1
Editorial
3–4
Articles
5–19
Not the defi nitive version:
an interview with Ross Noble
OLIVER DOUBLE
21–32
The origins of comic
performance in adult-child
interaction
IAN WILKIE AND MATTHEW
SAXTON
33–42
England? Whose England?
Selling Albion in comic cinema
CHRIS
RITCHIE
43–59
‘Pack up your troubles and smile,
smile, smile’: comic plays about
the legacy of ‘the Troubles’
TIM
MILES
61–69
Mutual intelligibility: depictions
of England in German literature
and thought
JAMES
HARRIS
71–83
Take my mother-in-law: ‘old
bags’, comedy and the
sociocultural construction of the
older woman
RUTH
SHADE
85–100
Court jesters of the GDR: the
political clowns-theatre of
Wenzel & Mensching
DAVID
ROBB
101–111 Comedy improvisation on
television: does it work?
BRAÍNNE
EDGE
113–124 Who’s in charge? Negotiation,
manipulation and comic licence
in the work of Mark Thomas
SOPHIE
QUIRK
Reviews
125–127 Statue Review #1: Max Miller:
“There’ll Never Be Another!”
127–128 The Cambridge Introduction to
Comedy, Eric Weitz (2009)
Report
129–130 Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009:
the year of the anti-comedian
Interview
131–134 Marcus Brigstocke: God Collar
Live
COST_1.1_FM_001–002.indd Sec1:1
_hk
PZgmmhdghpfhk^8
<eb\drhnkpZrmhppp'lhe^gm'Z\'nd(\hnkl^l
@bo^nlZ\Zee)+,1),*2),2
>fZbeZld9lhe^gm'Z\'nd
;:
!
Ahgl
"
<hf^]r
]^`k^^blh_m^gl^^gZl
Zchd^%[nmbmmZd^l
mak^^r^Zklmh`^m'
Mabgdrhn\Zg]h[^mm^k8
;:!Ahgl"<hf^]r3Pkbmbg`Zg]I^k_hkfZg\^
P^h__^kma^hger<hf^]r]^`k^^bgma^\hngmkr
Zg]aZo^ikh]n\^]mphpbgg^klh_IZkZfhngmÃlik^lmb`bhnl
<hf^]rhgMZi?nggb^lmLmn]^gm\hfi^mbmbhg'
E^ZkgZ[hnmma^ablmhkrZg]ma^hkrh_\hf^]rpabe^
k^_bgbg`rhnkldbeelbgpkbmbg`kZ]bhZg]MOlbm\hflZg]
i^k_hkfbg`lmZg]ni'
PbmaZi^k_hkfZg\^liZ\^maZml^Zml+))i^hie^
Zg]lmn]bhk^a^ZklZeliZ\^lp^\Zgk^Zeera^eirhn
lfZkm^gnirhnkZ\m
COST_1.1_FM_001–002.indd Sec1:2 COST_1.1_FM_001–002.indd Sec1:2 1/23/10 7:56:16 AM1/23/10 7:56:16 AM3 Comedy Studies
Volume 1 Number 1
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/cost.1.1.3/2
EDITORIAL
The launch of Solent University’s BA in Comedy Studies attracted huge atten-tion to the discussion of comedy in academia. But for students, lovers and professionals in comedy, the question might be why a genre with a millen-nial long tradition (stretching from Aristotle to Chris Morris) had not been considered worthy of academic attention sooner? This journal is a further step in the process of developing the study of comedy as an academic discipline. With Comedy Studies, a forum is being created for the discussion, analysis and critique of comedy. We aim to offer a worldwide platform for academ-ics, writers and readers interested in comedy to publish their opinions and ideas. Certainly, we welcome all attempts to theorize intelligently about why comedy is as it is. Yet there is also a strongly practical bent to our endeav-our: the thoughts and opinions of comics are present here. Most of the aca-demics published here are also performers of comedy. Both the editors have run and performed in comedy nights and sketch ensembles. For us, theory and practice are by no means opposed; it is the love of comedy that unites them. In this journal, we are keen to investigate comedy as a global phenom-enon. Right this instance, stories are being told and routines performed from Amsterdam to Jakarta. English comedy nights are playing to packed houses in Berlin and Japanese anime characters occasioning hysterics in American chil-dren. This journal is a natural home for investigation of comedy worldwide: our first issue takes in Albion in England, Germans in east Germany and the transatlantic improvisation scene. Future issues will have an even wider remit. Again and again in our studies of comedy, we have been struck by the simi-larities in how different cultures structure their jokes and joking. At the same time, Comedy Studies is fascinated with widening people’s perspectives on the function of comedy worldwide.
And not just now, either. Comedy is clearly a historical phenomenon, and this journal welcomes analysis of any epoch of the comic tradition: from its beginnings with Aristophanes through to the work of Ross Noble (our inter-viewee this issue). A working title of this journal was ‘Parabasis’, from the choral address to the audience on the Ancient Greek stage, and it is there
COST 1.1 Editorial_03-04.indd 3
4
that we locate the beginnings of the contemporary stand-up comedian. Such a wide historical perspective can only enhance a sense of the longevity and significance of comedy as a part of life.
In short, Comedy Studies is a defiantly non-partisan review. There is no era, no area, and no one approach in comedy that interests us more than any other. We welcome, of course, contributions with a sense of humour and especially those that can make us think anew. If there was one way to describe comedy, it would be anarchic: in the spirit of Greek ναρχια, ‘without ruler’, the quality of subversion and freedom. Comedy is a force that has often been on the side of the oppressed and trod-upon. It is in this anarchic spirit, and with a host of excellent contributors, that we launch Comedy Studies.
COST 1.1 Editorial_03-04.indd 4
5 Comedy Studies
Volume 1 Number 1
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/cost.1.1.5/1
KEYWORDS
Ross Noble stand-up comedy improvisationOLIVER DOUBLE
University of Kent
Not the definitive
version: an interview
with Ross Noble
ABSTRACT
In this interview, the celebrated improvisational stand-up comedian Ross Noble dis-cusses his early influences, starting his career in the anarchic Newcastle comedy scene of the early 1990s, the gruelling experience of building his career in London, the process of becoming successful, the creative possibilities of the DVD format, and his current working processes.
1. OPENING NOTES
Ross Noble is one of the most successful and gifted stand-up comedians of his generation. He has acquired a huge and enthusiastic following, in spite of having relatively little exposure on television. Instead, he has built his audience largely on the strength of his live performance, relentlessly touring with shows like Sonic Waffle (2002–03), Unrealtime (2003–04), Noodlemeister (2004–05), Randomist (2005–06), Fizzy Logic (2006–07), Nobleism (2007), and
Things (2009). As well as touring thousand-seat theatres, as of 2004 he
has released a series of best-selling stand-up DVDs. His comedy is char-acterized by surreal flights of imagination, and his extraordinary ability to improvise.
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 5
6
One of the built-in ambiguities in stand-up comedy is the extent of an act’s spontaneity. The interactive nature of the form, and the fact that it is performed in the first person, means that prepared material (performed for years or even decades) can come across as if it has just been invented before the audience’s very eyes. Most comedians strike a balance between improvisation and pre-pared material, but where one begins and the other ends is always left unclear. As Tony Allen, who was one of the first alternative comedians, argues:
In reality, of course, very little is spontaneous and it is only the poten-tial for spontaneity that exists. An honest stand-up comedian will admit that the moments of pure improvisation account for less than five per cent of their act.
