixed way of doing this. Some comedians work from verbatim scripts. Woody Allen, for example, would sit and write his entire act on a typewriter,

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based on ideas for gags which he wrote down on scraps of paper. For Jenny Éclair, ‘Every word is totally scripted.’8 Similarly, Ben Elton sees writing as all important: ‘To me, performing is an extension of writing. Everything for me starts with the words, the writing. I write my act just as I write a novel, or … sitcoms … or whatever.’ He writes his material, learns it, and performs it, even seeing the improvisation which is an essential part of stand-up as ‘sort of writing on the spur of the moment’. 9 Other comics work with something looser. Lenny Bruce would note down ideas on matchbook covers, napkins or memo pads. The notes he kept suggest a neater, more clipped style than the free-flowing routines he specialised in. A set of notes for performances in St Louis and Chicago in September 1959 is largely made up of short jokes or one-liners, some of them apparently only partly formed, like: ‘No use for H in Italian alphabet’ Or: ‘Chicago people have a strange way of talking – they’re always looking for someone who isn’t there.’10 Josie Long assembles her ideas into ‘this big spider diagram’.11 Rhona Cameron uses ‘a list, like a shopping list’, adding ‘A lot of comedians are list based.’12 This seems to be the case. Eddie Izzard’s script takes the form of a ‘set list’: ‘It just says “European History” and I go into it. And sometimes, on different nights, I’ll do totally different material on the same idea.’13 For Omid Djalili, planning a routine is ‘almost like theatre blocking’, and it’s written out as a set of bullet points: ‘When I have a bullet point, I have a general ball park idea that has to be put across before a joke.’14 Billy Connolly says he has ‘really fought the idea of coming on as an act. You know, having an act.’ Instead, he writes down a series of headlines on a piece of paper. At his Hammersmith Apollo show, he has his notes on a stool, next to his glass of water. He makes no attempt to hide them, and indeed, they become part of the act. At one point, he knocks over the water, and gets laughs by playing on the idea that this is a disaster, making the ink run so that he can’t read what

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he’s written. He also plays up struggling to remember what the notes are supposed to mean. ‘“Sex”?’ he says, ‘What have I got to tell you about that?’15 This shows just how flimsy the existence of stand-up material can be, outside of the actual moment of performance. The list inscribed on a piece of paper can only really be interpreted by the comedian. The actual content of a routine – and the particular way of performing it – exists solely in his or her head. If Connolly has truly forgotten what ‘Sex’ means when he sees it on his list, the routine may be gone forever. Even so, the spider diagrams, lists or notebooks in which comedians note down their ideas are enormously precious. Bob Monkhouse kept his material in two loose-leaf files. When they disappeared from his car in 1995, there was significant press coverage, and he offered £10,000 for their safe return. They had been stolen by someone who eventually approached Monkhouse’s agent demanding money, and were recovered by undercover police in a sting operation. Monkhouse was mystified over why they had been stolen, saying that the files were ‘of little use to anyone else but me’, presumably because the information they contained would only have made sense to him. However, what the culprits had instinctively grasped was that even if these files of raw comic material were only valuable to Monkhouse, their value to that one individual was immense.16 The way that the notebook or gag file fits into the comedian’s overall methodology varies. For Alexei Sayle, it was something in which to deposit raw ideas: ‘The way I worked was that I never scripted it as such … I would think of a gag, and then I would make a note of it. I would make a note of it in my notebook.’ Material from the notebook would then be put into a list which he would have onstage with him: ‘I always had a running order. I had, like, a little box with me props in on the floor, which was sort of vaguely built to look like a sound monitor, and taped to the top of it was always me running order.’17 Al Murray writes on a computer, which allows him to keep

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a well-ordered electronic archive of all his past material. This can be dipped into when he’s looking for inspiration for new routines: I’ve saved everything I’ve ever written. You know, if I open my files in front of me now, there is a main file called ‘Landlord’, there’s ‘Landlord Year One, Year Two, Three’ … and every time I sit down to write a new show, I go back over the old files and look and see if there’s something I wrote in 1998 that I just couldn’t make work then because I hadn’t got the character’s voice right or whatever and have a look and see if there’s anything in it at all that might be worth picking up and bringing with me.18 Harry Hill works by spending ‘the first hour of the day’ writing, generating ‘books and books’ of notes. Most of what he writes is ‘just rubbish, utter rubbish’, so he has a process of sifting through it. Preparing for a tour means going through his notebooks and making a note of the ideas he thinks are ‘worth trying’.19 He then takes these and tries them out in a low-key gig, and the ones that go down well become the material for the show.

Off the top of the head Then there are the comedians who come up with material whilst they are actually performing. This method was popular among the sick comedians. Mort Sahl, for example, remembers: ‘If they’d laughed at something, I would extend it from night to night. In other words I’d write it in front of them. The joke’d grow, like a house, but you couldn’t write it by yourself, you had to be there with them.’20 Shelley Berman says that of all the routines he recorded, only one was written down on paper. The rest are ‘stuff that happened on the spur

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of the moment, and maybe had gone through some refinement in the repeating, but they began purely as improv.’21 Many comedians still work in this way. Adam Bloom says, ‘I go onstage with a rough idea of what I’m gonna say and then it evolves on stage. I never, ever write it down.’22 Similarly, James Campbell says, ‘Almost all of my material comes about through mucking about on the stage. And the stuff that works is the stuff that sticks, and goes on to the next day, basically … I never write anything down beforehand.’23 Phill Jupitus gives a detailed account of exactly how he grows his material onstage: I think that there’s the nut of the joke. I think the joke is one idea, it’s like the joke is the punchline, and it’s the route there that you let unfold onstage, really. And when you first do it, the route’s very short. And then if it goes really well, you make the route longer, and you find more. You just find a longer and longer way to get to the end of a joke. So it’s like the Star Wars show that I did in Edinburgh started out as me saying to [fellow comedian] Kevin Day in the dressing room, ‘I will do some stuff about Star Wars.’ … And I think I had a Wookiee impression and a joke about Darth Vader. And then the next week, because you’ve thought about it a bit more, you have a few more bits, and if they’re good and they work, I would just remember them … It would grow very organically … so within three months, that couple of one liners is a whole 20 minutes.24 Some comics use a mixture of techniques to generate routines – scripting some in advance and developing others in front of a live audience. Mark Thomas, for example, says: Some stuff, I’ll write. And you sit down and … you worry about it and you kind of try it one way and then you try it another way and what have you. Other stuff, because it’s based around events that actually happened, and people

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who are there who are real … it’s like telling a story to your mates or to people who don’t know. And quite a large section of stuff is busked … you just kind of tell the story, and in the process of telling it, bits drop out, or bits add in, and you play around with things.25 For Milton Jones, the particular form his material takes is crucial: ‘The stuff that I tend to do tends to be very honed. And even an intonation can mess it up.’ He gets it to a honed state by taking it through ‘lots of incarnations’ before he finds the words he wants. The final part of the process falls somewhere between scripting and improvisation: What I tend to do is write what I think the exact wording should be, and then not take that to the show, and see what it comes out like. So I’ve rehearsed it as I think it should be, but there’s something about facing an audience that suddenly means you turn it round, or use fewer words, or you see it from the audience’s point of view, because of the adrenaline, for some reason.26

Planning a show When comedians reach a certain level, they stop playing short sets in comedy clubs and start touring their own show. This adds an extra dimension to the process of generating material, because when a new tour starts, rather than having to come up with a new routine or a few new gags, the comic has to put together an entirely new full-length show. Jo Brand plans her shows section by section: [F]or a longer show which is an hour, I roughly kind of divide it in my head into twelve five-minute chunks. And I think, “Well if I can write … six of those, and then that’s kind of half an hour.” Then hopefully I can expand on

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a couple of them and they’ll expand into seven or eight minutes, maybe, and then I’ll see how I’m doing.27 Although Ross Noble’s material is more fluid and improvisational, he also tends to build his shows from separate chunks, albeit fewer of them: ‘What tends to happen is, I’ve noticed that when I’ve looked back at previous note books, each kind of two-hour, two-and-a-half hour show I’ve done seems to always consist of eight words.’28 For some comics, the fluidity is part of the show’s structure. In Billy Connolly’s Hammersmith Apollo show, he starts telling an anecdote about something that happened to him in Dunedin, New Zealand. He strikes off on a number of lengthy tangents, and each time he returns to the story – ‘So, we’re in Dunedin …’ – the audience laugh, and sometimes clap. It’s a technique he shares with a number of other performers, from Eddie Izzard to Henry Rollins, and it’s difficult to say why it’s so pleasing. Perhaps it’s the incongruity of having drifted so far from the story? Perhaps it makes the audience feel clever at being able to tune back into the anecdote so easily? Perhaps the tangents are seen as part of the comedian’s endearingly chaotic way of thinking? Whatever it is, the ability to dip in and out of a routine in this way shows an impressive mastery of the material. Steven Wright uses a different kind of fluidity. His act is made up of a large number of short jokes. It is structured not by having a fixed running order, but by having a set of jokes which are brought out in the order he sees fit, depending on how the audience are reacting. Dividing the gags up into three categories – A, B and C – according to quality, he alternates between the different categories in response to the laughter he gets.29 Milton Jones has a different way of categorising his jokes: If I do ABC, it tends to be more in terms of formula. Because, you know, some stuff I do, it’s either a pun or a reversal or a concept, but if you do too many of the same

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formula in a row, the crowd find it easier to guess what’s coming … suddenly the scaffolding is there, and you see how the thing is put together.30 He also explains that having his material made up of tight, compact gags rather than longer, more fluid routines poses problems when planning a full-length show: [I]f you’ve got over a hundred one-liners, and often they’re 200 in a longer set, it’s literally too much information. And what I have tried to do in the past … is just vary the angle of attack, so that even though it isn’t a rest, it feels like one … You can’t put a number on the gags, but if I do more than ten minutes, fifteen minutes – I think that’s the magic number actually, fifteen minutes of bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang – you can feel the audience going away. Because blood comes out of their ears, they can’t quite cope. And if you keep that up they will come back, at about 30 minutes, but you’ve sort of lost a bit in the middle there. So if you can find a way of stopping and starting again, fooling their brains into thinking that you’ve pressed clear, I’ve found that to be helpful.31 Jones has a number of tricks to vary the angle of attack to fool the audience into thinking they’ve had a rest from the barrage of gags. In between sections of straight stand-up he will intersperse set pieces with a different format – perhaps gags delivered in character, material underscored with music or visual jokes on a flipchart. One method of developing a new full-length show is what Eddie Izzard calls ‘this roll-over thing’.32 This involves starting a tour with the old show, then gradually changing it bit by bit. For Victoria Wood, this means replacing old bits with new 20-minute sections week by week until the new show is complete. Jo Brand likes the security of keeping a bit of old material in the show:

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I always have to have an overlap, a sort of, a bit of old stuff to make me feel safe, that I know’s gonna work, you know. And then build on that. So most shows I do tend to be, like, three quarters new stuff, eventually, and a quarter of an hour of old stuff which I’ve just kind of clung on to, really. Like a drowning man.33 The danger of the roll-over method is that it carries the risk of presenting an audience with material they have already seen. Perhaps ‘danger’ might sound a bit strong, but in 1999, the consumer programme Weekend Watchdog was contacted by punters complaining that Eddie Izzard’s Circle show largely consisted of material they had seen on the previous year’s Dress to Kill video. The report they ran seemed slightly tongue-in-cheek: ‘We’ve counted up all the gags on this video, 55 in total, and we’ve put them here on our Weekend Watchdog Eddie Izzard gag count. Now we’re going to send in our gag accountant …’34 Nonetheless, it was a serious matter. Mick Perrin, Izzard’s tour manager, later recalled, ‘It ended up with Eddie getting a letter from the Office of Fair Trading saying, “Don’t do this again or you will end up in court.”’35 Izzard was stung by the furore, sending up the thinking behind the complaints: ‘It’s like going into a rock and roll concert and saying, “We’ve heard the Stones, we’ve heard these fucking numbers before. You’re on Watchdog for fraud.”’36 Since then, big name acts have taken much more care to avoid repeating material in their full-length shows. Jimmy Carr’s DVD Comedian, for example, has an insert tucked inside the box advertising the following Repeat Offender live tour. In keeping with his professional, business-like approach, the insert assures the potential punter: ‘The Repeat Offender tour is new material – it’s different from The Jimmy Carr Comedian DVD you’ve just bought – I wouldn’t try and sell you the same thing twice.’ Clearly, stand-up has come a long way from the days when comedians could get away with touring the same act for years.

