Jeremy Thorpe: A Life in Comedy

The flamboyant former leader of the Liberal party, Jeremy Thorpe, passed away last week. A noted raconteur and apparently a devastating impersonator of political rivals, he will be remembered for, among other things, two contributions to comic history. The more direct of these was his famous quip about the Night of the Long Knives, when Harold MacMillan sacked seven of his cabinet ministers: “Greater love hath no man than this – that he lay down his friends for his life”.

The other contribution was a more roundabout affair. The exact details of Thorpe’s relationship with Norman Scott and his possible involvement in a plot to kill the latter are still a source of dispute. Thorpe was acquitted of conspiracy to murder Scott, but the judge’s remarks to the jury before they retired to consider their verdict were widely seen as prejudicial (see the section on Committal and Trial here).

The following week Peter Cook, appearing in Amnesty International’s first Secret Policeman’s Ball, needed some new material to respond to a critic’s complaint that the show lacked satirical bite. The rest is comedy history:

Dissecting the Target: Ben Target interview

One-man comedy laboratory Ben Target was the subject of the very first post on this-here blog. Three years later he is still every inch the idiot-savant man-child. I caught up with him on the last day of his Fringe run to find out what made him tick.

The interview, complete with incredibly unprofessional opening sequence, can be found here.

Dissecting the Fringe: Edinburgh Diary

Saturday 23^rd

Until last Saturday I had never seen Late Night Gimp Fight. This might seem like something of an oversight on my part given their prominence at the Fringe and in London over the past few years, but everything I had read and heard about the group had suggested that they were not what I was interested in, comically speaking. Sitting through their greatest hits in a raucous Pleasance Beyond confirmed this suspicion: rarely have I felt more out of place in an audience, or felt that a show was aimed at people other (i.e., younger) than myself. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy it. The troupe are relentlessly professional and dispatch their sketches with ruthless aplomb. A couple of the presentational ideas (sock puppets made using the legs of the performers, and a silent piece where all the audience can see are translucent gloves and other accoutrments) were superbly executed, and one of their songs was wittier than any ditty about bestiality has a right to be.

Nevertheless, there’s arguably less to LNGF than meets the eye. The point isn’t that too often they fall below the level of their best ideas – after all, this is true of almost any sketch troupe. Rather, what was surprising to me was how unchallenging the show is, in the sense of how closely it conformed to its audience’s expectations. Unlike the traditional late-night Fringe gig, with drink-fuelled heckles and put-downs and a genuine battle of wills (if not wits) between audience and performer, this was entirely slick and controlled from the word go. In fact, it put me in mind of a children’s show, albeit one marketed at children who found references to masturbation and paedophilia hilarious.[i] The edgy humour which is the group’s selling point was delivered in spades, but a show where the audience expects shocking material and is there precisely to see it is one whose edge is automatically blunted.

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[i] Not to mention, somewhat more dismayingly, a number of sketches where the punchline involved nonconsesual sex.

Dissecting the Fringe: Edinburgh Diary

Thursday 21^st- Friday 22^nd

That hardy perennial, the one-liner comic, is well represented at this year’s Fringe. A couple of different acts I saw illustrated the variety of approaches available to the most stripped-down form of stand-up. In particular, they each found different ways of dealing with what is often a characteristic feature of one-liner comedy: the comedian, since they are giving us the joke and waiting for us to get it, assumes a high-status role, remote from the cares and worries of the audience members they are deigning to guide towards enjoyment.

Mark Simmons wears the de facto uniform of recent one-liner comics, a suit, but it’s rumpled and not particularly intimidating, much like the man himself.[i] He does tell us that if we don’t get a joke we should raise a hand and he can explain it, which sounds very high-status but in practice undercuts his role. He’s also a naturally warm performer: ‘warm’ can mean a number of different things depending on the kind of show in question, but in this case it means he giggles endearingly at his own jokes. In other circumstances, giggling indicates a nervousness which can ruin a show, but Simmons is a fluent enough performer that the audience never worries about his ability.

Sean Nolan takes the theme of non-dominant performer even further. He wears a t-shirt and jeans and reads most of his jokes from a notebook (many of which, interestingly, are the same as when he performed them here last year without visual aid):

The vocal delivery is very deadpan, which is a classic trope of one-liner comedy, but lightened by a shy grin after each one. In some cases this is a necessity, given that some of his material is edgier than anything in Simmon’s set. Nolan is obviously influenced by Demetri Martin in how he constructs his jokes,[ii] but some of the jokes themselves would sound more appropriate coming from Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr. Nevertheless, the impression remains one of a cheeky young ‘un nudging at the boundaries of what we will accept, rather than an alpha figure striding confidently over the line.

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[i] He also changes his clothes as the show progresses, which is intriguing and only slightly spoiled by the rather weak punch-line to which it leads.

[ii] And in the drawings he presents at the end of his set, which were the most consistently funny element of the show.

