Josie Long: the Funhouse interview

In the past few months, there have been some Funhouse “projects” I've wanted to get back to. Following the passing of my dad (see below), I also realized that several topics went unheralded here on the blog. One of those was an interview I conducted with British comedian Josie Long while she was performing her show Cara Josephine in NYC late last year.

I plan to air the interview on the Funhouse TV show with applicable clips from Josie's standup and TV appearances. I had, however, posted two really interesting clips on YouTube shortly after our chat, as a preview of the conversation.

Both questions I chose to post have to do with the U.K. comedy scene. The first found me asking her to recommend names of other U.K. comics we may not have heard of over here but certainly have “access” to via YT. She was more than happy to supply a list of her favorites (keep in mind we'd already mentioned Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, Robin Ince, and Simon Munnery, so their names aren't in this list).

The second question was one I know that Josie is not fond of, namely the position of women in the world of standup. I thought it was worth discussing the question itself, though, in light of the fact that in the U.S. the easiest route to mainstream acceptance for female standups is if they are cute and discuss sex in great detail (Sarah Silverman, Whitney Cummings, Amy Schumer, and now Nikki Glaser).

In the U.K., however, Josie and her fellow women standups (Bridget Christie, Isy Suttie, Maeve Higgins) do material about more interesting, esoteric, and socially committed topics. I know there are many American women standups who do not go the “did you ever hear of a Dirty Sanchez?” sex-talk route (I brought up Maria Bamford, who is much worthier of attention than the dirty-talk crowd), but I think it is interesting that the ones who emphasize that sort of material wind up getting the biggest showcases on premium cable (presumably because men will watch *that* kind of women comedian).

Josie's statements on this topic are wonderfully eloquent, and take into consideration not only the standup audience's demands, but those of the premium-cable “taste makers.”

More British humor to come...

British humor 10: Simon Munnery

We should’ve heard of this guy by now. Simon Munnery is one of the most unique standup comics currently working — and extremely funny to boot — and yet Americans have no idea who he is. I’ll try to offer a “101” in this entry, which will also allow me to revisit my favorite Munnery moments and lines.

The latter element, his “lines,” is perhaps the single most unique thing about him. For, besides being a great character comic and a brilliant “mad professor” of comedy concepts, Munnery is one of the only modern standups who regularly includes humorous aphorisms in his act.

Yes, aphorisms — sayings. I’ll call them maxims, because perhaps that might not make the reader run away, thinking that Simon’s sayings are of the “a penny saved is a penny earned” variety. Instead he was written a number of maxims that are not one-liner, set-up/punchline jokes; they are also not the kind of surreal observations that are the meat of the great Steven Wright’s act.

The closest equivalent we’ve had in America are Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts,” and even those (which I love) still function along the lines of surreal jokes. Munnery’s humorous maxims are, dare I say it, damned close to the kinds of things Oscar Wilde came up with in his day — perhaps it’s the caustic edge, but do not despair, for Munnery is not an artist in the strictest sense (that would seem to imply he's not entertaining). He is a comedian, albeit sui generis.

So reviewers struggle to describe what he does (as I am now). He responded by musing on how the worst thing you can call a comedian’s show is “close to art”:

I was hesitant to run through a number of his maxims (they are copyrighted material) until I considered the fact that many of them are on YouTube in his performance clips and that there are pages like this one that contain dozens of them. Thus, my 16 favorite maxims — I have tried not to duplicate some of the ones that are available in several places on the Net and ones that work only if spoken verbally (“If you want to take offense, take offense. If you want to build a wall, get some bricks.”)

MUNNERY MAXIMS:

Do not punish yourself, you deprive the world of its purpose.

All men are brothers. Hence war.

What should one say after making love? Thank you seems too much. I’m sorry — not enough.

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” said Shakespeare. “ I say, “Wank!” Thus I win.

Behind every great man there lies a great woman. And one in front of him as well if he’s lucky.

It is said that at the age of 55 each man becomes what he most despised at the age of 25. I live in constant fear lest I become badly organized trip to Bournemouth.

Have you anything to say? No? Then shut up. Unless you are a woman, in which case carry on — it’s delightful.

It is the vanity of women to spend hours in front of a mirror. It is the vanity of men not to bother.

If you only read one book in your life… I highly recommend you keep your mouth shut.

To the Italians I say this. “Rome wasn’t built in a day. Perhaps it could have been if you spoke less with your arms.”