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Notes 1

Kitty Bruce (ed.), The Unpublished Lenny Bruce, Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984, p. 16

2

Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012

3

Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012

4

Interview with Jimmy McGhie, Whitstable, 30 August 2012

5

‘I Didn’t Know how to Love You’ on Marc Maron This HAS to be Funny, Comedy Central Records, 2011, CCR0122

6

Interview with Jimmy McGhie, Whitstable, 30 August 2012

7

Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 August 2012

8

Quoted in Alison Oddey, Performing Women: Stand-ups, Strumpets and Itinerants, Houndmills and London: MacMillan Press, 1999, p. 21

9

Face to Face, BBC Two, 12 January 1998

10 Kitty Bruce (ed.), The Unpublished Lenny Bruce, Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984, p. 22 11 Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012 12 Interview with Rhona Cameron, by telephone, 19 March 2004 13 Garry Mulholland, ‘When Eddie Met Henry’, Time Out, 2–9 December 1998, p. 25 14 Interview with Omid Djalili, by telephone, 28 June 2004 15 Billy Connolly, Too Old to Die Young, Carling Hammersmith Apollo, 29 September 2004 16 See Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993–8, London: Century, 1998, pp. 171–2, 244 17 Interview with Alexei Sayle, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003 18 Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012 19 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 20 Funny Business, BBC Two, 29 November 1992

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21 Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004 22 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004 23 Interview with James Campbell, by telephone, 25 August 2004 24 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 25 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004 26 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 27 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 28 Interview with Ross Noble, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 29 John Hind, The Comic Inquisition: Conversations with Great Comedians, London: Virgin, 1991, pp. 51–2 30 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 31 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 August 2012 32 Kate Mikhail, ‘Eddie Izzard, Comedian’, Observer Magazine, 22 September 2002, p. 22 33 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 34 Excerpt included in Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, 2 Entertain, 2010, 2EDVD0592 35 Ian Burrell, ‘Izzard Breaks Records with Rock and Roll Tour’, the Independent, 22 September 2003, p. 6 36 Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, 2 Entertain, 2010, 2EDVD0592

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Performance Rehearsing When I used to compère the Last Laugh comedy club, I would always spend half an hour going through my material out loud to myself. This would allow me to finalise the structure of the gags I was going to start the show with, to get an idea of the actual words I would use and to fix them in my memory. It was a deeply unpleasant, enervating process, bringing down upon me an almost irresistible urge to collapse into a heap. Although I was alone in the room, I would always imagine someone was outside, listening, finding what I was saying the unfunniest thing they had heard in their life. Preparing to perform my 20-minute set at another venue would be less unpleasant. I’d write out a running order, and later I’d run through it in my head whilst driving to the gig. I had no idea if I was the only comedian who rehearsed in this way, as I never really discussed the matter with other performers. The front cloth comics of the variety era would certainly have rehearsed. In spite of wanting to come across as being as natural and unaffected as if he was one of the audience who had climbed on to the stage from the front stalls, Ted Ray prepared meticulously for performance:

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Every night, hour after hour, I would stand in front of the mirror in my bedroom, grimacing, smiling and winking with the idea of getting the most effective expression for putting over a joke … Every inflection of voice and every shade of emotion as reflected in a comedian’s voice do count tremendously and I was determined that if hard work and ceaseless rehearsal would help, no trouble on my part would be too great.1 Frankie Howerd – who, like Ray, strove for a greater naturalness of delivery – also rehearsed meticulously. A 1990 documentary shows him wandering through fields, near his home, obsessively going through pages of script, whilst surrounded by grazing cows.2 The footage intriguingly reveals the careful crafting that lay behind the apparent spontaneity of his stammering delivery. Nowadays, this kind of careful rehearsal seems to be rarer. Asked if he rehearses his act, Al Murray replies: I’ve never done that. I mean if I’ve got a tongue twister I need to learn, or like I used to do a thing with a huge chunk of Shakespeare, then I’ll sit down and learn that, but I’ve never stood in front of a mirror, never rehearsed. I’d feel so stupid. [laughs] Putting on the jacket and jumping around in my front room, I mean it’s not going to happen!3 For many comics, it’s more a question of mental preparation than actual rehearsal, and the idea of doing the act in front of the mirror as Ray did is widely rejected. Jeremy Hardy explains, ‘I try and run through things in my head, but I don’t rehearse saying things.’4 Adam Bloom takes the same approach: ‘[I]t’s all in my head. I have an idea, I think of it to myself. It bounces round in my head. So I’m hearing my voice in my head.’5 For Rhona Cameron, rehearsal is simply a matter of getting the material to stick in her memory: ‘I would have the list a few days before the gig on a huge piece of paper, poster size, at the end of my bed or when I’m lying in the

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bath, Blu-Tacked to the wall, because you have to memorise the list.’6 There are, though, still some comedians who rehearse in a more tangible way, by talking the material through. This is how Omid Djalili gets new jokes ready: ‘I write them out then perform it to myself. Never in a mirror, but just say it out to myself and just visualise myself on stage.’7 Milton Jones takes a similar approach, and explains his reasons for doing so: ‘I rehearse in so far as I sit at my desk and I go through the words. But I don’t stand with a microphone at a mirror, as it were … But I do feel like I need … the muscle memory of going through the words.’8

Outside eye When Alexei Sayle was doing stand-up regularly, he would primarily work on new material with an audience, improvising and working in new routines as he went along. Later in his career, he would only perform in big tours, and this meant having to rehearse offstage: ‘The last few tours … I’d rehearse in front of my wife. We’d be sitting there, in the conservatory, you know, in the front room or something, and I’d do the show for her … Her and the cat would sit there, and I’d do the act, you know.’ This conjures up a pleasingly bizarre image, given Sayle’s unique performance style – all that surreal comic fury raining down on his wife and cat in the conservatory. It also raises an important point. Whereas most actors are guided through the process of creation by a director, stand-ups usually have to find their own way – but in some cases, they can get some informal direction from someone close to them acting as an outside eye. Sayle is careful to explain just how important his wife was in this respect: ‘I’ve always said my wife Linda is as responsible for my career as I am … because it’s very difficult to find somebody who knows … what works,

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and also will be honest with you.’ She was helpful not just in the rehearsal process, but also in performance: When I came offstage, for my first encore, she would remember the whole show, and she would tell me anything I’d left out … We never actually … discussed it, it’s just she fell into doing that … She would say, ‘You haven’t done that bit’ … and I’d go out and do it in the first encore.9 Similarly, Omid Djalili uses his wife as a sounding board for new material: ‘I try it to my wife. I tell my wife, “What do you think of this?” and she often finds a better word. I think it’s good to collaborate with other people where you can find a correct word, a funny-sounding word.’10 He credits her with coming up with the word ‘halitosis’ in the ‘oil, phlegm and halitosis’ joke – originally, he had used the phrase ‘bad breath’. More recently, stand-ups have started bringing in professional directors to help them develop their full-length shows. Tiernan Douieb admits that he was initially ‘very opposed’ to the idea of working with a director, but acknowledges that ‘a lot of people do it now’. He has brought Paul Byrne in to direct his Edinburgh shows, and explains how this has worked: I had an hour and I was just running through it and he’d go, ‘No, no. Slow that bit down.’ You know, he gave me specific instructions for my first show like, ‘Take a sip of water then … Sit down then.’ And it really is directing because it just paces everything out differently. Often … I’ll do a couple of previews without him early on, and then he’ll come and watch one and he’ll just sit down and go, ‘That bit doesn’t quite fit there,’ or ‘What is it you’re trying to say here?’ or ‘Where do you want to go with this?’ and just gets my mind into structure.11 Similarly, Jimmy McGhie articulates what his director Adam Brace has brought to his Edinburgh shows:

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I’ve worked with Adam on each show, and on the second show, his input was a lot less. He came in right at the end towards the previews, and just watched the previews, and then said structurally what he thought and things like that, and gave me a few pointers, and a few ideas obviously … I put him on my poster as a credit and I’ve seen a few other people actually start to credit their directors … I mean it’s an hour long show, essentially it’s like a piece of theatre. There should be no reason why you shouldn’t have a director on it. And given how many popular stand-ups have writing teams and have people writing for them anyway, I just can’t see why it would be a problem. You can tell an Edinburgh show that has been directed. You can feel it, because it just feels tight and well structured because an outside eye has come in. It’s so difficult when you’re onstage to know how you should be going.12

Test gigs The most public form of rehearsal is a test gig, where the material is tried out in a low-key show in a small venue. Stephen K. Amos explains, ‘If I’m doing a tour or a radio thing, I try and just try out ten minutes at little comedy clubs all over London … ten minutes of written stuff where I will not deviate, I will not fall back on tried and tested stuff, I’ll just do it.’13 Mark Thomas developed the material for Dambusters during a run at the Soho Theatre: ‘[O]ver the ten weeks, the stories just changed and developed … But the essential ingredients of it, the big changes happened within the first three weeks … and then the rest was refining it …’14 In order to be effective, the test gig has to be carefully set up. Harry Hill used to make appearances around the London comedy circuit, but found it ‘quite difficult to try stuff out’ because ‘really they want you to storm it’, something that’s hard to do with untested material. He now tends to try out

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new jokes and routines supporting fellow comedian Ivor Dembina at the Hampstead Comedy Club: I can do 40 minutes, and basically, the rules of engagement are that the audience know I’m floundering around trying to find out what’s funny, so they give me a lot more rope. You know, a lot more leeway. And I can really get a lot out of it quite quickly …15 The ‘rules of engagement’ are established by making the process of trying out material completely open. At a test gig for a TV series in May 2004, Jack Dee tells the audience at the Stag Theatre in Sevenoaks exactly why he’s there, explaining that they shouldn’t think that his career is on the skids just because he’s playing in a small, out-of-the-way venue like this. He has a big sheet of notes with him. It’s placed on a stool on the stage, but he doesn’t refer to it much. However, when a routine gets slightly less response than he’d hoped for, he goes over to the paper and makes a note of it, saying aloud what he’s writing: ‘Never do that bit on stage again. In Sevenoaks.’16 In a show at the Battersea Arts Centre – a rehearsal for the filming of An Audience with Harry Hill the following Sunday – Hill has his set list taped to the monitor at the front of the stage. When he forgets where he’s going, he makes a joke of it. ‘Where was I?’ he asks, then very obviously leans forward, making it clear he’s looking at the list. ‘Oh yes. I’ve remembered now,’ he says. At one point, he comes out with the word ‘fucking’, then gets a laugh by saying, ‘We won’t be doing that on Sunday night.’17 For Josie Long, test gigs are a way of not just rehearsing material but also writing it. Before the previews for her Edinburgh shows, the material only exists in the form of a spider diagram: I take that onstage and just try and splurge as much as possible and record that. And then actually the adrenaline of that will usually mean that I’ve more or less got the show

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… And then more and more laughs come the more you do it … because you just naturally improvise. So for me it’s like I do most of it onstage.18 Sarah Millican, on the other hand, uses the fact that she’s got a test gig coming up as a spur to write new material: I have a new material night booked in my diary and I do them regularly so it usually is only a 10-minute spot. And there’s one at the Glee in Birmingham that I do, and I do the Comedy Store in Manchester quite regularly and that deadline makes me go, ‘Bugger! I need to have 10 minutes of new stuff by then.’19 Test gigs allow comedians to spend time with an audience, and for many this is extremely valuable in its own right. As Al Murray puts it, ‘I’m a real believer that stage time is the ultimate preparation, that five minutes of stage time – if you’re thinking about what you’re doing rather than trotting stuff out – five minutes of stage time is worth, you know, a day sat at the computer trying to write’.20 Ross Noble prepares to perform simply by constantly performing – even between tours, while supposedly taking time off, he will regularly do off-the-cuff gigs in trusted small venues. He explains, ‘It’s less about sort of coming up with a show, and more about just getting up to match fitness, you know. Just mentally – well, physically as well as mentally – just being in that headspace.’21 Making a slightly broader point, Sarah Millican argues that getting time onstage with an audience is a crucial factor in helping a new act to develop quickly into a fully-fledged comedian: I think you progress at a certain rate. So if you do one gig a month, you’re going to progress at that rate. If you do three in a week, you’re going to progress at that rate. You know, so I just think it means you can shrink down the time it takes to get good if you just do it as much as possible.22

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Pre-show rituals Having generated the material – and possibly rehearsed it – the next step the comedian faces is to mentally prepare for actually going onstage and performing. Pre-show rituals vary from common sense things, to the strange and quirky. At the sensible end of the spectrum are comics like Omid Djalili: I have my set list written out and I find that if I don’t really study it a good hour before, for a good 20, 30 minutes, and go over it, and go over things in my head, the gig suffers, really. Especially when I’m doing touring, but even [doing] 20 minutes. I remember back in ’97, ’98, I always had my computer print-out of all the bullet points and going through it over and over again in my head.23 But even apparently rational pre-show rituals can have an obsessive element to them. Alex Horne stretches his mouth and moves his tongue around to prepare himself for speaking clearly, but he also engages in more compulsive behaviour: ‘And I’ll always go through just my opening line, over and over again. I don’t know why, but I guess that’s a superstitious thing. To make sure I know exactly what I’m gonna say straight away.’24 For some comics, the pre-show ritual is there to get them in the right mood, or to generate performance energy. Phill Jupitus says: ‘I had to listen to very loud rock music before I went on, I would like the sort of physical psyching up …’25 At one stage, Mark Lamarr’s pre-show ritual was to avoid doing anything special to prepare: [F]or years I would’ve literally been sat chatting in the dressing room and someone would go, ‘You’re on,’ and you get up and walk on. Not that it meant little to me, but that’s always been very, very important to me, to be natural.

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And so I think it was that, maybe that’s my process, is not preparing. However, he has also found it necessary to generate performance energy before going on: Because I don’t have a process … for sort of five or ten minutes before I go on, I’ll probably start pacing up and down, just to work myself up. Because otherwise, I’m just a bloke. D’you know what I mean? Yeah, otherwise, I’m just … not gonna put any effort into it. That’s the only thing, probably, and that’s not a superstitious thing, that’s purely for performance … I try and get some kind of adrenaline going, ‘cos otherwise, I wouldn’t really be that interested in talking to a roomful of strangers.26 Getting into the right state of mind to perform can involve pre-show rituals which seem to veer away from the rational and towards the metaphysical. Some comedians actually pray before going on stage. Milton Jones is a Christian, but for him the prayer is more about performance than his faith: I do pray before I go on each time. I mean, sort of, a general sort of focusing and just clearing my head. It’s always tricky in a dressing room. I try and just have some time on my own before I go on. And that’s not even really a superstition, that’s probably a drama school thing.27 Shelley Berman is emphatic that for him, prayer is not motivated by religion: ‘I don’t want people to go off thinking that I’m some sort of religious fanatic, but at least for the first ten years, 15 years of my work, I never went on without a little prayer. That was to myself, and it had nothing to do with anybody else.’28 Only the agnostic Adam Bloom acknowledges that pre-show prayer might have a religious aspect: I say a little prayer. Despite not being overly religious. When

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I first started, I was fascinated with the whole concept of, ‘Is there a God?’ which is surely the biggest question there possibly is to ask. So … because I was kind of dabbling in the idea that He was there and you could talk to Him and He can hear your thoughts, I thought I’d have a little prayer … I still say a little prayer. Also, it’s talking to someone inside yourself, you know? If man invented God, it still wouldn’t be a bad thing to talk to the person you invented in your head, because it’s bringing yourself together, isn’t it? It’s no different to just going, ‘Come on, Adam,’ you know, it’s the same thing. Whether God’s, you know, outside of you or in you, it’s still something that helps you get through your gig. And the thing is, in a particularly rough situation, you know, very late show, crowd are tired, it helps you focus, so that’s 50 per cent superstition and 50 per cent … some kind of mental strategy.29 Beyond prayer are those kinds of pre-show mental strategies we’ve already seen, which veer off into pure irrationality – whether these be wearing particular pair of trousers or putting nine sections of green toilet paper in your pocket.

