Reviews o'clock

Two more for Chortle: WitTank (I've just noticed that their publicity puff compares them to "a runaway carnival of invention", which is a bit of a lie - if they had said "a runaway carnival of silliness, big faces and high energy", it would be more accurate, but perhaps that's the reason I don't have a job writing puff pieces for sketch shows.)
And Ralph Shirley's Philosophical Investigations (for the record, my note that Shirley ordered his topics using Tractarian notation rather than the numberless paragraphs Wittgenstein used in the Investigations was cut by the editor. Unbelievable.)

And two from edfringereview.com: Nottingham newcomers Chaps on Legs, and Singles Collection, a double-bill curio featuring Tim Shishodia, often weird and sometimes wonderful.

I have seen various other shows at the Fringe, and I shall endeavour to write something about them as soon as I get the chance.

Review of Benny Boot...

...can be found here. It's the best thing I've seen so far.

Best Joke of the Fringe?

As voted by the viewers of Dave (The Home Of Witty Banter):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-14646532

Two things to note: first and most obviously, no-one takes this sort of vote seriously, not even people who take the whole business of jokes very seriously indeed. (Actually, that's not quite true - Dan Antopolski's Best Joke award from a couple of years ago is mentioned in the publicity for his sketch show, Jigsaw.)

Second, it's often hard to know how jokes get onto the best and worst lists. For the sake of drawing conclusions of a Biblically unscientific nature, I read two of my flatmates here the best and worst jokes from the above article. Both preferred Paul Daniels' effort. Personally, I would rather Helm's, but it's not as though there's a chasm between them. They're both puns, both fairly cheesy, and neither are as good as DeAnne Smith's (which, for obvious reasons, was never going to win).

Crowd Surfing (Naz Osmanoglu & Stuart Goldsmith Edinburgh previews, Glassblowers 6/7/2011)

How do you stand out from a crowd? That’s the question facing every stand-up at the Fringe, where the number of acts gathered could form an independent country (they outnumber the population of the Vatican City at any rate). It might be easier if you’re performing in Urdu, or on stilts, or improvising topical hip-hop versions of classic tunes (‘The Night They Drove Old Brixton Down’?), but these strategies bring their own dangers. At the risk of painting in extremely broad strokes, most stand-ups at least gravitate towards a middle ground: one man (usually, although less so of late), one mic, telling stories about themselves and modern life. The trick, then, is how to make a niche for yourself by developing small but important variations on this formula.

Naz Osmanoglu and Stuart Goldsmith illustrate two of the possibilities. Neither tries to reinvent the stand-up wheel, but there are notable differences between them. Osmanoglu is more about a number of set-piece routines, definite high points which his set is structured around. This suits his onstage energy – always bristling, but positively ricochetting around the stage during the climax to one of his stories. He manages to be propulsive without skidding into mania, and importantly manages to keep the stretches between the big set pieces pretty lively as well.

Material-wise, Osmanoglu’s selling-point is his Turkish-British heritage. He has a few adroit but rather standard observations on the respective stereotypes, but things become more interesting when he burrows into his relationship with his father. There are no unsettling revelations here, unless you count a hilariously disgusting lads’ night out in Amsterdam (yes, I know - but trust me, it’s funny). It would be interesting to see if the high-octane delivery would be muted if he took on more personal themes.

I’m guessing Stuart Goldsmith doesn’t have a convoluted ethnic heritage to draw on. It’s very much the trials and tribulations of a middle-class bloke for him. Unlike Osmanoglu, his delivery and material is geared towards lower-key incidents and smaller details. Indeed, for much of the set, his material, enjoyable though it is, reveals less about him than his manner.

Where Osmanoglu is high on energy, Goldsmith charms us into submission. He has the kind of twinkle in his eye and relaxed manner that apparently characterises every second Irish stand-up. This makes him delightful company (unlike every second Irish stand-up), but does mean that the set as whole sometimes drifts. However, this manner does very neatly counterpoint Goldsmith’s theme, that of taking responsibility. He doesn’t speak like a man shouldering much of a burden, but this makes his tales of anxiety and negative thinking that much easier to warm to. There’s very little by way of exaggeration for comic effect here; the stories are low-key enough to sound real even if one hundred per cent fiction. It makes for a show which burns more slowly than Osmanoglu’s, but with just as much warmth.

