It is April 1st today and yesterday I thought about planting a story I was changing gender and wanted, from now on, to be known as Jean Fleming.
But, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered setting it all up believably and the self-publicity was not necessarily all positive.
April Fool jokes can turn and bite the begetter.
As I write this, it is 09.30am and already April 1st stories have appeared, a couple good, one bad.
At 00.25am this morning, comedy club-runner Martin Besserman posted a Facebook message saying:
An excellent idea, because it is just about believable, especially at 00.25am in the morning. I almost fell for it, because Martin is an increasingly prestigious man, or so he tells me. In any case, what you remember longer-term is Monkey Business being associated with some sort of up-market area.
That man in the white suit on the left is a hologram. Or not.
When I woke up an hour ago, I had a Facebook message from Dan Berg of go-getting comedy streaming company NextUp saying:
Hey John, Hope all’s well! I remember you sat in the front row for our gigs so thought you might like this – a lil bit of NextUp technology which launched today so the front row is never too far away… http://lologram.co.uk
It was touting a new concept in which you can project video holograms of comedians in any location.
Exactly the sort of thing he and NextUp might do and it projected a PR image of a futuristic forward-thinking company. A comedy hologram called Lologram sounds like a great name. Good PR for NextUp.
Detailed but backfiring?
I also received an email from the Edinburgh Fringe which announced that they are building a roof to cover the area of the Royal Mile sponsored by Virgin Money… and they want you to fork out money to crowdfund it… So they have a financial sponsor (Virgin Money) and they want punters to help finance the financial sponsor.
A good April Fools joke – maybe – but one which rebounds as bad PR for the Fringe, given that it makes you wonder yet again what Virgin is actually sponsoring. Not the Fringe Programme, where a 40-word entry costs £300-£400 for 40 words and costs an arm-and-a-leg for a quarter page ad.
The seed is also planted in your brain (even though you know it is not true) that Virgin Money are calling themselves sponsors but do not have enough money and are asking ordinary people for crowdfunding to make what they do seem better.
April Fools jokes should be jolly, but not leave a funny PR taste in the mouth or egg on the face.
The gag was to open your performance at a venue by saying:
“In show business, there’s a saying that you play (enter name of venue) twice in your career. Once on the way up. Once on the way down. (PAUSE) It’s good to be back…”
Martin Soan had heard (from Malcolm Hardee) that Ian McPherson had jokingly asked to be paid when Malcolm stole the gag and Malcolm had – much to Ian’s shock – actually paid several hundred pounds.
This surprised me because, in fact, I had nothing to do with either the book or with Simon Munnery’s show Cluub Zarathustra beyond seeing and immensely enjoying it at the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe. It is a fascinating show which was turned into a BBC2 TV series Attention Scum! directed by Stewart Lee in 2001.
The BBC have never released a DVD, but there are clips on YouTube.
BBC executives never liked the series and hid it away on BBC2 on Sunday nights at 11.50pm. They cancelled the series which was then – embarrassingly for them – nominated for the Golden Rose of Montreux as best TV entertainment show of the year. As I understand it, BBC executives then had to fly with Simon Munnery to Switzerland and sing the praises of the series which they had cancelled because they hated it.
There is almost a sitcom in that saga in itself.
But back to Ian McPherson and the gag theft by Malcolm Hardee.
Later, Malcolm nicked the gag, much to Ian’s annoyance.
Malcolm with distressed shoulder in his Up The Creek office (Photograph by my eternally-un-named friend)
“And,” Ian told Robert Wringham, “as he’d done it on some pap-for-the-masses TV programme, it looked as if I’d nicked it off him. So I had to drop it. He also put about that he’d bought it from me. Which he hadn’t. He then offered to buy it retrospectively. Fuck off, Malcolm, I quipped. So I fined him a pretty modest sum for theft. I was pretty furious about it at the time, but he had his eye on other stuff I’d written, so I was also warning him off. He ignored the fine at first, but he was just about to open (his own club) Up The Creek, so I gather some comedians refused to play there till he paid up. Which he grudgingly did. I also made it plain in words of one syllable that I was not, repeat not, selling the line. He muttered something about 6 seconds of material but, as I pointed out, It was 7 and a half seconds, Malcolm. You should have nicked my timing.