Onstage The intense nowness of stand-up comedy means that the actual moment of being onstage is all that really counts. The process which leads up to it may be important, but only if it makes this moment right. As discussed earlier, most comedians use a mixture of prepared material and improvisation, and the moment of performance requires them to juggle these different elements, putting them together in the moment to make them work in the best possible way for that particular show. Mark Lamarr tried to contain as much of the creation of his act as possible within the performance itself, believing that ‘doing it onstage’ was ‘the organic way’:

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I would tell a bit, and each night it would grow or diminish, you know, as it deserved to, and I never, ever wrote any of it down … even then I always sort of thought, ‘If you don’t write it down, it looks like you’re making it up.’… And it would make me laugh myself, you know, ‘cos there’d be a bit, you’d think, ‘God, I forgot that line, that’s a fucking killer line, I haven’t done that for three months!’ And you’ll suddenly be talking, and it’s like ad libbing it even though you’ve done it before, because … it just comes out, you know. And, yeah, that was very important to me, to make sure I didn’t do it as a written piece, you know, after those first few years of being really tied to words.30 Many experienced comics share this fluidity of material, cutting routines together in response to the audience. Alexei Sayle says: ‘To edit, I threw a lot of stuff out, did a lot of new stuff, you know. A two-hour show or something … that I edited on the fly, you know, while at the same time still working to an audience.’31 To be able to effortlessly piece a show together whilst performing it suggests that comedians achieve a very sophisticated mental state while onstage. Eddie Izzard says that when he’s performing, his brain is ‘almost like a split screen’, so that he can play to the audience and ‘work things out at the same time’.32 Other comics share this ability to analyse what is going on at the same time as actually doing it. Victoria Wood says, ‘While one side of your head is performing, the other half is thinking, “Oh, that didn’t go so well, I’m going to miss out the next bit,” or, “I’d better speed up, some quick laughs are needed!”’33 Alan Davies gives a similar description of the mental process: ‘You’re rarely thinking about what you’re actually doing … it’s the next thing and the next thing. That line didn’t work, so the other one in 20 minutes probably isn’t going to go down too well either …Why’s that person not laughing?’34 Paradoxically, the other half of the two-level mental state, which co-exists with this detached, analytical side, is instinctive

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and often ecstatic. Victoria Wood describes the feeling when a show is going well as being ‘like flying’.35 Performing stand-up myself, I found that good shows were almost trancelike. I felt confident, free, fluid, engulfed by my train of thought but just aware enough to react if something unexpected happened. I completely lacked uncomfortable self-consciousness. Time seemed to go very quickly. Sometimes somebody would come up to me after shows like this and tell me about something I’d said onstage. It would be a pleasant surprise, because before they reminded me of it, I’d have forgotten saying it. This is a common experience, as genuinely spontaneous moments in stand-up disappear often into thin air as soon as the show is over. Phill Jupitus says, ‘I’ve lost two Edinburgh shows of spontaneous thought that just happened on the night and I didn’t write down.’36 Jeremy Hardy agrees: I can never remember when I come off stage. I might improvise something really good, and I’ll have forgotten it. And I lose quite a lot of stuff because I write things down in note form and often things are never actually properly written out in full, so I forget the end of things, and I can never get it back again, which is annoying.37 Bad shows create a different state of mind. I’d feel trapped and exposed, and time would seem to go more slowly, allowing me to take in every horrible detail. Ironically, this kind of extreme self-consciousness improves the memory. I had no trouble remembering the stupid, unfunny things I’d said to hecklers after a bad show. Phill Jupitus shares this perception: The funny thing is, is I bet most people you talk to could tell you, like, the temperature in the room, what they heard when they died … You can’t capture moments from a good gig … I think good stand-ups’ brains switch off. Conscious thought abandons you … whereas you are nothing but conscious brain when you’re dying, it is all conscious,

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absorbing every fact, facet, you know. It’s all front brain when you’re dying.38

Trial and error The forgetfulness that follows a good gig is inconvenient, because part of the experience of performing is seeing what works so that it can be re-used in future shows. Most comedians seem to agree that developing a stand-up act is simply a question of trying things out. Phill Jupitus says, ‘[W]ith stand-up you throw anything at the wall and see what sticks … It’s just when something works, you know it works and you do more of it.’39 Adam Bloom makes a similar point: ‘Honing [material] in is the best way to get something, because it evolves through trial and error.’40 This suck-it-and-see methodology is yet another thing that links stand-up with the music hall. Max Beerbohm describes how Dan Leno would work in a new routine: A new performance by Dan Leno was almost always a dull thing in itself. He was unable to do himself justice until he had, as it were, collaborated for many nights with the public. He selected and rejected according to how his jokes, and his expression of them ‘went’; and his best things came to him always in the course of an actual performance, to be incorporated in all subsequent performances. When, at last, the whole thing had been built up, how perfect a whole it was!41 The material isn’t the only thing that can develop by trial and error. For Shelley Berman, the distinctive overall style of his whole act came about by accident rather than design: ‘It’s a style that just happened. It was never something I thought of. It was just something that happened.’ Even the trademark barstool came about more through a particular set of circumstances

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than a carefully thought out strategy. His earliest stand-up routines were one-sided telephone conversations which he’d originally done with the pioneering improvisational group the Compass Players. Performing them in a stand-up environment meant making certain adjustments: I sat on a chair when I first did these things, and then I realised that some of the nightclubs that I was working in, the audience couldn’t see me in the back if I sat down on a chair. So I asked to borrow a barstool. So I’ve been sitting on a barstool ever since.42 The essential element of trial and error means that the final stage of a stand-up’s methodology is to think back over how the act has gone once the show is over. Ken Dodd used to keep detailed notebooks, filling in details on every show. A particular entry might include information on the length of the act, the size and character of the audience, even the weather outside. Then there would be two columns, one listing each joke that was told, the other containing notes on how well each of these had gone down.43 A more common method is to make an audio recording of the show and listen back to it afterwards. This dates to at least as far back as Lenny Bruce, who bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder when such items were still relatively uncommon. Similarly, Steve Martin has recalled that in the 1970s he would tape his shows ‘with a chintzy cassette recorder’ in case he ‘ad-libbed something wonderful.’44 Recordings allow the comic to assess the performance objectively, check the exact wording of a strong new joke, notice mistakes and consider different ways of arranging a routine. Harry Hill regularly makes audio or video recordings of his act: ‘[S]ometimes watching things back … at the time I haven’t thought they’re very funny, then sometimes watching them back you think, “Oh, well yeah, no, that is quite funny,” or, you know, “Here’s something you could do” … exaggerate it, or do something extra on it.’45

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Recordings are also useful, given that many comedians keep minimal notes, or avoid writing down anything at all. Phill Jupitus says: ‘I used to do The Square [a venue in Harlow, Essex], ‘cos they had an A/V set up and so you could record your act, and I’d keep The Square videos and would watch them back, and would remember pieces.’46 Similarly, Jeremy Hardy says: If I haven’t gigged for, like, three or four months, then I have to do quite a lot of work trying to remember [it], and sometimes I will find a tape of a gig I’ve done and listen to it through. If I’m doing gigs reasonably regularly, there’s enough in my head that I can choose from. Listening back to recordings of the act is not necessarily a pleasant process. Hardy says it’s ‘unbearable … it’s just so tedious to listen to, for me.’ Then he laughs, adding, ‘I hope not for the audience, but –’47 Stephen K. Amos doesn’t use audio recordings, because he doesn’t find them helpful: ‘Well I normally go out when I’m doing new stuff … with my very good writing partner and friend who is there making notes. Because I don’t think I can ever repeat it the same way just by listening to it.’ Nonetheless, these notes can provide useful, detailed information, even about the minutiae of delivery: ‘[T]he only way that I know that’s different is if someone in the room that I trust has made a note. And it can be a slight nuance. It could be a pause, it could be the word “a” that I’ve just added accidentally that makes a difference.’48 As we’ve seen, some of the private recordings comedians make to develop their act have found their way into the commercial market, and some comedians even use commercial recordings of their acts to revise for a gig. A documentary from 2000 shows Alan Davies travelling to a show in a van, going over routines by listening to his audio cassette Urban Trauma on a personal stereo. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve done a gig and I don’t have any scripts. Nothing’s scripted.

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So the only way to remember routines is to listen to tapes,’ he explains, noting down gags in a list.49

Laziness Talking to stand-ups about how they work, an interesting tendency emerges. As they become experienced, their methodology become more and more minimal. There is less preparation, and the job starts to involve little more than the actual act of performance. Dave Gorman says: ‘It used to be very written. At the beginning, when I was deadpan, there were a lot of one-liners, which would be very precisely worded. There was one way of telling them. But then as it got more storytelling and stuff towards the end … I never wrote them down.’50 Jo Brand gives a more detailed account of how her preparation has decreased: How I generate material’s kind of changed over the years. I have to be honest, I was a lot more conscientious when I started. I would sit down and I’d write it all down, sort of word for word, and I would learn it, you know, almost like a poem, really. And kind of over the years … I, personally, have just found I’ve got a lot lazier about it … I’ll have an idea in my head, and think, ‘Well that might be a funny punchline,’ and I’ll just try it out. And if it works sort of 50 per cent, then I’ll just keep trying it and refining it until it does, really. And I’ll have it on a bit of paper as just one word, whereas before I would have kind of had five sheets of paper very neatly typed out with the whole thing, you know.51 Words like ‘conscientious’ and ‘lazier’ suggest Brand feels a twinge of guilt about having to spend less time preparing. It’s a twinge shared by Andre Vincent, who accuses himself of laziness, although he has never written material down. He

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tends to generate new jokes by going through the Evening Standard, and circling stories, then taking the newspaper on with him and busking routines from it. He says of this method: ‘[I]t is really bad of me, really lazy. I’m so lazy. That’s the worst thing.’52 Harry Hill shows a similar hint of guilt about his aversion to rehearsal: I don’t rehearse, I can’t bear rehearsing, I can’t rehearse really, no. I mean, normally on the way to a gig I would do it in the car, you know. I’d have a sort of list on the passenger seat, and run through it like that. But I think probably I should rehearse, I think probably, you know, it wouldn’t do you any harm, would it?53 While some comedians may feel guilty about their apparent laziness, others realise that with experience, preparation becomes unnecessary, even counterproductive. The very idea of rehearsing stand-up is rejected. Eddie Izzard says, ‘You can’t rehearse it. This is the terrible and brilliant thing of stand-up … I think you rehearse in front of paying audiences.’54 Dave Gorman puts his argument beautifully: ‘It’s impossible to rehearse. It’s like a guitarist rehearsing by playing air guitar. The audience are actually the instrument.’55 The fact that comedians can reduce the amount of preparation they do and still perform as effectively – or possibly even better – when they are faced with an audience, is a testament to the skills they have acquired. The idea of sketching down a few notes, going through it in your head, then going onstage and doing it might make stand-up seem like the ideal job for the lazy person, especially with working hours of between 20 minutes and two hours a night. However, in most cases it only becomes a slacker’s profession after years of experience, and the learning process is a long, hard slog.

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Notes 1

Ted Ray, Raising the Laughs, London: Werner Laurie, 1952, p. 69

2

Arena (‘Oooh, er Missus! The Frankie Howerd Story’), BBC Two, 1 June 1990

3

Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012

4

Interview with Jeremy Hardy, Streatham, 1 April 2004

5

Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004

6

Interview with Rhona Cameron, by telephone, 19 March 2004

7

Interview with Omid Djalili, by telephone, 28 June 2004

8

Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004

9

Interview with Alexei Sayle, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003

10 Interview with Omid Djalili, by telephone, 28 June 2004 11 Interview with Tiernan Douieb, Gulbenkian Café, Canterbury, 17 March 2012 12 Interview with Jimmy McGhie, Whitstable, 30 August 2012 13 Interview with Stephen K. Amos, by telephone, 18 September 2012 14 Interview with Mark Thomas, Clapham, 27 February 2004 15 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 16 Jack Dee, The Stag Theatre, Sevenoaks, 23 May 2004 17 Harry Hill, Battersea Arts Centre, 14 September 2004 18 Interview with Josie Long, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012 19 Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012 20 Interview with Al Murray, by telephone, 2 April 2012 21 Interview with Ross Noble, Leicester Square, London, 25 August 2009 22 Interview with Sarah Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012

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23 Interview with Omid Djalili, by telephone, 28 June 2004 24 Interview with Alex Horne, by telephone, 6 July 2004 25 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 26 Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004 27 Interview with Milton Jones, by telephone, 28 June 2004 28 Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004 29 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004 30 Interview with Mark Lamarr, Chiswick, 14 July 2004 31 Interview with Alexei Sayle, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003 32 Quoted in John Lahr, Show and Tell, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 176 33 Quoted in John Hind, The Comic Inquisition: Conversations with Great Comedians, London: Virgin, 1991, p. 98 34 Quoted in Ben Thompson, Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office, London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004, p. 109 fn 35 John Hind, The Comic Inquisition: Conversations with Great Comedians, London: Virgin, 1991, p. 98 36 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 37 Interview with Jeremy Hardy, Streatham, 1 April 2004 38 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 39 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 40 Interview with Adam Bloom, by telephone, 29 June 2004 41 Max Beerbohm, The Bodley Head Max Beerbohm (ed. David Cecil), London, Sydney and Toronto: The Bodley Head, 1970, p. 377 42 Interview with Shelley Berman, by telephone, 5 August 2004 43 See Eric Midwinter, Make ‘Em Laugh: Famous Comedians and their Worlds, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979, p. 202, for more details on this

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44 Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, London: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2008, pp. 137–8 45 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 46 Interview with Phill Jupitus, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 47 Interview with Jeremy Hardy, Streatham, 1 April 2004 48 Interview with Stephen K. Amos, by telephone, 18 September 2012 49 Stand-Up with Alan Davies, BBC One, 19 June 2000 50 Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004 51 Interview with Jo Brand, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 52 Interview with Andre Vincent, Central London, 14 July 2004 53 Interview with Harry Hill, by telephone, 26 August 2004 54 TX (‘“Je Suis a Stand-Up”- Eddie Izzard Abroad …’), BBC Two, 7 December 1996 55 Interview with Dave Gorman, by telephone, 29 June 2004

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Why bother? As somebody who teaches stand-up comedy in a university, I’m faced with a nagging question – why bother? The comedy circuit is purely market driven, and people who run comedy clubs will only book acts they can be sure of pleasing the punters. Unamused audiences may not come back next week. It’s now more difficult than ever to get established in British comedy clubs, and the only way to avoid months or years spent slogging away in the amateur open mike clubs is to win a competition or be spotted by an agent. Given this, a degree certificate won’t cut much ice. There’s also the possibility that trying to teach somebody how to do stand-up might do more harm than good. As Jo Brand puts it: ‘Having been to workshops for stand-up comedians, I personally don’t think they’re a good idea. I think they tend to bland everyone out a bit by making the stand-ups uniform in the way that they approach the job.’1 Along the same lines, Stephen K. Amos rightly points out: ‘[T]here are now courses you can do in stand-up comedy which may well teach you the techniques and the devices you can use but if you don’t put them in your own voice you end up sounding like someone else or being a generic comic’.2 Both of these arguments suggest that doing a course might make people take a uniform approach to being a comic, neglecting the individuality that’s so crucial to the art of stand-up. They tap into a commonly held idea about teaching

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– that it is something the teacher does to the learner. What is taught is simply passed on. The teacher is active, the learner is passive. This idea is implicit in the current tendency to depersonalise teaching in higher education. Learning outcomes are published in advance, and ticked off one by one. Marks are neatly divided up between the assessment tasks. Essays are anonymously marked, feedback written without any idea of who will be reading it. Somehow, not knowing the students will improve their learning. They are customers who should be given a standardised slice of the education salami. There may be a danger that comedy courses might ‘bland everyone out’, but it doesn’t have to be like that. To me, teaching stand-up isn’t about imposing a fixed set of techniques on the students, but helping them learn and develop for themselves – to find their own way of becoming a comedian. This doesn’t fit the impersonal model of modern higher education. I have to understand the students and get to know them as individuals, because their personalities and the lives they lead are the raw materials they’ll be working with. Their work couldn’t be anonymously marked unless they disguised their voice and did the act with a bag on their head. I do what happens in the professional world. I watch them work and give them advice. I play Max Miller to their Bob Monkhouse, Jack Rollins to their Woody Allen. I have to try and understand who they are, and what makes them tick. I have to spot what they’re doing that’s brilliant, interesting or quirky, and encourage them to develop it further. I have to notice where they’re struggling and try and help them get through it.