Comedy Snobbery

Blimy. It only seems like yesterday I was defending Stewart Lee against charges of being a posturing, indulgent dead end. Now comes some rather more loaded criticism from the Telegraph.

So what has Guy Stagg got against Stewart Lee? The rap sheet includes comedy snobbery, the “more poisonous” forms of snobbery which comedy snobbery is apparently a vehicle for, and the hypocrisy of Lee’s showing off his own prejudices while criticising others. ‘Vanity’, ‘cynicism’ and ‘hate’ also get thrown about, and there’s even a mention of the ‘Left-wing elite’. It’s like an Edinburgh Fringe of comedy evils.

Since ‘snobbery’ features twice in Stagg’s Seven Deadly Sins, we’d best be clear what it’s about. Snobs apparently hang around culture and “tell you what to like” and hate. The nerve of them, carrying on like their opinions might matter to anyone else. As Stagg initially presents them, snobs sound like critics, or anyone who leaves comments under an on-line review. I’m going to make a wild guess that someone who blogs on “the fringe arts scene” among other things isn’t suggesting that no-one should air their opinions on the merits or demerits of anything cultural.

So let’s try again. Snobbery, it seems to me, involves at least an element of prejudice, or refusing to engage with something (or someone) on its (or their) own terms, because the validity of those terms is denied. It’s not about telling anyone what to like; it’s about prescribing the criteria by which they ought to make evaluations. And (as Stagg correctly notes) it often involves judgements not just of cultural artefacts but of the people who dare to enjoy them.

Comedy snobbery, it seems, is particularly objectionable. Stagg dismisses it as “indulgent”, since comedians are the worst comedy snobs; but they are often the ones who know and care the most about comedy, and if anyone should be entitled to a little haughtiness towards underwhelming acts, it is they. Comedy snobbery is also “inappropriate”, since laughter is instinctive and inclusive; so too is sexual arousal, but that strikes me as a poor argument against those who would dismiss the artistic merits of pornography.

Stagg’s third point is more interesting: the comedy snob will ignore the laughter of the audience and continue to the judge the joke to be unfunny.  There’s no doubt that being told that something you enjoy ‘isn’t funny’ is aggravating, particularly if one considers comedy to be, fundamentally, a subjective matter. But equally, there are objective criteria by which any comedian can be assessed; they won’t ever capture everything about an act, but they are there just as surely as in composition or dance (if you think that no objective criteria can be applied to dance, you’ve obviously never seen me cutting the rug.)

Michael McIntyre is apparently targeted by snobs for telling simple, popular jokes, free of contempt or bile. For what it’s worth, I suspect that these are among the reasons why it is (or was, at any rate) fashionable to dislike McIntyre. I’m not sure Lee’s ‘My on-stage persona ate my homework’ explanation was entirely convincing; it’s a little too close to giving himself carte blanche to say whatever he, or ‘Stewart Lee’, feels like.

On the other hand, Lee clearly regards McIntyre as part of a burgeoning movement in comedy, one which it’s fair to say he regards with ambivalence rather than contempt. And the fact that it’s popular to criticise McIntyre doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to do so, or evidence of creeping snobbery. Stagg stacks the deck somewhat with his pocket description of McIntyre’s act. For ‘popular’, one could justifiably substitute ‘bland’; for ‘lack of contempt’, ‘lack of ambition’. One’s attitude towards McIntyre will ultimately come down to such value judgements. (Likewise, one’s attitude towards McIntyre’s critics will come down to whether one thinks of them as fashionable snobs or as connoisseurs.)

But the real issue here isn’t attitudes towards comedians, but towards comedy audiences. This is the heart of Stagg’s complaint: Lee’s sets

are a refined way of saying that anyone who reads Dan Brown is stupid and anyone who watches Top Gear is racist. In dissecting the prejudices of others, Stewart Lee is also showing off his own.