Doing Penance

John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary has received glowing praise in the British press, though a somewhat more lukewarm response in Ireland. Much of the coverage has centred on the question of whether or not it succeeds as a critique of post-Catholic, post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland. Without providing an answer one way or the other, I want to briefly consider its use of humour.

Calvary was billed and reviewed as a black comedy. The humour is certainly black enough, with smalltalk about paedophilia, domestic abuse, pubs being shut down and other socially unacceptable practices. The problem lies with the ‘humour’ side of the equation. I found it a strikingly unfunny film, in a way that is helpful in thinking about how it takes up those big themes of religion and society. 

Comedy need not be uplifting to be funny – or rather, even if good comedy is always amusing, it can carry more disturbing emotional or satirical undertones. The difference between a point made through comedy and one advanced by other means is often little to do with the point itself or the emotion it seeks in the audience, and more a matter of the tone in which it is delivered. While it need not always provide relief, comedy must work by a light touch. Satire which is not deft is mere propaganda, and black humour will slide into nihilism or despair without a spark of enjoyment to light up its darkness.

The comedy in Calvary is, by and large, ponderous and unsubtle. This may be particularly true for an Irish audience, but it is hard not to wince at each clichéd scene Brendan Gleeson’s troubled priest is faced with: politically correct fellow-clergy, a dissolute former banker, achingly casual references to homosexuality and adultery, and so on. With the mise-en-scene stacked in this way, there is no sense of normality against which irony or understatement can work. When almost every character offers little but a jocular challenge to Fr. Lavelle’s moral system, the power of irony to reveal something terrible without displaying it – the electrical charge of genuine black comedy – fizzles out.

Black humour ultimately relies on the laughter of recognition. We laugh because we understand the gulf between how characters speak and act, and the things which they reveal in doing so. McDonagh’s script leaves no gap across which our recognition can reach. It is merely blackness in search of comedy.

Everything Happens So Much (or: But is it Comedy?)

I hadn’t heard of Horse_ebooks until reading a NewYorker article about it, which tells you something about my own internet browsing habits.[i]  For the uninitiated, Horse_ebooks [ii] is a Twitter account which posted a series of apparently unconnected messages, usually grammatically half-formed and reading like they had been taken at random from advertising copy (‘I have personally used this technique to break many memory’; ‘and more! Start raising your self-esteem today!’), but with occasional undertones of pathos or even humanity. It had the feel of a bot gone slightly wrong, or perhaps doctored in a bid to disguise its spamming.

Originally, this is exactly what it was – an automated programme pasting text culled more or less at random from books on e-library.net, the site for which it was advertising. But for the last two years of its life (the account became dormant last September), it had actually been run by Jacob Bakkila, who chose the text from publications across the internet. The feed created its own ecological niche, inspiring comics, merchandise and excited commentary on its significance.

In the New Yorker article, Susan Orlean places Horse e_books in the context of ‘net art’, artworks made specifically for (and often about) the internet.  Whatever about art, is it comedy? There’s a sly humour on passing the feed off as a benignly malfunctioning bot has a sly humour, nicely inverting our traditional preoccupations with machines passing as humans or possessing subjective qualities. And some of the individual tweets are undoubtedly funny. My favourite, and the most retweeted, is the title of this article; it has some of the gnomic quality of a Steven Wright one-liner.

That said, I’m not sure I’d call it comedy. Bakkila’s own description, ‘performance mischief’, seems more accurate: it’s playful, teasing expectations rather than subverting them, drawing attention to its own form. But its principle aim isn’t humour, and the tweets themselves are more often bizarre than amusing. The randomness of the tweets and the almost total lack of context for what they say gives them their somewhat unworldly charm, but also means that they rarely have anything recognisable as a set-up-reveal structure. And while the conceit of a fake bot is lovely, the result wasn’t a humorous narrative or an elaborate practical joke, but a constant is-it-or-isn’t-it, an uncertainty as to whether the author was human or not. One contributor to Orlean’s article was quoted describing Horse_ebooks as a ‘long con’, but this suggests a sustained attempt to fool people, which isn’t really what the feed was trying to do. It was playing with what they believed rather than firmly pointing them in a particular direction. This sort of deliberately ambiguity is much more characteristic of contemporary art than anything I would call comedy. The contrast with an earlier project of Bakkila’s is illuminating:

‘This Is My Milwaukee’ is more straightforwardly comic. It’s also less a lot less interesting (and rather dated – six years is an eternity on the internet).

Despite my luddite tendencies,  I have a passing familiarity with the different forms of comedy which have blossomed on Twitter: stand-ups and writers dashing off one-liners, fake Twitter accounts for celebrities, or just riffs on the practice of tweeting itself. There’s scope for something a little stranger there, more oblique and not afraid to risk being unfunny on occasion Even if Horse_ebooks isn’t itself comedy, it may yet prove of great importance for the genre.

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[i] As does this blog, which I started around five years after the vogue for them had peaked. I anticipate launching a Twitter account sometime in 2018.

[ii] Apparently it’s pronounced ‘Horse Ebooks’, not (sadly) ‘horsey-books’.

Top 10 comedy films – an alternative list

No. 9 – The Apartment

Only a few of the films on this list have the sole purpose of making audiences laugh. Most have some other aim, be it social, political or artistic (in the sense of stretching the boundaries of what comedies are capable).  Of those with a social message of some kind, The Apartment is arguably the best thought out and most perfectly pitched.

The main plot is the love story between office drone C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator girl at the building where he works. Baxter’s rival is Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray),  an overbearing personnel manager with the power to transform Baxter into an executive or dispatch him back to the drudgery from whence he came. This fact indicates the social critique the film develops, as does the use of Baxter’s eponymous dwelling by Sheldrake and other senior members of staff. This critique isn’t politically sophisticated, but few other films have so acutely tuned the epic themes of self-knowledge and rebellion against the social order to the minutiae of modern life. Any of us who have ever worked in an office (or lived in an apartment) can identify with Baxter as he juggles romance and his career and more generally tries to find some nobility in his subservient place in society. There’s no overt comment on the distorting effects of this society, but it’s hard not to read it between the lines as Baxter bends his life to accommodate those more powerful than him.

Billy Wilder is one of two directors whose work is more or less mandatory in a list like this.[i] There is no doubt that Some Like it Hot is a funnier all-out comedy than The Apartment, but arguably the latter has been more influential. This is partly because of its subject-matter, and partly because Wilder succeeded in coaxing dramatic themes into lightly played comedy. This bittersweet tone has been the template for any number of modern blends of comedy and drama.

That’s a beautifully chosen (and delivered) ‘fruitcake’. What might have been a corny, overplayed joke (‘She sends me a cake every Christmas’ ‘What kind?’ ‘A fruitcake’) is undercut, a word slipped into the middle of a line thrown away at the end of Lemmon’s monologue. It's poignant, and funny because of what Baxter's infatuation has become, and because he realises it. That mixture of something genuinely touching with a character's awareness of its absurdity is the gift The Apartment has given subsequent comedies.

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[i] No prize for guessing who the other one is. (There’s a good case to be made for Alexander Mackendrick, but – spoiler alert – I have decided not to include any of his films.)

Top 10 comedy films – an alternative list

Looking for inspiration for something to watch on New Year’s Eve, I tried the Guardian website for their inevitable Top 10 Films of 2013 list. While there, I perused their more extensive list of genre all-time Top 10s.[i] I found the comedy list a little disappointing. This is not to suggest that the films picked were not worthy of their place (with one exception, I greatly enjoyed them all), just that the list was a little predictable and, dare I say it, safe. Some Like It Hot, Annie Hall, The Life of Brian - these are the Citizen Kane, Godfather Part II and Rashomon of the comedy canon. You can see why they have to be there, but you can’t help but feel that their presence makes the list less interesting.

So I’ve decided to kick off the New Year with an alternative Top 10 Comedy Films. A few preliminary points are worth noting. First, these are not necessarily what I regard as the funniest ten films (the Guardian list has taken a good five or six of those). Nor are these the films I laugh the most at – some of them I included because they do something very different with the comic form, while remaining funny (in my opinion). I’ve tried to avoid consciously responding to the films in the Guardian’s list, but in a couple of cases I’ve more or less had to opt for an alternative effort from a particular director and a particular studio (there are probably other equivalences between the two lists if you care to look). And for the most part I’ve eschewed overly controversial choices – chances are you’ll have seen or at least heard of all of these films. No doubt there are people better qualified than I to come up with far more ‘alternative’ suggestions – if you are one of those persons, feel free to pass your suggestions on.

So (in no particular order) at no. 10 we have Groundhog Day.

Plenty of films have used the device of a character thrown by plot magic into an inexplicable scenario (Big, Midnight in Paris, The Exterminating Angel), and a few have had a romantic lead spying on their loved one to glean the knowledge with which to woo them (Everyone Says I Love You). Groundhog Day works these ideas together wonderfully, with Bill Murray (never better) chasing Andie MacDowell (very good in a less promising role) over the course of several year’s worth of the one day. It’s hard to think of a comedy which has better developed its humour from its basic premise. There are relatively few zingers – the funniest scenes rely on the combination of Phil Connors’s being trapped in Punxsutawney and exercising a petty dominance over the situation:

Apart from Murray’s list of deaths he has survived, he has no funny lines in this scene. The interactions with Doris and the other diners aren’t individually funny, but the culminative effect of the mini-scenes is beautifully judged (and a microcosm of the film as a whole).

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[i] We ended up watching their number-one crime film, Chinatown – a perfect New Year’s movie, which I should have thought of myself.