Talent, perseverance and luck It’s May 2011, and I’m compèring a show at the Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury, featuring ex-students who have gone on to make a living from comedy. Alongside razor-sharp



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improv comedy troupe the Noise Next Door and the brilliant sketch group Pappy’s are two fine stand-ups, Tiernan Douieb and Jimmy McGhie.3 Jimmy – the student we met in Chapter 1, with the routine about an unfortunate incident in a sleeping bag in Thailand – graduated in 2002, and the route he took to becoming a professional comedian was circuitous to say the least. He started off doing ‘the odd gig’ on the London open mike circuit, and got to the semi-finals of the So You Think You’re Funny competition in Edinburgh, where a routine about a South African Muppet flopped. Knocked out of the competition, he felt disillusioned and started developing a career as a TV researcher, and later, a production manager he was working with made him send off a tape of one of his old university performances to a BBC competition for new acts. He ‘sailed into the semis having done no gigs for about three years’, and eventually this made him decide to give stand-up another try: I just made a decision to just get back into it properly, and give it a good go, so I didn’t end up always regretting it. And that would’ve been about four, five years out of uni at that stage, so I was about 26. So I just started gigging and it was my dirty little night-time hobby that no-one knew about … I was just constantly exhausted driving from work to gigs, getting back in the middle of the night, getting up, going to work. But I just kept at it … and then eventually it just got to a point where I thought I was going to have a go at doing it professionally … I’d spent three or four years trying to become a professional stand-up and then one day just sort of woke up in a Travelodge in Nottingham, and just thought, ‘Oh. I am one. OK … I’m a professional stand-up. That’s all I ever really thought about doing.’ … It took at least three years to sort of chip away at the bigger clubs before I started to do opening twenties … It was a long, slow grind and sort of weirdly the happiest but most unhappy years of my life really. I loved it. I knew I was

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doing something that meant something to me but it wasn’t easy.4 Tiernan graduated a year later, in 2003, and he also had to work hard to become established, starting off doing a couple of open mike spots a week, and gradually building things up: The more you gig, the more promoters see you. My agent Brett Vincent saw me when I was doing five minutes at the Comedy Store, and then helped me out with gigs at his then-club Bound and Gagged, and from that I remember Off the Kerb saw me somewhere and they gave me a paid 20, and it’s just a gradual build-up. I’d love to say I remember my first paid gig, but I don’t … But it got to a point where the one or two gigs every couple of weeks was suddenly becoming three or four gigs a week. And then that was slowly becoming one or two of those would be paid, and suddenly they’re all paid. It took four years or so before I could go full-time. And even then that was only because I got a Carlsberg advert that paid me to live for six and a bit months, and that gave me the confidence to go, ‘I’m quitting my job, let’s just go with this money.’5 It’s often struck me that to become a successful stand-up you need three things – talent, perseverance and luck. There’s nothing you can do about luck, but you can hone your talent by constantly working on material and stagecraft. Even so, in order to make it you also need to persevere, no matter how hard or demoralising it may be. Jimmy’s and Tiernan’s stories make this abundantly clear. Jimmy is happy to admit that he had a rude awakening when he first started doing open mike nights in London, having been ‘a big fish in a small pond’ while performing in the student comedy night: ‘I think that it meant that I had a very lackadaisical and arrogant attitude towards my own stand-up … So of course when I hit London to do my open spots and to become a comedian I had a really big slap in the face.’



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I ask them both what they got from doing my course. Tiernan starts by saying, ‘I never would’ve thought of doing comedy ever in my life before if I hadn’t done it as a course here.’ Jimmy makes a similar point: ‘Stand-up was the only thing I wasn’t spectacularly average at in my entire life. And that year was genuinely … a watershed moment, where I thought, “I can do this.” Up until then I’d never considered stand-up particularly’. Something else they both identify is being encouraged to find their own voice. Tiernan recalls: [Y]ou told me some of my material was me being me and some wasn’t. And I just remember you saying, ‘You’ve got to be yourself,’ and, ‘What is it that you like?’ And I still hold that now. I don’t do any material about stuff I don’t believe in now, I don’t, I refuse to do it … And I think that’s really important …You helped me with joke structure and things like that but I think ultimately that just making-mebe-me is the most important thing you could do, really. Jimmy argues that the course gave him a sense of space to develop away from the pressures of the circuit: It gave me a sense of freedom that I still have, which I think if you didn’t do a course like that and you just started doing gigs in London off your own bat, you may find that you’re constricted faster by the idea that you have to be slick or you have to do a tight five. I kind of almost luxuriated in a creative freedom which I think is still in me now and I think has only been a help to me. So I didn’t sort of go in and already kind of conform. I think a lot of new acts, you know, you can tell who their heroes are, who they like as stand-ups, because they’re essentially aping them. Whereas I don’t think I ever really did, I think I had my own voice from the start, because I was encouraged to have it, by you and by the way the course was designed … So in that respect that’s probably my most cherished quality, is that

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I’m still quite freewheeling and I’m still quite passionate about doing it the right way because I had that instilled in me quite early. Tiernan is first on at the Gulbenkian, and his act has all the qualities that define his comedy – cheery likeability, a penchant for puns and an ability to encompass both childlike silliness and left-wing political anger. A routine about his annoyance at the way his bank handled his credit card being defrauded provides a good example: Several days after it happened, I got a call from my bank going, erm, ‘Did you use the cash machine down at the end of the road where you live?’ I was like, ‘That was me, yeah.’ ‘And, er, ten minutes later than that, did you go to the Starbucks near where you live?’ ‘Oh yeah, that was me as well.’ ‘And, er, in between those two transactions, did you er fly to the Philippines and draw out £200?’ ‘What the fuck do you think??’ [laughter] I mean really – really. Is it, is it worth asking me? [laughter] And – ha! And surely, surely if I said yes to that, there’d be bigger problems afoot as to whether or not my card had been frauded, and more how on earth have I learned to travel at the speed of light! [laughter]6 His delivery and the way he structures his ideas have the sheen gained by years of experience, but his conversational rhythms are very recognisable from the performances he gave as a student. Looking back to those times, Tiernan recalls, ‘When you did the course, the other thing that was very useful which I think a lot of people don’t have is just having an outside eye’. It took him a few shows to really start being himself onstage. Initially, he was lively and energetic, but I felt he was a bit too eager to please, talking about things that he thought the audience would like to hear rather than what really interested him. I encouraged him to talk more about himself, and he started to explore a quirkier mix of references



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– hip-hop, clubbing, diabetes, vegetarianism, animals, cult movies. About halfway through the first term, he really loosened up and the way he spoke onstage suddenly sounded pretty much the same as his everyday speech. The laughs got bigger and getting them seemed much more effortless. I remember one week in particular, when he talked about going to see the drum and bass artist Roni Size at Fabric. He made fun of the club’s bouncers, and in particular their slack attitude, turning a blind eye to drug taking whilst being surprisingly vigilant for more minor misdemeanours: ‘And you go into the club, and people are rolling up and popping and snorting, and they go, “Don’t stand next to the speaker!” [laughter, some clapping]’7 There’s an echo of this in the gag about the person dealing with his credit card – both pick up on the ridiculous thinking of somebody in a position of authority. Jimmy opens up the second half of the Gulbenkian show. Towards the end of the act, he starts talking about the emptiness of his life, spending the days by himself and not really having anyone else to talk to: The closest relationship I have right now is with Anil – [laughter] who is the night manager of Balham High Road Tesco Express. [laughter] ‘Cos I see him every single day without fail, every single day, and of course every single day I put a new basket of produce in front of him and he can identify more and more dark emotions – [laughter] about my life, you know, and I can see him scanning my stuff just looking really upset, just sort of going – Now he imitates the Tesco manager scanning his purchases into the till – boop! – breathing heavily as he does so. You know, and sometimes I can see he just wants to say something, just like boop [breathes heavily] ‘Four cans – of Magners. Two bags of Toffee Crisp Clusters. [laughter] And a bag of Haribo Starmix.’

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There’s a quiet, fluttering laugh, which extends to fill the pause, then the manager continues: ‘What’s happened? Yesterday you came in here, you had you gym bag with you, you bought a fucking pomegranate, didn’t you? [laughter] Individual bags of salad and an Onken Biopot. [laughter] What’s possibly happened in 24 hours for you to fall so spectacularly? [laughter]’8 As with Tiernan, there are distinct echoes of his student performances here. Ten years ago, Jimmy got consistent big laughs from the audience in the student bar with his anecdotes, structuring them well, and always acting them out evocatively with great characterisation. I encouraged him to follow this line, touching on as many areas of his life as possible. He filled the stage with stories about bullying at school, a trip to the GU clinic and what his mum thought when she found a can of butane gas under his bed. He always had a sharp eye for the telling reference, and a line from a routine about his military father co-ordinating a group of animal rights protestors provides an excellent example: ‘Right – Mingey, Manky, Swampy, Crusty and Fuck – you go all the way round the back and break in. And I’ll stay in the Renault Espace operations room. [laughter]’9 It’s the contrast between the cartoonish names of the animal rights crusties, and the qualities a Renault Espace conjures up – large, dependable, respectable, perhaps slightly boring – that gives the joke its comic bite. The Tesco Metro routine shows Jimmy’s eye for references has only sharpened over the years. The basic gag is simple – that someone can judge his emotional well-being based on what he’s buying. What gives it its real flavour is the perfectly-judged choice of references to indicate depression and a craving for comfort – Magners cider, Toffee Crisp Clusters, Haribo Starmix – as opposed to an optimistic desire to adopt a healthy lifestyle – a pomegranate, bags of salad, Onken yoghurt. Behind the gag is something else he showed as



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a student – honesty, a willingness to explore his own vulnerability and peek behind the facades of pretention. Thinking about how Jimmy and Tiernan started out and the comedians they have become makes me realise what I like about teaching stand-up. My job is to help students express themselves as individuals. It’s a joy to see them facing an audience with their own quirks, anecdotes, peeves, obsessions and conspiracy theories, and to hear the laughter echo around the room in reply. The course may not magically open the doors of professional comedy clubs to them, but as well as giving them some stage experience and material to face the open mike circuit with, it should – as Jimmy points out – discourage them from starting out by simply imitating their comic heroes.10 Ultimately I’d answer the question ‘Why study stand-up comedy at university?’ by saying ‘Why not?’ It only seems wacky because it’s a comparatively new idea. The idea of formalised training for actors would have seemed bizarre 200 years ago, when most of them learnt their skills – as Lupino Lane did – through teaching carried out within theatrical families. RADA was only founded a 1904, and it wasn’t until 1947 that Bristol became the first British university to establish a drama department. Stand-up comedy is a vibrant, popular form, which attracts far bigger audiences than many of the playwrights and performers who are routinely studied in universities. At its best, it manages to balance popularity with cutting edge inventiveness, daring and profundity. It can encompass an individual revealing intimate secrets to a group of strangers, a performer-audience relationship so intense that it can literally descend into violence, a challenging of taboos so serious that the authorities intervene, and the most painful moments being transformed into occasions for laughter. Surely something that exciting is worth studying?

