Comédie sans frontieres?

The national sense of humour, much like national characteristics more generally, is hard to define though often recognisable. This is particularly true of Finland, where the distinctive sense of humour is often one of the first things mentioned about the locals. Having recently moved to Helsinki, I was curious to see what evidence of this dry and self-depreacting wit I could uncover. Obviously this is the work of a lifetime, or at least more than one blog post, but in the interests of making a start I went along to a local alternative comedy night.[i] What was most interesting about the experience was how little I learned about the Finnish sense of humour, and what it suggested about stand-up as a form of entertainment.

The night I attended, Comedy Idiot, had seven Finnish performers out of nine, and what was striking was how like any multi-stand-up night in the UK it was. There were different accents and local references (the politician most sneered at was Alexander Stubb rather that David Cameron), but in terms of themes and the attitudes displayed by the acts and clearly expected of the audience, it could have been Headingley or Hackney rather than Helsinki. Topics touched on included ex-girlfriends, hipsters, Ikea, parenting, growing up in a strict ethnic-minority household, the perils of drinking too much (it may lead to involuntary euthanasia, apparently), plus the regulation edgy material; any of these would have been familiar to UK audiences, and would have been received in much the same way.

The biggest difference was the style of the performances. As might have been expected, few of the performers could have been classed as high-energy. In general they were more understated, and in a couple of cases very dry indeed. But this difference should not be overstated - that style is currently quite popular in the UK, albeit often with a Stewart Lee-esque running commentary on the comedian’s own performance which none of the performers at Comedy Idiot undertook. One other difference, related to the lack of energy, was how few of the performers spoke in any voice but their own; there was very little imitating other people or enacting dialogues. This might suggest something about the Finnish sense of humour, but more likely it suggests that most of the performers did not come to stand-up through university drama or comedy improv.

I can think of two possible reasons for this similarity with stand-up in the UK, apart from the fact that the performances were in English. The first is that the performers might, consciously or not, have been modelling their acts on British or American prototypes. After all, this is often the case with stand-up in the UK or the US, and one of the main reasons for the fact that many newer acts there feel familiar, if not downright derivative. The second reason is a tentative thesis to do with the nature of stand-up itself. As a practice and set of conventions imported wholesale, it may tend to smooth out local idiosyncrasies. The beauty of the format, it has often been remarked, is its simplicity – the performer can in principle say or do whatever they want. But that very lack of technical or co-operative demands arguably tends to make performers, isolated on stage and wholly responsible for their own success or failure, cling to what they know works; and what works is usually fairly familiar and restricted in terms of range and style. None of the performers at Comedy Idiot presented anything avant-garde, let alone a local subversion of the genre, but this arguably tells us less about the peculiarities of the Finns and more about stand-up as a global entertainment form. When you think of the sheer number of active comedians, the percentage who are doing anything particularly inventive or parochial will be very small indeed. Therefore, if I wanted to discover something about the peculiarities of the Finnish sense of humour, a comedy club was the last place to which I should have ventured.

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[i] In English. The English-language comedy scene is thriving in Finland – Helsinki is hosting the upcoming Arctic Laughs festival, with a mixture of local acts and UK-based performers. Finland also has a native language comedy scene, which to the uninitiated seems mildly terrifying, like listening to theoretical physicists, or Harry Potter devotees discussing the rules of quidditch.

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.