(Allen 2004: 93)
Noble turns this potential for spontaneity into reality, improvising far more than 5 per cent of his act, and building much of the show from conversations with audience members or occurrences that happen in the performance space, on the stage, or the auditorium. As a Times reviewer puts it:
Ross Noble can amble on stage, spot a piece of fluff on the floorboards, a latecomer trying to slip into a seat, an odd-looking chandelier, and
Ross Noble (courtesy of Ross Noble).
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 6
7 1. See Double (1994) for
a detailed account of the provincial scene at this time.
suddenly he’s got his first half-hour of material, building a pyramid of observations from any starting point … More than any other comic playing the big stages, this straggle-haired Geordie seems to risk calam-ity every night.
(Maxwell 2005)
Something else that marks Noble out is his age. Still only 33 years old, he has been performing stand-up for seventeen years, and has been well known for ten, having been nominated for the Perrier Award in 1999. It is unusual enough that he started working as a stand-up at the remarkably tender age of 15, but the particular set of venues in which he cut his teeth was also far from ordinary. Having grown up in Cramlington, Northumberland, he first began performing in and around Newcastle upon Tyne, in one of the emerg-ing comedy scenes that had started growemerg-ing in provincial towns by the late 1980s.1 This meant that his first experiences of live performance happened in
a freewheeling atmosphere where comedians and promoters were discover-ing how stand-up worked as they went along. Anvil Sprdiscover-ingstien, one of the leading lights of the Newcastle comedy scene at the time, pointed out that audiences were similarly uninitiated:
Because audiences up here have never really had a history of being able to go out to comedy clubs … people don’t know how to behave in a comedy night, so the standard of heckling has been very strange and different, and no two gigs have ever been the same.
(Double 1994: 257–58)
Springstien also pointed out that, lacking the tighter expectations of the more established London circuit, the Newcastle comedy scene of the early 1990s encouraged more inventive approaches to stand-up: ‘There’s an awful lot of just standard, straight stand-up [in London], gag, gag, gag, gag. People want to be TV-friendly, so they write their sets towards that, you know, but up here it’s a different kettle of fish’ (Double 1994: 257–58).
Starting off in such an atmosphere has coloured Noble’s whole approach to stand-up. It allowed him to gain an unusual amount of stage experience very quickly, and freed him from the restriction of audience expectation. As a result, he prefers the spontaneous to the highly prepared, the rough edges to slick perfection. More importantly, he is comfortable taking the artistic risks which improvisation entails on a regular basis.
Meeting up again with Noble on 25 August 2009 in Leicester Square to interview him, I was struck by how closely his conversational style resembles his onstage delivery. His sentences are far from linear. He will stop halfway through a clause to rephrase or refine an idea, or go off at a tangent. On stage, he brilliantly exploits this tendency, commenting on his own sentence struc-ture, and conjuring up whole routines based on little more than a slightly odd choice of word or a strange inflection. In conversation, he largely avoids this temptation, but his mercurial thought processes and his propensity to repeat and foreshorten makes transcription rather tricky. If I were to attempt to make whole sentences out of his exact words, his meaning would be in danger of disappearing under a riotous heap of ellipses and parentheses. Instead, I have simplified things in the interests of clarity, whilst trying to represent what he actually said as accurately as possible to give an accurate presentation of his words.
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 7
8
2. Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott and Max Boyce were the three most prominent stand-up comedians to emerge from the British folk music scene in the 1960s and 1970s.
3. Bev Bevan (1944- ) was the drummer with British rock bands The Move and Electric Light Orchestra.
4. ‘The Magic Roundabout’ was an early stand-up routine by Jasper Carrott, in which he parodied the animated children’s series of the same name by incongruously adding sexual content into it. A recording of the routine was included as the B-side to Carrott’s single ‘Funky Moped’, and its notoriety and popularity was said to have accounted for the success of this record, which reached number five in the UK pop charts in 1975.
5. The Wow Show was a group of performers on the early alternative comedy circuit, made up of Mark Arden, Lee Cornes, Mark Elliot and Stephen Frost.
2. THE INTERVIEW
Who were your early influences?
Up until I started, I used to listen to Connolly and Carrott and Max Boyce,2
and who else did I have on CD? Just like the sort of people that you’d see on the telly all the time, you know. You know, obviously TVs and albums were the only way of sort of seeing people. And obviously all of those shows where comics were on, like the Just for Laughs thing, and there was that show
Paramount City – things like that, you know. Yeah, so it wasn’t until I started
watching stuff like that - I then actually started reading about comedy.
So with people like Carrott and Connolly, what was it about them that you got into?
The obvious thing was the nature of what they did. The creativity of it, you know, I think that was the thing – the fact that they were being funny in a specific way to them. Rather that in that interchangeable way. And that came across, you know. Because when I was a kid, I used to really like Lenny Henry, you know. Because it was the sort of thing where he was on telly a lot, and you think, ‘Oh, he’s funny’. Then what I started to like more and more about those guys, certainly Connolly, was the fact that even though they were mainstream, they seemed like they had a kind of an attitude to them. They sort of felt authentic, even Carrott, kind of. Back in the day there was a sort of an edge to him, you know, you got the feeling that he wasn’t like a shiny-suited bloke. And stuff like Sweet and Sour Labrador (Carrott 1986) and Little
Zit on the Side (Carrott 1979), those books of his routines – you know, like,
there were some of those which obviously weren’t on TV, about him and Bev Bevan3 and all that. You sort of read those and there was something kind of a
bit rock and roll about him, you know. On TV he came across as sort of like a dad from Birmingham, but then you listened to ‘The Magic Roundabout’.4
And I think that was the thing that appealed to me about it, it was estab-lishment, but at the same time it wasn’t like middle of the road shit, you know. Which even the Comic Strip, you know those sort of Comic Strip lot, it was almost like they were these kind of edgy wild characters – they were edgy and wild compared to blokes in dicky bow ties doing chicken-in-a-basket clubs. Whereas actually, and I’ve got to be careful what I say, but a lot of them, or certainly the ones that made it, were kind of a bit middle of the road, you know. Whereas the real ones like Keith Allen and the guys from, like, the Wow Show5 and all that sort of stuff, they had that sort of edge to them.
You were also influenced by the American improvisational comedian Jonathan Winters. How did you come across his work?
From looking more towards America, you know. I mean basically like from reading about the American scene, and the amount of people who said he was influential on them, you know. And then, specifically Robin Williams going on about him, Robin Williams and Bill Cosby. I saw interviews with them where they were going, ‘This guy’s the man’, you know. And that made me go, ‘I should probably have a look at him!’ [laughs]
What was the north-east comedy scene like when you first started performing?
Well there were sort of two camps up there. There was Chirpy Chappies Comedy Café, which even saying it now sounds like something that somebody
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 8
9 6. Now a well-known
name on the national comedy circuit. 7. In Birmingham. 8. When alternative
comedy was starting off with the opening of the Comedy Store, the founding of Tony Allen’s Alternative Cabaret group, etc.
would make up for a bad film about stand-up, you know. Chirpy Chappies was run by Dave Johns, who at the time, because there was already a Dave Johns in Equity, was calling himself Ben E Cauthen, which is the weirdest stage name.
