Tickling the English

  Tickling the English

  DARA O BRIAIN

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2009

  Copyright © Dara O Briain, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Quotes reproduced from: A Natural Curiosity (copyright © Margaret Drabble, 1989) by permission of United Agents (www.unitedagents.co.uk) on behalf of Dame Margaret Drabble; The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner, published by Black Swan and reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd; The Architecture of Happiness, published by Penguin Books (copyright © Alain de Botton, 2006), by permission of United Agents; and Empire (copyright © Niall Ferguson, 2008).

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193257-6

  This book is dedicated to all the letters of the

  alphabet, but in particular, to big S and little o.

  Chapter 1:

  What’s Up with This Place?

  It was about one in the morning. I was in the passenger seat of a rented car on the M4. The car was being driven by a man called Damon. We were heading back to London after I’d done a gig at a theatre called the Playhouse in Weston-super-Mare.

  The night had been a huge success, thanks mainly to the audience, who were chatty and interactive. In particular, there was a man called Chris who had an answer for everything.

  He told us how his appendix ‘went away’. He told us about the game he plays with his step-son where he lays a hammock on the ground and attaches one end of it to his car, the other to a tree. Then he accelerates away, tautening up the hammock and firing his step-son into the air.

  And when we thought we had heard all we could from Chris, he told us that he had been on the game-show 3-2-1 in the seventies, won a cruise, brought his family but that his daughter had contracted a form of TB which had been eradicated in the US for many years so they had to spend the entire cruise in the cabin.

  All in all, it was a very funny night.

  So, we’re driving home contentedly and one of us decides to put on the radio. It was late, so the phone-ins were in full flow on every station and the one we settled on was getting heated.

  The topic was a new international survey that placed England in the top ten countries to live in, worldwide. In Ireland, I remembered these surveys appearing intermittently, and a good result was always regarded as a bit of a pat on the back.

  ‘Next on the line is Susan from Dorking. What do you want to add, Susan?’ asks Dave, the host of the radio phone-in.

  ‘Well, David, I just want to say that this is clearly a joke. I mean, look around you. Look around you. This country is going to the dogs.’

  ‘What do you mean, Susan?’ says Dave, deftly drawing Susan out.

  ‘Well, the schools. And the crime. And the NHS. It’s all going to the dogs.’

  ‘Let’s move on,’ says Dave, moving on. ‘Next up is Mike from Kettering. Mike, what do you think of this, then? One of the best places in the world to live?’

  ‘I think they must be thinking of somewhere else, Dave. They clearly haven’t walked around the England I know. Kids are running rampage, twenty-four-hour drinking, teenage mums. It’s a bloody mess, Dave. A bloody mess.’

  Dave took the next call.

  ‘It’s Kevin from Gloucester. What do you think, Kevin, are we living in one of the top ten countries in the world?’

  ‘They’re having a bloody laugh, Dave, that’s what I think. A bloody laugh.’

  And so the callers continued. Voice after voice decried the survey as inaccurate, misleading and poorly researched; England was a terrible country to live in. The evidence was insurmountable: failing institutions, rising crime, disastrous public-building projects. Citizens were depressed and angry and in constant danger. If the knife crime didn’t get you, the MRSA would.

  Not one of the callers could say that they had lived in any other country, but all of them could say, hand on heart, that England didn’t deserve to be in any top ten. The place was a mess.

  Now, obviously, it’s a little dubious to base a snapshot of the nation on the sort of people who phone in to radio stations late at night. Until that moment, though, I would have based it on the people I had just spent two hours laughing with in a theatre in Weston-super-Mare.

  In just one evening, I’d encountered a people who were clearly good-humoured, charming and spontaneous, but also, it appeared, terribly, terribly brave, given the appalling conditions they find themselves living in. And they handled this bravery in a stoic way, only under the most intense pressure resorting to phoning in to radio stations to counter any reasonable assertion that things aren’t really that bad here.

  How could the people of England be so happy while, at the same time, reserving the right to be so desperately unhappy?

  Next time I tour this country, I said to myself, I’m going to try and find out what’s up with that.

  So that’s what I did.

  Chapter 2:

  The Show

  I always thought there was something funny about England.

  When I was a child in Ireland, we would watch That’s Life! on the BBC on a Sunday night, and see the locals roar with laughter at funny-shaped vegetables or dogs that said the word ‘sausages’. I’ll be honest: we laughed too.

