Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 9

The French philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1900 intellectual landmark Le Rire – helpfully translated into English as Laughter in 1911 – is most celebrated for its contention that much of what is considered comic can be boìled down to moments where ‘the human reduces itself to the automatic’. In a less frequently quoted passage of the book, Henri makes the seemingly straightforward assertion that ‘to understand laughter we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society’.

‘Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,’ Bergson notes. ‘It can travel within as wide a circle as you please; the circle remains, none the less, a closed one.’ To illustrate this notion, he uses the example of travellers sharing a joke in a railway carriage while another passenger sits across the aisle, forbidden by basic etiquette from joining in. ‘Had you been one of their company,’ Bergson chuckles, ‘you would have laughed like them.’

Obviously this was before mobile-phone radiation had fatally eroded our conception of personal space in public places, but when you consider the peculiarly modern spectacle of individuals on buses or trains performing virtual stand-up comedy routines into Nokia handsets for the benefit of faraway friends, while flesh and blood audiences of complete strangers sit around them in stony silence, it actually underlines the truth of Bergson’s observation rather than undermining it.

‘However spontaneous it seems,’ Bergson argues, ‘laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry.’ If you could mark the points at which this freemasonry either breaks down or is particularly strong, you would end up with a kind of dot-to-dot relief map of the national subconscious.

Based – as it is – on how much, in terms of ideas or emotions, a performer is able to share with their audience, comedy can teach us a great deal about who is swimming with society’s tide and who is swimming against it. Consider in this regard the following two incidents of live onstage trauma: the first reassuringly trivial, the second rather less so.

Rory Bremner got rid of his original Scottish accent in response to social pressure applied within the English public school system, but soon learned to pick up others in its place. A few years later, after this facility had turned into a career, the BBC’s determination to keep him in a light-entertainment strait-jacket pushed him to Channel 4, where he made a startlingly successful transformation (at least in his own mind) from boyish purveyor of sports commentators and weathermen to diamond-hard political satirist.

Away from the safety of the small screen, however, the construction of appropriate showcases for impressionistic virtuosity can still be a perilous business. In the first flush of his reinvention, amid the plaintive cry of the Essex gulls at the elegant Southend Cliffs Pavilion, Bremner’s inaptly confident ‘Does anybody here listen to Radio 4?’ is met with a fairly crushing silence. What price a dazzling impression of crusty, rugby-obsessed, radio sports eminence Cliff Morgan in the cold, hard world of the east-coast riviera?

The second incident involves Scott Capurro – a raffish, catty, minutely boss-eyed, gay comedian from San Francisco, who briefly set down his picnic blanket on the banks of the British comedy mainstream in the early to mid-nineties. The high point of his career was probably an appearance on Pebble Mill, where Alan Titchmarsh asked him the immortal question ‘So you’re a gay comedian, how do you go down in America?’

The fun in a Capurro live show comes from a consensual over-stepping of the mark. (‘Are you heterosexual?’ he taunts straight audience members. ‘Really? You were the last one I would have expected.’) The edge comes from our – and his – awareness of how easily consensus can turn to conflagration.

At an early live appearance at the Hackney Empire, a gang of rough-looking individuals in the front row begin to get restive about five minutes into Capurro’s set. One of them calls him a ‘faggot’. Capurro says: ‘I want to love you – help me.’ The situation simmers and then gets uglier. People at the back of the crowd start to shout at the people in the front, one of whom gets onstage, grabs the microphone and roars in fury and bewilderment, the scar down the side of his face pulsing eerily, ‘What is it, are you all faggots?’

The rest of the audience shouts ‘Leave! Leave! Leave!’ – at first tentatively, but then with increasing fervour as the Hackney Empire remembers its former status as the home of alternative cabaret. Eventually, the front row gets up and storms off en masse, Capurro’s taunts – ‘He wants me!’, etc – ringing rather half-heartedly in their ears. The violence in the air has hobbled the comedian’s instinctive bravado, but though visibly and understandably shaken, he still manages to have the last word: ‘Oh, I was wrong, it wasn’t the gay thing…It was the Vietnam thing.’