Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
Sean Hughes has a seemingly unattainable ambition: to make Sandi Toksvig look like a significant literary figure.
How can someone be so perceptive one minute and so totally blind to their own limitations the next? In the broader show-business world, this is known as the Clive James Conundrum.
Taking yourself too seriously is a common flaw among comedians. It only becomes a real problem when it makes you hate your audience. Hughes once threatened to play over-eighteens’ venues only – on tonight’s evidence, he would need to book a bus shelter if he did – and yet at this point seems to maintain an easy, avuncular rapport with his much younger fans.
There’s no reason why he shouldn’t, either, as teenage self-absorption is his major comic staple anyway.69 And the extension of adolescence from a seven- to a twenty-year span which mysteriously takes place at some point around the turn of the decade70 only renders Hughes’s distinctive brand of late-twenties bachelor angst (‘How am I ever going to have a kid when I still wake up in the foetal position?’) all the more à la mode.
A year or so later at the London Comedy Festival, however, things seem to have gone a bit sour. Hughes looks increasingly uncomfortable with the tender years of his constituency. His attitude at times seems almost disdainful, as he veers uneasily between talking down to his audience (heaven preserve us from bad impersonations of Damon Albarn – the real thing is difficult enough to cope with) and going wilfully over their heads. One Winston Churchill and Nancy Astor reference is so reluctant to give itself up that a passing police detective inspector has to be called in to talk it down off the roof.
What makes Hughes’s increasingly compulsive underachievement so frustrating is that at his funniest – dissecting dysfunctional family relationships or Dublin lounge décor, for example – he is a truly challenging performer. He has a real talent for undermining the assumptions of shared experience on which so much second-rate comedy is based. ‘Did you ever do that thing’, he asks at one point, in the casual vernacular of a thousand arrested-adolescence nostalgia gags, ‘of feigning serious injury when your dad hit you?’
In happy contrast to Hughes’s ever grouchier generational rank-pulling, Lee and Herring – the mid-nineties’ fifth-form (or even year 10) comedians of choice – prefer to make the most of the youth and supposed impressionability of their target audience.71 In the course of three series of their Fist of Fun Radio 1 show (one of the few artistic successes of the early years of Matthew Bannister’s regime at what was then Britain’s most-listened-to radio station),72 this mischievous double act develop a uniquely participatory style of comedy which involves mobilizing listeners en masse to scour the UK for the charity event that raises the least money.
‘The Lee and Herring child army’ – Fist of Fun’s core audience of young people with time on their hands – are also encouraged to deluge unsuspecting local radio personalities with sacks of motiveless fan mail. So how do the twenty-seven-year-old generals of this deadly teenage guerilla force think their footsoldiers feel about them?
‘We’ve got some stalwart fans who are impressed by us,’ insists Richard Herring proudly, ‘but not all that many of them…Mostly, we send people stuff we’ve got lying around in the office and they write back in a slightly ironic way and say, “Oh thanks – I’ve got a piece of rubbish that you’ve touched”.’
Five. Bill Hicks in the afterlife, a.k.a. that whole ‘comedian as martyr’ delusion
As Bob Hope was to Bob Monkhouse, as Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer and Lenny Bruce were to the Beyond The Fringe generation (i.e. both icons of American otherness, and an object lesson in just how much might be achieved by British comedians who were willing to study them hard enough), so were Denis Leary and Bill Hicks to the people who saw them at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990-1.73
There were some similarities between the two – both were gravel-dry iconoclasts with beguilingly rough-and-tumble sensibilities – but a fairly general feeling prevailed that had Hicks not hit the ground running first with the cancer material, Leary might have thought twice about following him out of the low-flying helicopter. And even while Hicks was still alive, some people were buffing up a pernicious duality.
Hicks, the story went, was chiselling nobly away at a Platonic ideal of comic integrity, while Leary was ‘just an opportunist’ (like that’s not what all comedians are meant to be). And then, a few years afterwards, Bill Hicks died. Which was tragic. Worse still – in terms of his subsequent apotheosis by comedians (and indie bands) in search of a higher purpose – he died at approximately the same age as Jesus. Denis Leary, meanwhile, bought shares in the MTV version of himself, made some OK films and was seen about town with Liz Hurley a lot.
In a year (1994) when death cast an abnormally long shadow over what are sometimes called the lively arts, Hicks – with River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain – made up a trio of prematurely departed icons who proved that whatever else you might think of the Grim Reaper, he certainly has taste. Their passing left a spiritual hole in the middle of each of their respective fields that was too big to walk around.
While for both Cobain and Phoenix the end was – purposely or otherwise – self-administered, Hicks was different. His act celebrated hedonism; he spoke out in favour of recreational drug use and was a fanatical defender of the right to smoke. Early on in his career, his profligate lifestyle seemed to court the kind of excess-fuelled, rock-star-style premature death which eventually befell his fellow Texan ‘outlaw comic’ Sam Kinison. Yet he finally died of natural causes in the ugly form of pancreatic cancer, having long since given up not only drink and drugs but cigarettes too.
‘The comic is a flame – like Shiva the destroyer,’ Hicks had told the New Yorker critic John Lahr (the same man who made such a meal out of not getting Reeves and Mortimer) in a rather vainglorious moment in 1992. ‘He keeps cutting everything back to the moment.’
Comics are so much of the moment that it is difficult enough to capture what is good about them on TV when they are alive, and harder still for them to sustain an afterlife. Even when they do – as, say, Lenny Bruce has – anyone who didn’t see them perform will often find it hard to remember what was funny about them.
The only hope, as so often, lies in commercial exploitation. ‘It’s Just a Ride’, the tribute film which makes up the first part of the hastily patched-together Channel 4 video Totally Bill Hicks, offers some fascinating insights into Hicks’s life and work. There are revealing interviews with his parents—God-fearing Southerners who ‘couldn’t understand why Bill used the f-word so much’ – and with the geeky friends with whom he used to sneak off to perform at a rough-and-tumble Houston comedy club at the tender age of fifteen.
The affection and envy mingling in the eyes of his fellow professionals speaks volumes about Hicks’s talents (comedians are competitive people after all, not usually given to abasing themselves at the feet of their peers). Eddie Izzard and Sean Hughes represent Hicks’s UK fan club – it could just as easily have been any number of other people – but the most illuminating insight comes from the American comedian, Brett Butler. Hicks’s treacle-voiced fellow Southerner, star of Channel 4’s Grace Under Fire (which was quite funny for a while, until it got all syrupy), observes astutely that ‘For all the talk about Bill being like Hendrix or Dylan or Jim Morrison, it was Jesus he wanted to be’.
These Messianic tendencies are all too apparent as Hicks emerges from tongues of fire on to the Dominion Theatre stage on the last night of his 1992 Revelations tour. But it’s the ordinariness of his appearance which is striking once he’s taken his cowboy hat off – slicked-back hair, button eyes, face like a potato in a stocking – and which throws the brilliance of his performance into even sharper relief.
Bill Hicks’s command of the stage