Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 35

‘Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives’

William Hazlitt

What must it feel like to be a comedian on national television telling a joke which you know that not all, but a good proportion of the audience will have heard before? Not just because it’s an old joke – after all, jokes, like tunes, are something there can only be a certain number of – but because you yourself told it on a different show a couple of weeks previously. Maybe twice.

Paul Merton is on Des O’Connor’s couch in the autumn of 1993. For many comics, Des is the perfect foil – not so much a sympathetic interrogator as a craven one – but the antagonism upon which Merton thrives is not a part of his repertoire. So Merton is telling the joke about someone going into a newsagent’s and asking if they’ve got a copy of Psychic News. The punchline – ‘You tell me’ – has already been a palpable hit on Have I Got News for You, on Merton’s own television show and throughout his successful live tour.

But this evening Merton doesn’t look as if he has the stomach for the delivery. Trying to say the line as if it’s just come to him seems to be making him miserable. Not showbiz Paul Merton miserable – grouchy, curmudgeonly and all those other ‘-lys’ that make him so entertaining on the radio – just the plain, common or garden kind. He forces the punchline out eventually, but his body seems to be trying to stop him. The message in his eyes reads: ‘Why me?’

This might not have been exactly what William Hazlitt, the nineteenth-century stand-up essayist, meant when he wrote: ‘Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives’, but the point still stands. When the occupation of ‘joke-teller’ was on a par with, say, ‘juggler’ or ‘optometrist’ in terms of social significance, the issue was simple: the only imperative in the recycling of your own or other people’s material was not to get caught.

There is a perfecdy respectable comic tradition of unapologetic repetition.⁵⁹ It dates back beyond Morecambe and Wise (who learned their trade in the variety halls at a time when ‘an original joke was a rare treat’) to Sigmund Freud, who was so sympathetic to the old joke transaction that he even designed an equation to represent it in a therapeutic light.⁶⁰

For the new breed of TV-career-driven, magazine-cover, advert-icon comedians which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, things were much more complicated. The same medium that brought them success changed the very nature of their calling.

Everybody thinks of comedy as essentially a ‘live’ phenomenon, but all too often seeing favourite performers in the flesh is now less of an experience than seeing them on television. You’ve seen the show, you’ve heard the jokes, now shell out to experience them all over again without being able to make yourself a cup of tea. And then buy the live video.

An unprecedentedly large phalanx of big-name, alternative-gone-mainstream comedians set off around the Civics and Regals of the land in the autumn of 1993. In Paul Merton’s footsteps followed Steve Coogan, Lenny Henry, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Ben Elton, Jack Dee, Newman and Baddiel. All had to face the recycling dilemma, and it wouldn’t really be fair to blame them for taking the easy way out. They are, after all, only human.

New material takes months to write. And comedy agents are renowned for their heroic efforts to make boxing promoters look scrupulous, forcing wet-behind-the-ears comedy novices out on two-hundred-date tours before they’ve had a chance to drink their Perrier Awards.

The mass live audience which television brings makes different demands anyway; if you don’t recycle your greatest hits onstage, you might get lynched. It must be a bizarre and perversely unsettling sensation for those who learned their trade fighting for survival on small stages in front of demanding crowds, to find themselves suddenly in front of several thousand people and able to do no wrong. The air of unreality which so often hangs over large-scale live comedy events stems from the fact that a large section of the crowd have come to pay tribute to an established TV persona rather than to watch someone push back the outer envelope of their art.

Jack Dee’s Channel 4 television show (first broadcast in 1992) complicates things still further by being a stylish distillation of an idealized live comedy experience. Suavely suited professional arrives at club in classic car, scythes through the crowd, is extremely amusing for about twenty-five minutes and then leaves, gracefully acknowledging the applause of the crowd with a modest nod of the head. The idea behind the show’s ‘Bohemia Club’ setting, Dee explains, ‘was to be somewhere Simon Templar might take his best girl for a night out’.⁶¹

An actual tour, though, is a different matter. Dee himself is fine – a tidy bundle of compressed malice – but the Hammersmith Apollo, a venue so cavernous that many a seventeen-piece soul orchestra has looked lost in it, is not the best place to see him. There is something fundamentally depressing about the experience of such well-ordered mass sniggering. As if in acknowledgement of this, the crowd’s biggest laugh is reserved for some witless heckler’s oh-so-amusing reference to Dee’s role in a television advertising campaign. Jack’s contempt for this runs deeper even than usual. He seems almost, well, bitter.⁶²

‘It’s not good enough just to be getting a laugh,’ he frets, a few months later. ‘After a while, you start to be fussy about the kind you’re getting…There’s a particular laugh which I really hate,⁶³ which is the one that belongs to people watching television shows.’ What does that mean exactly? ‘That “Ooh no, missus” kind of thing – Carry On-type comedy where you only have to mention knickers and you get this awful “Yo ho ho”. I would do anything to stop that. I’d rather people didn’t laugh at all.’