Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
his own libido as the demonic Goat-boy (motto: ‘Let me wear you like a feed bag’) – is almost frightening. Like the preacher he often fancied himself to be, Hicks could be self-righteous and he could hector, but he could also be devastating.
‘Ever noticed’, he muses, ‘how creationists look really unevolved?’ The industrial-strength sarcasm which went down so well in Britain sometimes landed him in trouble in his less sarcastically minded homeland, especially when applied to such notoriously humour-resistant targets as fundamentalist Christianity. In October 1993, when Hicks turned his scorn on anti-abortionists in a routine being recorded for The David Letterman Show—‘These pro-lifers…You ever look at their faces?…[screws up face and assumes bitter, pinched voice] “I’m pro-life”…Boy, they look it, don’t they?’—he became too hot for even the supposedly cutting-edge Letterman to handle.
The fact that the cancelled slot had been recorded in the same theatre where Elvis’s rotating pelvis was deemed unsuitable for The Ed Sullivan Show did nothing to lessen its mythic significance. And when the ensuing censorship furore spurred Hicks on through the rigours of chemotherapy to a final epic bout of creativity – ‘It was like Bill to the tenth power,’ said friend and producer Kevin Booth. ‘He couldn’t be involved in any kind of mundane situation for even a second’ – the foundations of his martyr cult were firmly in place.
It does not diminish what was special about Bill Hicks (in fact it rather underlines it) to say that comedians, as a rule, are meant to be involved in mundane situations. That is what encourages them to think up funny things to say.
‘Two options are open to him,’ Harry Secombe wrote of the aspiring laughter-maker in his preface to Roger Wilmut’s Tony Hancock: Artiste: ‘either he gives them [the crowd] what he wants, or he provides them with what they want. If he takes up the former he is liable to finish up returning to the rice pudding factory from which Hughie Green plucked him.’
You don’t have to subscribe fully to this extreme mechanistic view of the comedian’s proper relationship with his or her audience (after all, as Vic and Bob have shown us, many of their art form’s richest possibilities are bound up in the utter bemusement and confounding of the paying customer) to think that the whole Shiva the Destroyer thing is a bit of a blind alley.74
What the legend of Bill Hicks offers is an excess of mythological armour. And, just as later English monarchs would struggle with the weighty chain-mail of Richard the Lionheart, so other comedians who tried to put on Bill’s heavy suit would generally end up blundering around, bumping into the antique furniture. Take Rob Newman, for instance, cruelly sustained by Hicksian example in the delusion that his post-Newman-and-Baddiel career was actually a heroic one-man struggle against the evils of capitalism.
Denis Leary meanwhile – blessed by destiny with the chance to go on living, with all the failures and compromises that entails – has had a different kind of afterlife. While the bones of Hicks’s ceuvre have subsequently been picked clean by well-meaning vultures, and the endless slew of commemorative videos and live CDs have inevitably become subject to the law of diminishing returns, Leary’s 1992 A&M album, No Cure For Cancer, now stands – from its savage assault on the culture of complaint (built around the healing mantra ‘Shut the fuck up’) to its rabble-rousing redneck anthem, ‘(I’m An) Asshole’ – as a gleaming comic monument.
Untarnished by the oxide of sainthood, it’s both the perfect refutation of late-eighties bullshit and a brutally ironic reversal of the pop culture myth-making’s founding principle of living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse.
The comedy edifice needs bricks and mortar, just like any other (in five more parts)
1. The Management
‘They get blamed for things I’ve done’
Stewart Lee
Amid the remorseless expansion of the comedy industry in the late eighties and early nineties, the basic business of just being funny or not being funny gets pushed ever more to one side. A comedy career tends to be publicly defined in terms of material – rather than creative – advance: how much you got paid for your video, how many series you’ve had on Channel 4, how many nights you can sell out at which West End theatre. It is in this context that the small amount of coverage given to the complex art of comedy management will generally be encountered.
Which of us has not felt an involuntary contraction of the bowel muscles on watching some pointless TV showbiz news report and hearing the halfwit holding the microphone say ‘and [insert name of pop-culture phenomenon X, from bingo to pigeon-racing] has become big business’ While such in-depth reportage has probably ensured that at least the names of the three main corporate players in British comedy – Avalon, Off The Kerb and PBJ – will be vaguely familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the field, the extent of the impact they’ve had on their various clienteles may well come as something of a shock.
The contrasting ways in which the workplace cultures of different management companies evolve has had a crucial influence on developing social, creative and ideological divides in the British body comedic. To such an extent that at times you start to wonder if comedy management is an exoskeleton or an endoskeleton.
Like record company bosses and film producers, comedy managers tend to get a very bad press. This is because everyone else – from critics to fans to the artistes themselves – has a vested interest in blaming them for anything that might go wrong in their clients’ careers. As false as the notional opposition between the unsullied innocence of the artist and the deceiving greed of the agent undoubtedly is, people find clinging on to it much easier than asking themselves awkward questions about exactly whose idea it was to do that dreadful advert.
It is much to the managers’ and agents’ credit that you will rarely hear them complain about the resultant sullying of their reputations. Whatever their other differences, they seem to share an innate understanding that it is chiefly by means of this process of ‘automatic guilt by association’ (succinctly formulated by Stewart Lee as ‘They get blamed for things I’ve done’) that they earn their percentage. Thus one form of formal buck acceptance begets another.
Speaking to comedians75 about their agents, there is very little of the bitching which might be conspicuous in discussions of a similar nature with an actor or author. Perhaps because comedy is such a lonely and competitive business – Off The Kerb boss Addison Cresswell describes its practitioners as ‘the most paranoid group of people I’ve ever met’ – the very existence of an advocate and mentor, however fallible, is something to be grateful for.
(a) Avalon’s testosterone vale
The turning-point in Jenny Eclair’s long slog from waitress to resting comedy actress to Perrier Award-winning comedian seems to have been the moment she moved from the sisterly agency she shared with French and Saunders, Ruby Wax and Sandi Toksvig to the testosterone vale of Avalon (home to Frank Skinner and David Baddiel among others). Talking to her about them in 1995, she seems quite happy to be the lone female on the books of an organization for whose profile the word ‘muscular’ is widely deemed to be an understatement.
‘I adore them,’ she says, ‘because they play the game so well – the reality of going up and down the motorway playing to six people is very mundane, but when the pantomime is done properly…well, I can almost believe the car which is taking me to Manchester this afternoon will be a bullet-proof limo, even though it’ll actually be a Ford Orion.’
For corporate gigs (the dark underbelly of a good comedic living), Avalon even supply her with a bodyguard. ‘The companies concerned are paying quite