Rise of the Underdog!

Fest Magazine (written as Benjamin Edwards)

Stand-up comedy is one of the few vocations where failure is no impediment to success. It’s a quirk that the following gamma males offer thanks for on an almost nightly basis, and never more so than during the Edinburgh Fringe, when hour-long shows encourage them to admit their deepest flaws, fading dreams and relationship woes to roomfuls of strangers.

“Well, we all like a bit of schadenfreude don’t we?” reckons Rhod Gilbert, who will be recalling the near-breakdown he suffered encountering The Award-Winning Mince Pie.

“Comedy needs a victim and with me, the victim has always been myself, I’ve rarely done jokes at anyone else’s expense. My character is a buffoon who misinterprets everything and tends to react almost violently in a completely inappropriate manner.

“When I started out, whenever I told audiences I was Welsh I would get all those sheep noises. So I found it natural to play on the back foot, as if the crowd had me pinned in the corner and I was a kid lashing out at all these bullies around me. I still feel like that.”

In America, the dominant tradition has been for stand-ups to assume superiority over the audience, ‘playing high-status’, as exemplified by the Def Jam school of comedy. Taking its inspiration from hip-hop, its worst exponents of all races tend to establish their pre-eminence with stereotypical digs at other ethnic groups, genders and sexualities.

As a parallel, consider Richard Pryor’s influence on Eddie Murphy. Murphy’s stand-up appropriated all of Pryor’s swagger yet none of his vulnerability, the acknowledged weakness of a heart-attack suffering, junkie womaniser. There’s no question as to whose stand-up is aging better, with much of Murphy’s live work from the 1980s now looking unpalatably homophobic.

In the UK, our national flair for self-deprecation confuses status positions. Comics like Jimmy Carr and Simon Evans look down upon their audience from impeccable middle-class perspectives, yet remain tongue-in-cheek enough to generally escape disapproval, with both acknowledging their physical peculiarities as a way of ingratiating themselves.

Miles Jupp abandoned his Laird of the Manor character to perform as himself and now interacts far more easily with an audience. Interestingly, the likes of Daniel Kitson, Josie Long, Russell Howard, Alun Cochrane and David O’Doherty employ hip-hop bragging and mannerisms to varying degrees of irony.

Messing about with power relations was integral to We Are Klang!’s success.

“We always wanted to be the three biggest idiots in the room,” Steve Hall explains. “It was almost an attempt to dispense with status games, because whichever one of us was ‘winning’ at any point, we were still the three biggest losers. Once everyone bought into that, huge amounts of fun would follow because we were prepared to do anything.”

By his own admission Klang’s “least memorable member”, Hall takes being a joke’s butt literally and is best known for his yapping bare backside during the sketch troupe’s 2006 if.comedy-nominated run. His debut solo show, Vice-Captain Loser, derives its title from an insult the 14-year-old Hall once received from his father, no doubt spurring Hall towards whoring his “slight, unremarkable” body for more Klang stage time.

“We work on a bartering system” he explains. “I get to smuggle in my jokes and show my commitment by being the one who’s prepared to humiliate himself the most. It’s more subversive if the quiet one you haven’t necessarily noticed suddenly reappears as a talking arse. Though, I’ve occasionally met audience members who haven’t understood it was my arse that was speaking.”

Both if.comedy award winners, long-time UK-based foreigners Brendon Burns and Phil Nichol, are extrovert performers whose triumphant shows revealed them at their most pathetic.

“It’s certainly strange in Edinburgh,” says Stephen Grant, who split from his wife recently and lost his top ranking on Google to an American namesake who succeeded in murdering his, “because you need to downplay the fact that there is a big room full of people who’ve only come to see you, by absolutely not coming out and blurting ‘fuck, I must be brilliant me!’”

Grant maintains “there are more runners-up in the world than winners” and that with Second he’s “appealing to a larger demographic”, trying to prove that “second is the new first” and that “in an increasingly winning obsessed society, under a Labour government that seems, bizarrely, to have created more class divisions than ever, ultimately the person who strives hard and nearly does well, yet doesn’t quite make it, has the best stories.

“Laughing is a defence mechanism, just as for some people it’s getting angry or wasted and for some comedians it’s all three. Usually, comedy is a fairly cooperative industry and it’s only in new act competitions and Edinburgh where the need for other comics to perform badly rears its ugly head.”

Luke Toulson embodies such sentiments in There Are So Many Things That I Can’t Do. A 2005 Perrier best newcomer nominee with sketch partner Stephen Harvey, the dyslexic former supply teacher earned mixed reviews for the pair’s 2006 offering, subsequently lost his agent and his fiancée and believes that the nomination “snared us with too much attention before we’d really had time to develop”. He’s since re-emerged as a solo stand-up, winning the Hackney Empire New Act Award, and as Captain DJ on Cbeebies Space Pirates, failing to impress his son, who prefers Angelina Ballerina.

Nevertheless, Toulson’s niche television stardom and semi-pathetic state of affairs have been catnip to young single mums, a trend Gilbert recognises and identifies as the “mothering instinct.

“It’s definitely to do with vulnerability up there. I’m not a sexy comedian, I’m the type you want to mother. But I do feel vulnerable on stage, so it’s natural to play that angle for me.”

Not A Lover, Not A Fighter is the first solo show from Gilbert’s countryman and flatmate Lloyd Langford, who reckons that many comedians’ insecurities emanate simply from “losing thousands of pounds performing at the Fringe”.

A melancholic blues fan, the 24-year-old Welshman enjoys “a bit of fragility with my comedy” and feels that stand-ups are inherently outsiders. He only recently began performing material on sex, acknowledging that “you get comics with braggadocio or machismo, whereas all I’m saying is that I’m a bit useless”. He makes a point of mentioning he has a girlfriend in his set, but to no avail with female admirers. “Yeah, it happens” he admits.

“When I first started performing,” concludes Hall, “I thought I’d love to be this Bill Hicks dark poet, as many misguided young comics do. It took my fiancé to make me understand that my vulnerable side was what she liked about me, rather than me being Mr Edgy. So I started working on it aggressively to make her fancy me more.

“She then said that I was going too far and looking like a charity case, walking onstage and saying ‘Hello! I’m the biggest loser that’s ever lived!’” Read more!

Andrew Lawrence - It’s an embarrassing, self-indulgent, pathetic job

The Scotsman

The night before I meet Andrew Lawrence, I watch him perform as part of The Dark Show at the Kilkenny Comedy Festival. He’s been coerced by other acts and audience expectations into delivering his most depraved material, ridiculing his girlfriend, brutally threatening his family and eliciting laughter simply by mentioning Joseph Fritzel.

It’s a superb showcase of his ‘greatest hits’. It is also a decidedly niche performance unlikely to appear on Live At The Apollo anytime soon. “I guess that dark stuff comes easiest to me and when I started out it was that material I was mostly doing,” reflects a comedian whose previous Fringe shows have been called How To Butcher Your Loved Ones and Social Leprosy For Beginners And Improvers.

“Some of it was a bit harsh though, a little Jim Jeffries. All that anti-girlfriend stuff I don’t tend to do anymore. My parents aren’t all that bothered. As long as I’m paying my bills and have enough money to keep my mind, body and soul together, they don’t mind. But if they were coming to a gig, there’s specific material I wouldn’t do. The way Adam [Hills] introduced me made it quite difficult to be honest. I had to play the weird freak. But nowadays it’s much more toned down and I’m very much more myself.”

Sitting opposite me with a cup of tea, his red hair recently cropped short and wearing a smart but staid jacket, the slight, thoughtful Lawrence looks every inch the librarian he once was. His stage persona is becoming a truer reflection of his real self, less of the growling, homicidal misfit denouncing his parents and an unfeeling world. This interview is one of the first he’s conducted out of “character” and so there will be no berating “the Edinburgh C***s Festival” and the if.comedy panel for overlooking him (he has been nominated twice, for best newcomer in 2006 and for the main prize in 2007). Only those cold, black eyes of a shark behind his spectacles, occasionally underscored by a mischievous grin, suggest a serial killer manqué.