“Simon Munnery told me he does it too, but attributes it to me. Which is fine. No problem there. Good man Simon. I was told that Simon Fanshawe did it on radio. No attribution. I wrote to his agent at Noel Gay Artists three years ago for a clarification but he must be a slow typist. No response as yet. But not everyone is called Simon.
“A young film maker contacted me last month. Apparently he’s doing a documentary on Malcolm Hardee. Wanted to know if I wrote Malcolm’s gag. Malcolm’s? Apparently some of the older comedians who’d first seen me do it had told him it was mine. Anyway, he intimated they would be using the TV clip of Malcolm doing my gag and, er, was I okay with that. And maybe it was the Irish blood coursing through my veins, but my response was a good deal less than civil. Listen, I said. You people stole my country. I’m fucked if you’re nicking my act. Does that answer your question?”
Well, not really stolen. I look on my use of them as an homage to Robert’s work and I recommend you buy his book on Cluub Zarathustra, a show that deserves to be remembered.
Robert Wringham’s assuredly excellent book which I have not read… But buy it
As a post-script to this tale of joke theft, I should also mention that juggler Steve Rawlings, who often played Malcolm Hardee’s clubs, also got in touch with me yesterday after reading my blog.
It is a widely-read blog and has probably had bits repeated from it without attribution.
Malcolm Hardee had handfuls of oft-repeated catchphrases. He used one of them to put-down anyone unwise enough to heckle him. He would say: “Isn’t it a shame when cousins marry?”
Yesterday, Steve Rawlings told me: “He got that line from me. I’d got it from a big-headed American juggler who was doing put-down lines on the other acts while we were sat drinking before a gig.
“He came out with three when I was sat alone with him.
“One was the when cousins marry line.
“One was It’s hard to believe out of millions of sperm you were quick enough to get there first.
“And the last was Living proof that Indians DID fuck buffalo, which was never going to work in England.
“I had the first two lines to myself for about two months and they were killing.
“Then Malcolm phoned me and said: Oy oy – Is that ‘when cousins marry’ line yours?
“I said: No, I nicked it off this American act.
“He said Oy oy again and hung up.
“Not long after that, everyone was using it. But for just a little while I had it to myself.”
I did ask Ian McPherson yesterday if there was anything he wanted to add to his British Comedy Guide tale of Malcolm stealing his opening routine. He said: “Say hello to Martin Soan and Steve Bowditch. Lovely, lovely boys and a credit to their respective mothers.”
Both are members of The Greatest Show On Legs which included Malcolm before he drowned and both are currently performing in Switzerland, where BBC TV executives had to smile and accept compliments for Simon Munnery’s cancelled series Attention Scum!
What the relevance of that is, I have no idea, but it sounds good – something which should never be underestimated.
Comedy trio The Greatest Show On Legs are playing five shows in five cities in five days in Switzerland this week. This morning, Martin Soan set off by train, laden down with props for the shows. The other two GSOL members – Steve Bowditch and Richard Ryszynski aka Dickie Richards – flew by plane. It is the best way to fly.
The late legendary comic Malcolm Hardee used to be a member of the Greatest Show On Legs. He was famous or infamous for many things as a comic, club-owner, compere and anarchic character. One was the fact that he had around six jokes which he lived on for around 20 years. Another was a set of catchphrases, most or all of them picked up from other people.
If a member of the audience left to go to the toilet during one of his shows, Malcolm would say to the audience: When he comes back… let’s all hide.
“I did that first,” laughed Martin Soan yesterday, “out of desperation and I didn’t realise it was funny until Malcolm said it. I said it at a gig The Greatest Show On Legs were doing. I can remember the stage but I can’t remember where it was, but something fucked-up. I was on-stage introducing a sketch and I think the tape machine or something fucked-up, so I was left on stage and had to fill and some guy just got up and walked off and I said: Let’s all hide before he gets back.
“I don’t know if I even got a laugh that night, but Malcolm took it on in later shows and he got laughs from it.”