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Notes 1

Alison Oddey, Performing Women: Stand-ups, Strumpets and Itinerants, Houndmills and London: MacMillan Press, 1999, pp. 108–9

2

Interview with Stephen K. Amos, by telephone, 18 September 2012

3

Two members of the Noise Next Door – Sam Pacelli and Tom Houghton – did the stand-up course. Pappy’s weren’t actually on the stand-up course, but Matthew Crosby and Tom Parry both did a lecture-based module about stand-up which I taught at the time, and both were regular punters for the weekly comedy night featuring the stand-up students

4

Unless otherwise stated, all quotes from Jimmy McGhie in this chapter are from interview with Jimmy McGhie, Whitstable, 30 August 2012

5

Unless otherwise stated, all quotes from Tiernan Douieb in this chapter are from interview with Tiernan Douieb, Gulbenkian Café, Canterbury, 17 March 2012

6

Monkeyshine: The Professionals, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 20 May 2011

7

Tiernan Douieb at Mungo’s bar, Eliot College, University of Kent, 20 November 2002. An audio recording of this routine is included on the CD: various artists, Monkeyshine 2001–2011, University of Kent, 2011, K-LAF 002 (available to order from the University of Kent online store. Go to https://store.kent.ac.uk/ and search for Monkey Shine)

8

Monkeyshine: The Professionals, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 20 May 2011

9

Jimmy McGhie at Mungo’s bar, Eliot College, University of Kent, 15 November 2001. Another of Jimmy’s student routines can be found on the Monkeyshine 2001–2011 CD – it’s the one about his mum finding a can of butane gas under his bed

10 In fact only a small minority of my students want to do stand-up for a living in any case – but I’d argue that they come away from the course with a great set of transferable skills. After doing a year of stand-up, having to address a meeting, present an award or give a best man’s speech will be easy by comparison

APPENDIX Exercises for teaching stand-up comedy These games work best if carrying out in the spirit of casual messing about. The students should have fun carrying out what they’ve been told to do, rather than strain too hard to be funny. Funniness should gently grow out of the activities rather than being forced into life. The person leading the class shouldn’t be too worried if the exercise in hand veers off into casual banter, because this can also spark off ideas – but try and learn how to judge when there’s been enough banter, and take the students back to the game in hand. Students should always have a notebook handy to write down any ideas for gags and routines that arise from the exercises. They should also record anything they do that involves getting up behind the mike, so they can listen back to it and mine it for potential material. The art of leading a class like this is to be able to pick out anything the student has done that might be useful onstage – a gag, a routine, an idea, a well-chosen word, a tone of voice, a gesture, a stance, what they happen to be wearing, etc. – and feed this back to them.

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Microphone Conversations How it’s done This is a devilishly simple exercise. The students arrange their seating so that they form a small audience. The microphone stand is placed in front of them, to form a stage area. One of the students then gets up behind the mike, and simply has a conversation with the audience. There’s no requirement to be funny, or to assume any kind of formal stage attitude. This should be as much like a normal, everyday conversation as possible, in spite of the microphone and audience. The student can ask questions of the audience, and vice versa. The entire group should acknowledge the reality of the situation, rather than pretending that this is a real stand-up gig where the comedian doesn’t know the audience. All of the stuff they talk about to each other before the workshop begins can be used in the exercise. The subjects discussed can range from the banal (what you had for breakfast) to the profound (your philosophy). One potential hazard of the exercise is that sometimes it descends into members of the audience talking among themselves, and if this happens, the student behind the mike has to sort it out and restore order.

What it’s for Microphone conversations is the best way I have found of getting students used to the feeling of being onstage and addressing the audience directly, without the crutch of a fixed script. Their confidence increases, and they start to define who they are in relation to the audience. Because the exercise is so easy, the students relax and often manage to make the rest of the group laugh. There are also times when a tangible sense of excitement is generated, when something comes up in conversation that can form the nugget of a gag or a routine. This is

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also a great way of starting to work on stage persona, because the individual quirks of each student will be magnified by the situation. The teacher should look for these and feed them back to the student concerned.

The Attitudes Game How it’s done Again, the basic set-up is a student behind the mike facing the rest of the group arranged as an audience. The player is given a series of subjects, and has to give his or her honest opinion of that subject. I usually print out little slips of paper, each with three subjects on, and give these out a few minutes before the students do the exercise, so that they have a bit of time to think about them. Their responses should prioritise honesty over gratuitous funniness, and might encompass deeply held political beliefs, prejudices, pet hates, relevant anecdotes, even the admission that they have no strong feelings on the subject. Subjects given should be as varied as possible, and move between the trivial and the serious. Some examples: a band you like; pornography; God; things you find embarrassing; a stupid thing you’ve had to do as part of your job; your parents’ house’; Facebook; plastic surgery; things that keep you awake at night; a film you’ve seen recently; the government; something you spend too much money on; moist toilet paper; the human capacity for evil; picnics; a celebrity you hate; washing up.

What it’s for The Attitudes Game makes the student think about who they are and the relationship they have to the rest of the world. If modern stand-up is often about sharing a world view with the

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audience, it helps if you actually know what your opinions are. This exercise can help student to define who they want to be on stage, as well as generating basic ideas for gags and routines.

Find the Link How it’s done The students sit in a circle, and the sequence moves clockwise around it. Person 1 starts the sequence by suggesting a subject, say, superheroes. Person 2 (to the left of Person 1) then suggests a second, completely unrelated subject, say, arson. Person 3 (to the left of Person 2) then has to find a link between the two subjects. This can be anything: MM

A simple, factual link (e.g. you could use superhero comics to start a fire)

MM

A personal association (e.g. I used to be slightly scared of superhero comics when I was very young – and I’m quite scared of arson now)

MM

An imaginative connection (e.g. the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch would be brilliant at arson)

Then the sequence starts again, with the person to the left of Person 3 suggesting a new first subject. The game continues until it runs out of steam. Not all the links will be funny, but some of them will. It’s important to come up with subjects and find the links as quickly as possible, because thinking too much about it robs the game of spontaneity. There’s no way anybody can lose, because no link can ever be wrong. Sometimes the sequence is broken, for example, if the second person gives a subject which is clearly related to the first (Person 1: ‘Pants.’/Person 2: ‘Vest’). This doesn’t matter: a lot of comedy is made by breaking sequences. In fact, it’s good to

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vary the format. Let anyone come up with a link, even when it’s not their turn, if they think they’ve got a better one than the first one suggested. Make everyone except the two people who suggested the subjects come up with a link. Try taking the sequences anti-clockwise around the circle for a change.

What it’s for Find the Link is designed to encourage the kind of associative, lateral thinking that happens when comedians think of ideas for material. It encourages reversals, incongruities and jarring contrasts. Students enjoy playing it, so it’s a good for warm-ups, because it creates the right atmosphere – relaxed and playful. It also starts to suggest rhythm and structure. The basic three-part sequence mirrors the rule of three, which many jokes are based on.

Rule of Three How it’s done A variation of Find the Link. The students sit in a circle and the sequence passes around it, but this time Person 1 simply says one word, Person 2 says a second, related word, and person 3 says a word that’s as unrelated as possible to the first two. For example: Person 1, ‘Pants’; Person 2, ‘Vest’; Person 3, ‘Genocide’. Then the sequence starts again, with the person to the left of Person 3 suggesting a new first word.

What it’s for Obviously, this is about the students starting to think in threes, as so many jokes are based on that number. Not all the

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sequences will be funny, but when they are it demonstrates the comic power of three. Again, this is good for warm-ups.

Playing with Words How it’s done Each student is given a slip of paper with a word on it. They have to think of as many ways as possible to mess about with it. For example, they might find other words hidden within it, use it to make puns, find weird ways of pronouncing it, try saying it with an accent, make an acrostic out of it, suggest made-up definitions for it, etc. Let’s say the word was ‘conjugate’. The words ‘con’, ‘jug’, ‘ate’ and ‘gate’ are all in there. It might suggest a jug that ate a con[vict], and thinking about it, ‘jug’ is old slang for prison. You can conjugate a verb, but conjugal rights are to do with having sex. Maybe a conjugate is a gate you go through to have sex? ‘Etagujnoc’ is conjugate backwards. You could pronounce it ‘conjugarté’. Conjugate could stand for ‘Come On Nigel, Jump Up – Go And Tell Ethel.’ And so on. The students go behind the mike to share their ideas with the group, and they can also talk about the whole process – perhaps they didn’t know what the word meant, or didn’t know when to stop, or got really fed up with the whole exercise. Some words you might use for the game: acrobat; salami; meteorite; angel; twee; anemone; happy-go-lucky; mosquito; baguette; catastrophe; billy goat; carnival.

What it’s for Wordplay is a huge part of comedy, and this gets the students to start looking at words for the creative possibilities they contain.

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Surreal Instant Character How it’s done The students stand in a circle. Somebody starts off by nominating somebody and telling them something daft to impersonate, ideally involving a daft juxtaposition (e.g. a suicidal toaster, a happy monk, an angry guinea pig, a cannibal typewriter, a depressed baby, etc.). The nominee then has to act this out as an instant character, as if in a stand-up comedy routine. Having done so, they then nominate the next person, and tell them what to impersonate. The game continues until everyone’s had a go. It’s best if it’s all done in a throwaway fashion, with simple gestures and a casual energy, rather than treating it like a proper acting exercise. Even the way the students react to the suggestion they’ve been given is part of the game, as the expression on their face will give away a lot about what they think of it. It’s best if they remain standing to do the characterisation, rather than sitting or rolling around on the floor or whatever – after all, most stand-ups stand up for most of their act. The game should be quick and snappy – don’t let any characterisation drag on too long.

What it’s for This is a great warm-up exercise, because it’s good fun. It also gets the students used to practising instant character, and might spark off ideas for those whose comedy tends towards the whimsical or surreal.

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Nominated Instant Character How it’s done This is another game with a student behind the microphone, facing an audience. This time, the student behind the mike has to describe someone they know. The group nominates the person they will talk about, and it should be someone known to them. Suggestions might include: a sibling; a parent; a teacher they had at school; a friend; somebody they’ve worked with; somebody they really dislike; etc. Unlike the previous exercise, the suggestion shouldn’t be surreal, but should be someone from their life. Normally, it would be a human, but it could conceivably be an animal (e.g. a childhood pet). The student’s impromptu performance has to involve some instant character, so that they actually characterise the person they’re talking about, and practise switching between character and narrator.

What it’s for Instant Character is about practising a basic performance skill common to most stand-ups. It might reveal a hidden talent for voices and impressions, or the characterisation might be imbued with the student’s attitude to the person, as in Jack Dee’s ‘You smoke – I choke’ routine.

Writing Exercises Most of my classes are taken up with students getting up and performing something for the rest of the group which they’ve been primed to prepare in the previous workshop. I try to make the briefs for these writing exercises as open as possible, to allow each student to produce something that fits

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their emerging style. Examples include: an anecdote from your conversational repertoire; an observational routine; a piece of ‘found comedy’; your manifesto for a better world; a piece that consciously breaks the conventions of stand-up; a routine that involves instant character. They are road-testing material, so of course they should record their performance to see where the laughs are. Feedback is crucial and sometimes takes longer than the performance itself. It’s great to get students to give each other feedback, because that helps to increase their own understanding as well. One exercise I set early on is simply – ‘Write some jokes.’ This puts them on the spot a bit, but it’s a good way of getting them to think about what exactly constitutes a joke and also makes them realise that stand-up material is more than just formless waffle. The danger is that that they all come in with a series of simple puns that don’t fit their style, so warn them in advance about this, and get them to discuss what a joke is before going off and doing the exercise.

GLOSSARY OF COMEDIANS This glossary is here so that you don’t lose track of who I’m talking about when you read the book. It’s not meant to be some kind of definitive list, and not every comic in the book gets a mention here. I’ve only included people who are mentioned more than once in a reasonably substantial way. Entries are designed to remind you who everybody is, and the length of each one in no way reflects the importance, status or longevity of the comedian it describes. Tony Allen (1945–) UK The founder member of Alternative Cabaret, and one of the original alternative comedians, Allen started doing stand-up comedy in the late 1970s, after working with Rough Theatre. His comedy was daring, often dealt with difficult subject matter, and was informed by his anarchist politics. He doesn’t do much stand-up any more, instead running the Performance Club, appearing at Speakers Corner and teaching and writing about stand-up and similar subjects. Woody Allen (1935–) USA Originally a successful comedy writer, in the early 1960s Allen started performing clever, surreal, very funny stand-up routines, initially in small venues in Greenwich Village. By the middle of the decade he was a well-known comedian, and released a series of comedy albums, before moving into the movie business and becoming the legendary film director he is today.

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Stephen K. Amos (19??–) UK Since making his Edinburgh debut in 2001, Amos has enjoyed a highly successful stand-up career in live shows, radio and TV – notably fronting The Stephen K Amos Show. A black, gay Briton of Nigerian descent, his lively, engaging act plays on various aspects of his identity. Amos deliberately refuses to reveal his age, saying, ‘I don’t want any labels at all, so that’s why I avoid it.’ Bill Bailey (1964–) UK Bailey started in London comedy clubs in the 1980s as part of musical double act the Rubber Bishops. He went solo in the early 1990s, and now performs surreal, cerebral, spaced out stand-up dressed up in rock and roll stagecraft, drawing heavily on his musical virtuosity – he plays guitar, keyboards and even theramin in his shows. He was also a team captain in the comedy pop music quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Milton Berle (1908–2002) USA After performing in vaudeville as a child in various different acts, Berle found fame as a monologist. After the vaudeville circuit died, he performed in nightclubs and appeared in film and on radio, and became massively famous in the early days of television in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the star of the shows Texaco Star Theatre and The Buick-Berle Show, where he became known as ‘Uncle Miltie’. Shelley Berman (1926–) USA Berman became a stand-up in 1957 after training as an actor and working with improvisational theatre group the Compass Players. He performed his act seated on a barstool, and many of his routines took the form of imaginary telephone conversations, although he also did a nice line in observational comedy. One of the sick comedians, he had huge success with a series of comedy albums, starting in 1959 with Inside Shelley Berman.



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John Bishop (1966–) UK After working in sales and marketing for a pharmaceutical company, Bishop started in stand-up on the Manchester comedy circuit in 2000. After building his reputation as a live act, TV appearances on shows like Live at the Apollo, Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and John Bishop’s Britain have made him successful enough to be able to play arenas. Adam Bloom (1971–) UK Bloom has pursued a very successful stand-up career in British comedy clubs from the early 1990s onwards. His delivery is frenetic, his jokes often clever and offbeat. Three series of his show The Problem with Adam Bloom have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He’s known on the circuit for being almost obsessively analytical about his comedy (and comedy in general). Frankie Boyle (1972–) UK Boyle started as a stand-up in the mid-1990s, and has become extremely successful in the last few years due to appearances on a number of TV shows, particularly as a regular on Mock the Week. His comedy is scabrous and misanthropic, delivering a series of well-written, deliberately offensive jokes and engaging in insulting banter with individual punters. Jo Brand (1957–) UK After a career as a psychiatric nurse, Brand moved into stand-up in the 1980s, originally working under the stage name ‘the Sea Monster’. Much of her early comedy dealt with her physical size, and since then, she’s been unfairly criticised for basing all her comedy on this one subject, as well as being regularly vilified by the right-wing press for her feminist politics and left-wing sympathies. In fact, her comedy is based on a gleeful outrageousness which takes in broad ranging targets, and both her live act and her TV work have deservedly made her a big star, and earned her a devoted following.