I delicately phrase a question about his features. “I played up to looking odd earlier in my career,” he admits. “But I reckon I look pretty normal and it baffles me that journalists write so much about my physical appearance. Then again, I talk about it in my act and make a lot more of it than there actually is. It’s very easy to make people see things if you come on and say ‘I’ve got a creepy face’. There’s a very small percentage of comedians who are attractive enough to go on stage, say that and have the audience dispute it.”

He’s intrigued by comparisons to the late television comedian Charlie Drake, “because I’ve never watched him, though he looks like one of my uncles, so maybe there is a facial resemblance” and frustrated by those with Michael Crawford, to the point where “I have to acknowledge that I sound like him at the start of my set because I’ve had so many people shouting out ‘Frank Spencer!’ Obviously, your voice sounds different in your own head, but even speaking in mine is a curiosity for some people.”

Born in Croydon, the 28-year-old comic was an intensely focused cross country runner in his youth. He would train six days a week, two hours a day, and regularly attended the Fringe while studying English at St Andrews University. He also taught himself to play guitar, and his twisted songs won him the BBC new act award in 2003.

“I remember going up to Edinburgh the year before I did my first show, which was very musical and I had long, crazy hair,” he says, “seeing Tim Minchin performing his dark songs with his crazy hair and thinking ‘f***. I have to change my act’. He’s an amazing musician, so much better than I could ever be. You see people like that throughout your career, those who make you feel you’ve got to improve or change what you’re doing.

“Comedians who are great musicians make me feel like a fraud, though having said that, if you can write funny lyrics it’s about the comedy really so I might come back to it. But the guitar was a crutch and it was nice to get rid of it. After two or three years as a comic, you start doing what you want to do rather than what comes instinctively. I don’t know what the rate of progression is, but I feel that year on year I’m getting better and becoming more versatile.”

He increasingly strives to perform material “that hits home with everybody” and recalls a rude awakening he endured in 2005. It was only his second year of stand-up, and he was playing the late-night showcase Spank at the Underbelly, when an aggressive challenge to an audience member ended in an ungainly scuffle.

“I was still new, maybe only performing three nights a week,” he explains. “I was having a difficult time in my personal life and wasn’t focusing coolly. I’d been used to everyone going mental for me and went on doing very self-indulgent, esoteric, poetic stuff that only a few people were really going for. And then I just got mixed up with this guy who wrestled me to the floor. It was inexperience that made me get him up on stage, because you should never do that, especially with someone who’s quite angry and drunk in the dark. There was an article about it in The Times that poked fun at me a bit which was quite unpleasant.”

This was the same Spank run that saw Australian comic Steve Hughes heckle Lawrence to leave the stage and let him finish the show after the younger stand-up had overrun his 12 minute slot by half an hour – “You may want to close a set at 3am mate, but I don’t. F***ing get off!” – and the same Edinburgh he played Darren, the much-maligned offspring of Ian Boldsworth’s Yorkshire blowhard Ray Peacock, in Ray Peacock & Son. Ironically, the pair developed an intense mutual dislike during rehearsals, and as with his role of Marco, a Christian builder in the Johnny Vegas sitcom Ideal, he is refreshingly candid in describing these collaborations as “not my cup of tea”. Though Ideal “has a lot of people I really like and enjoy as comedians, and as a sitcom on BBC3, it could be a lot worse”.

You sense he places much greater trust in his own comedy instincts. A series of snarky, five-minute Radio 2 skits on the arts, hastily written and recorded in a week earlier this year, were born from working with a group of producers that had given him almost free reign with 20 weeks of podcasts to accompany the Channel 4 reality series Shipwrecked.
“Half an hour each week slagging off the contestants,” he recalls. “It was all improvising and there was so much to work with, just these horrendous people. I really enjoyed that.

“I’d love to do a television sitcom, not a traditional one, but a half hour with loads and loads of different characters. But I’d never be allowed, because you’re always beholden to meet producers halfway. Unless you do something great first.”

Expectations are high for his new Fringe show, an attack on society’s insatiable desire for self-improvement entitled Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!, yet he seems inclined to confound them. “The material I’m doing this year is more along the lines of social commentary,” he explains. “About this strange idea that you can achieve anything you set your mind to if you work hard enough. Which is just not true. As human beings we attribute value to something in accordance with how rare it is. But by that reasoning and with six and a half billion of us on the planet we must consider ourselves to be pretty worthless. Trying to elevate ourselves above everyone else by striving to own the best home or looking the best is misdirected and extreme ambition that can’t really bring you purpose, value or any sense of happiness in life.”

He acknowledges the personal contradiction with a twist of the familiar self-loathing. “Certainly, like anyone I want to do something worthwhile with my existence. But it’s tricky with this job, because it’s an embarrassing, self-indulgent, pathetic job in a way.”



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Sarah Silverman: I Won't Defend My Jokes, It Never Ends Well

The Scotsman

When Sarah Silverman posed as a louche Amy Winehouse in Vanity Fair recently, few could have predicted that their kinship went beyond a glossy conglomeration of the world’s most controversial Jewish princesses.

But while Winehouse sparked widespread concern and incomprehension when a bizarre film she’d shot for her husband appeared on the internet featuring mice and Pete Doherty, Silverman was applauded for confessing to cheating on her boyfriend in “the bed, on the floor, on the towel by the door, in the tub, in the car, up against the minibar …”, in a song subsequently exposed to You Tube and an audience currently approaching 10million views.

Of course, Silverman and her accomplice Matt Damon were only joking that she was “f**king Matt Damon” for the benefit of her beau, late-night chat host Jimmy Kimmel, celebrating his fifth anniversary show. With the Hollywood star gamely and repeatedly reiterating that yes, Silverman was indeed “f**king Matt Damon”, Kimmel responded gallantly with his own video announcing that he was “f**king Ben Affleck”, featuring, among others, Affleck, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Robin Williams, Meat Loaf and Harrison Ford.

If, as widely predicted, “I’m F**king Matt Damon” wins an Emmy next month, it will be something of a bittersweet irony, as less than a week before this interview was conducted, publicists confirmed that Silverman and Kimmel had split. Rather poignantly too, this weekend finally brings a UK cinematic release for Silverman’s breakthrough 2005 concert film, Jesus Is Magic, which takes its title from Silverman’s line about their relationship: “If my boyfriend, who’s a Catholic, and I ever have a kid, we’ll just be honest with it. We’ll say that Mommy is one of God’s chosen people and Daddy believes that Jesus is magic!”

“I still do some of those routines,” admits Silverman, taking a break from filming her second series of The Sarah Silverman Programme, the first of which aired in the UK on the Paramount Comedy Channel. “And I’ll play some of the songs on the road because it’s fun to do them again live. It’s hard because I’m working on my TV show all the time, so I’m not doing enough stand-up to have the amount of new stuff I should have. But we wrap in a week and I’m going to New York to focus on stand-up again.”

The new series, which like Jesus Is Magic features Silverman’s sister Laura in a perennially subordinate role to her sibling’s self-obsession – “that’s really fun, she has a lot more funny stuff this year” – also includes familiar faces from British screens, including Mighty Boosh collaborators Rich Fulcher and Matt Berry, who play “a minister” and “a representative of the dictionary”, and former Dr Who Christopher Eccleston as Dr Laser Rage, the hero of a DVD box set purchased by Sarah’s gay neighbour Brian.

Silverman is hoping to perform a few stand-up dates in the UK this autumn. Previously, her only visit to these shores was for Amnesty International’s 2006 Secret Policeman’s Ball, “which was so fun and exciting, everyone was so nice and I had a blast. I was mostly impressed by the audience, so many standing and the show lasted five hours. I went on about four hours in and everyone was still into it.”