The legendary Malcolm Hardee – pirate of many a good gag (Photograph by Vincent Lewis)
One of Malcolm’s opening lines when he played a new venue (or sometimes even if he had played it lots of times) was to say:
“In show business, there’s a saying that you play (enter name of venue) twice in your career. Once on the way up. Once on the way down. (PAUSE) It’s good to be back…”
Before he left for Switzerland, Martin Soan told me Malcolm had nicked this line from comedian Ian MacPherson.
“It was Ian MacPherson’s gag and Malcolm had seen him do it,” Martin told me. “So Malcolm then goes out and does it and Ian MacPherson found out somehow. Ian MacPherson was actually really cool about it. But he rings up Malcolm and says: Hey! MaaaIcolm… heard you did one of my gags…
“And Ian MacPherson is really cool about it but he says: I want £400 for it.
“And Malcolm sent him £400 for the gag – or £200 or whatever it was. I dunno how much. But that story is the truth. And Ian MacPherson – of course – was gobsmacked.
“He’d been down to Malcolm’s club the week before and Malcolm had told him he would get paid £150 and only gave him £100 on the night. The sort of thing Malcolm usually did.
“But Malcolm paid Ian MacPherson for the gag… obviously because it was a great gag and he wanted to keep doing it forever.
“At Malcolm’s funeral, I opened the doors with the coffin behind me and I bellowed into the empty church: They say you play St Alfege’s twice in your career. Once on the way up. And once on the way down. It’s good to be back!… and then the whole procession came in and the audience filled the church.”
THERE IS MORE ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF THIS JOKE – INCLUDING IAN MACPHERSON’S VERSION OF WHAT HAPPENED – IN A BRITISH COMEDY GUIDE ARTICLE.
The Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards 2013: Comic Originality, Pound of Flesh and Cunning Stunt,
The winners of the Increasingly Prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards – see www.increasinglyprestigious.co.uk – were announced during a rowdy two hour variety show in the ballroom of The Counting House at the Edinburgh Fringe in the early hours of today..
The increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Award winners are:
She performed her controversial show “Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!” naked from the waist down in intimate new venue Bob’s Bookshop.
Malcolm Hardee judge Kate Copstick said: “This show is brutal, brilliant and brave. It is painfully funny and if you miss it you will miss the moment in the history of stand-up comedy wherein a woman actually took the genre and did something with it that no man could do. It is an extraordinary hour. All the more so because Adrienne Truscott isn’t even (or wasn’t until now) a stand-up. She is one half of the fabulous Wau Wau Sisters but, wau, is she sticking it to ’em now.”
Barry printed 2,000 fake copies of Fringe review sheet Broadway Baby in which his own comedy show was given six stars and the review: “This is without doubt the best comedy show I have ever seen, or am likely to see in the rest of my life…A phenomenal show. Better than life itself.”
He topped this with another fake issue of Broadway Baby with the headline FOSTERS AWARD NOMINATIONS ANNOUNCED and then distributed the sheets around Edinburgh. The entirely fictitious nominations included Barry Ferns for both Best Newcomer and Main Prize. Members of the public could be seen picking it up and reading it all over Edinburgh.
The increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards panel said this stunt was “in the glorious footsteps of Malcolm himself”… Malcolm once wrote a glowing review of his own Edinburgh Fringe show and submitted it toThe Scotsman in the name of their own comedy critic. They printed it. Barry’s stunt took this scam one step further by actually faking the entire publication within which the review was printed.
The increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards panel decided there was no performer worthy of the annual ACT MOST LIKELY TO WIN A MILLION QUID AWARD this year so, instead – because they did not want to waste the trophy which had already been made – they gave…
THE MALCOLM HARDEE ‘POUND OF FLESH’ AWARD (already announced)
The Ellis & Rose comedy duo claimed Ellis had been attacked in the street because of their appearance in controversial comedy show Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show. In fact, Rose had punched Ellis in the eye four times simply to get publicity for their show. For more details, read my blog about it.
The increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards panel said the award was for the comedy duo’s “relentless pursuit of the kind of publicity money cannot – and perhaps should not – buy”
Perhaps the simple cactus has a lesson for comics & for us all
In that strange dream-like world between sleep and waking this morning, I was thinking about comedians telling jokes.
This is never a good idea.
I thought that, like tomatoes and broccoli on supermarket shelves, perhaps there should be a Best By… date and a Sell By… date on all jokes.
After that, it would be illegal to expose the joke to the public.
But then I remembered a conversation I had with a man who sold flowers.
There was a Sell By… label stuck on each and every cactus in his shop.
“Do cacti actually go bad after a certain date?” I asked. “I thought they just went on year after year, surviving through drought and everything.”
“Yup,” said the flower shop owner.
From memory, he told me the European Parliament had passed a law that all cacti should have a two-year Sell By… date.
“After that,” he told me, “the law says I have to throw them away.”
“So what do you do with them if they pass their Sell By… date?” I asked the flower shop man.
“I peel off the Sell By… label on the cactus,” he told me, “and stick on a new one.”
That is not a joke. It actually happened. In European Parliamentary legislation, the dividing line between a joke and reality can be a spider’s web-thin one.
Maybe, though, some jokes should have a Best By... date and a Sell By… date.
On the other hand, some jokes are like cacti.
They can go on forever.
The connecting factor may be the involvement of little pricks.
In the world of cacti, pricks are essential.
In comedy, you cannot beat a good knob gag.
Having rationalised this, I turned over and happily went back to sleep.
Tragedy/comedy masks, Hadrian’s Villa – but which is which?
A comedian phoned me yesterday evening, angry that another comedian was Tweeting trying to get comedy performers and promoters to sign up for a ‘No Rape Jokes’ pledge.
The idea is to ban comedians who tell rape jokes.
The first promoter to have ‘signed the pledge’ appears to be a club that only allows female comedians to perform, which seems a little ironic. I am thinking of opening a comedy club at which Jewish performers are banned but at which no rape jokes would be allowed. No problem there, then.
Trying to ban rape jokes is like trying to put sticking plaster over a symptom to hide an unsightly abscess, not cure the problem. It is the wrong target. The aim, surely, should be trying to stop audiences laughing at rape jokes.
Unless – in my opinion – they are funny.
Funny is funny.
I have known and worked with three women who were raped as children. All bore psychological scars. Obviously.
When I hear a comedian tell a rape joke, I cringe because of this. But also because the comedian is usually getting an easy laugh. He (seldom she) knows the audience will laugh in shock because the subject is in bad taste. They used to be able to get a laugh by just using the word “fuck”. That word’s shock value disappeared. Then it was the word “cunt”. Now that word on its own no longer gets a laugh.
But now you can get an easy laugh by telling a rape joke or a joke about (presumably) murdered little girl Madeleine McCann or her parents. It is lazy comedy. Knee-jerk comedy.
I do not like rape jokes. By and large. The comedians who tell them are bad comedians. By and large.
But Scottish comedian Jerry Sadowitz has told rape jokes. He is a brilliant comedian. The jokes were funny. I laughed. I enjoyed the jokes as jokes.
Fellow Scottish comedian Janey Godley (who was repeatedly raped as a child) used to tell stories around the subject of child abuse and rape. There is a fascinating clip on YouTube of her starting her act.
Normally, I do not repeat comedians’ routines. But this one is worth repeating because what is being said is in no way funny yet it gets big laughs because, as Frank Carson might have said: “It’s the way she tells ‘em”.
It is a masterclass in how to get laughs from an audience.
Janey says:
“When I was five, I was sexually abused by my uncle… Now, I don’t want you to all rush the stage and give me a hug, cos it’s OK… cos I got him killed for my birthday later on (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)… Yeah (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)… No, I did (BIGGER AUDIENCE LAUGHS)… That’s no a joke (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)… Yeah (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)… Got his cock cut off (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)… So… (AUDIENCE LAUGHS)…”
What is being said here is not funny.
At no point does Janey say she is joking. She says the exact opposite. She tells the audience a man was murdered and – five times – she points out to the audience that this is not a joke. She is joking about murder and sexual mutilation. But the laughter continues and heightens.
If rape jokes are to be banned, why not also ban murder jokes, incest jokes, adultery jokes and jokes about travelling salesmen, mothers in law and rabbits? All were certainly offensive to the ears of pre-War BBC Radio.
It is a short and slippery slope from banning jokes to burning books.
Lewis Schaffer, a Jew, has what I consider to be (currently) the world’s best three-part Holocaust joke, Should he be banned from telling it? He says on-stage that he is allowed to tell that joke. And not for the reason you might think. And that is part of the joke.
Blanket bans on jokes can never be a good idea. Let the audience decide. Or try to change audiences’ attitudes. But don’t try to ban the jokes.
I talked to comedian Bob Slayer about this last night.
“I’m thinking of blogging about The Rape Thing tomorrow,” I told him. “If I did, I could glide into the attack I have not yet launched in my blog on left wing neo-Fascism. That should get me spat at in the bars of Soho and the streets of Edinburgh… Love Bernard Manning. Hate Tony Benn,.. Something along those lines…”
I am old enough to remember the late-1960s and early 1970s when the Vietnam War was being fought. When people were booked at universities to speak in support of the War, demonstrations were organised by well-meaning left wingers who believed strongly in Freedom of Speech… to get the person banned from speaking.
In the real world, left wing irony has never been widespread.
Nowadays, freedom-promoting left wingers sometimes say candidates from the right wing BNP should not be allowed to promote their views in TV programmes or on the streets. But the BNP is not an illegal political party. If their views are so appalling, a law should be passed to ban the party. But, if what the BNP believes is expressed in a perfectly legal way, then trying to ban them from speaking is, in my view, Fascistic.
I personally agree that the BNP is abhorrent, but that is irrelevant.
I blame the French.
We say ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ because of the seating arrangements in the Estates General during and after the French Revolution.
The reality is that political extremism is part of a circle, not a horizontal line.
Hitler’s political party was correctly called a (national) Socialist party… Because extreme right wing views about a strong centralised state overlap into extreme left wing views about ‘the people’ controlling everything via a strong centralised state.
Wanting to ban jokes about rape is indefensible if you do not also want to ban jokes about murder. And, if you ban talking about certain things at live gigs then, logically, you have to ban the same things on television and in print.
It is a short and slippery slope from banning jokes to burning books.
Bob Slayer disagrees with me. He supports attempts to ban rape jokes in comedy clubs.
“Of course,” he says, “all of this will require a comedy police force to ensure that these rules are adhered to. Someone will have to vet every comedian, judge them before they even do their first open mic gig and award them with a provisional licence to perform clean, pre-approved jokes. They can then work towards proving they are capable of a full comedy licence to make up their own jokes.
“A comedian licence would work along similar lines to the one for buskers on the London Underground. It used to be that buskers who were homeless and looked like they were only busking in order to keep in the dry were driven outside to think about their lives while they slowly died of cold.
“Thankfully, they were then replaced by college students and trustafarians who had achieved at least grade 4 on their chosen instrument. These approved buskers were then given a laminated badge and allowed to entertain commuters with officially sanctioned playlists.
“I look forward to comedy being ordered in the same way.”
Next Thursday night, though, Ivor is opening a second comedy club in South London.
Or, rather, re-opening it. The Brixton Comedy Club was originally opened at The Hobgoblin pub in 1998.
“I set it up,” Ivor told me yesterday, “with my no-frills approach of Get some acts, put ‘em on, low ticket price.
“It was unexpectedly successful for two reasons. The first was that, at the time, people used to go out quite a lot on Sunday nights. But also it was a time when well-known acts would come down and try out material. That was quite a new thing then and I think the Brixton Comedy Club was one of the first places where that happened regularly. People like Harry Hill and Jo Brand. So you could see these well-known acts very cheaply in an informal atmosphere.
“I’d been running clubs for over twenty years, but I learned a very important lesson back then: that if you develop a tradition of famous acts turning up, of course, as soon as they move on, people stop coming. And the club went downhill quite quickly.”
“So how did you recover?” I asked.
“Well, I didn’t, really,” said Ivor. “It coincided with The Hobgoblin pub being taken over by a different management who wanted to put music in.
“So I moved to The Dog Star pub to do the same thing on a slightly smaller scale and it was fine, but I learned another lesson there: that people had, by and large, stopped going out to comedy on Sunday nights. Somehow, Thursday had become a new going-out night. It was just a cultural shift.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“I guess about five years ago,” he explained. “People just wouldn’t come out on Sundays; they were watching TV.
“I never actually closed the Brixton Comedy Club, but I’ve mothballed it for the last three years, just putting on occasional shows to keep the name alive. Now, partly through sentiment and partly because I want to speed up the process of going broke, I’ve decided to re-open it on a monthly basis at the Dog Star.
“The general lesson in running clubs is that, once people go to a comedy circuit club to see specific acts rather than to visit the club itself, your club’s finished. A great comedy club is somewhere people come irrespective of who’s on.”
“A big factor in the club is the MC, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Ivor, “People do like having a regular compere and I did build a rapport with that Brixton crowd. Both the Hobgoblin and The Dogstar were really nice venues: a good crowd.
“And we were helped at the old Brixton Comedy Club by the fact Daniel Kitson, who lived nearby… it became sort-of his favourite local club. So he became a regular fixture and you could say I’m the last person on the planet to successfully financially exploit Daniel Kitson.
“When word got around that Kitson was so good, we literally had people queueing round the block for the 200-capacity venue and it was so popular – I swear this is true – we even stopped putting it in the listings. We didn’t advertise at all and it was still filling up.”
“But a club is more than just acts,” I said. “It’s the format.”
“I think,” said Ivor, “that there are three basic precepts to running a club:
Keep it simple
Keep the shows varied with experienced acts and new acts
Keep the ticket price low
“We’re charging just £4.50 at the new Brixton Comedy Club. There’s no messing around with internet sales; you just turn up and pay £4.50 on the door. It’s the first Thursday of every month. I think the circuit works best when it’s uncomplicated.”
“So how are you going to keep the shows varied?” I asked.
“With experienced circuit comics and a few newcomers,” said Ivor. “So Lewis Schaffer’s headlining the opening night. And I’m going to mix it up just a bit more. Experienced stand-ups and newcomers plus perhaps a bit of music and poets – just to make it a bit more fast-moving and move it away from the traditional format.”
“And you’re still occasionally performing your own full-length show around and about?” I asked.
”Yes,” said Ivor, “I’ve got this really nice little show called Old Jewish Jokes which, obviously, is me telling my favourite old Jewish jokes, but interwoven with the story of a Jewish comedian – me – who turns up to perform at ‘an hour of modern comedy’ for his local Jewish community. Before he goes on, though, he’s given a shopping list of things he cannot mention: the Holocaust, Israel and so on.
“So the show is not just the jokes; it’s about the predicament of the modern Jewish comedian and why Jewish comedy has not moved on. It’s about Jewish people – who claim to have a great sense of humour but, when it comes to jokes about themselves, they’re not too happy!
“Traditional Jewish comedy is brilliant but, as someone who’s written a lot of Jewish comedy, I’m grappling with the question Why doesn’t it move on and tackle these difficult subjects like the Holocaust and Israel and the traditional perception of Jews? Why doesn’t it take these subjects on? Why is everyone so scared? That is embedded in the show, which I commend to you. You should come see it.”
“Very kind,” I said. “Well sold.”
“It’s on Tuesdays from 2nd October at the Alice House in West Hampstead.” continued Ivor. “And then the following five Tuesdays. Do you want me to give you the full spiel?”
“I’ll find it on the internet,” I said.
“I never normally tell people You should see this. It’s great,” Ivor said, “But, with this one, I honestly think it’s very good. I think it really takes Jewish comedy by the scruff of the neck and non-Jews love it just as much as Jewish people.”
A scriptwriter for a very well-known comedian told me this week that one of his jokes was recently rejected for inclusion in an ITV programme not because it was not good enough, not because the producer did not like it, but because it was a joke about a celebrity (a rock star, as it happens) who is on an ITV list of people who are considered too litigious to make jokes about.
Whether this is true or not, I cannot guarantee. But the producer showed the list to the scriptwriter.
“I am not even supposed to tell you it exists, let alone show it to you,” the producer said.
The comedian Jerry Sadowitz’s schtick is that he is highly offensive.
Last night, I saw his full-length stage show for the first time in a few years. The latest show is called Jerry Sadowitz: Comedian, Magician, Psychopath which, I think, pretty much covers all the angles – though it did not demonstrate any of the sheer genius of his actual magic act. He is a world class magician.
I have blogged before about Jerry’s early comedy career in the 1980s, how he was managed by the late Malcolm Hardee and how I produced a TV show in 1990 in which Jerry did not swear.
When I produced that show, Jerry spotted two lesbians in the audience (do not ask) and zeroed-in on them for particular comic attention. After the show, they were outraged and complained. Jerry was genuinely perplexed.
“They are just jokes,” he said, nonplussed.
My attitude was that, if you knowingly go to a Jerry Sadowitz show, you cannot complain afterwards about being offended. It is a bit like letting your small child watch Doctor Who and then complaining afterwards that he or she shat behind the sofa with fear.
That is almost the show’s raison d’être.
Doctor Who can sometimes scare the shit out of children.
Jerry Sadowitz’s comedy show is highly offensive.
The only reason to complain would be if Jerry were NOT offensive.
It was good to see last night that he can still go beyond highly offensive. All other so-called offensive comedians pale into insignificance compared to him. They are like a little pile of sugar four inches high in comparison to the Himalayas.
The two things which struck me last night were that he seems to be talking more about death than he used to. No surprise there, I guess. He is older. And, in among the bile and vitriol spewed at almost every target under the sun, there is an occasional unspeakable truth spoken.
I find it is always good for my blog to mention the late ‘old school’ comedian Bernard Manning because it annoys people. It is like saying “mint sauce” to a lamb.
If Bernard Manning had told almost any of the jokes Jerry told last night, people would have been even more outraged than the people who are currently retrospectively outraged by Manning’s live act although most of them never saw it.
If any other comic had told some of the jokes Jerry told last night, I think there is a high possibility he would risk being arrested.
And not without reason. Some of the Muslim jokes were so close to stirring racial hatred that there could be a nice philosophical discussion on where the line lies. Though, interestingly, some of the jokes were so unsettling because they said out loud some normally unsayable truths.
If comedy, like trouble, can be said to brew, Bernard Manning told comparatively mild gags. With Jerry, motormouthing for well over an hour at about three times the speed of any other comic, the gags are more bitter.
I recently wrote a blog about fame which mentioned the music business and the comedy industry. It provoked an interesting response from Mr Methane, the world’s only professionally-performing farter.
There is, of course, that famous old saying (usually credited to Janet Street-Porter) that “Comedy is the new Rock ‘n’ Roll”.
Mr Methane’s view is:
“Comedy was not, is not and never will be on a par with rock ‘n’ roll stardom. You do not wake up in the morning humming a joke you heard fifteen years ago because a joke does not take you back in your mind those fifteen years – unless you a comedy trainspotter.
“Music finds pathways into a nation’s soul and gets very deeply rooted there. It is valued as a great work of art by those who listen to it.
“Comedy, though a very serious business and labour of love for the artist, is generally seen as nothing more than a throw-away laugh by the consumer.
“Ringo Starr was not the only drummer in the Beatles – and, according to a joke by John Lennon, he wasn’t the best either – but let’s just say you have a choice between Ringo Starr and someone currently at the very top of the comedy tree coming round for dinner – maybe that Michael McIntyre bloke.
“It’s going go be Ringo Star every time for 90% of the British population. That is just how it is.
“We ain’t rock stars. We are the comedy arseholes of entertainment. In my case, literally.”
Is Mr Methane talking out of his arse (something he surprisingly rarely does) or clearing the air?
My thoughts are divided.
Comedians certainly rarely get respect as performing artists whereas singers do – although the increasing amount of money swilling around the upper, rarefied reaches of comedy success may be slowly changing that.
Nothing breeds admiration more than millions in the bank.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 