Pages 20 and 21 of the Guardian's Weekend magazine, Saturday 5th February 1994:
PERSPECTIVES
So comedy is the rock 'n' roll of the Nineties? That explains why it pretends to be rebellious but instead is a showcase for twerps. PHILIP NORMAN is not amused.Hollow Laughter
I WAS once trapped into watching a television awards show where Paul Merton was yet again being voted Most Brilliant Comedian in the Universe. On receiving his Platinum Funnybone (or whatever it was), Merton naturally was called upon to provide a sample of his comic genius. The routine he offered went something like this:
"Do you remember Lassie? 'E was always meant to be such a clever dog, wasn't he? If anybody was being held prisoner or trapped in a burning building, Lassie would always come and find 'em. Then 'e'd run to 'is owner and tug 'is sleeve and everyone'd say, 'Look, it's Lassie! 'E wants us to follow 'im!' That's all they ever said in those films, wasn't it? 'E wants us to follow 'im! So then everyone gets really excited and follows Lassie, 'cos 'e's a wonder dog ... and 'e leads 'em straight to a crap 'e done two hours earlier."
Humour, I know, is an entirely personal and subjective matter; what makes one person laugh may well make another enraged. But cannot there be some objective criteria for deciding whether the basic ingredients of a good joke are present? Humour, we can safely say, derives chiefly from shared experience. For how many people in today's world recognise Lassie films as representing shared experience? Allowing it may be an appreciable number, is the sharpest observation to be made about these films really that Lassie was always asking people to follow him? And how does "the crap 'e done two hours earlier" shape up as an example of the modern joke-writer's craft?
Of course, many great comedians have worked with ostensibly poor material. So was the style of Merton's delivery, perhaps, so exquisitely droll that the anecdote no longer seemed witlessly dull and crude? No, it came over exactly as it reads, delivered with the bleary doggedness of a plumber who will talk rather than getting down to your S-bend. More disappointing than the joke, to me, was the idle unprofessionalism it revealed. Merton must have known he was up for the award, and might be called on to perform before the cream of his profession, yet he still didn't trouble to prepare anything better.
Comedy is an intensely serious topic in Britain at the moment. Scarcely a week passes without the virtuosity of Paul Merton being hailed afresh in a long newspaper profile, enlivened by witicism of the part either of writer or subject. The recent public debate about whether or not Newman and Baddiel could be called funny was as earnest (and barren of jokes) as a Channel 4 News report on the General Synod.
What they're chiefly saying about comedy, in this desperately po-faced way, is that it no longer belongs to everyone. In the past, the proof of true humour was always its universality. On the morning after an Itma, a Goon Show, a Hancock's Half Hour, a Monty Python or a Not The Nine O'Clock News, all the generations might be found guffawing over the best bits together. Now, we're told, comedy has become the exclusive province of the young in the way pop music was during the Sixties and Seventies. Today's young comedians have the glamour and charisma of rock 'n' roll stars, performing in the same huge arenas on the same huge arenas on the same Messianic nationwide tours. They speak to the young alone, in the secret argot of youth. It's no good trying to appreciate Vic Reeves or Newman and Baddiel if you're over the age of 25.
For those of us in this benighted outer darkness, penetrating the New Comedy is certainly difficult. Its chief, and unifying, feature seems to be the almost total absence of what used to be known as "the punch-line". To an ageing mentality such as mine, accustomed to the outmoded glibness of a Bob Hope or even Tommy Cooper, nothing ever seems to be resolved. You can watch a new-style comedy show for half an hour, right into the closing credits, and still be waiting for it to begin. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are arch-practitioners of this; acting out non-events in strings of non sequiturs which their (many) fans recognise and adore, but which the uninitiated need a cipher book to follow. Is it just disgruntlement on my part that even the very laughter has a hollow and humourless ring; often seeming provoked by nothing funnier than words like "bugger" and "bum" and (if Paul Merton is involved) "dog crap"?
I'm surprised no one has pointed out the great flaw in this "Comedy: the rock 'n' roll of the Nineties" argument. Rock 'n' roll, although seeming a dangerous, iconoclastic medium, actually created a state of mass conformity, where con-artists and twerps could depend on being applauded with exactly the same fervour as genuine talents.
In any case, since when has original humour been the God-given prerogative of youth? Just as the elderly can be wicked and subversive, the young can be conventional, predictable and banal. To the humourless, of whatever age, funniness does not seep through unless semaphored with leaden insistence. Look at any newspaper column by Alan Coren, any stand-up routine by Jim Davidson, any edition of Noel's House Party. And now look at Newman and Baddiel's recent Wembley Arena concert poster, with its stars in Marx Brothers' masks and its tag-line "Live and in Pieces". By contrast, Mr Blobby seems avant-guarde, Alan Coren as light as a soufflé.