  And then Esther Rantzen’s tone would darken, and the show would suddenly become very serious. Without warning, we would be plunged into the miserable lives of children growing up in damp public housing, or watching parents who filled their children’s bottles with fruit juice and rotted their teeth, shamed or, the one I’ll always remember, hearing the heart-wrenching story of an elderly couple duped out of their life savings by a travelling con-man.

  On that particular occasion, Esther’s chorus read out the testimony of the old couple and the authorities, and we all shook our heads at the cowardly nature of the crime. Then Esther showed us a photo-fit of the con-man.

  ‘Maybe you’ve seen him,’ she said, staring straight down the lens. ‘Maybe he approached you, maybe you
saw him at a petrol station, a pub or a restaurant. Look around you. Maybe he’s sitting in the room with you right now.’

  I looked around me. The only people in the room were my parents and my sister. I tried to imagine any chain of events that would lead to a complete stranger being wedged on to the couch with us. And, furthermore, what would cause us to decide to sit down, a family and this stray we’d taken in, to watch That’s Life!.

  Was this how people lived in England? Did random people often drop by on a Sunday night to watch your telly? Did you all live communally? Were there only a few televisions?

  It made England seem like the most foreign place imaginable, a place where groups of strangers clustered together round the flickering light, like the survivors in a disaster movie. Even as they watched, in one of these huddled communities, a con-man was looking at his own face, drawn in pencil from a pensioner’s description, and he was doing a long, fake yawn, going ‘Is that the time?’ and getting ready to run. England was strange.

  Of course, a healthy strangeness isn’t a bad thing if you want to be a world centre for comedy.

  There are three places in the English-speaking world where stand-ups gather. They are Los Angeles, New York and London. Two of those are filled predominantly with US comedians. The third is the only one to have funny people from all over the world living there: Irish, Canadians, Scots, Americans, New Zealanders, a couple of Germans and the odd Dutch guy, along with hundreds of English comics.

  There are a number of reasons why England is a great country to be a comic. There are comedy clubs in every town in the country. They are very popular with the locals. This means that there is a living to be made for all these comedians, playing the clubs, learning the trade and travelling from town to town. This is in contrast to New York, where the fee for a gig has been $60 for about twenty years. American comics gamble on a terrible poverty-filled few years, in the hope that when telly or movie success arrives the rewards will be huge. The American comedy world is filled with stories of household names who used to sleep in their cars, waiting for their big break.

  This also means that American stand-ups, particularly in LA, tend to create perfectly crafted short sets, in order to attract the attention of casting directors. Ten-minute slots are the norm, and a lot of US comics hone their act until it’s the perfect calling card for a cameo sit-com role or, even better, the six-minute slot on one of the late-night chat shows.

  Most Irish comics haven’t even said hello after ten minutes. In fact, on this side of the Atlantic, comedians are trained by years of doing the Edinburgh Festival into writing longer shows – at least an hour – and then eventually taking those shows on tour and performing in front of enthusiastic crowds, for sixty, eighty, even a hundred-plus nights throughout the year.

  The opportunity to do long tours like these are what makes it great to be a stand-up in England and, if you’re looking for someone to thank for this, turn to the Victorians.

  The Victorians invented leisure.

  It was probably the inevitable by-product of the industrial revolution and the invention of mass transit, and could very well have happened elsewhere, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive that many Victorian innovations and entertainments still form the leisure market as we know it today. The Victorians invented everything except waterparks and Quasar.

  For a start, they came up with the idea of holidays. Before the nineteenth century, holiday trips of any kind were generally for rich people, who would go on a grand tour around Europe or take trips to spas such as Bath or seawater resorts such as Brighton. In the nineteenth century, improved transport meant that, when they had time off, day trips for the working classes and longer holidays for the emerging middle classes became possible. It was an opportunity that was eagerly taken up. Within a fortnight of the opening of Britain’s first public railway, between Liverpool and Manchester, in 1830, the line was used by a group of daytrippers.

  We’ll get to the Victorian’s zeal for inventing modern sport a little later, but the revolution that led to codifying football, rugby, horse-racing and all the rest wasn’t just about the players but also about the way ordinary people enjoyed sports as spectators. Before the second half of the nineteenth century, the common people expected to attend the mass sporting events they went to for free. From the 1870s onwards, enclosed racecourses and football grounds began to charge for admission. Watching sports became a consumer activity.

  And so to theatres.

