Tommy: What’s Comedy Got To Do With It?

 “I’ve been doing this for eighteen years. I could be doing it for another twenty. I’m tired of it, like. What interests me is just getting up now and talking, and seeing if that encounter between a person and a crowd where it’s totally spontaneous, if that can bring the adventure back into it”

“It feels like being wilfully shit. It makes you feel like you’re an artist taking chances but you’re not. It’s indulgent.”

– Tommy Tiernan, Tommy: To Tell You The Truth

There is something very attractive, in prospect at least, about an artist rebelling against convention and pursuing their own vision even at the expense of popularity. In comedy, the artistic risks come with an extra edge, since an alienated audience will make clear what they think in such a stark manner. Perhaps because of this, pretty much any comic who is seen to break new ground has been praised for, among other things, ignoring or at least downplaying the wishes of audience members.

Tommy Tiernan’s all-improvised tour of Europe last year, documented in Tommy: To Tell You The Truth, outwardly fits the above description. In fact, it is very different. On what is shown there, his performances consisted of him alternately rambling and ranting, with a sprinkling of genuine wit (as when in Zurich he discusses Marx’s quixotic attempt to incite socialist revolution in the most bourgeois city in the world). Early in the film he presents himself as taking artistic risks, but by the middle of the tour, in the face of bemused audiences and car-crash gigs, he expresses doubts about the merits of his new approach.

It is interesting to consider the difference between what Tiernan does on this tour and the kind of artistic risk-taking that seems worthwhile. One tempting response is to say that it’s a question of what you like: something is ‘risk-taking’ or ‘adventurous’ if you enjoy it, ‘self-indulgent’ if you do not. But I don’t think this is quite right. After all, it is possible to admire an artist for striking out on their own path, even if you find what results boring. For instance, I admire Paul Foot for his wilful eccentricity, even though I personally don’t enjoy the results:

What seems lacking in Tiernan is a sense of the possibilities and the value of what he has been doing, i.e., comedy in general and his comedy in particular. On stage he seems rudderless (which is very different to an improviser who is control of what they are doing, even if they don’t know exactly where they are headed). It is worth contrasting his approach with anti-comedians like Ed Aczel and Neil Hamburger. They create comedy by subverting and mocking the conventions of stand-up and the expectations of the audience, but they do so in effect by establishing and exploiting new conventions based on rejecting the standard approaches. What Tiernan is doing is, in a sense, a purer form of anti-comedy, one which undermines much more basic conventions of stand-up (that the comedian is funny in a way which the audience can be expected to appreciate) but not for any discernibly comic end. His tour manager describes the show as ‘Like punk rock improv… there are no rules’. But apart from the fact that the majority of improvisers do use rules, improvised comedy only works if it is directed to a certain purpose, i.e., being funny.

Tiernan himself worries that what he is doing is self-indulgent, which usually has connotations of arrogance and self-importance, but arguably he is also suffering from a loss of faith in the value of making people laugh unless it is accompanied by some philosophical insight or catharsis. This view might be understandable, though still curious, in someone who did not tour European cities playing what were presumably billed as comedy shows. Furthermore, the exercise is not only unfair on the audience members; Tiernan is selling himself short as well. Comedy which forsakes the search for laughter in favour of higher concerns will not only be poor comedy, but will sabotage its chance of achieving anything else. 

Freely Speaking

The right to offend, and the corresponding right of audiences to bellyache about it, is an ongoing topic in the comedy world and elsewhere. Spiked, the online home of contrarian libertarianism, hosted a debate on the subject at the Stand in Edinburgh earlier today, and assistant editor Tom Slater has published articles here and here. My response, which tries to tease out the differences between the rights of the interested parties and broader threats to freedom of speech, is here.   

Dissecting the Fringe: Edinburgh Diary

Tuesday 11^th

Matilda Wnek & Rosa Robson, the duo who make up Beard, describe The Grin of Love, as mixing ‘sketch, clown, theatre and nightmare’. For some of us, the term ‘clown’ will always have nightmarish connotations, but Beard carefully disarm any such link. Their pocket description is in fact as accurate and succinct as one could hope for. Not hoping to match it for brevity, I can nevertheless fill in some of the details.