But anyway, so it was Dave Johns and he ran the Comedy Café and there were a few acts who were sort of good enough in his eyes to play, to be support acts there. And they were Mike Milligan, John Fothergill, Anvil Springstien, and Paul Sneddon (who was billed as Vladimir McTavish). They were sort of the main support acts, and he used to bring the acts up from London. He had headliners like Jo Brand, and Mark Lamarr, Mark Steel and people like that. And then on the other side of that was a ‘comedy collective’ (which is very of the time) a comedy collective called Near the Knuckle – who ran a club called the Crack Club. Anvil Springstien was in that, but then there was also Tony Mendoza, there was Steffen Peddie, the Big Fun Club (who were like a double act), and who else did you have in that? Oh, you had a double act called Scarboro and Thick, and for years I never got that that was a play on Morecambe and Wise. It’s like ‘Scarboro’ instead of ‘Morecambe’, ‘Thick’ instead of ‘Wise’. But what was funny about that was they would introduce themselves as Scarboro and Thick, he was Eric Scarboro, and he was Little Ernie Thick [laughs]. The younger guy must’ve been like in his early twenties, probably about 21, 22, but the two of them had met when they both worked in a factory, or an engineering place. The older one had sort of given up his job as an engineer, gone into teaching, and so you basically had an older guy, and then Little Ernie Thick, who worked in this factory, but he had a kind of punk sensibility. He was into punk and would play the guitar – so he was obviously like a punk with a day job. And they’d do the sort of double act stuff, and it can be revealed now, Little Ernie Thick then went solo and used his real name, and that’s Gavin Webster.6
And all the Near the Knuckle gigs were basically rooms in pubs, because at that point, the only purpose-built comedy was the Comedy Store in London – but then outside of London, that was around that time the Glee Club opened.7 Yeah
I think it might have been end of 1993 possibly when the Glee Club opened, and that was the first proper comedy club outside of London where it was like, ‘OK, we’ve got a dance floor afterwards, and proper seats’ rather than such-and-such a club at this venue. So anywhere that had a decent function room we’d start a comedy club there. Some of them lasted and then some of them you’d do a cou-ple of weeks and they’d just go, you know. But all of those acts were unlike, say, London, where already by the early 1990s there’d been ten years of stuff.
There wasn’t the idea of people going to comedy clubs, and we used to frequently get people, you know, older people, you’d be doing your stuff and they’d go, ‘Tell us a joke. You haven’t got any jokes mate.’ And all the time you’d sort of get asked – it was always the same thing – it’s like, ‘Do you tell jokes, or are you alternative?’ But it meant that we were doing a lot of differ-ent gigs, you know, like one night we did a working men’s club, and the next night was a function room, and then it might be a bit of a festival, you know, Stockton Festival, and there’d be like a marquee. It was very new and it was in effect what had happened in London ten years earlier.8
Do you think that because you came out of this nascent scene, and that you started at such a young age, that it affected your comedy style as it developed?
Yeah, definitely. Because there was so few acts up there, it was one of those things where, I think I got a compèring gig, it might’ve been like my third
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 9
10
9. A well-known competition for new stand-up comedians, established in 1988, which takes place at the Edinburgh Fringe.
gig or something. And like in London to get a job compèring you’d certainly have to be an absolute bulletproof sort of act, possibly even a headline act, in order for them to go, ‘Oh we’ll trust him.’ But when there are only a hand-ful of people, you know, we used to start clubs up, and I’d compère. And I also used to compère at the university, I’d do Newcastle University one week and Sunderland University the next, for when the acts would come up from London, and I got myself a gig as the regular host. I also used to compère down at the Comedy Shack in York.
But because of that, the idea of doing five minutes and honing it to get another gig, and honing it to try and get another gig in London, that was completely alien to me. My whole thing was, I’ve got to compère a show next week, there was the same audience the week before, so it was just the idea of new material, and sometimes doing quite a long time onstage. That meant that by the time I’d got to London, I got loads of work doing TV warm-ups, just because of that conversational thing of just having that high turnover of material. And then it went from sort of trying to have a high turnover in terms of writing jokes to just going on and going, ‘I’ve just got to be funny and entertain these people.’
So what was it like when you first moved down to London?
It was bizarre from the point of view that I went from earning money, you know, doing the gig and then getting paid, and feeling like it was my job – well, it was my job – to all of a sudden (and rightly so with hindsight), you know, basically being forced to become an open spot. Sort of almost starting again and having to do five-minute, ten-minute slots. Some of the open spot nights were like a competition, you know. There was a competition down at one of the clubs, and it was like they had heats, and you came back for the final; I won the heat and then I was beaten in the final by this guy. At the time I would quite like to have won, you know, because it would’ve speeded things along. And the guy who won, I’m sure now he’s not doing it any more, and I’m sure he sits there and goes, ‘You know, I once beat Noble in a comedy competition,’ and I think brilliant, I love the idea that his mates go, ‘Yeah, course you did!’ you know what I mean?
When was it that you actually moved down to London?
It was sort of early ‘95. But it was an odd thing that happened, because I was doing like these open-mike nights and all the rest of it, and from doing those, started getting people going, ‘Oh, he’s quite good, this bloke.’ But then my first agent, he was sort of scouting around looking for acts. He ran a comedy club down at Southend, and his mate, who he used to be in a band with, won So You Think You’re Funny9 and so he went, ‘I’ll manage you.’ So he set
himself up as a manager, then he went out scouting for acts. So he saw me at one of these things and basically went, ‘Can I get you some gigs?’ And then that’s what opened the floodgates for the equivalent of what I’d been doing in Newcastle but down here.
He was based in Essex, so a lot of these gigs were working in nightclubs in Essex, you know. I got a gig once where they launched Fosters Ice and the gig was I had to turn up to pubs, with these promotions people, and I had to host the night – and what it was, they had a big block of ice with bottle tops inside. And they would give punters hammers, and they had thirty seconds to hammer at the ice as hard as they could with these hammers, and then if they
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 10
11
got the bottle top out they won a free Fosters Ice or a T-shirt – it said what the prize was on the bottom of the bottle top. I was in these pubs in Essex with these real sort of like chavs hammering blocks of ice.
Yeah, so it was that sort of stuff, you know. One of the first warm-ups that I did was one for a thing called Gail’s Campus Capers, and it was like a game show around universities with a page three girl.
And a thing called Who’s Sorry Now? which was for Living TV and it was about couples, people who’d had grievances, and then at the end the audi-ence would decide their punishment – they’d spin a wheel and they would come up with what they had to do. Which actually worked out quite well because I ended up in the show, I went on there as a fake contestant. Like the day before, the people pulled out and they said, ‘Well we’ve got no one for tomorrow’s show, can you go into the audience and see if you can find some-body that’s had a grievance?’ Anyway, so no one wanted to do it and I went, ‘Well I’ll just do it, and pretend,’ and I went, ‘Does anyone else want to?’ and this girl put her hand up, she went, ‘I’m a drama student, I’ll pretend to be your girlfriend if you want.’
So we went on there and we filmed this show. I’m sitting there dressed in green and I’m going, ‘I’m obsessed with the colour green,’ and the audience members were going, ‘Why are you?’ It was the height of Jerry Springer, you know, so it’s like people were just going, ‘What is it about the colour green that you love?’ and I went, ‘Because green is Jesus’s colour.’ And this woman goes, ‘How is it Jesus’s colour?’ and I went, ‘Well, because you know he used to hang around with the fishermen, and the sea’s green.’ And this women went like, ‘The sea’s blue’ and I went, ‘Not at night’ [laughs]. And it went out on telly!
So it was all of that, you know. And then I got a gig doing the warm-up for GMTV, as their warm-up man in Spain for six weeks, as part of Fun in the
Sun. So every morning, I’d go down to the beach, and have three hours
enter-taining holiday makers, and then for about ten minutes of that three hours, Mr Motivator would make them dance, and then off we’d go, you know.
I can see how that experience of playing horrible gigs would give you a lot of good stage experience, but it could also really coarsen you artistically. It could just make you slam out anything that works, but it didn’t. You were actually a much more sur-real and creative comedian. How did you sustain your creativity during this time?
Well, because I was trying all the time to balance the two, you know. Because at that time I was firmly under the impression that if people didn’t go with what I was trying to do, it was because I wasn’t being funny enough! It wasn’t, it was because I was being a dickhead! That’s not fair, when you’re on a beach in Spain at six o’clock in the morning and people have just come out of their local nightclub, you know. I knew what I wanted to be doing, and that was me on the way there. So all the time there was that balancing act, because I never wanted to just be self-indulgent. My thing was I thought I wanna be able to go on and entertain any crowd. There comes a point where you sort of actually sort of go, ‘I don’t wanna entertain these people.’ But if they came to the gig they’ll be entertained, you know, it’s that.
It is them coming to you rather than you coming to them. You see a crowd and you say, ‘Well you’re this sort of crowd so I’ll do this sort of set to you.’ In a way that’s the wrong decision. You’ve got to try and make them come into your comic world.
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 11
12
Exactly. I got a gig once doing the warm-up for the Radio 1 Roadshow. I was probably 19 at the time, you know, and I was onstage in front of 8000 people in a park, and it was that thing of like, ‘All right. How’s this gonna work?’ you know. But I knew at the time – and I sort of sound like a lifestyle coach here – the way I lived my life at the time was as if I was in a montage in a film, you know. It was that thing of like, ‘Oh I’m on a beach. Now I’m in a club.’ And I looked at it from that point of view. And it didn’t matter how shitty it got.
I had this one warm-up gig: I used to hate doing it. Every Wednesday I used to just go, ‘Fucking hell, here we go again.’ A horrible time, and everyone on the staff was horrible to me. And you probably won’t be surprised, it was a Sky 1 chat show fronted by Richard Littlejohn. Yeah. Richard Littlejohn Live
and Unleashed. And I would turn up there. I’ll give you an idea of the guests,
one week it was Barbara Windsor and Mad Frankie Fraser! [laughs] And I was standing there going, ‘Why am I doing this?’ And six dwarves dressed as security guards walked past me. In the end I couldn’t give a shit what the show was, I’d just turn up and like as soon as I was needed I just walked on. And I was like, ‘Why are these dwarves dressed as security guards?’ Richard Littlejohn goes, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, tonight on the show, the Half Monty.’ And it was just after The Full Monty, and they basically were these dwarf strip-pers, they went out and did ‘You Can Leave your Hat on’. And then, I was stood there backstage as they walked off. So there wasn’t even seven of them, these six naked dwarves just walked past me, ‘All right’, ‘All right, that were a good one’, ‘N’night, son.’ Past they went, you know, these naked dwarves.
And I think if I ever write my autobiography, the warm-up years, what this woman said to me will be the chapter heading. I was in the green room and there was like a platter of sandwiches, and of course I was the first one into the green room ‘cos everyone else was getting their make-up off and eve-rything. There was like a selection of sandwiches and I picked out the prawn sandwiches, four prawn sandwiches. I put them on this plate. The secretary, right, not even one of the producers, the secretary came across, took them off my plate, slotted them back into the platter and said, ‘Don’t eat the prawn ones, you’re only the warm-up.’ [laughs]
So how did it get from that to the point where it was actually starting to work and you were able to do things much more on your own terms? Obviously the Perrier nomination in ’99 would have been a big thing.
It was funny because that was definitely a tipping point but it was a weird one, that. I think I was a little bit resentful of that at the time because the momentum had already started. The ball was rolling, and it was happening anyway – and the Perrier thing, it was almost like they rubber-stamped it just as it was going out the door, you know.
I went up to Edinburgh in ’96. ’96 was the year where I didn’t take any time off, I went a bit mental in ’96 ‘cos I was pretty much onstage more than I was off, like. I took seven days off in ’96, so it was just like non-stop gigs. It got to the point where I would finish a gig and I’d pretty much stay up all night and then go to bed in the daytime. I just lived this life of, you know, just gig to gig, sleeping on people’s floors and all the rest of it. I went up to Edinburgh and did like a package show with a few others.
In ’97, I didn’t go to Edinburgh but decided to leave it a year and then come back in ’98 and do my first solo show. But then around that sort of time, around sort of ’98, ’99, I started to notice that when I was playing clubs,
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 12
13
and especially when I was compèring places, I noticed I’d start to get a bit of a following from people coming back to the clubs, you know. So ’99, I went up and did Edinburgh, Perrier, and then that’s when all of a sudden it was like the papers started writing about it and, you know, that’s when it sort of publicity-wise spread a little bit.
So I went to comedy clubs on nights when there wasn’t a club on, so like say they did a Wednesday night, I’d be there on a Thursday or a Sunday and play the same venues but go, ‘This is just me on,’ you know. And ’99 also, that’s when I first went over to Oz, as well. So I quickly realized that if I did festivals, and then instead of just doing circuits gigs I would do gigs that were in circuit venues but I’d take them over, and in effect do a tour, you know. Link them up and advertise it as a tour, you know. So I did that, and then the next year, you know, the venues that had been a handful of people, now they were full, you know. And then went back to Edinburgh and moved up into sort of small theatres and arts centres. And then what started to happen, through word of mouth, because I wasn’t just an act on the bill, people were going, ‘Oh, you should see this bloke.’ Rather than trying to jump straight from the clubs into the 1000-seaters, which is what a lot of people were trying to do, they just thought, ‘I’ll get on telly and then fwhhoomf! I’m straight in there.’ I just started building like that, and the 100 became 200 and then 200 became 400. Then I would do two nights in a 400 or 500-seater, and then when it got to that point, that’s when I went, ‘Right, now it’s time to do 1000.’ Then before I knew where I was, it was the sort of thing where I’d managed to get into the touring theatre circuit without having to be a TV name, you know.
Ross Noble (courtesy of Ross Noble).
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 13
14
You must’ve been the first person to do that since Eddie Izzard.
Probably, yeah. Yeah, I would say so. And also the West End as well, like in 2003, you know, I booked a West End theatre, the Vaudeville, I’d done the Soho Theatre in London, and then moved into the Vaudeville and did two weeks there. Then the next year came back and did two weeks, then I did three weeks at the Garrick, and then I went and did four weeks at the Apollo. And then on top of that, I started to release the DVDs, which then had the thing of people who’d seen me on DVD but hadn’t seen me live, you know.
I find the success of the stand-up comedy DVD really interesting, because on the face of it, stand-up is such a live medium that the idea of recording of it seems paradoxi-cal in a way. Why do you think it works as a medium?
Well I think the bottom line is something’s better than nothing. There’s an interesting statistic that 40 per cent of all DVDs are sold at the very end of the year – from the middle of November to December. So they’ve replaced socks as the thing you get your dad, you know. There you go: DVDs are the new socks. And so that’s half of it. And then the other half thing is that you probably get more laughs-per-minute on a stand-up DVD than you would in a comedy film, you know. It’s a different thing, the laughs are much more blatant – the laughs in a comedy film are probably more subtle. Another part of it is the souvenir aspect of people going and seeing a tour, they have a great night, same as people buying an album from bands and so on.
But for me, the thing that I always found weird for my act personally was the idea of DVD – or any recording – being the definitive version. So mine are sort of like live albums, rather than some comics release a DVD and it’s like a studio album. They do the absolute definitive version. They record two nights and cut them together. You know, they hone the thing down on tour so that it’s incred-ibly tight. Whereas the benefit of DVD over VHS is the fact that you can have a couple of discs in there and you can pack so much stuff on there with all the extras and everything. I think the wrong way for me to do it would be to go, ‘I’ll try and do a definitive version of the show, and then that’s what people see.’
We film them and we don’t cut anything out, I leave it in warts and all, you know. Randomist is more of a box set than just a single DVD, you know, it’s a compilation rather than just a one–off. And I think that I’m probably the first person to really try and make the DVD a thing in itself. Basically what you normally get is a show and the chapter points on it if you’re lucky, you know. Whereas hopefully I think what’ll happen is, as a new generation of comics come through, they’ll look at the DVD and go, ‘Actually this is like an album, you know, it should be packed full of stuff.’
It’s bizarre because probably one of the most unlikely people to do a simi-lar thing is Jimmy Carr, you know. Somebody who is so tight – what he does is probably the tightest show you’ll see – has heaps of extras and does really unusual things with his extras, you know. When my DVD comes out, it’s the sort of thing where people know that they can watch the main show, there’ll be a documentary on there, there’ll be a bit of bonus stuff. It’s gonna keep them busy for ages, you know. They don’t just have to watch the same show over again, there’s different ones.
In order to produce your DVDs, with all the extras, you must have to document your work carefully.
Yeah, yeah, we film pretty much every show.
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 14
15 10. Two audio CDs,
released in 2001 and 2003, that were sold via Noble’s website.
You used to minidisc-record your shows as well, because you also put out two CDs early on.
That’s right, those Official Bootlegs, yeah.10
Do you think the desire to document is just to do with the possibility of commercial release, or because your stuff is unique every time?
The latter. I did find it quite hard for a while, I was finding it quite hard to sort of deal with the fact that I’d come off after a great show that had some great stuff in it and just go, ‘That’s gone.’ And still there’s not enough room on a DVD to put everything on.
So you’ve got an extraordinary archive somewhere with all of your recordings.
Yeah, just every show basically.
If you’ve got so much stuff, presumably cataloguing is going to become an issue. How do you know what you’ve got?
When we were doing the TV series that I’ve just made, where we knew we were going to have to use something from lots of the shows, my tour manager sits there every night and writes down what I’m doing. So I can cross refer-ence that and then find the tape. And then if we’re doing an extra and we go, ‘Oh we need that bit,’ usually I can sort of go, ‘Well I think I did, in that gig.’ We just sort of spool it through and try and find it. It’s all very haphazard. Even with a TV show, there’s two or three things that I went, ‘Oh, and we need to put that in,’ we just can’t find it. We know it happened at some point on the tour but we just don’t know where it is on the tape!
When you’re putting together a DVD, and certainly the TV show, we filmed all the offstage stuff, and filmed all the onstage stuff, and then it was about mixing between the two, you know, taking all those different elements and weaving them into a thing. And again, that’s not the way that people make TV programmes. They decide what they’re gonna make. They plan it out. They then do the bits that they’ve planned. And then they edit it the way they thought about it beforehand. They don’t go, ‘Right, we’re gonna make a TV series. It’s gonna have elements of this and elements of that. Let’s just turn the camera on and see what comes out of my mouth. And then take all those things and try and build something at the end.’ Because if you’ve got a good editor, like Pete Callow who I work with, you know, we sort of created this TV series in the way that you might create like a documentary film. But without necessarily knowing what the documentary’s about, you know.
When I put the DVDs together, it’s much the same. An extra on the new one is a short interview where I talk about stuff that people put on the stage and then we show little clips of that. The commentary is basically me sitting in a room with the thing playing in the background, just talking. Just a stream of consciousness, like the same as if I was onstage but with no feedback. So it’s probably a chance to see what the show would be if there was no sound-ing board from the audience. Just me talksound-ing. Literally just sittsound-ing there just talking to myself, you know. And there’s bits of it which are laugh-out-loud funny, you know, because I keep one eye on the engineer, and there are bits where he’s holding his sides laughing. And then there are other bits that are just really, really boring, you know. I would say out of the two hours of com-mentary there’s probably a good half an hour in there that – if you actually
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 15
16
11. A film of this routine can be seen on Noble (2005). An audio recording of a different performance of the same routine can also be heard on Noble (2003). 12. See Noble (2006). 13. Because of his
improvisational approach, even Noble’s prepared material is constantly changing and evolving. So by the time he came back from touring Australia, the whole show had evolved to the point where it was completely different from the previous UK tour. For more on this, see Double 2005: 241.
edited out the shitty bits – that’s actually really funny laugh-out-loud stuff, you know. So that in itself kind of creates a new thing, you know. It creates a new show if you like. It’s a different type of show.
When you put a DVD out there, sometimes routines capture the audience’s imagina-tion and they take on a life beyond you with people quoting them to each other. Your ‘Muffins’ routine is a good example.11 Have you been aware of this?
Yeah, like people, kids actually, sort of shout stuff at me. That’s weird. Sometimes just a daft thing that you’ve said. The most obvious one, I actu-ally talked about it on the last tour, was when I broke my wrist and the ambulance men turned up, one of them said, ‘Do your Stephen Hawking impersonation.’ And my wrist was broken, I was in agony, I had to have an operation and pins in my arm and everything, and the first thing they said was like, ‘Great, can you do your Stephen Hawking impersonation?’ I was like, ‘I just need painkillers,’ you know. But I was at a Starbucks and I was looking at the muffins, just ‘cos I wanted a muffin, and I looked up and the guy just went, ‘Are you Ross Noble?’ and I went, ‘Yeah,’ and he just walked off into the kitchen.
The thing that I love the most, and the reason I love this so much is that I was like this with things myself, is when people say to me, ‘Me and my mates, when we’re hanging around, always say …’ and it could be something like the thing about the owl, tucking in the owl, you know, like ‘Can you tuck me in?’12 You know, like when you like get teenagers and stuff, going, ‘We always
go, “Can you tuck me in?”’
Moving on to your live work, different comics work in different ways in terms of preparing for a show, but given that so much of what you do is in the moment, how do you prepare for it?
Well, there was one show where there was no preparation at all. There was one show where literally the tour was booked, started on the first night and I had no jokes. [laughs] Just went, ‘All right, here we go! Yeah! Um …’
I used to just do it where I’d tour Australia, come back and start again, you know.13 And then the past couple of years, I’d go up to Scotland, and I’d go up
to the Highlands and Islands. It’s less about sort of coming up with a show, and more about just getting up to match fitness, you know. Just mentally – well, physically as well as mentally – just being in that headspace. ‘Cos even with, like, improv, it’s not necessarily about the speed of the invention, it’s about the application of it. And pace as well. When you get on tour, there’s a thing of feeling the energy of an audience – not so much if it’s going badly but if it’s going well – there’s a skill in it. If you haven’t done a gig in a while, like at the start of a tour, there’s a danger that you’re just hammering through it, and you do a bit too long maybe in the first half, rather than realizing that you’ve got to pace yourself over the show. And it’s about that, you know, you can sort of tire an audience out. The pace, if you like, that’s just as important a skill – a muscle – to exercise as anything else.
And of late, what I’ve been doing is, I’ll take time off over the sort of December, January time; but there’s a little music venue that used to be an old abattoir. Fairly small room, there’s like a bar out the front; then there’s a room out the back. Because it was an abattoir it’s got a sloping floor. It’s got all tatty old sofas and dining chairs and stuff. You’ll have probably about 100 people in and I’ll do that every Sunday, while I’m off, even though I’m on holiday.
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 16
17
I host the show and just get a few comics in. It’s just out of Melbourne, and it’s the sort of thing where we don’t advertise it. People who know where it is can come along, but you have to get there really early to get in. You know, it’s one of those things where then I could start a tour and it’s like the one tour’s just continued.
You mentioned getting into the headspace, and it seems to me that having watched you live and also on DVD, it’s not just about invention, but it’s also about being aware of which things to go for, if you know what I mean – which particular word, which combination of ideas to really develop and really exploit and run with and build. To me, that does seem to be an attitude of mind as much as anything else. It’s almost as if you have the ability to have that frame of mind that everybody has every now and again, that one little golden moment, where you’re suddenly being really funny and inventive, but it just lasts a second and then it’s gone. But with you, it is two hours every night. So that must be an interesting thing to experience on a regular basis.
You know, I’m not into drugs, but I can come offstage having had a great gig where everyone has thought it’s great, and sort of go, ‘Yeah. Not so much.’ Like, an audience could be in hysterical laughter for the whole show and give me a standing ovation at the end, but that’s only part of it. But yeah, even when it’s only all right, you know, it’s still as much fun probably if not more fun for me than it is for the audience, you know. And it’s a weird one because it’s not, say, like a drug where anyone can take it and feel that feeling, you know. It’s really quite a sort of intoxicating thing, you know.
I totally agree with you that the best comedy isn’t just about making people laugh, it’s about something else – but what is that for you?
It’s lots of different things, you know. It’s about – if I was getting really sort of analytical about it – physical precision. From doing it onstage, I can fall over on a hard floor and not hurt myself. It happened while I was in Toronto, I fell, but it’s one of those things where as I fell, you do the sort of parachute roll thing, you can land on your back, but as you go down you can land on those bits there [indicates back of upper arms] and you absorb it, but it looks like you’ve fallen flat. I fell on the floor but it was too realistic. There was a moment like where they all went, ‘Fuck, he’s genuinely fallen over.’ I was waiting for the audience, as I was falling I went, ‘As soon as my body hits the floor …’ It’s like a bang is the cue for laughter. You know, there is, like, triggers for things. Right, bang. And as I hit the floor, I went bang, and it was like – beat – that’s when it should have been. And the audience went, ‘Huurr.’ I realized – like they laughed – but there should have been a laugh and a round of applause. It was too realistic. So that takes the edge off it, you know, the show’s now only a 99.
It’s all those little elements as well of when you play around, when you say something sarcastic that people don’t realize it’s sarcasm, that can take the edge off it, you know. You know, when you do something like, when an audience doesn’t realize you’re joking about something. And even though the audience are applauding and standing and going, ‘Hooray!’ and in their heads they’re going, ‘Oh, it couldn’t get better, that show,’ in your head you’re going, ‘It’s only 64, that,’ you see what I mean? But that’s good, because it means when you get one that’s up there, you go, ‘Fair enough,’ you know.
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 17
18
3. CLOSING THOUGHTS
A number of interesting contradictions emerge during the course of the inter-view. Noble’s early experiences in the Newcastle comedy scene of the early 1990s have led him to prefer the rough and authentic to the slick and pack-aged, yet he clearly puts great amount of thought and effort into his work. His DVDs are commercial products, but he has applied his intelligence and crea-tivity to explore the potential of this comparatively new medium, and in doing so has found a way of documenting his work which is every bit as effective as the documentation produced by any avant-garde theatre company or live art-ist. He rightly shuns the idea of there being a definitive version of his shows, instead presenting the film of one main performance alongside footage from many other shows.
He understands that there is more to stand-up comedy than just get-ting laughs, and these extra elements are necessary for him to be fully satis-fied by his performances. Working as a compère and a TV warm-up man has led him to understand the necessary contradiction in stand-up between following his own humour and artistic ambitions and pleasing the audi-ence. Without the audience as a sounding board, his DVD commentaries have ‘shitty bits’ that are ‘really, really boring’ alongside the moments that are ‘laugh-out-loud funny’. However, in his live work, by collaborating and interacting with the audience, he improvises surreal trains of thought, enacted with such physical precision that what he does is as much art as entertainment.
REFERENCES
Allen, Tony (2004), A Summer in the Park: A Journal of Speakers’ Corner, London: Freedom Press.
Carrott, Jasper (1986), Sweet and Sour Labrador, London: Arrow Books. Carrott, Jasper (1979), A Little Zit on the Side, London: Arrow Books.
Double, Oliver (1994), ‘Laughing all the Way to the Bank? Alternative Comedy in the Provinces’, New Theatre Quarterly, 10:39, pp. 255–62.
Double, Oliver (2005), Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy, London: Methuen.
Maxwell, Dominic (2005), ‘I’m brilliant. A very funny man’, The Times (Features; The Knowledge), 15 October, p. 23.
Noble, Ross (2003), The Official Bootlegs – Part 2, London: Stunt Baby Productions.
Noble, Ross (2005), Sonic Waffle, London: Stunt Baby Productions. Noble, Ross (2006), Randomist, London: Stunt Baby Productions.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Double, O. (2010), ‘Not the definitive version: an interview with Ross Noble’,
Comedy Studies 1: 1, pp. 5–19, doi: 10.1386/cost.1.1.5/1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Following a career as a comedian and comedy promoter in the 1980s and 1990s, Oliver Double now works as a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent. He is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 18
19
Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005). He has
also written chapters and articles on comedy, cabaret, Variety theatre and punk. His stand-up comedy DVD Saint Pancreas, produced as part of a practice-as-research project, is available from the University of Kent website.
Contact: Eliot College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NS. E-mail: [email protected]
COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 19
afl]dd][lZggck
Afl]dd][lL`]Eadd$HYjfYddJgY\$>ak`hgf\k$:jaklgd$:K).+B?$MCtooo&afl]dd][lZggck&[get=%eYad2gj\]jk8afl]dd][lZggck&[ge KdYhkla[c[ge]\qakl`]hjaeYjqeg\] g^h]j^gjeYf[]^gj[dgofk$Yf\af K]jagmkHdYqH]Y[g[c]phdgj]kl`] ]ngdmlagfgn]jl`]hYkl-(q]Yjkg^ l`akmfaim]ZjYf\g^h`qka[Yd[ge]\q& L`jgm_`YfYfYdqkakg^[dgofaf_afY jYf_]g^k]llaf_kÇl`]Ylj]k$[aj[mk]k$ `gkhalYdk$j]^m_]][YehkYf\[`mj[`]k ÇH]Y[g[cg^^]jkY^jYe]ogjc^gjl`] ]nYdmYlagfg^[dgofaf_Yf\]pYeaf]k l`]l`]jYh]mla[hgl]flaYdg^l`] [ge]\a[h]j^gjeYf[]& L`akakl`]ÕjklZggclg]phdgj] [dgofaf_n]fm]kYf\klqd]kafda_`lg^ HdYqL`]gjq$af[dm\af_[gehYjakgfk g^ljY\alagfYd[dgof[ge]\qYf\ [gfl]ehgjYjq[aj[mk]kdac];ajim]\m Kgd]ad$Yf\[gfka\]jk^Yegmk[dgofk FgdYJY]Yf\KdYnYHgdmfaf&K]jagmk HdYqYdkghjgna\]kYml`gjalYlan] \]Õfalagfkg^[dgofkYf\[dgof h]j^gjeYf[]klqd]k$eYcaf_l`ak Yf]kk]flaYdj]Y\^gjk[`gdYjkg^ H]j^gjeYf[]Klm\a]k Dgmak]H]Y[g[cakD][lmj]jaf<jYeYYll`] Mfan]jkalqg^@mdd& :qDgmak]H]Y[g[c AK:F1/0)0,)-(*,)( HYh]jZY[c**,hh ),&1-t +( COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 20 COST 1.1_art_double_05-20.indd 20 1/15/10 8:44:55 AM1/15/10 8:44:55 AM21 Comedy Studies
Volume 1 Number 1
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/cost.1.1.21/1
KEYWORDS
comic performance adult-child interaction Child Directed Speech
(CDS) repetition incongruity nonsense superiority comic interplay
IAN WILKIE AND MATTHEW SAXTON
Institute of Education, University of London
The origins of comic
performance in
adult-child interaction
ABSTRACT
We argue that the essence of comic performance, in act and interpretation, is intrinsi-cally located in early adult-child interaction. We focus in particular on the special reg-ister used by parents with their young children: Child Directed Speech (CDS). We show how characteristics of CDS contribute to comic understanding in the child from very early on in life. Smiling and laughter emerge within the context of adult-child interac-tion, typified by a focus on the ‘here-and-now’ and the use of comic devices, which include surprise, familiarity, repetition, incongruity and nonsense. Cognitive develop-ment is, in fact, encouraged and enhanced through the use of comic interpretation – in the superiority gained through the grasping of concepts; the enjoyment of language based humour discovered in puns and jokes; and in the confounding of expectation. This article suggests that early parent-child interaction constitutes the blueprint for comic performance itself and that the quality of interaction between parent and child echoes the conditions for successful interplay between comedian and audience.
OVERVIEW
This article considers the origins of comic performance. We argue that the appreciation of comedy and aspects of comic performance find their roots in
COST 1.1_art_wilkie and saxton_21-32.indd 21
22
the unique form of interaction witnessed between parents and their children. Adults modify their speech in myriad ways when addressing infants and tod-dlers. They adopt a special register, known as Child Directed Speech (CDS), typified by a wide range of adaptations and simplifications (Saxton 2009). Compared with normal discourse, sentences tend to be shorter and gram-matically simpler, while the vocabulary chosen is concrete and confined to the child’s interests. The linguistic modifications on display in CDS serve to facilitate both communication and language development. They also provide the basis for the child to learn about humour and comic performance from the first weeks of life. In what follows, we describe the earliest signs of comic appreciation in infancy and consider how specific features of Child Directed Speech contribute to the development of comic performance from non-verbal through to verbal humour. We demonstrate that humour and laughter are intrinsic aspects of successful interaction between mother and child. We also show how the style of adult-infant interaction can be seen as the foundation of comic performance adopted by professional comedians.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SMILING AND LAUGHTER
Newborn infants can smile, in the sense that the corners of the mouth curl up, just days after birth, but mostly this occurs when they are either very drowsy or even asleep. In the following weeks, infants begin to smile when awake, but in an indiscriminate way, at both people and things. It is not until about six to ten weeks of age that genuinely social smiling emerges (Emde & Harmon 1972); the baby responds to another person’s smile with a smile of their own, and begins to initiate smiling also, in a process which only emerges through social interaction with other people. We know this from studies of blind infants, who often fail to progress spontaneously to social smiling (Fraiberg 1974). Once reciprocal smiling emerges, parents begin to feel notably more engaged, while the infant, in turn, begins to show signs of joy, a new emotion, when inter-acting with others. Soon afterwards, from twelve to nineteen weeks of age, laughter appears, generally in response to very active stimulation by the parent. For example, laughter can be induced by simple games of ‘I’m gonna get you!’ which might culminate in blowing a raspberry on the baby’s cheek. Laughter can also be induced by a vigorous pitch or unexpected tone of voice. As it hap-pens, CDS, when directed at infants in the first year of life, sounds quite differ-ent from normal speech (Garnica 1977). A relatively high pitch is ldiffer-ent colour by exaggerated, swooping intonation contours, which are designed to grab the infant’s attention. At the same time they can prompt delight and laughter in the child. Thus, Rasmussen reports of his daughter that at ‘one hundred and sixty-two days old he could always make her laugh by asking: “Can you laugh a little at father?” pitching his voice on high notes’ (Rasmussen 1920). Van Leeuwen describes the process of CDS, revealing many of the key features of proto-comic performative interplay, in a transcript of a mother interacting with her 12-week old baby during a research project on ‘toys as communication’:
Mother: ‘What’s that? … (excited high-pitched voice) What’s thaaat? …’ She holds up the rattle and shakes it.
Mother: ‘Who are they? What are they? They are funny ones ….’ She moves the rattle close to her ear again, shaking one of the charac-ters and listening to it.
Mother: ‘This is a nice one … Oooh! This is a squeaky one!’
COST 1.1_art_wilkie and saxton_21-32.indd 22
23
She squeaks him again. The baby shakes her arms and legs vigorously and looks on intently.
Mother: ‘Oooh … (creating a voice for the alien) Ho-ho-ho. It’s like a dragon.
(She continues, using the ‘aliens’ as puppets, creating sounds for them, making them wiggle, ‘walk’ across the baby’s tummy, caress the baby’s cheek, and so on).
(van Leeuwen 2005: 84–86)
SURPRISE AND FAMILIARITY
From the very first, attempts to provoke smiling or laughter in an infant are characterized by an element of surprise. In this vein, Darwin relates his exchange with his 3½-month-old child who was ‘exceedingly amused by a pinafore being thrown over his face and then suddenly withdrawn, and so he was when I suddenly uncovered my own face and approached him’ (Darwin 1872: 289). Our response to being surprised in this way persists into adult-hood, as we experience ‘the physiological squeal of transient delight, like an infant playing “peek-a-boo”’ (Critchley 2002: 10).
We see that an element of surprise is critical in triggering a comic response in both infants and adults. Comic triggers tend to be more vigorous than other forms of adult-child interaction, with parents engaging in exaggerated vocal play and facial expressions. A playful attitude is signalled by the introduction of absurdity and incongruity. This kind of early interaction is not only wide-spread but finds official sanction in advice dispensed by the National Health Service: ‘Put out your tongue and make funny faces. Your baby may even try to copy you! … Your baby is learning all about expression, mood and com-munication’ (Welford 1999: 124).
Surprise functions as a trigger for laughter, but not just any kind of sur-prise in any context. Arguably, an event is rendered both surprising and humorous by the occurrence of incongruity presented within a familiar set-ting. Sully observed the importance of surprise, rather than shock, more than a century ago:
Provocatives [sic] of laughter … were sudden movements of one’s head, a rapid succession of sharp staccato sounds from one’s vocal organ (when these were not disconcerting by their violence) and, of course, sudden reappearance of one’s head after hiding in a game of bo-peep.
(Sully 1896: 407)
The infant as an audience for comic performance needs to feel secure with the performer, typically a parent or family member. Infant and parent are typically bonded by familiarity and feelings of positive affect, so the setting for early comic performance is generally ideal. In a similar way, the success of comic per-formance in adulthood is also predicated on familiarity with the performer. The audience must in some way recognize the comic actor or the character they play. Of course, many comic characters are created with the deliberate intention to caricature unattractive traits. In this vein, one might mention Basil Fawlty’s iras-cibility, David Brent’s insensitivity, Rigsby’s cravenness, or Edina’s rampant ego-mania. But personality flaws do not prevent one from liking either the character, or more subtly, the actor portraying the character. Thus, Thomson suggests that
COST 1.1_art_wilkie and saxton_21-32.indd 23
24
‘it is not simply that we like the actor in spite of the character, rather that, in defiance of our own moral judgment, we like the character because of the actor’ (Thomson 2000: 131). Whether or not the audience likes the actor (or their char-acter), a sense of familiarity with the performance is, arguably, essential. In the same way, the infant will only laugh when they are both familiar and com-fortable with the performer. This is what Jean-Pierre Jeancolas refers to as the ‘reassuring’ element in comedy (Jeancolas 1992: 141). Accordingly, J.B. Priestley notes that:
The people to whom we are bound by real affection are always, to some extent, comic characters, and we begin to feel this in childhood. (We are always glad to see Uncle Joe or Aunt May but they can’t help being rather funny).