The history of modern British comedy has been a series of radical leaps: the Goons, Galton-Simpsons sitcoms, Sixties' satire, Monty Python. "Alternative" comedy in the Eighties was another such leap, but ultimately in the wrong direction. Just like pop music in the Seventies, comedy in the Eighties began turning back on itself, abandoning adventure and experiment for pastiche and regurgitation. Over the past 15 years, show me a new TV comedy show which, sooner or later, has not revealed its ambition to be Python mark II. John Cleese must stand as the towering figure of modern comedy, simply for the number of modern comedy, simply for the number of his imitators. Think of those who have got laughs by portraying Cleese-accented authority figures - Stephen Fry, Tony Slattery, Angus Deayton. Each time Deayton delivers his feeble cue-carded Basil Fawltyisms on Have I Got News For You, I keep willing and willing Cleese to sue.
Television is largely to blame for the rot, with its ruthless suppression of originality, its fear of true danger and subversion, its bullying of studio audiences into orgiastic mirth by producers and warm-up artists. Just as stultifying is the continuing obsession with television itself as a source of material: joke commercials, joke arts' discussions, joke breakfast TV interviews, joke headlines from News At Ten. Steve Coogan's The Day Today - however funny - is no more than a retread of what Monty Python was doing 20 years ago. Newman and Baddiel's dialogue between the two professors, modestly described by them as "the Parrot Sketch of the Nineties" (what a giveaway!) was merely the umpteenth variant on this.
So what's new in New Age comedy? Vic Reeves, with his self-absorbed mugging and bridling, seems to hark back to legends of the Fifties' Variety circuit such as Frank Randall and Al Read. Lee Evans, with his tight suit and orangutan facial contortions, is Norman Wisdom reincarnated. One can't help wondering whether Reeves and Evans are performing acts of conscious homage. Or are they like the modern pop musician who announced he'd written a song called Heartbreak Hotel, blissfully unaware that there'd ever been one before?
A far more urgent question about British comedy is why so many people who used to be brilliantly funny now seem, in various ways, to have gone off the rails. Viewed from the Paul Merton Dark Age, a golden epoch of hilarious men and women seems recently past. It is not long since Ben Elton was doing the most dangerously brilliant stand-up routine since Lenny Bruce; that Blackadder, starring Rowan Atkinson, offered possibly the best ensemble playing ever seen on television; that Smith and Jones seemed viable modern counterparts of Dud and Pete; that Victoria Wood became the natural heir to John Betjeman as a chronicler of provincial minutiae; that cult late night shows, notably Whose Line Is It Anyway?, were constantly producing new talents like Mike McShane and Sandi Toksvig; that you had only to see the Channel 4 logo and a blue-lit set to break into hysterics.
WHERE are they now, the Eltons, the Woods, the Atkinsons, the Smith and Joneses, the Frys and Lauries, the French and Saunderses? Rich and successful, sitcom superstars, best-selling authors, highly-paid columnists, West End thespians, ubiquitous TV voice-overs and - with the exception of Saunders, and Wood when you can find her - nowhere near as funny as before. It seems an immutable rule with British comedians (unlike American) that inspiration and effervescence diminish in direct proportion to financial success. I remember noticing it in the Sixties with Peter Cook, who rapidly metamorphosed from gauche undergraduate regular on the chat show circuit. I saw it again with dismay a couple of weeks ago, as Ben Elton discussed his latest book, solemn-faced, with Des O'Connor. Could he really not sense the nation's silent scream of, "Bring back the silver suit"?
Over Christmas, I watched a marathon television tribute to the great funny men of history. It was by no means as dire as it sounds, with interesting film clips of forgotten pearls like Sid Field and Nat Jackley, and articulate commentary by comedians of all eras. Most agreed that the consummate practitioner was Ken Dodd - not for the quality of his material so much as the quantity. As Ernie Wise (I think) put it: "That man gets off so many jokes per minute that sooner or later everybody's going to hear one that makes them laugh."
For me, comedy at its best has this same reckless, spendthrift quality, coming at you so hard and fast so many directions, it makes your head spin. Ben Elton used to do it with his almost levitating free associations about the Thatcher government and black plastic sacks; Rory Bremner does it in his minority spot on Channel 4, spilling out impressions that change in mid-sentence or even mid-word; jokes that often have barely formed their opening syllables before mutating into something else.
It's no disgrace, but rather a mark of utter professionalism, that great comedians like Bob Hope and Sid Caesar used to employ huge teams of writers, using and casting them aside faster than Catherine the Great did young hussar officers. No other kind of performance is so vitally dependant on making every second count. To me, newcomers like Jack Dee and Jo Brand, while stylistically original, seem to perform in an aching void of what American radio people call "dead air".
Incidentally, the same comedy awards which named Paul Merton Supreme Comic Genius of All Time and Space recorded an almost insultingly small vote for Rory Bremner. The appeal of dog crap is evidently universal.