The Grin of Love is one sense an abstract work. Instead of sketches with discernible plots or scenarios, Wnek and Robson present a series of set-pieces, most of which bear a delightfully tangential relation with reality. But in another sense their work is rooted in the concrete. Rather than beginning with characters or situations, each set-piece is anchored in a particular prop or props (e.g., a glass of wine, a veil and some disturbing make-up, an orange and a banana) deployed in a particular way (to indicate, respectively, a bored person of substantial means, a twisted gentleman’s club, and the miracle of reproduction). Some of the props look ridiculous and are played for laughs, but more often they are entry points to an otherwise hermetic world, and vehicles for the performers to playfully explore their own presence on stage.

Almost every sketch features audience interaction, but in keeping with a recent trend (for instance, Ben Target) it is neither threatening nor humiliating. The first audience member brought up on stage is asked to participate in a weird rite where the humour lies in the strangeness of what happens rather than what is happening to the victim. Later on, the entire audience is invited to wear blindfolds, to throw beans through two hula-hoops in answer to survey questions, and to collaborate in the supposed magic powers of each performer.

This way of approaching sketch comedy is the polar opposite of such troupes as The Pin or Minor Delays, who use few if any props and tend to provide variations on a more orthodox characters-in-a-recognisable-situation formula. But for sheer inventiveness and the detail with which they have worked out their ideas, Beard are a match for any of these groups. The Grin of Love may look ramshackle and deliberately odd, but it shows all the signs of having been thought through in some detail.  

Dissecting the Fringe: Edinburgh Diary

Monday 10^th 

The one-person character-and/or-sketch show is a formidably versatile vehicle, as demonstrated by Douglas Walker’s Möglich and Daniel Nils Roberts’ Asp.

Walker’s is the more theatrically accomplished of the two. His improv background shows in the precise characterisations and range of accents, accompanied by a relatively sophisticated lighting design. Between the sketches the stage is strongly back-lit, with Walker telling short jokes in almost total darkness; the same effect is also employed very effectively in one of the sketches where a journalist recounts his ordeal at the hands of kidnappers.

The most effective sketches – an intrusive psychiatrist, a lollipop man facing a crisis of confidence, and an elaborate set-up for a wonderfully contrived pun – come at the end of the show, following some less interesting ideas in the first half-hour. Each of these sketches is quite involved and demands a certain commitment on the part of the audience – for instance, the journalist sketch has no jokes for well over a minute – and perhaps Walker was reluctant to risk these too early. As a result, Möglich has a rather lop-sided feel of a very accomplished performer and writer who is perhaps a little tentative in how he approaches a fifty-minute show.

Asp has a less ambitious range of characters, and overall feels more like a work in progress. Roberts relies heavily on powerpoint slides, which can be inventive but sometimes feel like a crutch for characters who have not been developed in enough detail. A sketch character need not have a fully worked out backstory, but – to take one example - the UNICEF representative is so ill-informed about his job and the organisation he works for that the sketch feels somewhat pointless. Even the more successful sketches, such as the bellicose army cook, work because of individual jokes rather than a carefully-developed character or plot. Where Asp shows the most promise is in left-field touches such as the recurring theme of things seen or described from a bear’s point of view – not all of these work, but the Shakespearean reference he contrives is a delight, showing how effective his more lo-fi approach can be.

Dissecting the Fringe: Edinburgh Diary

Sunday 9^th

Since at least Monty Python, a criterion on which sketch shows have been assessed has been their formal inventiveness. Four years ago The Pin, a freshly-minted ex-Footlights troupe, offered a baroque twist on what was once a formal novelty, the idea of developing an overall narrative through a series of sketches. In their case, the sketches not only formed a narrative, but were presented in reverse order in such a way as to reveal how each situation was set up by previous events.  It was undeniably clever, but it wasn’t clear if the chronological trickery added much by way of humour.

This year’s model, Ten Seconds with the Pin, marries formal invention with a running theme of explaining the mechanics of sketch comedy to the audience, and crucially, both elements have been precision-tooled for comic effect. For the sheer number of ingenious premises and formal ideas this show, and in particular the first half, is as good as anything I have seen. To convey this properly one would need to outline the mechanics of several of the sketches. One example will have to suffice: the three versions of a sketch featuring a character called Jason recounting how his date has gone. The sketch calls nominally for three parts, two of which the duo (Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen) play in turn in each version; each time they elicit new humour from the variation, and the humour is on each occasion of a different kind (from revealing that one of the characters is superfluous to the scene, to showing what Jason’s friend is really like). Metacomedy plus new ways of presenting sketches plus laughter generated by each of these: this sketch, and much else here besides, is a model of what cerebral and self-reflective comedy should be like.