(Priestley 1976: 9)
Morreall notes that ‘babies enjoy peekaboo only with familiar faces of peo-ple they feel attached to’ (Morreall 1987: 135). By six months, infants begin to demonstrate an ability to distinguish between well-known versus strange faces (Sandstrom 1966: 173). And it is the familiar faces that evoke laughter.
If the reassuring context is absent, neither the young child nor the adult will be amused. For instance, the child’s first encounter with a jack-in-the box is just as likely to terrify as to amuse, unless it is introduced carefully, with some preparation by the caregiver that the new object will be a source of fun. In essence, the child must learn that the toy is not threatening and is, in contrast, comical: the surprise which then ensues is more likely to be pleasant. Circus clowns also exemplify this point, in as much as many children seem to be scared by clowns – giving rise to the dedicated phobia known as coulro-phobia. Perhaps the outlandish make-up creates an image of the human face that is excessively unfamiliar to young children. Events differ in their degree of novelty and hence in the extent to which the element of surprise they embody is amusing, rather than frightening. And often, the transition from comedy to alarm is quite subtle, as Hazlitt observed in 1885:
If we hold a mask before our face, and approach a child with this dis-guise on, it will at first, from the oddity and incongruity of the appear-ance, be inclined to laugh; if we go nearer it, steadily, and without saying a word, it will begin to be alarmed … it is usual to play with infants, and make them laugh by clapping your hands suddenly before them; but if you clap your hands too loud, or too near their sight, their countenances immediately change and they hide them in the nurse’s arms.
(Hazlitt 1885: 5)
It becomes apparent that the manner of the interaction is as important as the action itself. We see this point confirmed in verbal, as well as non-verbal humour. With puns or gags, the way in which the joke is told is essential in the realization of the comic potential. As the comedian Frank Carson would have it: ‘it’s the way I tell ‘em’.
INCONGRUITY
Incongruity is a fundamental feature of comic performance. And the ele-ment of surprise discussed above is an essential ingredient in the creation
COST 1.1_art_wilkie and saxton_21-32.indd 24
25
of incongruity. But so, too, is the familiar setting in which the surprise takes place. For an event to be incongruous, audience expectations must be confounded. It follows, therefore, that the ability to compare (however unconsciously) the expected with the unexpected is an essential ingredient in appreciating a joke or piece of slapstick (Morreall 1987: 130). For the infant, the ability to recognize the unexpected as the unexpected is therefore essential. In fact, research over the past 25 years has consistently shown that infants are attuned to unexpected events from the very first weeks of life (e.g., Cashon & Cohen 2000).
By the use of deception, infants can be presented with ‘magical’ events which defy the laws of physics or logic. For example, a drawbridge can be raised in front of an attentive infant, and, via illusion, can apparently ‘pass through’ a solid object (Baillargeon, Spelke & Wasserman 1985). On such occasions, infant behaviour betokens their sensitivity to the incongruity of the situation. They look longer or suck more vigorously on a dummy, and their heart rates increase when observing impossible events. This basic finding has been replicated dozens of times and the research method is now known as the ‘violation of expectation’ paradigm. It would seem that we are equipped from the very start with a key ingredient in the appreciation of comic perform-ance: a sense of the incongruous.
Writing in the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer was well aware of the importance of incongruity in inducing laughter:
The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which can be seen through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expres-sion of this incongruity.
(Schopenhauer 1909: 52)
Similarly, Kierkegaard noted that surprise is present in any ‘contradiction’ that, in turn, leads to a perception of incongruity (which must contain its own innate truth or ‘absurdity to itself’ (Kierkegaard 1941: 460)). This perception then leads to laughter. But why should laughter be the response, when faced with incongruity? The answer to this question is much more mysterious, but the sense of relief, or release, which people feel when they ‘get’ a joke may hold the key, even for the infant:
Research has shown we instinctively recognise these ‘incompatible con-texts’ in the first year of life … research shows that if a mother crawls towards the edge of the cot the baby will laugh because it interferes with the convention that babies crawl, mothers walk … Laughter is essential because it provides a cognitive respite.
(Hale cited in Skatssoon 2006)
THE HERE-AND-NOW
Adult-child interaction is rooted in the here-and-now. In fact, it might be argued that nothing else is possible (Saxton 2009). The typical one- or two-year-old is incapable of discussing ideas and concepts remote in time and space. Their interest is instead devoted to concrete actions and objects within their immedi-ate orbit. In fact, five topics tend to dominimmedi-ate the conversation of very young
COST 1.1_art_wilkie and saxton_21-32.indd 25
26
children: clothes; parts of the body; family; food; animals (Ferguson 1977). An adult who attempted something more ambitious, say some treatise on stock market prices or global warming, would be met with a blank stare. The adult is forced to follow the child’s interests and concentrate on matters of interest in the child’s immediate environment. Comedians also often draw their audience into a world that is rooted in the moment, as noted by Bruce: ‘Comedians drew on a repertoire of techniques which broke any theatrical illusion and rooted the experience in the here and now – they engaged directly with their audiences, ad-libbed, used catch-phrases and so on’ (Bruce 1999: 83).
LANGUAGE-BASED HUMOUR
At the age of about 12 months, most children utter their first word and the subsequent shift into a world of language takes off with remarkable speed. By the time of the child’s third birthday they can string multi-word sen-tences together. By the age of five, the typical child possesses a vocabulary of about 6,000 words and possesses most of the basic grammatical machin-ery for understanding and producing complex sentences (Saxton, in press). In tandem with this exponential linguistic growth comes a rising appreciation in the child for language-based humour. The development of a sense of humour seems to parallel the child’s linguistic development (Morreall 1987: 217). In verbal language play
the sort of language play that leads to puns is thought to serve an impor-tant function in the development of a child’s language and communica-tion skills … the greater source of pleasure seems to be the interaccommunica-tion with the carer or researcher … in this case ‘telling’ the joke … seems to make the children feel exhilarated at their new power to amuse their adult carer.
(Carr and Greeves 2006: 31)
Children on the threshold of language take great delight in onomatopoeia, simple wordplay and puns (Moustaka 1992). We find here an echo in the use of catchphrases by many comedians: instantly recognizable triggers for a comic response. Dave Willis’ ‘way, way uppa kye’ is particularly childlike and was, in fact, taken verbatim from an utterance made by his own son, Denny, when a young child (House 1986: 67). Tommy Morgan’s catchphrase was similarly childlike, with onomatopoeic qualities: ‘clairty, clairty,’ mean-ing ‘dirty, dirty’ (Irvmean-ing 1977: 29). Arthur Askey’s ‘hello playmates’ or Bernie Winter’s ‘hello choochy face’ are further appeals to the childlike state. In a similar way, playground chants and rhymes, with their reliance on rhythm and vernacular language, are often resonant of comedians’ catchphrases. In Scotland, for example, one finds so-called stottin rhymes, as in: ‘Ruglen’s wee roon rid lums reek briskly’ (this translates as ‘Rutherglen’s small, round, red chimneys smoke copiously’ (Mackie 1973: 102)). Freud states in Jokes and their
Relation to the Unconscious,
it is also generally acknowledged that rhymes, alliterations, refrains and other forms of repeating similar verbal sounds which occur in verse, make use of the same source of pleasure – the rediscovery of something familiar.
(Freud 1964: 122)
COST 1.1_art_wilkie and saxton_21-32.indd 26