Without a deadline I do nothing. With a deadline I do nothing. I do nothing until the deadline is upon me, then I panic. Which is doing nothing quickly. When the deadline has passed I begin work on my excuses.

Perhaps it was women who invented kissing — to stop men’s mouths.

Your importance in this world is incalculable. Now get some sleep.

Does pornography degrade women? Or does it merely raise the standard by which they are judged?

Whatever it says in the Bible the truth remains: You can read the Bible and dismiss it as nonsense if you like; you can dismiss it as nonsense without reading it to save time if you prefer.

A million monkeys were given a million typewriters. It’s called the Internet.

****

If you like the above, Simon is selling his book of aphorisms How to Live at his website. I am a proud owner of this strange little book.

Munnery is also a very talented “character comedian.” One of his first characters — which he performed onstage, on TV, and in a radio series — was a lunk-headed anarchist who called himself “Alan Parker, Urban Warrior.”

Alan is a uniquely British creation, as young Americans (on the whole — thankfully there are exceptions), are not politically motivated enough to be satirized. Munnery created Parker as an amalgam of people he’d encountered and made certain that the character does have a thoroughly consistent philosophy that of course makes absolutely no sense. Get a dose of Alan here (from ’94):

Here he is live, in 1993:

The 1993-94 radio show “29 Minutes of Truth” with Munnery as “APUW” and Stewart Lee as his dim-witted bandmate is available for download at the fistoffun.net site. Like all the radio projects done by Lee, Herring, and their chums, it’s top-notch stuff. Alan also hosted a failed TV pilot, “London Shouting,” that counted among its guests Super Furry Animals.

Simon also decided that security guards needed their own standup routine, so he created a security guard comedian who exclusively tells jokes that people in that profession would find funny (what was it I was saying about him being a very unusual performer?). Here he does his security guard-specific standup in 2007.

Simon also played a Cockney newsstand hawker who offers a meditation on people who wear buckets on their heads. This links to his weirdest creation, standup “Billy Buckethead.” This isn’t one of my favorite Munnery bits, but it’s characteristically bizarre (and seemingly was *not* inspired by the American guitarist who wears a KFC bucket on his head). The full act that featured this character outlined a world in which everyone goes around with buckets on their heads (it’s available on an MP3 on Simon’s site).

For my money, Simon’s ultimate incarnation is “The League Against Tedium.” The League is a gentleman decked out in what looks like a military outfit (a renegade admiral) who wears a top hat and is dripping with loathing for everyone he encounters. The League is here to tell you that “you are nothing!” It’s a brave comic gambit, but Munnery is, again, an incredibly brave performer.

What makes the League so goddamned memorable is that Munnery made him subject of a TV series that I consider one of his greatest achievements — although Simon himself seems to partially dismiss it in recent interviews. Believe me, there has never been another show as willfully weird and cynically funny as the 2001 six-episode League Against Tedium series Attention, Scum.

Directed by Stewart Lee (him again!), the show is extremely hard to describe because it consists of a number of equally odd elements. First and foremost the League visits English towns and preaches to crowds about how inferior they are from the back of a truck. He also dispenses his special brand of acidly sarcastic wisdom (herein enters the aphorisms).

Add to this framework a number of equally discordant elements and you have what I described on the Funhouse TV show as “the perfect alien comedy.” Upon first seeing the show I felt as if I’d been dropped into another (far wittier, belligerently bizarre) universe. Punctuating Simon’s segments are odd sketches, including “24-hour news from a man who’s been up for 24 hours” (the brilliant raw-nerve comic Johnny Vegas), short gag sequences set in a field that are reminiscent of Spike Milligan’s visual work (in films like Lester’s “The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film”), and “Kombat Opera,” musical sequences featuring poetically vulgar arias performed by Lori Lixenberg accompanied by composer Richard Thomas (who gave us the Jerry Springer and Anna Nicole operas — and for some reason is dressed here as Nosferatu!).

Attention Scum is a matter of taste — when I showed scenes from it on the Funhouse TV show there were as many politely negative comments (“just didn’t get it”) as there were positive ones (“I can’t get it out of my head”). I happen to love its blatant weirdness and caustic intelligence. But judge for yourself — due to the fact that the show has never been (and probably never will be) on DVD in the UK, the entire series is on YouTube. The first episode starts here:

The series was an outgrowth of Munnery’s solo standup shows as the League Against Tedium (see one amazing clip here) and his involvement with a conceptual cabaret group he headed called “Cluub Zarathustra.” The book You Are Nothing by Robert Wringham, from Go Faster Stripe, chronicles the activities of Cluub Z and its influence on modern alternative comedy in the U.K. Wringham sums up “Cluub Z” quite handily:

“Cluub Zarathustra was a very real cabaret creation, developed between 1994 and 1997 by comedians Simon Munney, Roger Mann, and Stewart Lee. It was founded to showcase non-stand-up forms of comedy, and would eventually take the myriad forms of sketches, opera, monologues, poetry, pyrotechnics, dance, stunts, and high- and low-tech gadgetry....

Over the years it featured prop comics, violinists, punk rockers, postmodern interpretive dances, brightly-colored wigs, malfunctioning homemade contraptions, lectures, film screenings, slide shows, and melting ice.” (p. 12)

Wringham's book includes quotes from the major participants in Cluub Z. The roster of people that collaborated on the shows reads like a who's who of modern British alternative comedy: Munnery, Lee, Kevin Eldon, Sally Phillips, Julian Barratt (of the Mighty Boosh), Al Murray, Graham Linehan, Richard Herring, and Johnny Vegas.

The reflections of the comedians are fascinating to read, as the material they describe sounds absolutely brilliant, fully insane, and madly self-indulgent (as the audiences' experience began at some shows with a bouncer carrying them *in* to the proceedings). The pullquote from Stewart Lee featured on the book's cover sums up the bizarre nature of the experimentation: “It was the best and worst thing I ever worked on.”

Wringham's research into the Cluub Z phenomenon is very thorough, and the book is essential for those who are interested in this crop of performers. He discusses both the concrete details of what the troupe did onstage and also their influences — when Munnery was asked once about the connection his comedy has to the work of Beckett and Wagner, he answered “They're people I steal from. If you're a comedian you're entitled to steal from great literature and take it into the filthy world of jokes.” (pp. 120-21)

Among the many wonderfully insane events that would occur at Cluub Z shows was the “Opera Device”: “Imagine the scenario for a moment. A heckler drunkenly shouts, 'You're shit!' or some other unwitticism, only for a Valkyrie [Lori Lixenberg] to be trundled onstage, on a tea trolley no less, with the sole purpose of blasting the heckler with mezzo-soprano overtures of 'You remind me of chemotherapy' – a real example of one of Lixenberg's put-downs, devised and set as an aria by Richard Thomas. Richard remembers this as 'the mildest insult on offer.' ” (p. 75)

Another form of dealing with hecklers was the “self-knowledge impregnator,” described here by Munnery to Richard Herring on his must-listen podcast:

A pilot was made for a “Cluub Z” TV series. It is essentially a dry run for Attention Scum. Some well-meaning fan-persons have shared this rarity with the world:

The invaluable indie mail-order DVD company Go Faster Stripe has released three Munnery discs, all of which show the range of his material. He seems somewhat nervous in a few of the short segments you can see online, but then he tosses off expert lines at random and uses strange conceptual devices to deliver very funny material.

The first Go Faster Stripe disc is called Hello and it’s a portmanteau collection of many of Simon’s different routines and personas. It also includes a short segment where he reads aphorisms from his book How to Live:

The Fylm Makker DVD is a concept show in which he sits in the audience with a video projector trained on him. He talks to the audience from a large screen on the stage (he reminds them that “it’s the first time in history that you can shout at a screen and it can hear you”). Since the home viewer is watching what he projected on the screen, we enter straight “into” the act as he moves through various bits of no-budget animation and deft verbal humor. He explains the concept at the beginning of the show with a catchy little ditty:

Simon’s third DVD from Go Faster Stripe, Fylm finds the concept refined and Simon offering more absurdist material. Munnery has worked in a few punk-sounding bands and he uses that experience well in his standup, crafting odd songs that seem to be the bastard stepchild of punk and Spike Milligan’s “Goon”-ish puns:

One of Simon’s best poems (again with a hint of punk, as well as John Cooper Clarke), performed here without a musical backing (you can hear it with a steady drum backing on the Hello DVD). His feelings about London:

Another GFS offering is the 2-CD set “Mr. Bartlett & Mr. Willis.” It’s a radio series that, to my knowledge, never aired on the radio. The series follows two chatty men, played by Simon Munnery and Kevin Eldon, who make small talk and are prone to time travel. Here’s the only episode missing from the set, because of music rights:

Simon’s experiments in audience confrontation have reportedly not resulted in any irate “punters” belting him one, but his good friend Stewart Lee reported that Munnery got a lot of grief for showing how superior the League was by killing a worm onstage. That part of his act has been preserved in what seems like the earliest clip of Simon online (not counting his odd comedy team “God and Jesus” found here), from a 1990 film called The Edinburgh Years.

