How I Escaped My Certain Fate (45 page)

Some art exists to ask questions, and to play with
expectations
. Some people want art to take them to a place they would never have imagined going to in the company of people they would never have imagined meeting. Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett and Reeves and Mortimer all do this. Other people want art to reconfirm the things they already know, and send them away feeling better about
themselves. This is the job of Coldplay, Music Theatre and those kind of Comedy Store/Jongleurs stand-up
comedians
who invite the audience to think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what happens whenever I try and open a sachet of tomato sauce too, brilliant!’ These polar opposite intentions can be equally difficult to achieve, and I’d wager that there’s an element of genius involved in simply thinking of the idea of
SingalongaSoundOfMusic
equal to the moment of epiphany enjoyed by Beckett when he realised it would be a good idea to strap Billie Whitelaw into a harness and light only her mouth while she rambled all but incoherently for twenty minutes in Not I. But one of these end points is clearly vastly more valid than the other.

The tragedy of Music Theatre is that it cannot afford to occupy the superior position. West End ticket prices, caused by the vast overheads such shows incur, are high. Broadway prices are even higher. Seats are filled up with coach parties whose bookers can’t risk alienating their
clients
, and people for whom seeing the show is the one big night out of their year, possibly even of their lives.
Economically
, tribute shows to Abba, Queen and Rod Stewart are safe. Demographically they’re hitting the exact strata of society and generation of music fans that has the money to sustain them. The Madness musical,
Our House
,
discovered
a viable musical coherence in the working class milieu of Madness songs and played some interesting games with narrative structure. But Madness fans aren’t yet old enough or wealthy enough to give such a show a long run. And they fight in the bar at half time which scares off the American tourists who make up 50% of the audience of any big London theatre show.

Music Theatre can’t afford to be the space that
punters
enter in order to be challenged, changed or confused.
When I was genuinely baffled by the appeal of a recent West End production, a Music Theatre professional, whose abilities I respect, explained to me why I hadn’t got it. ‘You check your brain in at the door,’ he explained, ‘and just go along with it all.’ It seems sad that even industry insiders justify the genre as an opportunity to suspend your
judgement
, rather than engage it.

I saw
The Producers
, which opens in London this Autumn, on Broadway last year. On some level, part of its impact was due to embracing Music Theatre’s
limitations
. It is the story of two producers who try to actively lose money by staging what they imagine will be the worst musical ever, a song and dance show based on the life of Hitler.
The Producers
is very funny. It seems to be a
surreal
, panic response to Nazism and the Holocaust. You either cry, or make a comedy musical about it. But it also addresses, sublimely, the basic insincerity of Music Theatre, its reliance on camp humour and kitsch values, and shows how ineffectual they are for dealing with significant issues. When the audience have hysterics at
The Producers
, they are in a way acknowledging the banality of the medium they themselves are complicit in endorsing. Great art exists in the spaces between the certainties. Economically, culturally and artistically, Music Theatre can’t afford spaces, only certainties.

Esquire
magazine,

October 2004

Here’s a piece written on the evening after a terrible gig – not for publication, but for my own benefit – in a righteous,
misanthropic
and entirely unattractive spirit of arrogant and precious self-justification. It is an example of why no one should blog. Nonetheless, I’ve included it because it captures the feelings of a comic who has just died, and reveals lots about my confused state of mind, professionally, at the time.

I have had a great run so far at the New Zealand comedy festival in Auckland. The Classic on Queen Street is one of my favourite five spaces to perform worldwide. It’s a converted porn cinema, there’s table service but it’s
genuinely
unobtrusive, and it has the kind of faded glamour you can’t manufacture. Pretty much all the shows here have enabled me to do what I hope to do – take people on funny journeys into spaces they wouldn’t have expected to arrive at in a stand-up comedy set. When there have been heckles or interruptions they’ve been playful, witty,
supportive
– things you could have fun with – or just genuinely confused people who want to understand, asking questions, with whom you could also engage in a positive way. When there was heckling it normally had the feel of a lively debate, or a flirtation. Nobody was humiliated or hurt, onstage or off.

I like to watch the crowd come in. I play a CD of a long Evan Parker sax solo while they do. I figure if people can’t put up with that then they will probably not be able to put up with me. About one in ten times someone will come up to the sound desk and ask to have the fucking horrible music turned off. The people that do this are always
subsequently
the people in the audience without the patience to enjoy my set. Tonight an English man in a red football shirt took a table with a party of ten to fifteen other men and started shouting from his seat for the music to be turned off. I identified him as the alpha male of that group and realised the evening would probably stand or fall on his approval. The kind of people that go to comedy in a big party usually need their laughter to be approved of by one particular member, and the sort of person who is that member of such a group will usually feel that I am
threatening
to their status as the clown/leader of that group and will try to undermine me. Since I came back to stand-up I have largely been playing to people on my wavelength, and I was never a Comedy Store or Jongleurs act, so I rarely encounter this mentality.

Sure enough, within a few minutes I realised the show was sabotaged. The man began jumping into crucial
little
spaces between feedlines and punchlines with his own attempts at pay-offs that were not as funny as mine, and usually reactionary in nature, but which nevertheless slowed the momentum of the show. I said to him, from the stage, calmly and politely, that I had identified him as the alpha male of his group even before the show started, and realised that as clown/leader of his pack I knew he would subsequently be obliged to undermine me. Even this bald statement would not silence him. He and his pack were here for the Lions tour. The Lions are a British rugby team.
Things in the set that I considered to be in playful bad taste were so enthusiastically gobbled up by the British sports fans that I felt their meaning and intent changed, and I felt ashamed to say them.

Towards the end I use the word ‘fingering’ in a set-up towards something else. At the arrival of the word ‘
fingering
’ came the shout, ‘Now you’re getting somewhere.’ I explained that this section was my least favourite of the show, and the fact that it seemed to have struck a chord with the rugby fans showed we really were on different wavelengths.

Usually I can silence hecklers with relentless logic, but what I was doing was so far away from what the sport fans expected from comedy that they didn’t even realise that, to all intents and purposes, they had been defeated, and so their barrage of witless inanity continued. Of course afterwards, they all want to buy you drinks, and
genuinely
seem to feel their interruptions have done you some kind of favour. One said his favourite comic was Eddie Izzard, which I accommodated, but when they expected me to engage in an enthusiastic debate about how brilliant Peter Kay was I felt I was out of my depth and left. They didn’t even know what they had done. They thought they had helped me to be more like a proper comedian. They thought they had improved the show.

It’s funny and sad that my only disastrous show here in Auckland should be as a result of the kind of British people I never usually encounter in Britain actually coming to my show, but when I went back to the flat later I began to feel depressed. The British rugby fans were trying to defeat the world of new experiences, rather than embrace it for what it is, or enjoy its difference. This is why British holiday resorts in Spain are full of British-style pubs and Fish and
Chip shops. This is why there aren’t any Spanish locals on Spanish beaches making a killing selling delicious
Spanish-style
food.

Privately, the debate continues amongst comedians, ‘What is Daniel Kitson doing?’ Why, many wonder, does he do The Stand when he could do the big room at Assembly? Why does he insist on shaking off half the following he has established every couple of years by doing a sensitive story show? Why doesn’t he have a nice haircut – surely he could afford it now? But Kitson once told me that after his
Perrier
nomination, he was doing a run at the Soho theatre. Sitting in a toilet cubicle one night he overheard some of his audience standing at the urinals talking, didn’t like how they sounded, didn’t like them, and realised he would have to begin a process of refining his fan base.

Scott, who runs the Classic and promotes me here, said I was wrong about the heckler being the alpha male of the sport fan group. He said the alpha male would have money, cars, women and be silent. The heckler was a kind of delta male, the jester to the king alpha male. He would spend his life in the orbit of power, trailing it, circling it, but never achieving it. This is of course true. But it didn’t give me any pleasure. It just made me even more sad to think that a perfectly serviceable show had been sabotaged as just yet another act in the drama of some inadequate’s quiet, or in this case not so quiet, desperation. What a wretched night.

Personal Diary Piece,

May 2005

At the Royal Festival Hall in 1997, Derek Bailey played a double header with the Japanese duo Ruins. I seem to recall a moment where the septuagenarian genius, lost in concentration, actually bumped into the back wall of the stage, his guitar making a resonating clang. Looking down, he appeared to consider what had happened, and then playfully bashed the instrument into the wall a second time. I laughed, and despite the wealth of different responses Bailey’s music had already offered me, I never thought it would provoke laughter. But something great music shares with great comedy is the capacity to surprise, to take us out of ourselves and engender a joyous, and not necessarily mean-spirited or cynical, laughter. I’ve
subsequently
learned Bailey once played in the pit band for Morecambe and Wise, when they toured theatres before their 60’s and 70’s TV success. Banging your guitar into a wall by accident, and then doing it again on purpose in a spirit of clownish curiosity, seems to me like a classic Eric Morecambe move.

There’s a great documentary about stand-up comedy currently winning awards all over the international film festival circuit.
The Aristocrats
, directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, shows sixty or so stand-ups telling a shaggy dog story enjoyed privately by American comics,
but never inflicted on the public. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that stand-up is, along with jazz and comic books, one of America’s great 20th century art forms. This seems a blinkered and isolationist observation. But
The
Aristocrats
started to swing me. Halfway through, soon after one of the comics has gone off on a tangent involving the father repeatedly slamming his penis in a drawer for the audience’s edification, somebody makes a case for
standup
’s relationship with jazz. The distinct variations
different
performers can extrapolate from the Aristocrats tells us that stand-up is about ‘the singer not the song’. Just as John Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’ is different to the Julie Andrews version, so George Carlin’s Aristocrats, told with a world-weariness that suggests he has been
compelled
against his will to relate this horrible event, differs vastly from Billy Connolly’s, which is delivered with
typically
infectious relish.

Carlin, a Fifties Catskills hack, turned Sixties radical, turned elder statesman of American stand-up, wisely draws the distinction between ‘shock’, a term that comes with pejorative overtones, and ‘surprise’, which has no obvious moral dimension. Though the endless variations in
different
versions of the Aristocrats mainly involve stacking up increasing levels of scatological or sexual symbols, what’s really making us laugh is the pleasure of surprise, of things being simply unexpected and wrong, of reversing the usual order of things. Surprise is the reason a one-year-old child laughs if you put a shoe on your head. Shoes are for feet, not heads. Even a baby has a sense of inappropriate
behaviour
. Respectable looking families shouldn’t smash their genitals into drawers onstage in the name of
entertainment
. And guitars shouldn’t be banged into walls by
elderly
musicians, and then banged again. But how exciting
is it to not know what’s going to happen next? Sometimes Derek Bailey’s music makes me feel like a kid on a
roller-coaster
. And Carlin, like some Native American
shaman-clown
, makes the need to subvert expectation, to
continually
surprise, sound like an artist’s Holy Obligation.