The Sky is the Limit
Rob Auton’s victory in Dave’s annual Funniest Joke
Competition has drawn if anything more than the usual complaints. Without wishing to defend the joke in question (though it’s by no
means the worst on the list), at least this time round the award has been given
to a relatively obscure comedian who will benefit from the publicity. Auton’s
hour, The Sky Show, is
quintessentially Fringe, in the slightly old-fashioned sense of being determinedly
peculiar and staged without a great deal of polish. Auton sets up his backdrop
(several pieces of cloth across which is written ‘The Sky Show’) as the
audience enter. The theme, such as it is, is the sky, encompassing surreal
stories about a factory where the weather is made and a tatty rival to The Sun which mostly consists of photographs
of the sky stuck onto pieces of paper. It’s the kind of humour that’s best
thought of as a tightrope act – there is little by way of snappy material,
slick stagecraft, audience interaction or big set pieces. Nor is it a piece of
deliberately bad or obscure anti-comedy; there was never any sense that the
show was a comment on stand-up. Rather, Auton has put the standard tropes of comedy
aside in order to do something as much on his own terms as possible. It’s not
always successful, but it is far more interesting than his winning joke might
suggest.
As for the also-rans, one that stood out for me was Liam Williams’s,
which he’s been using for a while to open his set:
It’s a fine joke,
but much like the winner it’s a variant on an idea that’s been around for a
while. Apparently this was a popular Victorian quip to sum up the difference
between the mind and the physical universe: ‘What is mind? No matter. What is matter?
Never mind’.[i] Maybe
someone should use that at the Fringe next year – there might be a prize in it…
A small point, but Berkeley was a *very* witty author, definitely one of the funniest in the philosophical canon. You probably need to see his short satirical pieces attacking the Cartesians etc to realise it though. "Alciphron" is also supposed to be funny, but I've never read it.
ReplyDelete... which, come to think of it, we might have guessed from Pope: "Even in a bishop I can spy desert / Secker is decent, Rundel has a heart / Manners with candour are to Benson given / To Berkeley every virtue under heaven"
ReplyDeleteThank goodness someone is finally working to reclaim Berkeley's rightful place in the comedy canon... Interestingly, Berkeley is not one of the philosophers mentioned by Monty Python in their song. Obviously they hadn't done their research either.
ReplyDeleteWell, do any synonyms of 'drunk' rhyme with 'Berkeley'? I do think my witty conversation is quite sparkly when I'm in my cups.
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