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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 order this book
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-turnedacademic, 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.
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