When I was courting my wife-to-be, sometime in 1985, we went to see Rowan Atkinson’s one-man show in London. If she harboured any illusions concerning my coolness before that evening, they were shattered during the classroom roll-call sketch, which had me alternately roaring, snorting and crying with laughter. I don’t really know why I found it so hilarious – probably Atkinson’s brilliant delivery and the fact that when I was at school, every form had a smattering of boys with bizarre names (including, I suppose, my own).
Anyway, analysing comedy is a mug’s game.
My son’s just been invited to watch Jack Dee record a performance for the BBC this evening, and I’m quite jealous, because he often makes me laugh (I mean Jack Dee, although my son is pretty good at one-liners himself) and I’ve never seen him live. In fact, I’ve only seen a handful of comedians in the flesh: apart from Rowan Atkinson, there was the glum-looking American Rich Hall, who failed to make me laugh once (he kept apologising for George Bush, so the rest of the London audience eagerly lapped his bullshit up), Jimmy Carr (on Michael Jackson: “If I was a billionaire paedophile, know what I’d do? Build a funfair in my back garden”), and Peter Kay.
These last three all came free, as part of new media industry events. In 1999 (or thereabouts) the BBC’s interactive TV team were up for an award from some magazine with an extremely boring title – Home Electronics Monthly or something – and had been invited to a dinner at some big hall in London. I loathed these events, and I tried to get out of it, but my boss lady insisted – bonding, morale, that kind of thing.
After a while, as my companions got drunker and I chewed chicken and nursed a bottle of sparkling water, a comedian came on. He was fat and Northern and my heart sank even further as I recalled a truly horrendous work-related evening at the vast Batley Variety Club some 20 years earlier, where the “entertainment” consisted of Peter Noone doing his Herman’s Hermits back catalogue, preceded by a stupendously unfunny comedian who was obsessed with his wife’s pubic hair – I might as well have been on Aldebaran for all the sense it made to me.
But this time the Northern comic had the whole audience – including me - helpless with laughter within five minutes. His act consisted mainly of clipping well-known pop hits to reveal the bizarre or frankly obscene lyrics hidden within the songs. Again, why this should be funny I don’t know – it just was. Here’s an updated version of that routine:
I wasn’t in the least surprised when, over the next couple of years, Kay became the best-loved comic in Britain. He’s immensely likable and the most naturally funny performer since the era of Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper: you just know he’d make you laugh if he was working a till at B&Q. I suspect Lee Mack would as well. He’s another of those Northern comedians we Southerners “get” – unlike, say, John Bishop, whom I suspect leaves most us south of Watford stony-faced. Of the other comic megastars who can currently fill stadiums, Lee Evans’s Norman Wisdom on speed schtick rapidly palls, and amiable, middle-class chubster Michael McIntyre doesn't half put his back into it, but after about ten minutes his irrepressible ebullience starts reminding one of the the Fast Show’s maddening office joker, Colin Hunt.
One comedian I wouldn’t mind seeing live some time is Simon Evans, whose full frontal assault on the citizens of Newcastle is one of the funniest routines I’ve ever heard:
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