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| Plenty of comedy, but a shortage
of laughs |
You can now study stand-up comedy, writes comedian
Ivor Dembina, but that doesn’t mean it’s something you
can necessarily learn
Getting the Joke by Oliver Double
Methuen, £9.99
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Mark Lamarr
Ivor Dembina
Eddie Izzard
Shazia Mirza
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COMEDIANS worked out long ago that success is determined by their
ability to create and sell a unique comedy persona: ‘childlike’
Harry Hill, ‘bloke down the pub’ Frank Skinner and ‘daft
suburban’ Victoria Wood.
That’s all very well until you trawl around the live comedy
scene and witness today’s aspirants; an abundance of persona
but a shortage of personality.
Comedy is everywhere. With a stand-up club in every town, 80 venues
in London including half a dozen in Camden alone, it’s no surprise
there are plenty of books about the subject.
What is less well-known is you can now study it at a British university.
Oliver Double teaches such a course and his new volume, Getting
the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy provides a diverting
account of the evolution of the craft, interviews with around 20
professional comedians, anecdotes from his comedy career and a description
of his students’ efforts at the University of Kent.
As a comic-turned-academic, the author approaches his study through
its techniques rather than as a creative human endeavour.
He’s at his best extracting recollections from the professionals,
ranging from the internationally famous Eddie Izzard to comparative
newcomer Shazia Mirza.
The difficulty is that we are left wondering if we are less interested
in how jokes get told than in the people who tell them.
Double exhibits an organised mind rather than an inquisitive one.
No harm in asking how you write material, deal with hecklers and
the rest, but the author’s breakdown of the stand-up art neatly
avoids the trickier task of explaining it.
“Trying to understand stand-up comedy,” he tells us, “is
a bit like trying to get hold of a wet bar of soap. Just when you
think you’ve got to grips with it, it slips out of your hands.”
Perhaps a better question to have asked would be: Why, if comedy
is everywhere, and worthy of study and analysis, is most of today’s
live output so uninspiring?
It’s not Oliver Double’s fault that we’re stuck in
an age when we interact rather than live together but, what defines
stand-up above all is its personal quality.
Sadly, comedy today is a construct; a dubious collusion between
joke-teller and listener, based upon a set of predetermined and
seemingly unchallengeable ideas.
Today’s comedians substitute endless observations about sex,
celebrity and popular culture for anything that’s truly personal,
and no amount of technique can reverse the drift towards cretinism.
Like all solo creative pursuits, the truth about stand-up lies at
the cusp of how comedians are on stage and how they feel off it.
In Mark Lamarr’s excellent foreword, we catch the sound of
the authentic stand-up voice; spiky, truthful and funny, silenced
only by Lamarr’s obsession to stand out and above the comedy
crowd.
It’s a telling contrast to Double who tells us, almost in parentheses,
that he gave up stand-up for ‘personal reasons’ and leaves
us screaming out to know what the reasons were.
When one of his interviewees, Eddie Izzard, apparently received
a letter from the Office of Fair Trading relating to complaints
about recycling old material, Izzard never gets asked how he felt
about this attack on his reputation.
And, when Jo Brand, former darling of the liberal-left tells him
she now supplements her earnings as jester to the corporate classes,
we have to make do with the bland explanation that she has a family
to support.
Double’s heart is in the right place. He applauds an incredibly
brave joke about 9/11 by one of his students and comes down firmly
on the side of Billy Connolly over the Ken Bigley affair when, a
few days before the hostage was murdered, the iconic Scots comic
caused a furore with a hellish joke urging the hostage-takers to
finish their captive off.
Comic moments like these resist analysis because they don’t
just enter our brains they resonate through our bodies. We can all
teach, write and pontificate about stand-up as much as we want but
the conclusion is all around us. So much comedy so little humour.
• Ivor Dembina is resident compere of the Hampstead Comedy
Club. 020 7633 9539. |
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