Having raised the bar so high, it’s understandable that The Pin don’t always meet their own standards. The finale felt a little like their 2012 show: a clever twist on an existing idea (in this case, sketch shows featuring spoof ‘cast and crew commentaries’, a la DVDs) but one which generates admiration rather than mirth. In not delivering on its premise, this sketch throws into sharp relief how impressively Ashenden and Owen have succeeded, for the most part, in extracting the maximum reward from thinking hard about their chosen form. 

The Philosophy of Humour: A Debate

Despite the fact that I’m interested enough in humour to write the occasional blog post about it, and that my day job is teaching/doing philosophy, I’ve always been rather suspicious of the philosophical study of humour. Philosophers can and do discuss humour, but I suspect it’s always going to be of rather limited interest as a philosophical topic.

Teaching at Leeds alongside Dr. Nick Jones, whose staff profile lists among his research interests The Philosophy of Humour, provided the opportunity to explore these issues in the context of a relaxed debate for the Leeds University Philosophical Society. The contributions from both Nick and myself can be found here, in separate files.[i]

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[i] Nick’s talk contains numerous references to Great Dead Philosophers and their weird and occasionally wonderful thoughts on humour and laughter. Readers interested in chasing some of these references up could do worse than have a look through this.

The Menace of Comedy

Watching Force Majeure, I was strongly put in mind of a term which to my knowledge has hardly ever been applied to recent work: the comedy of menace. If this term is heard nowadays, it is usually in relation to theatrical writing in a specific context (Britain in the late 1950s) and in particular to the early work of Harold Pinter.[i] But it strikes me as a precise characterisation of what Ruben Öustlund is up to in his film.

The comedy of menace is perhaps easier to recognise than to define. Francesca Coppa notes that menace “depends on ignorance; the terror of it stems from the vagueness of the threat. We do not know what is happening or why, and the lack of information leads us to fear the worst”. In contrast, black comedy “treats serious themes comedically, without the respect they deserve; it says too much, it says what should not be said”.[ii] That is, it makes it too clear what is really going on.

To this point, I would add that a sense of menace requires not just that characters be under threat, but that the audience empathises with them enough to feel a kind of vulnerability themselves. The effect is very different to seeing a comedy where you know something bad is going to happen to one of the characters, but you feel no empathy with them:

Tomas and Ebba (Johannes Kuhnke & Lisa Loven Kongsli) are taking a holiday with their children in a ski resort. In the face of an unexpectedly violent avalanche, Tomas abandons his wife and children to their fate. The avalanche turns out to be harmless, but Ebba cannot get over this betrayal. The incident and the themes it raises are discussed in three scenes – a dinner with a couple they met at the resort, a dinner with their old friends Fanni and Mats, and a scene between Mats and Fanni – which are masterpieces of tension and awkward comedy.

Awkward or cringe comedy, where the humour is rooted in the social embarrassment felt by the characters, has been a staple of television in particular for years. Where Force Majeure develops the form is in the length of these three scenes, and the naturalistic presentation of the characters before and during them. Larry David and David Brent are well-rounded characters, but we are never in doubt that they are comically deluded about themselves. Neither Tomas nor Ebba are presented as comic prior to the incident with the avalanche – indeed, the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the film could easily pass as a finely-observed drama of bourgeois life. The comedy is introduced slowly and inexorably, with far less plot machinery and a much more drawn-out (in a good way) pay-off than is typical of sitcoms specialising in cringe comedy.

One difference between the comedy of early Pinter and that found in Force Majeure is that the menace in the latter is not that vague. We have a pretty good idea of what’s happening and what will happen, in outline at least – indeed, it is so excruciating precisely because of this. That said, there is still menace afoot, in that we certainly fear the worst, even as it is unfolding before our eyes. This is perhaps the novel element which cringe comedy introduces to the comedy of menace: the sense of vulnerability we feel is heightened not the by the vagueness of the threat, but by its gruesome familiarity.

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[i] The Wikipedia entry on ‘Comedy of Menace’ focuses almost entirely on Pinter’s work, with a brief discussion of the article in Encore by Irving Wardle which popularised the term.

[ii] ‘The Sacred Joke: Comedy and Politics in Pinter’s Early Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter.