How I Escaped My Certain Fate (22 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
But as well as the supposed intellectual theory behind the bouffons’ show, the spatial relations of the
performance
also excited me. Like the Native American Pueblo clowns of the Hopi, the Zuni and the Tewa, of whom I had read much but never been fortunate enough to see, even these drama-student bouffons broke through the safety barriers between audience and performer, using the whole village as their stage. You never knew where they were
coming
from next. Because they were actors, not the anointed clown mystics of the Hopi or the genuine outcasts the medieval French bouffons would have been, it never felt truly dangerous, but the performance did have a
relationship
, I realised, with moments when I’d seen performers closer to home blur the edge of the space. And the
periods
when I left the stage and wandered around the room in
’90s Comedian
were perhaps most indebted to the
influence
of a strange incompatible trio of a roly-poly
funnyman
, an acid-fried archaeologist and a Russian
physicaltheatre
group.
Johnny Vegas, for me, is a massively misunderstood
talent
. I love him (see Appendix IV). In August 2003, Vegas had been given a budget to make a live DVD, but instead got me to direct an attempt to improvise a story about the Edinburgh Fringe, with live stand-up comedy inserts, called
Who’s Ready for Ice Cream?.
The cast, by their own admission, all had mental problems. And the only one who didn’t wasn’t an actor. He was an ice-cream man that Johnny had met in a park, though having been cast as an
ice-cream man, he delivered a consistent performance. The crew seemed to hate me, imagining that I thought I was above them because I had recently worked at the National Theatre, and my time on
Who’s Ready for Ice Cream?
is honestly the only occasion in my career when I have failed to win the confidence of the team working under me. And, because most of the people involved were from St Helen’s, the entire catering budget was spent on chips and gravy and fags, so that everyone had scurvy by the end of the week’s guerrilla-style shoot. That said, the live footage is great, and I used it as the template for all the live footage of myself subsequently shot for DVDs and BBC2 as I became more popular.
When Johnny would leave the stage and wander around the tiny rooms we filmed the live shows in, begging for affection and attention, close-up and personal, it created a crazed panic and tension. The literal boundaries of the stage itself had been abandoned, so were there any rules left? I met the American theatre director Peter Sellars at a theatre conference in Limerick in 2006. He said he had enjoyed
Jerry Springer: The Opera
because of the way ‘it introduced air into an airless room’, and he felt that this was a key to making theatre. Stand-up is already a fairly well-ventilated form. Was it possible to open the windows a little wider?
The following year, I saw the rock-star survivor and sometime archaeologist Julian Cope play a psychedelic hard-rock set with his band Brain Donor at the
Hammersmith
Lyric. Cope, clad in full face paint, camouflage fatigues, flying helmet and platform boots, left the stage for around twenty minutes to patrol the auditorium, stalls, circle and balcony, singing on a radio mic during one extended two-chord drone, often entirely invisible to the
majority of the audience and largely unlit. But just
knowing
that he was in the room, not on the stage where the performer should be, made the whole performance
terribly
and terrifyingly exciting. At any moment, the madman – and Cope often seems genuinely mad – might creep up behind you. I wondered if there was some way of
mainlining
this manic thrill into stand-up, and now that I get to play theatres with circles and balconies I am always on the look-out for the opportunity to make a Julian
Copestyle
foray into the audience. In the little rooms and on the low stages I was playing with
’90s Comedian,
making this conceptual leap into the dark usually meant just stepping 30cm downwards.
And in the summer of 2002, I went to see a show called
Inferno
by the Russian physical-theatre group Derevo. It was in a circus tent in a meadow in the north of
Edinburgh
, and in amongst a series of beautiful set pieces there was a sequence where some deranged hobo figures, not unlike the bouffons of the Corbières or the Pueblo clowns I’d read about, worked their way around the crowd,
singing
to them in Russian, sharing bread and wine with
different
individuals and communicating with wordless grunts. I became obsessed with the free nature of this section, within an otherwise tautly choreographed piece, and of the breathing space it seemed to provide. I went five times in all to try and see
Inferno
from every angle, to try and fix it and nail it in my mind and decode it. But I couldn’t. It was different every night, as different as the responses of the people Derevo approached to join their crazy party could make it. I realised this was what it meant to attend a genuinely live event, and the off-mic improvisations that have been in all my subsequent shows were an attempt to bleed a little of this, and Johnny’s unpredictable artistry,
and Julian Cope’s panic-inducing presence, into the airless rooms I perform in.
*
*
It’s also worth mentioning that the fourth stand-up I ever saw live, after Peter Richardson, Phill Jupitus and Ted Chippington, was Oscar McLennan. In the early days of Alternative Comedy,
McLennan
was a minor player on the circuit, and I saw him at Warwick Arts Centre in 1985, touring a confrontational and compelling, but largely laugh-free, stand-up show about a dysfunctional
family
, before he finally abandoned comedy and recategorised himself as a performance artist, having produced much fine work since. I remember McLennan, thin and wiry, rolling on the floor at the edge of the studio space, lit by a low-level light in semi-darkness, snapping at the feet of the front row, while a song by the
psychobilly
band Turkey Bones and the Wild Dogs blared. Looking back at some of my recent stand-up, I think the memory of McLennan was simmering inside all along.
Again, on some level, I think this approach was a
reaction
to my experience of the world of commercial theatre. ‘Let’s see the money on the stage,’ the financiers of the West End say, meaning massed ranks of tap-dancers, holograms of Laurence Olivier and gigantic swinging chandeliers. But stand-up’s strength, it seemed to me, was in its power to suggest, by spoken word alone, the most vivid pictures. So, how about not even being on the stage at all and giving people nothing to look at? The communal experience of being in the room was still exciting, because somewhere I was crouched down, hidden in the dark, mumbling, crying and masturbating.
*
*
I had become a great fan of the idea of the empty stage, having always liked the empty frame in television and film. When I scriptedited Harry Hill’s three Channel 4 series in the late nineties, our director was Robin Nash, a bow tie-sporting septuagenarian who had been producing and directing classic BBC light-entertainment shows since the war, and who was a perfect fit for Harry’s faux vaudevillian aesthetic, approaching it without any sense of hipster irony and just doing the best possible job he could with the
material
. Now, we loved an empty frame, a sketch that ended with the protagonists leaving the set, but Robin simply would not have it as it flew in the face of everything he held dear about television. ‘
Television
is about moving pictures!’ he would insist. But, in a milieu like television where you are supposed to be looking at something happening, or in a stand-up gig where you expect there to be
someone
on the stage, sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing.
Robin’s rules of light entertainment were an education in
themselves
, and having worked with him for three years I felt that I could now break them in future with the full knowledge of what I had chosen to do, and I am very grateful to him for that. Another one of his pet hates was any item longer than three minutes. He had been schooled in variety and simply would not have it. ‘But’, I countered one day, throwing one of his own anecdotes back in his face, ‘you were the producer of Top of the Pops when Queen were number one with “Bohemian Rhapsody”, and they all slept at your flat, and that song is about six minutes and presumably you let them do that.’ ‘I did,’ admitted Robin, ‘but I allowed them to perform half of the song each week on subsequent weeks.’ As far as Robin Nash was concerned, this milestone of pop history was, quite simply, ‘too long, dear!’
*
Reading
’90s Comedian
again, with the benefit of
hindsight
, the repetition of the phrases, the language and the measured tone in which it was performed give it an almost liturgical quality, and I suspect this is not just coincidence. First of all, it makes sense to address the subject material, Jesus, in a manner in which He is normally discussed. And secondly, I was in a church choir from 1975 to 1980, a
position
which enabled me to go to the local C of E school with all the proper middle-class children and become
educationally
privileged, and during this time I sat through at least three services a week of High Anglican ceremony,
sometimes more. To this day I can remember the exact
intonation
of the respective priests as they struggled, week after week, to inject meaning into the words they were obliged to repeat again and again. Canon Raymond Wilkinson, the oldest priest, was the best, and sometimes the choirboys in their pews would tear themselves away from their Michael Moorcock and Isaac Asimov paperbacks to enjoy the high drama of the ceremony. I must have listened to the
Communion
ritual at least five hundred times during my
sentence
in the choir. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suggest that some of it went in and shaped the way I look at the world, despite some sour experiences.
I suspect, reluctantly, that the actual business of being a priest isn’t that different in some ways to the business of being a comedian. My wife took me to her church in Gloucester. I always listen to the way the sermons are pitched with interest. It was a mixed audience – old Irish fellers, lots of displaced Filipinos, Poles, general Catholic diaspora, many without English as a first language. Tough crowd. And the Father’s out of the pulpit, down in the aisle, shouting, jumping around, working the room. The priest that did our marriage course in Stoke Newington faced a similar problem of playing to an incredibly varied
demographic
. His approach was to speak softly and calmly about some incident or personal story that seemed a million miles away from religion, then, having drawn the punters in, to clobber them with a theological right hook. Most priests are rubbish performers, though, and one wonders how an organisation as wealthy as the Catholic Church, for example, can’t spare some money to school the poor sods in a few basics of stagecraft. That said, the good ones are an inspiration, and let’s not forget a lot of them are turning over a new twenty minutes every week, which makes even
the stalwarts of The Comedy Store’s Cutting Edge team look lazy.
Comparisons between comedians and priests are a cliché of comedy criticism. ‘Bill Hicks was more than a comedian, he was a preacher,’ offers some fuzz-faced pothead loser on every documentary you’ve ever seen about the self-styled ‘Shiva the Destroyer’ of stand-up. Why is a preacher ‘more’ than a comedian? Why are comedians regarded as being so low in status that the most flattering thing you can do is compare them favourably to almost any other form of performer, public figure or artist? Out in the provinces, beyond the citadel of theatre, the stand-up comedians that pitch up to council-funded venues round the country are actually the closest thing punters there get to experiencing real art. In the first three months of 2010, when I was on the road, the only shows in places like the Beck Theatre, Hayes, or the Millfield Theatre, Edmonton, that weren’t hypnotists, mediums or tribute bands were me, Rhod
Gilbert
and Jo Caulfield: comedians. The only shows that
contained
original material, any form of authorial voice, had anything to say or explored on even the most basic level any degree of theatre practice were the stand-up shows.
*
*
The comedian Simon Munnery, who invented top-selling computer games for the ZX81 whilst still a teenager, was reviewed, favourably, by the Guardian recently as ‘the closest stand-up
comedy
gets to art’, and has pointed out himself that this suggests that however good stand-up gets, it can never really be art. There is an impassable canyon between the two. Munnery has since decided that rather than it being good comedy, he now wants his work to be categorised as ‘shit art’.
When I was working on
Jerry Springer: The Opera
at the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner called Richard
Thomas
and me in to discuss his anxieties about the end of the first act, which he didn’t feel was working. ‘You have to stop thinking like comedians,’ he said, his apparently endless patience finally exhausted, ‘and start thinking like theatre practitioners.’ It was a slip of the tongue that serves as a reminder of our status. In the world of the arts, a com edian, despite all the skills they pick up in the
harshest
environments, is never more than ‘trade’. But by the time I’d finished
’90s Comedian,
I realised I was more than happy with that.