Once again, I think there’s a little bit of truth in this. I don’t think Lee is saying precisely what Stagg attributes to him, but it’s hard not to see traces of contempt in some of his stand-up. But Stagg ignores every other aspect of Lee’s criticisms and how he articulates them. It seems odd to note that Lee often ‘savages’ other comedians but to not inquire into why Lee might want to do so, or the significance of him doing so in the context of a stand-up routine, or – most importantly – the fact that he pretty clearly ramps up his dislike of Dan Brown readers and Top Gear audiences for comic effect. He might be indulging his prejudices, but he’s also presenting his own disdain and elitism as something to be sniggered at.

This isn’t to say Stagg himself is being snobbish in dismissing Lee, neat though that conclusion would be. But he does seem guilty of simplifying matters to make his criticisms more plausible, and in doing so arguably missing the point of Lee’s comedy. It’s not snobbery to ignore or misinterpret irony. But it is ironic to do so in the course of dismissing a comedian as prejudiced.

Musique Royale (The Suitcase Royale, ‘The Ballad of Backbone Joe’ – Soho Theatre, 4/7/2011)

It’s not an unusual sight to see comedy troupes wielding rickety props and ramshackle accents in spoof genre plays. Nor is it surprising when they pick up instruments mid-sketch and launch into some appropriate ditty. Australian three-piece The Suitcase Royale invigorate each of these approaches by neatly combining them. Their tale of small-town Australian life (think crooked boxing promoters, detectives, and dark secrets all round) is intercut and underlain with live and recorded music, ranging from cod-jazz crooning to numbers more in the vein of early Johnny Cash or Roy Orbison.

The music itself is very good, in particular the rockabilly pastiches. But where The Suitcase Royale excel is how it is deployed. It would have been easy to play the songs for laughs, particularly considering that the humour and acting style of the show isn’t exactly on the subtle side. There are plenty of winks to the audience, frequent departures from the script, and much fun had with props such as outsize telephone receivers and the skeleton of what looked like a dog but might conceivably have been some obscure marsupial.

But the music mostly works very differently, creating an oddly melancholic atmosphere. This is true even of the songs between scenes, which tended neither to comment directly on the action nor advance it, but to work more in the way background music in films typically does. Mixing this with broad comedy was potentially awkward, but for the most part the different elements were integrated seamlessly. The music helped to create the world of the genre being spoofed, helped by some delicious lighting and judicious sound effects. The spoofing was left to the script and the performers, who were generally more than up to snuff.

The effect is curious, switching from inviting us to sympathise with the characters to laughing at them, and back again. On paper it sounds awkward, as though the cast are forever removing bricks from the fourth wall and peeping through, before filling the gap again. But probably because we’re so familiar with the tropes and the feel of the tough-guy genre, and because those noirish touches are always themselves close to the line between genuine emotion and parody, we can move easily with them. The Suitcase Royale pulled our strings as surely as they played their instruments. I felt used, but in a good way.

The Suitcase Royale are performing Zombatland at Pleasance Courtyard, 11.10pm, until August 28^th (except 16^th).

Edinburgh preview

Apparently there’s some kind of arts event happening in Scotland this year. Edinburgh, of all places. Who’s idea was that?

It would be remiss of me not to nominate a few acts in the Biggest Comedy Jamboree on Earth. Here are six I spotted flicking through the programme – I’ll have more suggestions presently.

Caveat emptor: I know a couple of the performers listed below. They’re still good, mind - just saying.

Acts I’ve seen and enjoyed previously:

1. Benny Boot – dry-as-dust Australian stand-up. Specialises in lowering the energy in a room, only to lower it further. (Pleasance Courtyard, 9.45 pm)

2. Hannah Gadsby – another pretty dry Australian, but in a more story-telling vein. (Gilded Balloon, 4.45pm)

3. The Gentlemen of Leisure – sketch duo who ransack the world of literature and culture for their topics. Basically, highbrow silliness. (Just the Tonic at The Caves, 3.20pm)

Acts I haven’t seen, but who sound like I would enjoy them

1.Toby – girl-girl sketch group. Last year's show sounded like terrific, inventive fun. That’s my kind of fun. (Pleasance Courtyard, 4.30 pm)

2. David Reed: Shamblehouse – ‘one-man sketch show’ from one-third of the Penny Dreadfuls. I’ve always liked the idea of one person doing a whole sketch show, but I’ve never seen anything that really fits that description. Maybe this will be that show? (Pleasance Courtyard, 8.30 pm)

3. Seminar – Emily Watson Howes specialises in high-concept comedy shows (monologues in ladies toilets, a sketch show set in a gym, that kind of thing). Here she plays a stress expert - it sounds like a close relative to the various management-guru/life-coach characters populating comedy festivals in recent years, but hopefully she has a few interesting twists on the formula. (Pleasance Courtyard, 2.10 pm)

The Future of Comedy?