  It’s estimated that there were around ten theatres operating in London in 1800, but around a hundred and fifty were up and running just a century later. Theatres sprang up across the country in the rapidly growing towns, where previously there had been only a few dozen theatres outside the capital. By 1892, England had more than four hundred substantial theatres and music halls, as well as close to a thousand other venues, such as pleasure gardens, assembly halls and galleries, which staged entertainment.

  Theatres increased their capacity by making the halls larger, and the major theatrical spectacles and pantomimes often used hundreds of extras. Animal wranglers were also needed, as the Victorians liked to pepper their entertainment with onstage cavalry charges with real horses, or lions stalking across the stage.

  Of course, try to get a real lion into your show these days and you’ll have Health and Safety on your back, quicker than you can say Siegfried and Roy. Plus, they’ll poo all over the tour car.

  In tandem with the great theatrical productions of the nineteenth century was the music-hall scene, which grew up in the first half of the century from semi-organized singsongs in bars and gin palaces. By the second half of the century, almost every Victorian town of any size had some form of music hall, some of them seating several thousand.

  Even if the scale has changed, this is the infrastructure that remains to this day. Every town in the UK has at least one theatre and, not uncommonly, it’ll be an architectural beauty that dates all the way to this golden age. This is where we comedians do our tours and, ultimately, this is why England is such a great country for us.

  Enjoying the history lesson?

  If you already knew all of the above, I apologize. I have no idea what history is taught in English schools. I know that in Irish schools relatively little English history is taught, other than that which directly impinged on us. (And, boy, did you ever impinge…)

  There are, therefore, vast tracts of English history which we in Ireland don’t know anything about, stuff like which Houses your kings were from; your wars against the French, or Spanish, or Dutch; or Cromwell’s well-hidden charming side.

  All news to us Irish.

  So, while we’re all learning here, I’ll tell you something you might not have known. Big comedy tours don’t start in Victorian music halls, or modern arts centres. They start in small rooms at the back of anonymous pubs scattered around London. These are the preview gigs where a new show takes its first steps and, while there may be only sixty people in attendance, these venues are more petrifying than most of the thousand-seaters. At least by the time you do the thousand-seaters, you know the stuff works.

  With the first preview dates looming, I start preparing my routine. I’m not sure how other comedians write jokes, but this is what works for me. I sit in a room at night, chained to a desk, with a bottle of wine. I have scraps of paper in front of me covered in scribbles. I’m banging down anything that even vaguely resembles a joke, or the opportunity for a joke, or a joke’s first cousin. I stare at these and think how desperately unfunny they all are.

  Two glasses into the wine, I am now buzzing sufficiently to forget myself and how self-conscious and contrived this whole process is. I talk to myself, and the ideas flesh out into little rants and associations. This is where the funny starts to happen. It happens when I’m not thinking about it and just making silly stuff up and chatting away to myself while banging a few funny things together. This will lead to a couple of half-jokes, maybe more.

  After the fo
urth glass, I’m too drunk. I just sit there, happily remembering how funny I used to be, back there about two glasses ago. Then I stumble off to bed.

  At night I have that dream of arriving late and unprepared for an exam. It’s been fifteen years since my last academic test and, still, before each tour, with the opening night looming and the show not yet written, my subconscious pulls that feeling of panic out of a drawer, dusts it off and spools it through to remind me that the clock is ticking and that the job isn’t done.

  To finish the joke, you have to try it out. A joke doesn’t exist until it’s been said in front of a crowd. This is true no matter how famous you are, or how good your comedy nose is. You just don’t know if something is funny until you hear yourself trying to sell it to a crowd. This is a vital part of the writing process because, surprisingly often, it’s not good enough. And as you’re saying it, a voice in your head goes, ‘What the fuck were you thinking? This isn’t even remotely amusing!’, and a completely separate part of your brain, which had lain dormant until this moment of near-humiliation, kicks in with a twist that suddenly makes it funny and saves your hide.

  Half an idea and the panic of dying: that’s how you write stand-up.

  The back room of The Fighting Cocks, Kingston

  An audience of young and friendly regulars.

  This is how I’ll describe the shows throughout the book. I’ll give you the venue and who I spoke to. This particular night isn’t a good example, though, since I didn’t talk to anyone in particular. I just read out a load of ideas scribbled on sheets of A4. The crowd don’t mind; they’ve seen this before.

  Only a few minutes earlier, in fact, when Omid Djalili was on, trying out his new material.

  And just before that, when Al Murray was doing the same thing.