Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (9 page)

I also
write with my friend Mark Kelly from time to time because my life got to the
stage where it was so busy that if I had a benefit coming up or telly that I
needed jokes for, I simply didn’t have the time to do it all myself. Mark, who
is also a comic on the circuit, writes some excellent lines for me. We have a
similar hit rate. One in ten ideas seem to work but I am very grateful to him
for coming up with brilliant one-liners like this:

‘My
husband never learned to drive… in my opinion.’

Making It to the Top

There are many great
comics who should be household names yet who remain in the shallows of comedy
renown. The fame achieved by some people in the world of comedy is not really
about how good a comic they are, it is more about a combination of several
things. The most important of these are:

1. Luck

Being in the right place
at the right time and representing what the important people in television
perceive to be the comedy zeitgeist. Let’s take Russell Brand as an example.
Although Russell is a good comic, stand-up is not his forte. Russell happened
to grab people’s attention, when he was on the show that followed
Big
Brother
—
Big Brother’s Big Mouth
— in which I think he was genius.
He is very good at responding on his feet, he has huge charm and his use of
slightly Victorian, literary language just happened to sit well in this
particular show, because he was impudent, imaginative and quick. Added to this,
he was perfect tabloid fodder, being the contemporary equivalent of Beau
Brummell, a mercurial ladies’ man, who seemed somewhat other-worldly like a
modern-day Oscar Wilde. And so it was this platform from which he was launched
into the firmament, rather than the platform of his stand-up.

America
has grasped him to her bosom. That’s because America seems to love a British
fop and Russell is that irresistible combination of a highly intelligent,
ordinary, working-class guy who has a foot in both camps. It’s a shame to me
that he has been tempted to appear in films that I can’t even be bothered to
see because they sound so middle-of-the-road. The same goes for Ricky Gervais.
Why has he gone to America? Why has the subtlety of his dark, malevolent wit
been shovelled into the gaping, uncompromising, populist maw of the Hollywood
machine, which can only result in a watering-down of his strength? Is it money?
Is it global fame? I don’t know. Am I just envious? I can honestly say I’m not
— and so maybe the problem is mine, in that case!

2. Talent

I have put talent second
because I believe it is less important than luck. The list of neglected comedy
talent is stuffed with extremely funny, potentially huge comedians: Johnny
Immaterial (Jonathan Meres) John Hegley, Boothby Graffoe (James Martyn Rogers),
Hattie Hayridge, Linda Smith (God rest her lovely comedy soul, even though she
didn’t believe in Him), and many others who seem to have missed their
opportunity as it passed silently by them.

3. Television execs

Those powerful people in
television, who get to point to a comic as if they are laid on a table like a
buffet, play a huge part in who makes it and who doesn’t. And if they don’t
like you, you’re going to struggle, unless you’re so popular, they cannot
ignore you.

4. Not being like another
comic

No aspiring comic should
base their act on someone they admire. Individuality of thought and performance
is what TV people are looking for, and if you model yourself on, say Jack Dee
or Billy Connolly, it’s obvious that if those people have already become
household names, a wishy-washy version of them, which you will invariably seem,
is not what’s required.

I have narrowed down my
favourite comedy moments to half a dozen, leaving out an incident in a hotel
with two comics which I am sworn not to repeat.

One of
my all-time favourite comedies is
Fawlty Towers.
Despite the race and
gender stereotypes, which have been retrospectively condemned by many, there is
so much to admire about this series. Basil Fawlty is a supreme comedy
character, and there are some sublime moments. We all have our favourites, but
one of mine is the scene when the grumpy old guest complains about the view,
and Basil launches into a rant about what she’d expected: ‘Hordes of wildebeest
sweeping majestically across the plain,’ for example.

Just
recently I stayed in a very upmarket hotel en route from Cornwall. I had
performed at a lovely small theatre near Liskeard and was travelling to a village
near Hastings where I was opening my brother’s fete, because
ex-Doctor Who
Tom
Baker had pulled out at the last minute. (Probably too many Cybermen
encroaching on Winchelsea.)

At the
hotel, a very sweet young man took me to my room and showed me where everything
was, and he commented particularly on the wonderful view before drawing back
the curtains to show me. Unfortunately he had forgotten it was midnight and
there wasn’t a bleeding view, but it was very entertaining nevertheless.

Dawn
French and Jennifer Saunders gave me another top comedy moment when they came
up with their pervy, fat old geezers who would attempt to shag anything (and it
didn’t even have to move) including the side of an armchair. I remember first
seeing them and laughing till I cried. Every detail was so accurate, right down
to the fact that so many men of that ilk seem to think that women are ‘gagging
for it’ and they are the blokes to give it to them. Sublime.