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Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown (1945–) UK Brown originally started as a drummer in the working men’s clubs in the 1950s, before turning to stand-up. He has enjoyed much success by doing ‘blue’ (i.e. sexually explicit) material, touring big theatres and selling shedloads of videos. His trademark costume is a garish, multi-coloured suit and a leather flying helmet. Lenny Bruce (1925–66) USA A legendary stand-up, his act was extraordinary for a number of reasons: he improvised, dealt with obscene subjects, used expletives, talked about illegal drugs and attacked racism and hypocrisy. His willingness to delve into taboo areas in his comedy (and, it must be said, his drug use) led to legal difficulties which destroyed his career, and probably contributed to his early death from a drug overdose. Brendon Burns (1971–) Australia This Australian comic has built his stand-up career in Britain. His performance veers from cheeky to aggressive, and his material is often deliberately provocative. His award-winning 2007 Edinburgh show So I Suppose This is Offensive Now climaxed with a truly remarkable coup de théâtre in which a pair of hecklers turned out to be not quite what they seemed. Rhona Cameron (1965–) UK A Scots comedian who started in the early 1990s, Cameron’s delivery is assured, her material observational and autobiographical and, as she puts it, ‘my lesbianism show[s] itself in a comedic way’. She moved out of the comedy clubs into touring her own show, and has also worked on TV, e.g. as a presenter of Gaytime TV and a contestant on the first series of I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here! James Campbell (1973–) UK Having started his career as a storyteller in schools in the mid-1990s, Campbell gradually found that the stories were



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disappearing in favour of more tangential material until he realised he was performing stand-up comedy for kids. Although he has performed for adult audiences in comedy clubs, he now mainly works in theatres, touring internationally to audiences of children and parents. George Carlin (1937–2008) USA After some success as half of the clean cut double act Burns and Carlin, he reinvented himself in the early 1970s, adopting a hippy image, aligning himself with the politics of the counterculture and talking about drugs. Later, his style mutated again, and as an older comic he became increasingly cynical, gleaning comedy from a grumpier, more misanthropic world view. He was a giant of American stand-up, an influential and highly respected figure. Jimmy Carr (1972–) UK Carr started on the comedy circuit in 2000, and has enjoyed much success with a middle-class persona, deadpan delivery and a series of short, well-crafted gags which are often calculatedly offensive. On television, he has presented numerous list shows and currently hosts the panel show 8 out of 10 Cats. He is a hardworking live comedian, regularly touring and releasing a series of popular DVDs. Jasper Carrott (1945–) UK Originally a folksinger, Carrott ran a folk club called The Boggery in his native Birmingham. Gradually his act mutated into stand-up comedy, and he’s enjoyed much success with his live act, various TV projects and a series of successful comedy albums starting with Rabbitts on and on and on … in 1975. His classic routines include ‘Car Insurance’, ‘The Mole’ and ‘Nutter on the Bus’. Margaret Cho (1968–) USA After starting in stand-up whilst still a teenager, Cho has worked in film and TV as well as pursuing her live career. Her

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solo shows – including I’m the One that I Want, Notorious C. H. O. and Beautiful – are rooted in her own life and experiences, involving anything from anecdotes to polemical jibes. She sometimes focuses on her Korean background, frequently impersonating her mother, and more frequently her experiences in the gay community. Louis C. K. (1967–) USA C. K. began working as a stand-up in the 1980s, and in recent years has built a reputation as one of the finest live comedians of his generation, with an autobiographical style that takes a painfully honest approach to anything from his divorce to his relationship with his children. He stars in, writes, directs and edits Louie, a semi-autobiographical comedy drama series about the life of a stand-up. Billy Connolly (1942–) UK A Glasgow-born comedian who was a shipyard worker and a folksinger before his act slid into stand-up comedy. Connolly built up a huge following, originally in Scotland, and subsequently in the rest of the UK thanks to a series of interviews on Parkinson in the 1970s. As well as various TV projects and film acting roles, he continues to tour internationally to big audiences, and constantly produces high quality new material. A consummate performer, his act can be angry, tender, wistful, sick, scatological and joyful. Steve Coogan (1965–) UK A successful impressionist on the comedy circuit in the late 1980s, Coogan moved into character comedy in the early 1990s, winning the Perrier Award (jointly with John Thomson) at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1992. His characters, which appear in various TV shows as well as his live act, include drunken Mancunian lad Paul Calf, minor TV personality Alan Partridge and no-hope comedian Duncan Thickett.



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Dane Cook (1972–) USA Cook built a huge following for his stand-up shows by cultivating his audience on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, and is one of the few American stand-ups to play arenas. His delivery is serious and energetic as he shares silly ideas like having a superpower of being able to squirt spaghetti into people’s faces. He has been criticised by a number of other comics who argue that his comedy lacks substance. Bill Cosby (1937–) USA Probably best known for starring in the highly successful 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show, Cosby has also pursued a successful stand-up career dating back to the early 1960s. In his early career, what was unique about him was that he was an African-American who didn’t deal with race in his act. Instead, with a gentle, anecdotal style, he told stories about his childhood and early manhood. David Cross (1964–) USA This bald, bespectacled comic emerged from the American alternative comedy scene, and has appeared in TV on Mr Show and Arrested Development. He benefits from a beautifully engaging conversational style, and his material is intelligent and politically outspoken. His stand-up CDs and DVDs have been released by the cult Seattle-based label Sub Pop. Rhys Darby (1974–) New Zealand Darby started out on the nascent New Zealand alternative comedy scene in the second half of the 1990s, regularly appearing in and helping to run Christchurch’s first comedy club, touring his own shows and starting to work on TV. He moved to the UK to further his stand-up career, before finding fame in the Flight of the Conchords’ eponymous TV show, playing their manager Murray. He continues to work as both comedian and actor.

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Jim Davidson (1953–) UK After various childhood forays into showbusiness, Davidson began performing stand-up in pubs and working men’s clubs in London, and became well known nationally after winning New Faces in 1976. His mainstream TV work on shows like The Generation Game contrasts with his live stand-up act, featuring ‘blue’ material and racial gags which many would find offensive. Jack Dee (1961–) UK Dee is a highly skilled deadpan comedian who started in the London comedy clubs in the late 1980s. His act transferred extremely well on to TV in two series of The Jack Dee Show in the early 1990s, and since then he has continued to work as a live act, on TV, radio and in various acting roles. His image is that of a sophisticated, besuited entertainer with shades of the Rat Pack, and his comedy is based on a kind of weary, sometimes scathing cynicism. Phyllis Diller (1917–2012) USA Diller was 37 when she first started in the 1950s, and was the first female stand-up to become a big star. Her act was based on the premise that she was the opposite of society’s image of womanhood, and she joked about her looks and lack of domestic skills. Her delivery was dominated by her extraordinary laugh, her material made up of a string of short gags. Omid Djalili (1965–) UK A British-Iranian comedian who threw himself in at the deep end in 1995 by taking a show called Short Fat Kebab Shop Owner’s Son to the Edinburgh Fringe despite having no previous experience of doing stand-up. Subsequently, Djalili has built up a successful career as a live act, initially in the comedy clubs, then touring his own show. He also works as a character actor with cameos in such movies as The Mummy and Gladiator, and starred in two series of The Omid Djalili Show on TV.



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Ken Dodd (1927–) UK An eccentric Liverpudlian comedian who started in the latter days of the British variety circuit. Dodd’s act encompasses comedy songs, sentimental ballads, ventriloquism and quickfire gags ranging from the whimsical to the surreal. He has an extraordinary image, with spiked-up hair and prominent teeth, and uses a duster known as a ‘tickling stick’ in his shows. Still a hardworking touring comic, his shows are famous for being extremely long. Tiernan Douieb (1981–) UK Since completing the University of Kent’s stand-up comedy course, Douieb has become a busy working comic. He set up the Fat Tuesday comedy club, which he ran and compèred for several years. In 2009, he put together the Twitter Comedy Club, the first stand-up event using that platform. He is now the resident compère of the Comedy Club 4 Kids. In recent years his stand-up has become more overtly political, as seen in his 2011 Edinburgh show Tiernan Douieb vs. the World. Ben Elton (1959–) UK Starting on the alternative comedy circuit of the early 1980s, by the end of that decade Elton had become well known as a sweary, motormouthed comedian in a spangly suit and glasses, mixing observational and scatological routines with satirical jibes against the Thatcher government. Once quite a controversial figure, in recent years he’s moved into the mainstream, although he has not jettisoned his leftish political beliefs. Zach Galifianakis (1969–) USA As well as starring in movies like The Hangover, Galifianakis is a successful stand-up on the American alternative comedy scene. A dishevelled-looking, bearded figure, his delivery is slow and laid back, and he sometimes accompanies his surreal one-liners with ponderous piano instrumentals. He appeared in Patton Oswalt’s The Comedians of Comedy tour.

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Dave Gorman (1971–) UK After working as a clever deadpan stand-up and comedy writer, in the late 1990s he moved into autobiographical one-man shows in which he chronicles a series of challenges like finding a given number of people who share his name (Are You Dave Gorman?) or using the Internet to find ten Googlewhacks in a row (Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure). In 2009, he returned to straight stand-up in a touring show called Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop and Stand Up. Dick Gregory (1932–) USA A groundbreaking African-American comedian whose big break was a highly successful appearance at the Playboy Club in Chicago in 1961, to a predominantly white audience. Before this, Gregory had worked only in black venues. With a cool, relaxed style, his stand-up act aimed sharp satirical barbs against racism and hypocrisy, and as the 1960s progressed he became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights movement, as well as running for president in 1968. Jeremy Hardy (1961–) UK Hardy started on the alternative comedy circuit in the early 1980s, and won the Perrier Award in 1988. His satirical stand-up act is superbly written and performed. Originally, his acerbic left-wing views were nicely counterbalanced with a tweedy, slightly cuddly middle-class image, but more recently he has tended to play on being grumpy and out of touch with modernity – which works equally well. He also writes newspaper columns and appears regularly in such radio shows as The News Quiz and Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation. Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) USA Hedberg started his stand-up career in Florida in the late 1980s. He had a genuine gift for surreal one-liners, which he delivered in a style that was somehow both spaced out and slightly staccato. This long-haired comedian played on his



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rather druggy image, with gags like: ‘I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.’ Lenny Henry (1958–) UK In 1975, at the tender age of 16, Lenny Henry won the TV talent show New Faces with an act based on comedy impressions. With very little experience of performance (or life), he was launched into a comedy career playing working men’s clubs and summer seasons, and even became the only genuinely black person to appear on The Black and White Minstrels. In the early 1980s, seeing acts like Alexei Sayle at the Comic Strip led him to change his style, rejecting the self-deprecating racial gags in favour of a more positive style. Since then, he has become one of Britain’s most popular entertainers. Richard Herring (1967–) UK After enjoying success in the 1990s as half of the double act Lee and Herring (alongside Stewart Lee), Herring went solo with a series of imaginative, often thought-provoking themed stand-up shows like Christ on a Bike, The Headmaster’s Son and Hitler Moustache. His DVDs are released on the pioneering indie comedy label Go Faster Stripe. Bill Hicks (1961–94) USA After growing up in Houston, Texas and starting to perform stand-up whilst still in his teens, Hicks forged a career by working hard and really pushing at the boundaries of what it was possible to do with the form. His act took in spirituality, smoking, rock and roll, conspiracy theories, the evils of American God-fearing capitalism and UFOs, amongst other things, veering between the sick, the tender and the thought provoking. He worked in the UK as well as the States, and received more recognition here than in his native country. Harry Hill (1964–) UK Doctor Matthew Hall gave up his job in 1990 to pursue a

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stand-up career in London comedy clubs, after performing in medical revues. Originally taking the stage name Harry Hall, he then became Harry Hill, a surreal comedian with a unique style involving quirky catchphrases, running jokes, non-sequiturs, pop songs quoted out of context, and a distinctive costume with beetle-crusher shoes, an enormous collar and pens protruding from his jacket pocket. His series Harry Hill’s TV Burp (2002–12) became an institution on British television. He continues to tour his live show around large venues. Wil Hodgson (1978–) UK This former skinhead hails from the Wiltshire market town of Chippenham. His autobiographical comedy covers such topics as his former career as a professional wrestler and his penchant for collecting 1980s girls’ toys such as Care Bears. He used to sport a distinctive pink mohican haircut. His DVDs are released on the pioneering indie comedy label Go Faster Stripe. Bob Hope (1903–2003) USA Although born in the UK, Hope was raised in the US, and forged a phenomenally successful career as a comedian originally in vaudeville, and subsequently in radio, movies and TV. His persona was that of a wisecracking everyman, his material provided by a team of writers, some of which he kept on even when old age stopped him from performing. A tireless entertainer of American troops abroad, his vocal support for the war in Vietnam led to difficulties with some of the soldiers whilst performing shows there. Alex Horne (1978–) UK Since starting out in stand-up whilst still a student at Cambridge University, Alex Horne has pursued an eccentric comedy career with a series of imaginative shows, often collaborating with Tim Key. These include Making Fish Laugh (recreating a 1970s scientific experiment on laughter), Every Body Talks



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(a show about body language) and When in Rome (a show about Latin, which toured around Roman towns). Recently, he has been the lynchpin of musical comedy show The Horne Section. Frankie Howerd (1917–92) UK After experience as an amateur entertainer before and during World War Two, Howerd first toured the variety circuit in a show called For the Fun of It in 1946. By the end of that year he had started working on Variety Bandbox, the radio show which very quickly made him a huge star. His stammering, gossipy style was distinctly camp, as he reeled out far-fetched tales of woe, heavily laden with numerous catchphrases. He sprang back from a career lull in the early 1960s, largely due to a highly successful season at Peter Cook’s venue The Establishment, and continued to perform live stand-up throughout the rest of his life. Eddie Izzard (1962–) UK Izzard started doing stand-up in London comedy clubs in the late 1980s, after working in street theatre. His style is highly distinctive: tangential, surreal and improvisational (but not entirely improvised). His subject matter is eclectic, ranging from jam to European history, from cats to religion. His stage costumes are sensational, partly because he’s a transvestite – although he does also perform in more conventional attire. He’s built up a massive following through touring big venues in the UK and internationally (including performing his act in French in Paris), and his hugely successful live videos. His British shows now tend to take place in arenas. Milton Jones (1964–) UK Starting at the very end of the 1980s, Jones became very successful in British comedy clubs with a stand-up act based on very clever surreal jokes, with a quietly unhinged persona dressed in appalling pullovers or Hawaiian shirts, his hair alarmingly gelled. His radio work includes The Very World