Everyone loves Stewart Lee, right? Apart from Daily Mail writers, Joe Pasquale, and the kind of person who prefers their funnies to start ‘I’m not saying my mother-in-law is fat...’? And even some of those people probably like Lee, secretly.

I’m simplifying a little – but chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ll be a Lee fan. So it’s refreshing to see Joe Daniels tilting at this loftiest of comedy windmills. Refreshing, but I don’t think he’s got Lee right.

Self-referentiality is perhaps Lee’s main selling-point; both in that his set involves a running commentary on itself, and in the slightly broader sense that he spends a lot of time performing comedy about comedy. It’s fair enough to point out that a great deal of art about art, writing about writing, etc., is smarmy posturing. This is a danger inherent in it, the short step from ‘Let’s poke fun at these hackneyed conventions’ to ‘What kind of fools could take these conventions seriously?’ This might even be a fair criticism of some of Lee's act. But it’s possible to justify quite a bit of his snobbery: inane celebrity biographies and eager-to-please television hosts deserve to be mocked rather than taken seriously. And one of the delights of Lee’s performances is the self-awareness built into this mockery. The audience are both invited to share in the condescension, and at the same time nudged in the ribs at how ridiculous Lee’s irritation is.

Daniels suggests that his mockery leads Lee to set up false dichotomies, between the bits of culture he deems worthy of ridicule (pretty much all of it, apparently), and the elitist standard to which he aspires. While this is true to an extent, I’m inclined to say, ‘Yes, but it’s a comedy set’. Lee exaggerates the blandness of much contemporary culture for comic effect. Again, his audience will be perfectly aware of this; it’s an essential part of their enjoyment. (This might sound very much like I’m saying Lee is having his cake and eating it, inviting his audience to look down on the detritus of popular culture while also finding humour in Lee’s antipathy towards said detritus. Well, he is. Provided this is done skilfully enough, there’s no real contradiction here, just the comic tension that comes from justified irritation at something tugging gently at an obvious over-reaction to it.)

Third, Daniels is right to say that Lee’s act, to the extent that it involves criticising established comic conventions, depends on their continuing popularity: “His act only works when enough people out there like seeing Michael McIntyre bound about in enormo-dromes”. To this extent, Lee’s act is a reaction to the mainstream, and so is ‘reactionary’. But anything (artistic movement, revolutionary vanguard, “silly” “posturing” stand-up) which seeks to subvert something else is reactionary, in the sense that it is a reaction to the thing being subverted. If this is your definition of ‘reactionary’, there will be little that escapes it. One might take this as a clue to find a better definition of ‘reactionary’, or maybe just a better dictionary.

Daniels implicitly sets up his article as considering whether Lee represents a “deadpan dead end” or the future of comedy. I think we should assume he is aware this itself is something of a false dichotomy. A world in which comedians did nothing but endlessly deconstruct each other’s act would be a bit boring, but that’s not what people mean when they speak of Lee as comedy’s future. At least, I hope not. And I suspect Stewart Lee hopes so as well.

Bridesmaids

A blog about comedy isn’t going be able to avoid the gender issue – as part of my licence to litter the internet with my musings, I’m obliged to devote at least five posts a year to such topics as what the producers of Mock the Week have against female stand-ups, or to analysing the latest nuanced and balanced arguments as to why no women anywhere have ever been funny. I thought I might as well face the issue head-on; and it doesn’t come much more head-on than a film called Bridesmaids, written by two women and with an almost perfectly distaff line-up of lead characters.