Monty
Python
was woven into the fabric of my teenage
years, and most of the sketches I loved featured Terry Jones dressed up as a
woman. There was something about the floral fifties’ dress and wrinkly
stockings on his skinny legs that was hysterical, and in
The Meaning of
Life,
as a pregnant mother plopping out babies at the sink while washing
up. I laughed every time I thought of it, even slightly inappropriately in
public from time to time.

Airplane
is one of my all-time favourite comedy films,
because it is so silly and has so many gems of funniness in it. I think my favourite
character was the one played by Lloyd Bridges who works in the airport and is a
typically stressed and out-of-control man. Throughout the film we return to
him time and time again, as he says the immortal lines, ‘I picked the wrong
week to give up smoking/drinking/amphetamines/glue-sniffing’ and sinks back
into a mire of substance abuse. As an oral person who has the potential to be
addicted to all these things, it was my perfect kind of comedy.

Richard
Pryor was a comedy genius, and to some extent many of the comedy acts that
followed him drew upon his brilliant evocations of ordinary life as a black
working-class person in America (even though a lot of the comics were neither
black nor lived in America). No one could possibly fail to laugh at his
anthropomorphising of his pets and how they fitted into the family hierarchy.

Only
Fools and Horses
is another comedy that is full of
stereotypes, and although I love the supreme timing of Del Boy’s fall backwards
through the bar after the barman has unwittingly left a gap there, my favourite
episode involves the crash to the floor of the priceless chandelier, because
Grandad has loosened the wrong one while Del Boy and Rodney wait haplessly
beneath another one with a sheet.

And
that — as they say in the biz — is your lot, folks.

Doing stand-up abroad is a
bit weird given that in some countries the cultural gap is so enormous that the
audience is completely puzzled by your jokes. Of course, the major barrier is
language, which means that British comics are confined to those countries that
speak English as a first language or fluently as a second language.

Therefore
the main countries available to us are America, Canada, Australia and a vast
selection of other countries in which ex-pats live such as Dubai and Hong Kong.

My
limited experience includes only Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe such as
Germany and Holland, where you will find that the natives speak better English
than we do most of the time. (I exclude Australia from that statement.)

Canada

I have been to Canada
twice, both times for the Montreal Comedy Festival, which has intimate
connections with Edinburgh and the big comedy agencies over here. Every year, a
scout from Montreal will come over to England to watch comedy and then invite
various comics to go over and perform at their festival. At the time I went,
there was a comedy programme linked to it which was shown on Channel Four,
called
Just for Laughs.

I was
invited following an Edinburgh performance and despite my dislike of flying I
decided to grit my teeth and go for it. Rumour had it that some of the big
American agents wandered around Montreal, which was obviously easier for them
to travel to, rather than coming to England, and you might get yourself an HBO
(Home Box Office — big comedy channel) special or something even better.

I
didn’t really want to go to America and work, but decided it would do no harm
to my career if I at least showed up. So I found myself queuing at Heathrow,
somewhat anxious about the nine-hour flight but determined to mitigate the
nerves with a bout of extreme smoking. (There is more about smoking later; it
gets its very own chapter. See
A Nasty Habit,
page 244).

This
was in the early nineties, and at that point everyone was still smoking their
heads off on planes, so as I reached the desk with my friend Sue, I confidently
requested a smoking seat up the back, just like being at the back of the school
bus.

The
woman on the desk — sneeringly I thought —informed me that it was a No Smoking
flight and at that instant I hated her more than I have ever hated anyone. In
the few seconds I had, the idea ran through my head that I might just as well
go home and forget the whole bloody thing. However, I reasoned I had got this
far, and decided to batten down the emotional hatches and go for it.

It
wasn’t a pleasant experience; there was a fair bit of turbulence and I arrived
at the other end feeling jaded and thrown about. Montreal seemed like a
slightly smaller, nicer version of America with its glass towers gleaming in
the sun, the centrepiece being a huge pink tower which was immediately named by
one wag ‘The Jolly Pink Penis’. On the flight with me were Frank Skinner, Jerry
Sadowitz and Craig Charles … all ready to fire a handful of jokes at the
Canadians and see if they laughed.

We were
put up in what I considered, with my limited experience, to be a very flash
hotel and immediately set to what comics are famous for — a lot of drinking.

In
order to crank ourselves up for the Comedy Gala (in Canada it is pronounced
‘Gayla’) we had the opportunity to try out our material in smaller clubs to
see if it worked. I found myself in one show called
The Nasty Show
(in
Canada pronounced ‘Nair-sty’) and it couldn’t have been more apt, making me seem
very mild. It displayed the talents of some most unpalatable racist, misogynist
comedians, and when one of them vomited out a really horrible joke about Oprah
Winfrey I began to wonder if I was in the right place.