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of Milton Jones and The House of Milton Jones. Recently, he has benefited from appearances on TV shows like Live at the Apollo and Mock the Week, allowing him to play to the larger audiences he has always deserved. He was the very first act to headline at my old comedy club, the Last Laugh in Sheffield. Phill Jupitus (1962–) UK Jupitus first became established as Porky the Poet on the ranting poetry scene of the 1980s, then worked in the pop music business, before becoming a stand-up at the end of that decade. Physically large, the laddishness of his act was nicely balanced by a more delicate side, skilfully acting out his ideas. His Jedi Steady Go show in 1998 focused exclusively on Star Wars, and was eventually almost as long as the film itself. He put his stand-up career on hold to present the breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 (2002–7), but has now returned to live comedy as well as continuing as a team captain on the longrunning comedy pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Daniel Kitson (1977–) UK Bearded, bespectacled, lisping and stuttering, Kitson doesn’t seem like an ideal candidate for a stand-up comedian, but he’s a natural, improvising effortlessly, telling revealing stories and criticising his own technique whilst being technically excellent. Starting in the mid-1990s, he’s built up a big following in the comedy clubs and beyond, and he won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002. He has presented a series of soulful, groundbreaking solo shows which prioritise artistic values over mass commercial success, and as such he has become an important influence on the DIY comedy scene. Mark Lamarr (1967–) UK Lamarr became a performance poet at the age of 18, having had a poem published in a Faber anthology, but he quickly abandoned the poetry in favour of stand-up and moved on to the London comedy circuit. Sharply dressed with quiffed



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hair, he had an easy authority, playfully improvising around conversations with the audience and the whole situation of the gig, as well as having some strong material. He gave up stand-up to concentrate on a career in TV and radio. Stewart Lee (1968–) UK Lee started as a stand-up in the late 1980s whilst studying at the University of Oxford, and went on to work professionally both solo and as half of the double act Lee and Herring (alongside Richard Herring). He gave up stand-up for a few years to create the musical Jerry Springer the Opera, but revived his act when that project suffered from being targeted by right-wing Christian groups. Since 2004, he has created a series of extraordinary full-length shows, becoming possibly the finest stand-up working today. Dan Leno (1860–1904) UK Probably the greatest and most popular music hall comedian of his time, Leno’s comic patter was more important than his singing, thus making his act a crucial evolutionary step in the development of stand-up comedy. He was also the most successful pantomime dame of his generation. Little Tich (1867–1928) UK A highly successful music hall comedian, Little Tich was only 4’6” tall, and the word ‘titch’, meaning somebody who is very small, originates from his stage name. Most famous for his big boot dance, he was also very skilled in performing songs and patter routines. Josie Long (1982–) UK Long started performing stand-up as a teenager, and in recent years has become a prominent figure in the DIY comedy scene. Her comedy is marked out by passion and earnestness, with a charmingly home-made feel which manifests itself in, for example, showing the audience her own amateurish drawings. More recently, her work has become more explicitly political

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with shows like The Future is Another Place, and she has worked with the anti-tax avoidance group UK Uncut. Lee Mack (1968–) UK Mack has enjoyed a successful career with an energetic, physical style of straight, no frills stand-up. He also stars in and co-writes the sitcom Not Going Out, and is a team captain on the panel show Would I Lie to You? Bernard Manning (1930–2007) UK This rotund Mancunian progressed from singing to stand-up comedy on the working men’s club circuit, as well as running his own venue, the Embassy Club. Achieving national recognition on The Comedians in the early 1970s, he established a fearsome reputation by working hard in his live shows and liberally dispensing gags which were offensive on the grounds of race, obscenity or just pure abrasiveness. Marc Maron (1963–) USA The bearded, bespectacled Maron started his career in Los Angeles, but went on to become part of the New York alternative comedy scene. His stand-up is fearlessly honest, mining his family background, personal life and his own neuroses in order to create painfully funny material. He also presents the successful podcast WTF with Marc Maron, in which he interviews comedians about their work. Demetri Martin (1973–) USA An American alternative comedian who adopts a laid back style and has an imaginative approach to presenting his clever, surreal one-liners, often setting them to unusual music, or in the form of drawings. He won the Perrier Award at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe, and his folksy, home-made approach influenced the UK’s DIY comedy scene. Steve Martin (1945–) USA Martin’s stand-up act was clever, wacky and stylistically



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subversive, and he built up a following so huge that by the late 1970s, he became one of the first comedians to perform in arenas. He found the rock and roll atmosphere of these big venues unconducive to the subtleties of his art and moved into starring in such films as The Jerk and Roxanne. Jimmy McGhie (1980–) UK McGhie was one of the first students on the University of Kent’s year-long stand-up course, and since then he has become a successful comedian, working in the UK and internationally in Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Singapore, Australia, India and Dubai. His anecdotal stand-up benefits from a sharp eye for telling cultural references, and he has created a series of themed Edinburgh shows including 2010’s improbably-titled The All-Powerful Warrior Who With His Endurance And Inflexible Will To Win Goes From Conquest To Conquest Leaving Fire In His Wake. Michael McIntyre (1976–) UK McIntyre’s stand-up is characterised by his energetic, highly physical delivery – he famously skips on to the stage at the start of his act – and his observational routines, which focus on the minutiae of everyday life. A key figure in the current UK stand-up boom, McIntyre is arguably the country’s most successful live comic – although he has also been publicly criticised by a number of fellow acts. Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow has become an important TV showcase, bringing the guest comedians it features to a wider audience. Max Miller (1894–1963) UK Wearing a white trilby and an outrageous multi-coloured suit, with an irresistibly cheeky persona and a penchant for daring sexual innuendo, Miller was the most successful front cloth comic in the heyday of the British variety circuit. Sarah Millican (1975–) UK After getting divorced, Millican attended a writing workshop

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with Kate Fox, where she delivered a short comic monologue. Encouraged by Fox, she started doing open mike spots in comedy clubs, and quickly established herself as a successful stand-up. With a distinctively high-pitched South Shields accent, her deceptively rude comedy often involves chatting with the audience. TV appearances on, for example, The Sarah Millican Television Programme have made her one of the country’s most popular comics. Shazia Mirza (1976–) UK A Muslim stand-up most famous for the post-9/11 gag ‘My name is Shazia Mirza – at least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence’, her act was originally characterised by short, clever jokes and a deadpan delivery. More recently she has adopted a more expressive, anecdotal style. Bob Monkhouse (1928–2003) UK Starting as a comedian in the variety theatres, Monkhouse’s career encompassed comedy writing and presenting numerous TV game shows as well as his stand-up act. He continued to perform stand-up throughout his career, but although he had plenty of efficient material, his ‘smarmy’ delivery was frequently criticised. In spite of this, he was a very popular light entertainer, and an intelligent one, writing insightfully about the craft of comedy. Dylan Moran (1971–) Eire One of the comedians who emerged from Dublin’s Comedy Cellar, Moran moved to London in the early 1990s and became a big name on the circuit with a charming, shambolic style and an intelligent, literary gift for imagery. He won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1996, and has gone on to co-write and star in the sitcom Black Books, as well as continuing to perform his live stand-up act. Al Murray (1968–) UK Murray performs his stand-up act in the irony-steeped guise



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of the Pub Landlord, a patriotic, pub-loving bar-room philosopher who takes common sense to the point of bigotry and nurses a particular hatred of the French. The character originated in Harry Hill’s 1994 Perrier-nominated show Pub Internationale, and Murray went on the win the Perrier Award for his own show in 1999. Bob Newhart (1929–) USA Having written some great material, Newhart’s record company set up a gig for him to record his first album, in spite of the fact that he’d never performed stand-up before. The success of his comedy albums, starting with 1960’s The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart, allowed him to pursue a career as a live comic, with an act made up of a series of separate, individual routines introduced as if they were songs. He has starred in sitcoms, appeared in movies and still tours with his live show. Rob[ert] Newman (1964–) UK Originally an impressionist on the comedy circuit, Newman became a big star thanks to the TV show The Mary Whitehouse Experience, in 1993 becoming (with David Baddiel) one of the first stand-ups to play the Wembley Arena. In the late 1990s, he stepped away from the superstar comedian role, instead pursuing a career as a serious novelist, and a much more low-key approach to performing. His current stand-up is intelligent, thought provoking and politically radical. Ross Noble (1976–) UK After starting as a juggling comedian at the age of 15, Noble progressed through the comedy clubs to the point where he now tours big venues with his own show. He has become well known primarily by working hard with his brilliant live stand-up act, which is energetic, highly improvisational and surreal, often building ideas based on conversations with members of the audience.

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Tom O’Connor (1939–) UK Before becoming well known as a TV quizmaster, O’Connor was a stand-up on the Merseyside working men’s club circuit, and was unusual because rather than simply telling a series of pre-existing gags, he would do observational routines and material about his upbringing in working class Liverpool. He still performs today. Patton Oswalt (1969–) USA Oswalt started his stand-up career in the late 1980s and has become a leading figure in the American alternative comedy scene. His comedy encompasses autobiography, politics and pop culture, with references to anything from Star Wars to American hardcore punk. He was the prime mover in The Comedians of Comedy tour, which took stand-up to indie music venues, and provided the voice for Remy the rat in Pixar’s Ratatouille. Pappy’s (founded 2004) UK A sketch group founded in 2004, initially under the slightly longer name of Pappy’s Fun Club. Made up of Matthew Crosby (1980–), Tom Parry (1980–) and Ben Clark (1981–), they changed their name after the departure of the fourth founder member, Brendan Dodds. Crosby, Parry and Clark have all worked as solo stand-ups, and Pappy’s’ hugely funny sketch shows incorporate a number of stand-up elements, playing on the performers’ personalities, and generally playing on the nowness of the situation in which they are performing. Andy Parson (1967–) UK A topical stand-up with a trademark look based on a shaven head and a goatee beard, Parsons is a regular on the panel show Mock the Week. He has released two stand-up DVDs, Britain’s Got Idiots and Gruntled. Richard Pryor (1940–2005) USA Starting in the 1960s as an African-American comedian in the



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Bill Cosby mould, by the end of that decade, Pryor’s stand-up started taking a more militant approach to racial matters as well as encompassing obscene language and subject matter. His work was exquisitely performed and searingly honest, dealing frankly with events in his turbulent personal life, tackling difficult topics and acting out scenes with a rare delicacy. In America, he’s widely regarded as the greatest stand-up comedian of all time, and he’s at his peak in the film Live in Concert. He gave up performing in the early 1990s, due to the effects of multiple sclerosis. Ted Ray (1905–77) UK After starting off as Nedlo the Gypsy Violinist, in the late 1920s Ray made an important innovation, rejecting theatrical costumes in favour of an ordinary lounge suit, and becoming possibly the first front cloth comic to perform as an ordinary bloke, just like one of the audience. In addition to his live act on the variety circuit, he also enjoyed big success with the long running radio series Ray’s a Laugh and various TV and film work. Howard Read (1975–) UK Howard Read is best known for his double act with a computer animated boy, Little Howard, which is projected on to a screen. The act was originally devised for an Edinburgh show, as an attempt to artificially simulate spontaneity, and since then it has been widely performed in front of both adult and children’s audiences. Read has produced three series of Little Howard’s Big Question for the children’s channel CBBC. He also does a straight stand-up act, which often features his distinctive comic songs. Michael Richards (1949–) USA Richards was once best known for appearing as Kramer in the long-running sitcom Seinfeld, but in 2006 he was captured on video shouting racist insults at a group of African-American hecklers at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. The footage was

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posted on the TMZ website and quickly spread on the internet, bringing him the kind of notoriety that’s hard to shake off. In 2007, he announced his retirement from stand-up. Joan Rivers (1933–) USA Emerging from the Borscht Belt hotels and small clubs in Greenwich Village, Rivers gained national recognition through a series of TV appearances starting with the Carson show in 1965. She has gone on to enjoy a successful stand-up career which continues to this day, with a style based on calculated bitchiness and a look based on plastic-surgery-style glamour. Chris Rock (1965–) USA Probably the most important African-American comedian since Richard Pryor, Rock started in American comedy clubs, released his first album in 1991 and had appeared in movies and on TV by the time of his 1996 HBO special, Bring the Pain, which made him a stand-up superstar. His material deals fearlessly and controversially with racial and sexual matters, and his delivery is loud, impassioned and sometimes angry. Mort Sahl (1927–) USA Sahl gave his first performance at a beatnik club called the hungry i in San Francisco in 1953, and there developed a style which would revolutionise comedy and lay the ground for the modern stand-up style. His delivery was conversational, his material intellectual and satirical, sometimes daringly so. Although his career was damaged when he got caught up in the investigation of the assassination of JFK, he continues to perform stand-up to this day. Alexei Sayle (1952–) UK The original compère of London’s Comedy Store in 1979, Sayle was one of the first alternative comedians. His act was silly, surreal and satirical, with a manic, sometimes furious delivery, his fat figure stuffed into a tight suit, his skinhead haircut sometimes hidden under a porkpie hat. Although



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he called himself a Marxist, the jibes at Thatcherism were interspersed with vicious gags at the expense of his left-wing audience. He stopped performing stand-up in 1995, becoming a respected author, but returned to it in 2011. Sarah Silverman (1970–) USA Silverman’s cleverly offensive jokes are undercut by her pretty, airheaded stage persona. Her delivery suggests she’s almost oblivious to the fact that what she’s saying is so outrageous, and thus seems to send up the attitudes she’s supposedly espousing. Her stand-up can be seen in the film Jesus is Magic, which intercuts live footage with songs and sketches. Frank Skinner (1957–) UK Skinner cut his teeth as compère of the 4X Cabarets in his native Birmingham in the late 1980s, and made a name for himself in comedy clubs nationally, before winning the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1991. With a laddish charm, he enjoys a warm rapport with his audience, and is extremely deft with explicit sexual and scatological material. TV vehicles like Fantasy Football League and The Frank Skinner Show, as well as his live stand-up shows, have made him a big star. Doug Stanhope (1967–) USA Stanhope has built a reputation as a comedy outlaw with an outrageous, outspoken act which veers from abusive invective to gleeful exploration of obscenity to deft social commentary. No stranger to controversy – or to people walking out of his shows in disgust – he has been known to tell audiences that his comedy is like going into battle because, ‘You’re not all going to be here at the end.’ Mark Thomas (1963–) UK First taking the stage at the White Lion in Putney on 19 November 1985, Thomas made a name for himself on the London comedy circuit for his biting political comedy. In 1996, the first of several series of The Mark Thomas Comedy

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Product was broadcast on Channel 4, containing a brilliant mix of his stand-up act and pranks played on politicians and other worthy targets. He has presented a series of touring comedy shows which are as stylistically inventive as they are politically radical. These include Dambusters (about his role in the successful campaign to stop the controversial Ilisu Dam project in Turkey), It’s the Stupid Economy (in which the audience proposed and voted on policies for his manifesto) and Bravo Figaro (about his father’s love of opera). Tommy Tiernan (1969–) Eire After winning the Perrier Award at the 1998 Edinburgh Fringe, Tiernan became a hero in his native Ireland for a stand-up act which encompasses intelligent, sometimes controversial material, and a performance style which can range from mad-eyed shouting to nuanced subtlety and rapt silences. For a few months in 2009, he held the world record for the longest solo stand-up show after performing non-stop for over 36 hours. Andre Vincent (1964–) UK After training at the Fratellini Circus School, doing a street theatre act and working with Keith Johnstone’s Loose Moose theatresports company, Vincent moved on to the London comedy circuit in 1990. He did some stand-up work in America in the early 1990s, before moving back to Britain and establishing a name for himself as a hardworking circuit act, with a penchant for topical material and sick jokes. In 2002, he did an extraordinary show at the Edinburgh Fringe, Andre Vincent is Unwell, about the cancer he was suffering from at the time. Holly Walsh (1980–) UK Walsh took up stand-up after attending evening classes on comedy writing, reaching the finals of both So You Think You’re Funny and Funny Women in 2006. Her acclaimed 2011 Edinburgh Fringe show Hollycopter recalled her experience



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being injured whilst jumping off a pier in the Worthing Birdman competition. She was once a continuity announcer for the children’s channel CBBC. Mark Watson (1980–) UK Having grown up in Bristol, Watson took the unusual step of adopting a Welsh accent for his stand-up act – convincingly enough to fool the Mirror newspaper – although he has dropped this in recent years. His comedy is playful, garrulous and extremely likeable. In 2004, he pioneered the idea of the extremely long stand-up act, in a show called Mark Watson’s Overambitious 24-Hour Show. Henning Wehn (1974–) Germany Wehn has built his stand-up career on the British comedy circuit, dubbing himself the ‘German Comedy Ambassador’. Much of his material stems from knowingly playing with stereotypes, particularly the British image of Germans as efficiency-obsessed Nazis – for example, getting a stopwatch out ostensibly to time his act to the second. As well as sending these stereotypes up, this also gives him licence to mock British attitudes. Jonathan Winters (1925–) USA One of the sick comedians, Winters emerged from the New York clubs in the 1950s. His stand-up was improvisational and highly imaginative, often involving acting out scenes in which he would play all the parts, as well as providing the sound effects. He enjoyed a successful career with his own syndicated TV show, live performances and a series of comedy albums, and was a major influence on Robin Williams. Victoria Wood (1953–) UK Wood started out as a playwright and singer of cabaret songs after appearances on the TV talent show New Faces in 1974, and by the 1980s her live act had mutated into stand-up comedy. TV programmes like Victoria Wood: As Seen on

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TV, as well as her solo shows in big theatres, have made her the first British stand-up comedienne to become a huge star. She sold out a 15-night run at the Royal Albert Hall in 1993, another in 1996, and a 12-night run in 2001. Steven Wright (1955–) USA At the age of 23, Wright started performing in American comedy clubs, building a career on an act based on extraordinary comic minimalism. With a rigorously deadpan delivery, he dispenses a large number of short, bizarre, brain-frying jokes. His live work has been supplemented by cameos in numerous films and TV shows. His first comedy album, I Have a Pony, was released in 1985, and its sequel I Still Have a Pony was released 22 years later. Henny Youngman (1906–98) USA Known as ‘The King of the One Liners’, Youngman’s act was a relentless stream of them. Starting in the Borscht Belt hotels whilst still in his 20s, Youngman spent nearly 70 years performing his stand-up act. His short gags were conventional, his delivery an old-fashioned quick-fire bark. He’s widely believed to be the originator of the gag, ‘Take my wife – please!’

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Interviews Amos, Stephen K., by telephone, 18 September 2012 Berman, Shelley, by telephone, 5 August 2004 Bloom, Adam, by telephone, 29 June 2004 Brand, Jo, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1 April 2004 Cameron, Rhona, by telephone, 19 March 2004

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Campbell, James, by telephone, 25 August 2004 Cho, Margaret, by telephone, 19 April 2012 Cho, Margaret, Leicester Square Theatre, 29 October 2012 Darby, Rhys, by telephone, 30 June 2004 Djalili, Omid, by telephone, 28 June 2004 Douieb, Tiernan, Gulbenkian Café, Canterbury, 17 March 2012 Gorman, Dave, by telephone, 29 June 2004 Hardy, Jeremy, Streatham, 1 April 2004 Herring, Richard, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 14 February 2012 Hill, Harry, by telephone, 26 August 2004 Hodgson, Wil, by telephone, 12 September 2012 Horne, Alex, by telephone, 6 July 2004 Jones, Milton, by telephone, 28 June 2004 Jones, Milton, by telephone, 28 August 2012 Jupitus, Phill, BBC Broadcasting House, London, 6 June 2004 Lamarr, Mark, Chiswick, 14 July 2004 Lee, Stewart, Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 25 February 2012 Long, Josie, Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 18 February 2012 McGhie, Jimmy, Whitstable, 30 August 2012 Millican, Sarah, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012 Mirza, Shazia, by telephone, 28 June 2004 Murray, Al, by telephone, 2 April 2012 Noble, Ross, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 Noble, Ross, Leicester Square, London, 25 August 2009 Pappy’s (Ben Clark, Matthew Crosby, Tom Parry), Patisserie Valerie, Canterbury, 29 February 2012 Read, Howard, by telephone, 17 August 2012 Sayle, Alexei, University of Kent, Canterbury, 21 November 2003 Thomas, Mark, Clapham, 27 February 2004 Thomas, Mark, by telephone, 1 May 2012 Vincent, Andre, Central London, 14 July 2004 Watson, Mark, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 31 October 2012

Live shows Bailey, Bill, Part Troll, Wyndham’s Theatre, 18 October 2003, 3 p.m. Biafra, Jello, Sheffield City Hall (Memorial Hall), 30 September 2001

508 Bibliography

Brand, Jo, The Stag Theatre, Sevenoaks, 10 May 2004 Brown, Roy ‘Chubby’, Margate Winter Gardens, 24 February 2004 Campbell, James, Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, 1 June 2004 Carr, Jimmy, Gagging Order, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 September 2012 Cho, Margaret, Mother, Leicester Square Theatre, London, 29 October 2012 Comedy Store, Thursday 26 February 2004 Connolly, Billy, Too Old to Die Young, Carling Hammersmith Apollo, 29 September 2004 Davidson, Jim, Vote for Jim, Winter Gardens, Margate, 25 October 2003 Dee, Jack, The Stag Theatre, Sevenoaks, 23 May 2004 Douieb, Tiernan, Chatback Comedy Club’s Kids Hour, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 17 March 2012 Herring, Richard, What is Love, Anyway? Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 14 February 2012 Hill, Harry, Battersea Arts Centre, 14 September 2004 Kitson, Daniel, Brighton Dome Pavilion Theatre, 30 January 2004 Last Laugh Comedy Club, The Lescar, Hunters Bar, Sheffield, 4 May 1995 Lee, Stewart, Vegetable Stew, Whitstable Playhouse, 26 July 2010 Lee, Stewart, Carpet Remnant World, Leicester Square Theatre, 10 December 2011 Lee, Stewart, Carpet Remnant World, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 24 February 2012 Long, Josie, The Future is Another Place, The Horsebridge, Whitstable, 18 February 2012 McIntyre, Michael, Showtime, O2 Arena, London, 27 September 2012 Merton, Paul, Out of my Head, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 24 April 2012 Millican, Sarah, Thoroughly Modern Millican, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 23 April 2012 Moran, Dylan, Monster II, Brighton Dome Concert Hall, 28 April 2004 Murray, Al, The Pub Landlord, The Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 31 January 2004

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Noble, Ross, Noodlemeister, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, 24 June 2004 Noble, Ross, Things, Assembly Hall Tunbridge Wells, 3 April 2009 Noble, Ross, Mindblender, Assembly Hall, Tunbridge Wells, 1 October 2012 Stanhope, Doug, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, 24 March 2012 Thomas, Mark, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 8 December 2004 Horsebridge Comedy, the Horsebridge Centre, Whitstable, 28 September 2012 Laughs in the Park, Verulamium Park, St Albans, 23 July 2011 Mungo’s bar, Eliot College, University of Kent, 15 November 2001 Mungo’s bar, Eliot College, University of Kent, 20 November 2002 Monkeyshine: The Professionals, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, 20 May 2011

Vinyl Berman, Shelley, A Personal Appearance, EMI Records, 1961, CLP 1512 Biafra, Jello, No More Cocoons, Alternative Tentacles Records, 1987, VIRUS 59 Carrott, Jasper, A Pain in the Arm, DJM Records, 1977, DJF 20518 —The Unrecorded Jasper Carrott, DJM Records, 1979, DJF 20560 —The Stun (Carrott Tells All), DJM Records, 1983, DJF 20582 Howerd, Frankie, At The Establishment Club & at the BBC, Decca, 1963, LK 4556 Jones, Jimmy, All the Breast: Best from Jimmy Jones, JJ Records, 1979, JJ0002 O’Connor, Tom, Ace of Clubs, North West Gramophone, 1975, NWG 75102 Sahl, Mort, 1960 or Look Forward in Anger, Verve Records, 1960, MG V-15004 Sayle, Alexei, Cak!, Springtime Records, 1982, CAK 1 Walker, Jimmy, Dyn-O-Mite, Buddah Records, 1975, BDS 5635 Various artists, Fifty Years of Radio Comedy, BBC Records, 1972, REC 138M —Great Radio Comedians, BBC Records, 1973, REC151M —Laugh with The Comedians, Granada TV Records, 1971, GTV 1002

510 Bibliography

Audio cassettes Allen, Woody, The Nightclub Years 1964–68, EMI, 1990, ECC3 Brand, Jo, Jo Brand Live, Laughing Stock, 1993, LAFFC 21 Elton, Ben, Live 1989, Laughing Stock, 1993, LAFFC 16 Ray, Ted, Ray’s a Laugh, BBC Radio Collection, 1990, ZBBC 1117 Various artists, The Golden Years of the Music Hall, Saydisc, 1990, CSDL380

CDs Berman, Shelley, Inside Shelley Berman, Laugh.Com, 2002, LGH1111 —Outside Shelley Berman, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH1115 Bruce, Lenny, The Lenny Bruce Originals Volume 1, Fantasy Records, 1991, CDFA 525 —The Lenny Bruce Originals, Volume 2, Fantasy, 1991, CDFA 526 —The Historic 1962 Concert when Lenny Bruce Was Busted, Viper’s Nest, 1992, VN178 —The Carnegie Hall Concert, World Pacific/Capitol Records, 1995, CDP 7243 8 34020 2 1 —To Is a Preposition; Come Is a Verb, Knit Classics/Douglas Music, 2000, KCR-3019 —Warning: Lenny Bruce Is Out Again, SicSicSic Inc., 2002, LBSU-666 —Let the Buyer Beware, Shout! Factory, 2004, D6K 37109 Carlin, George, Class Clown, Eardrum Records/Atlantic, 2000, 92923-2 Cook, Dane, Retaliation, Comedy Central Records, 2005, 300304 —ISolated INcident, Comedy Central Records, 2009, COMC30085.2 Cosby, Bill, Why Is there Air?, Warner Bros., (no date given for CD release, album originally released 1965), 1606–2 Diller, Phyllis, The Best of Phyllis Diller, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH1112 Gregory, Dick, Talks Turkey, Vee Jay/Collectables/Rhino Entertainment, 2000, COL-CD-7163 Hackett, Buddy, The Original Chinese Waiter, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH1107

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Thomas, Mark, Dambusters: Live 2001 Tour, Laughing Stock, 2003, LAFFCD 0136 Wehn, Henning, My Struggle, Laughing Stock, 2010, LAFFCD 0200 Williams, Robin, Reality … What a Concept, Laugh.com, 2002, LGH 1104 Winters, Jonathan, Stuff’n Nonsense, Laugh.com, 2001, LGH 1059 Wright, Steven, I Have a Pony, WEA Records, no date, 7599253352 OMCD 1150 Youngman, Henny, Henny Youngman Himself, Laugh.com, 2001, LGH 1008 Various artists, The Comedy Store: 20th Birthday, Uproar Entertainment, 1996, UP 3669 —4 at the Store, BBC Audiobooks Ltd, 2004, ISBN no. 0563523077 —Gems of the Music Hall, Flapper/Pavilion Records, 1993, PAST CD 7005 —Monkeyshine 2001–2011, University of Kent, 2011, K-LAF 002 —Music Hall Alive: Edwardian Stars Recorded on Stage 1938 & 1948, Music Hall Masters, 2003, MHM022/3 —Stand-Up Great Britain, Laughing Stock, 2000, LAFF CD 105

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Other Holborn Empire poster from week beginning 17 December 1934, reproduced on a facsimile postcard produced by The Badger Press, Westbury, Wiltshire (available from www.vaudevillepostcards.com) Leeds Empire programme, week commencing 28 February 1938 Pathé News interview with Reg Dixon (entitled ‘Reg Dixon Hometown’) dating from 1950–9, http://www.britishpathe. com/video/hometown-reg-dixon/query/reg+dixon+hometown [accessed 6 June 2013] Tour programme for Eddie Izzard’s Sexie, 2003

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Stand-up comedy is best experienced live. Many of the comedians mentioned in this book are still alive and working today. Why not go and see them perform live? Failing that, many of the audio and video recordings are still available to buy. Why not buy yourself some of the recordings listed here?