A comedy lesson

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Coarse fishing

RICHARD HERRING / BEN VAN DER VELDE, 1ST DECEMBER 2008, OXFORD CELLAR

(Ahem - er, yes, a little overdue, this one...)

For someone who's the regular compere elsewhere (the Shaggy Dog Comedy Store in west London), Ben Van der Velde seems rather nervy and a bit hesitant. It doesn't help, of course, that just when he's starting to settle into a groove a phone rings to jolt him out of it. How hard is it to take heed of the pre-gig announcement and afford the performers you - and, more importantly, others - have paid to see the decency of turning off your mobile?

The behatted Geordie evidently feels there's mileage to be had from his Jewishness (or at least feels expected to make some mileage out of it), saying that he doesn't tell jokes about the Holocaust "because there are funnier genocides" and that his Palestinian girlfriend has had her pubic hair waxed into a Gaza strip, but he's at his best when ruminating on the suggestive power of language - the one-word film review "Baffling" from a newspaper, Rick James being charged with "aggravated mayhem"...

Tonight's headline act Richard Herring isn't here to perform his 2008 Edinburgh show 'The Headmaster's Son' (that comes to Oxford in the spring) but to deliver a stand-up set that, it transpires, is so deliberately rude and provocative that it'd merit a firm clip around the lughole were the old man to be present.

He starts off innocuously enough, claiming that "The motto I choose to live my life by is 'My enemy's enemy is my friend'. But I'm my own worst enemy..." and going on to deliver a sequence of increasingly convoluted ripostes to his PE teacher's motto "There's no 'I' in 'team'" and the perverse logic apparently underlying it.

But after that - aside from a segment in which he rails about the stupid reasons people call 999 and the occasional references to being old and having a lifestyle that is pitiable rather than enviable (increasingly familiar these days in the wake of 'Oh Fuck, I'm 40') - it's pretty much what the Daily Mail would no doubt be inclined to label "a non-stop torrent of filth".

Particularly memorable is the section on the playground hand gestures of childhood which betray a fundamental misunderstanding of homosexual acts, Herring of course seizing the opportunity to suggest more realistic alternatives. He jokes of Baby P that his parents "could have at very least given him a name", basking in the nervous laughter of an audience wondering if it's too soon to be making comic capital out of tragedy before adding with a mischevious smirk "I've got worse" and alluding briefly to the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Even the concluding segment, in which he dissects a simple phrase or comment with trademark persistence and pedantry from every conceivable angle (and some you simply won't have conceived of) - think 'Someone Likes Yoghurt' - focuses on a lewd T-shirt slogan, "Give me head until I'm dead", with predictably unsavoury consequences.

So, what's the point? (With Herring there's nearly always a point, even if it's not immediately obvious.) Is it simply a matter of deliberately pushing the boundaries of taste for cheap laughs, or is there something more going on? The latter, inevitably. As much as he discomforts the lily-livered and offends liberal sensibilities, he still elicits plenty of laughs and, crucially, at one point suggests he's performing comedy "just like Bernard Manning, but in a postmodern way - I know what I'm saying is wrong". Cue chuckles - but then the question that, for me, cuts to the quick: "But does that make it better - or much, much worse?" That seems to reveal the whole show to be a clever critique of the sort of comedy that pleads irony as a defence for saying the unsayable - albeit while at the same time effectively performing the same trick - as well as a robust challenge to audience attitudes and complacency: think for a moment what you're laughing about - you shouldn't be finding it funny.

A set that subverts itself? You don't get that with Jason Manford.

Mike Wozniak - Falling Down With Laughter @ Belushis, Southwark, 23/09/08

While I tire of people’s incredulity at a non-alcoholic choosing to quit booze, as is the case with myself, it’s hard to be too defensive against anyone who peddles remarks such as Dean Martin’s “I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day” as one effect of quitting drinking is that the bipolarity of the ‘night-out’ experience is levelled out. This has certainly been the case with watching comedy. I am certainly much more aware of what’s causing my laughter, and am less given to rolling-on-the-floor reactions.

Not that this makes me any more perceptive a critic, but I know now that when something moves me, it’s genuine, rather than lubricated. In sobriety I recall only twice crying with uncontrollable laughter; first was courtesy of Justin Edwards’ ‘Jeremy Lion’ character at the 2004 Fringe and, now, this London reprise of Mike Wozniak’s if.comeddie Best Newcomer-nominated Edinburgh show.

Let’s get the critique out of the way first though. Wozniak’s very deliberate delivery is both a strength and a weakness. The crafted wordsmithery of his tales are given a beautiful rhythm, but also fuses a bit too easily with the style of Richard Herring, something made all the more apparent by Herring’s Edinburgh show ‘The Headmaster’s Son’ following twenty minutes after this*.

However, while Herring increasingly is mining a intellectualised shock-value seam that tries to create a tension before subverting, Wozniak aims for the right level of squirm, taking grotesque, coprophilic and penoscrotal imagery but wrapping it up in such tight lyrical nuggets that they easily bypass offensiveness.

While the delivery may be reminiscent of both Herring and his erstwhile colleague Stewart Lee, the take on his subject matter is much more akin to Rhod Gilbert, particularly the Welshman’s latest “…Award Winning Mince Pie” show, where reality is bubbled, stretched and warped so as to have a surreality whilst retaining an anchor in the conceivable.

His Polish background and his moustache (the kind you could lose your dinner in) are weaved in and out of the tales but in the most part the stories concern his amateur scientist father and yarn-spinning grandparents. How much is actually true scarcely matters, as his characterisation embodies these figures with distinct warmth, despite the often gruesome nature of the stories. The call-back lines don’t always work as well as they might, but the dovetail at the end, bringing all his narrative threads together in the form of imparted advice, is a triumphant pay-off.