An attractive, slim brunette with a swanlike neck that she describes as “one of the best of my many good features”, the 37-year-old projects a narcissistic, naïve persona that frees her to express the most politically incorrect material, her wide-eyed bigotry pushed to ludicrous extremes. She begins the film promising a show about the Holocaust and AIDS, goes on to throw in a callously throwaway line about 9/11, then a love song comparing her affection to black guys calling each other “n*gger” before a couple of alternately laughing and stony-faced African-Americans, eventually ending up in her dressing room, alone with her reflection, which she begins to kiss ravenously. Endearingly, she won’t dismiss the thrill of being described as “the world’s hottest, most controversial comedian”.

“It’s subjective,” she maintains. “I want to always try to let that stuff make me feel good, but I would never want to get too attached to it. No-one is hot or the most controversial forever, both of those things have expiration dates. I Googled myself a couple weeks ago and saw ‘Top Nine People That Should Host Saturday Night Live ... Sarah Silverman ...’ I was so flattered, clicked on it and it said: ‘if Sarah Silverman hosted SNL I'd punch myself in the face.’ Served me right.”

She wrote for the programme between 1993 and 1994 but was fired after one season, and for many in the UK, their introduction to her humour was the film The Aristocrats, where she accepted the challenge of trying to tell the most distasteful version of a vaudeville in-joke by claiming that she’d been raped by Joe Franklin, a veteran US showbiz turn. Franklin then threatened to sue, with the furore echoing her breakthrough appearance on the talk-show Late Night with Conan O’Brien, when her profile soared after a routine that turned on the word “chink”. She addresses that controversy in Jesus Is Magic¸ and if anything, exacerbates it.

“I try to make it a practice to never defend or try to explain my jokes,” she says. “It never ends well and definitely never ends funny. Sometimes people come up to me and say the most crude and disgusting things and I try to be gracious because I know they must think I like that stuff. To me there's a difference between surprising or honest or even graphic and just gross for gross’ sake – a very subtle, but very big difference. I'm not sure I’m smart enough to explain it, but like the hairy animal I am, I just feel it instinctively I guess.”

Ah yes, extraneous body hair. Silverman is blithely honest about her bodily functions and dysfunctions, confessing to bed-wetting till an advanced age and to being “extremely proud” that her ‘Poop Song’ is now hugely popular with kids. Her comedy career actually began in childhood under the tutelage of her social worker father.

“When I was three he taught me ‘bitch, bastard, damn, shit’” she recalls. “I would say it and grown-ups would die laughing and be so shocked. I saw then, at three, the positive reaction that came from that kind of verbal surprise and got addicted to that feeling. I just hope I find something funnier than poop before it all gets old. But does it ever get old?”

The youngest of four daughters, she looks up to a rabbi sister, “so good and loving and supportive, she loves me even though religion is not a part of my life, and I love her though religion is her life!”

Yet despite, or perhaps because of a teenage history of depression, she became a comic at 17, singing a song called ‘Mammaries’ in a restaurant. Her material “was about high school mostly, because I was in high school. It always seems to be about what’s mostly on my mind”. She dropped out of New York University at 19 and pursued stand-up in Greenwich Village. “When I was 19 I lost my virginity and my act became all about sex, then drugs and so on.”

Later, she started performing at the Boston Comedy Club, around the same time as Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle.

“I would see Chris Rock all the time and I learned something really important from him,” she explains. “He was different then, delivery-wise. He would go up, start his jokes and if the crowd was talking and unsettled he would just keep going. If the crowd missed a joke or two, he seemed fine with it, because eventually, the whole crowd would be silent, hanging on his every word. He made the audience come to him. So often in that situation your instinct is to talk over them to make them listen. He never stooped to that.”

Silverman has routinely stooped to bit-parts in movies, invariably playing the best friend or bitchy girlfriend in films like There’s Something About Mary and School Of Rock, but that’s all in the past now.

“I'm really only interested in playing someone who is three-dimensional,” she states. “I feel finished with the ‘bitch’ or ‘sassy friend’ that exists only to provide exposition for the main girl character. I don't care about the size of a role, I'm done playing the band-aid for shitty writing.”

Exclusively attracted to funny men, she believes that ultimately, her gift to the world is “either laughter or herpes. Hopefully the former.”


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