Paul Feig’s (yes, a man – perhaps he directed in drag) film has been hailed in some quarters as proof (for some, unprecedented; for others, merely the latest) than a surfeit of oestrogen is no barrier to being funny. A more interesting question is what it tells us about male and female approaches to humour. Along with the look!-It’s-a-funny-woman! bromides, there’s been a fair amount of comment on the rather crude nature of the humour. It’s certainly a lot more robust than one might expect of a film with that title. We’re accustomed to male actors casually tossing around scatological and sexual references, while their female counterparts roll their eyes or try to cajole them into taking this relationship more seriously. So to an extent, female characters being voracious, rude and occasionally disgusting are a welcome sight. Kristen Wiig is central to this. Billed as a story of female friendships and relations, Bridesmaids is at least as much a character study. Annie is often humiliated but never judged or demeaned, and Wiig’s dry manner and not-quite-papered-over emotion carries her and the film through every mortifying incident.

It’s possible to overstate how novel this is. The female relationships are the engine of the film, but they’re powering a rather more traditional chassis. The finale is, after all, a white wedding, and Annie gets her dream man, who is as adorably crumpled and open-minded as in any frothy chick-flick. This might be canniness on the part of film-makers pitching their wares to a predominantly female audience, but it might also have been simply following the trail of numerous other Judd Apatow productions where the bonds of friendship hold firm despite the twists and turns of high jinks and low laughs.

           

So what sign is there of distinctively female humour? I have two suggestions. One is a lack of cruelty – we might laugh at what happens to the characters, but we are never invited to sneer at them. That said, the films Apatow has been involved with tend not to be mean-spirited, so this may not be a sign of female comedy as much as a house style showing through.

The other contender for a distinctively feminine touch was the sight of Wiig having sex while still wearing her bra. Isn’t the whole point of underwear and coitus that the first is removed in order to facilitate the second? Having them together is like mixing starter and dessert, and not in a sexy way. But maybe this is just my male viewpoint skewing things.

On Target
(Ben Target Edinburgh preview, Camden Stables, 7/7/2011)

Ben Target enters wearing a scarf wrapped across his face. He pulls it away to uncover a pacifier. This presently falls from his mouth, and he stands revealed, looking like a man who should be running a vegan crunk night (2.25 here).

The starting point for describing this show might be character comedy. But the comedy is not really about the character, so much as a character imposing himself on us through a series of set-pieces. We learn very little about Target’s persona, or what he (as opposed to Target himself) is trying to do. If asked after the show to describe him, it would be difficult to go beyond such generic terms as ‘eccentric’, ‘oddball’, or ‘idiot-savant man-child’. But what happens in the show is clearly the product of a definite, albeit tangential, vision. It makes sense for this person to ride around in a tiny car, get laughs out of juxtaposing a cake with a candle, or earnestly present silly cartoons on a flipchart. Or so at least it seems to me. I daresay it would be quite difficult to enjoy this show if one did not accept this; there would presumably be a strong temptation to regard it as self-indulgent sub-Dada antics.

What’s more interesting is that if one buys into the conceit of the show, it becomes surprisingly difficult to dislike. With a lot of comedy, one can appreciate what the performer is up to without necessarily enjoying it. This is harder in the case of Target; partly because the joke often simply is that he is actually doing what he is doing, and partly because he does it with such dedication, never breaking character even when his vigorous pounding on the door goes unexpectedly awry.

The freedom from character, narrative or any explicit theme is in one sense liberating, but can also be somewhat constricting. For one thing, it gives the show as a whole a rather episodic feel. Target gets round this to an extent by saving the most sustained set-piece for the end, but there is still room for his character to be brought out more. The closest thing we got was a thread of romantic yearning. An early set-piece involves him finagling one member of a couple out of the room on a theatre and champagne date, only to return a moment later, deflated and sadly carrying a large, phallic vegetable. The vegetable (it looked like a long turnip, if that makes sense) did not feature before or after, and he did not draw attention to it. Never mind; it paid its way in poignancy and a low note of innuendo. But this snapshot of emotion was not explored further. There’s something there, and in his ridiculous champion-of-the-world posturing, that could turn a hugely enjoyable and compulsively inventive show into something genuinely moving.