*As a side point, £6 for two full-length hour shows in central London is a real steal; Alexis Dubus and Sy Thomas, the comics behind ‘Falling Down With Laughter’, should be duly commended.

Fringe Review - Richard Herring: The Headmaster's Son, White Belly at the Underbelly, 08/08/2008

It has almost become a tradition now. This is the fifth year in succession I've been to see Richard Herring's solo show in the Fringe, and he seems to get better year on year. I am happy to report that this year is no exception.

For the past few years his shows have been straight, vaguely themed stand-up, as opposed to the rigidly structured shows that went before. This year he's moved back towards those older shows, but the theme remains broadly the same as the one that seems to have obsessed him for a while now, namely that of why he is moving into middle-age without ever having seemed to grow up.

Herring is 41 now, never married, no children, sexually promiscuous, and still seemingly trying to act like a teenager. And he has recognised that a great many people who act inappropriately in their advancing years blame all their problems on their childhood. It has become something of a trend these days to blame your parents for almost anything you do which society frowns on. So he decided to examine whether his parents could be responsible for his behaviour, particularly his father, and his experience of growing up in a school where his dad was also his headmaster.

Of course, he instantly recognises the absurdity of claiming to have suffered psychological trauma from what was, essentially, a nice, happy, middle-class upbringing in the picturesque Somerset town of Cheddar. But he still manages to get easily his hour's worth of mileage out of the situation, often brilliantly, especially the section in which he reads excerpts from his teenage diaries, pricking the pomposity of his former self, and culminating in a conversation between his 16 and 41 year-old selves discussing the way his life has gone against the way he expected it to be.

It's a more rigid and rehearsed performance than we've been used to from Herring of late, and this caused some problems on the night as he had to battle against a large group of Portuguese schoolgirls who sat right at the front, didn't speak much English, and insisted on talking to each other all the way through. But if he was thrown off his stride at all, it didn't show, and the rest of the room seemed to lap up his verbal dexterity and intricate wordplay. It may not be the show that finally breaks him through into the big-time, but if not then it can't be far away.

Richard Herring, Neil McFarlane, Keith Farnan, Gordon Alexander, compere Susan Calman - The Stand, Edinburgh, 25/04/2008

One of the problems that The Stand encounters as a comedy club is that as the Edinburgh Fringe draws ever closer, so the bigger names on the circuit start to be reluctant to play the city. As such, to pull in one of the biggest names of all at the end of April is quite a coup, and reflected in the bustling house.

Diminuitive Glaswegian Susan Calman is in charge of proceedings for the night, and to my mind she is fast becoming the best MC on the Scottish scene. She has everything you want in a compere, a fast mind, a cutting wit, and a seemingly genuine interest in her targets. She knows when to attack and when to hold back, and how to keep control of the punters who want to take things a bit too far, as well as an innate ability to take anything thrown at her and seamlessly find the right bit of material to suit the moment.

Opening act Keith Farnan set the pace of the evening well. A laid back Irishman from county Cork, he has that easy Irish charm that benefits so many comics from the Emerald Isle. His comedy is very much performed with a wink and a grin, drawing the audience in with a warmth of delivery and a conversational style. And although much of his material is not exactly ground-breaking, mostly revolving around “look at us Irish, aren’t we eejits, we can take anything and make it Irish,” it is nonetheless extremely funny, and as such does the job it sets out to do.

Gordon Alexander is a very blokish comic. Hailing from the north of England but now resident in Scotland, he has been slowly making a name for himself on the local scene. Standing six feet six and with a shaven head, he looks quite a scary sort, but his delivery is quite matey. Unfortunately, although this performance shows promise, his material is not really strong enough for this sort of level and routines which include saying stupid things to the Bullseye Bully’s Prize Board tune, while quite amusing, don’t seem to go anywhere.

Neil McFarlane is another local comic, but one who is starting to move out onto the national scene. Like Farnan, much of his material is based in the experience of being Scottish, and routines revolve around annoying Edinburgh tourists, his middle-class Scottish upbringing, and his years spent working in the BBC Glasgow complaints department. He’s an experienced and polished act, and one who can draw his audience in with his relaxed and often seemingly random style.

Finally we came to Richard Herring, and this was an interesting experience for me, because while I have seen him performing countless times in his own shows, I wasn’t quite sure how he would fit in the more pressured environment of a club night, in front of an audience many of whom had come out for a night of good laughs rather than because of who was on the bill. Herring can be an acquired taste, with his penchant for pedantry, and for often drawing out a gag at excruciating length to the point at which he courts losing his audience altogether.

And the answer, to be honest, was that I’m not sure that he did fit very well. Most of the material for the night was drawn from last year’s Fringe show, and while he started well with some snappy deconstructions of common mottos, when he moved into a lengthy dissection of the slogan on a tee-shirt, which proceeded to form the bulk of the set, I could see he was starting to lose certain sections of the audience who were wishing he would move on and not keep hammering the same topic over and over.

Herring is the first to admit that, despite two decades of stage experience, much of it was spent in the “rehearsed show” format, and he came to pure stand-up late in the day and as such is still learning. His name on the bill, of course, is always going to be a draw, and for a comedy literate crowd the brilliance of his wordplay is a sheer delight. But I think he needs still to learn to judge his crowd and tailor his material to the night. He’s a class act, and no denying it, but for me, on this night, there was just something missing.