One of the best vehicles for the League was a music-video hosting gig on a show called “Futur TV.” Here Simon’s bon mots and plain old weirdness could punctuate other content and warp the minds of the souls who tuned in to see a bunch of prefabricated music-vids.

A 1999 standup clip in which Simon demonstrates what it’s like after ingesting shitloads of drugs and watching way too many Michael Caine movies:

One of Simon’s oddest routines is a paper puppet show in which he plays the parts of the thieves who were crucified with Christ. A Munnery fan has converted this bizarrely cartoonish routine into an actual cartoon.

A recent live Munnery show was as far removed from standup as theater can get — he played various employees at a "restaurant" in an open field called “La Concepta,” at which there is no food (it's “all the rigmarole of haute cuisine, without the shame of eating”). I particularly like the cheapness of the props (and Simon's awful mustache). [Note: the website mentioned in the clip is now defunct — quelle horreur!]

And if that is too conventional for you, there's always Simon's more recent show in which he “sings Kierkegaard.” Two things that I recently caught up to are further down the conceptual wormhole. The first is an event where Simon took a leaf from Andy Kaufman’s book (you remember him) and became an intergender wrestling champ for an evening.

The second is a gameshow (!) that Simon devised and hosted for a total of seven episodes. Named “Either/Or” (another nod to the melancholy Mr. Kierkegaard), the show features the League Against Tedium interrogating a bunch of audience members cloaked in hooded garments. If they win, they can leave and keep their anonymity; if they lose they are given fame, something the League has no use for.

The actual game is beside the point, and that of course is part of the problem — each of the seven episodes is remarkably similar to all the others. The only thing that changes are the League’s choices for the hooded viewers and the operatic insults hurled by “Opera Device” Lori Lixenberg (again accompanied by Richard Thomas). The other problem is that the show is seen mostly through a camera attached to the League’s sword, so we see a b&w, fish-eye image that is occasionally punctuated by a color view of the (mostly monochromatic) studio.

That said, there are some great off-the-cuff quips by Munnery, and some delightfully daft choices the hooded unknowns must choose between — my personal favorites are “Either… the Dalai Lama, Or… Bananarama” and “Either… Celine Dion, Or… heroin.” (Anyone who doesn’t choose heroin deserves a good overdose.)

Lixenberg’s insults aren’t exactly subtle (“Is that your face/or is it an armpit?” “Keep your toilet clean/by shitting on the carpet”), but the fact that she’s delivering them as mini-arias contributes to the overall weirdness of the show. For anyone unfamiliar with Munnery’s work I would not suggest watching “Either/Or” first — you’d do far better with the standup clips embedded above or “Attention Scum” for a better dose of the League and his minions. But I am very grateful that YT poster Christian Daugherty has decided to share “Either/Or” with us.

Munnery’s sole appearance in American media (that I’m aware of — feel free to leave comments) was an interview with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast (currently locked up behind Marc’s inimitable “pay cash for a formerly free podcast” firewall). In the UK, he’s been seen in recent years in sketches on shows hosted by his friends and colleagues Stewart Lee (Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle) and Kevin Eldon (It’s Kevin) and doing standup on the Comedy Central UK show The Alternative Comedy Experience (which isn’t excerpted anywhere online).

I know that Simon has buried his League Against Tedium and Alan Parker characters, but I look forward to a time when those of us in the U.S. can experience Munnery’s weird inventiveness in person.

His better half: Richard Ayoade's 'The Double'

There is something inherently cinematic about a lot of the best recent “alternative” British comedy, and yet none of the most likely suspects (Lee, Munnery) have branched off into directing feature films. One exception has been the brilliant Chris Morris, whom I interviewed when he was in the U.S. promoting his wonderfully dark comedy Four Lions.

Only one other British comedian has taken the plunge so far. In 2010, Richard Ayoade, a very celebrated (and very busy) comic actor and writer, directed and scripted the charming coming-of-age picture Submarine. Now he's returned with a nightmare comedy called The Double, based on Dostoyevsky's short story of the same name.

The film is a highly atmospheric piece, set in a near-future bureaucratic dystopia. Our anti-hero Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) is startled when his doppelganger (also Eisenberg) appears at his workplace and turns out to be a far more successful version of him. The double becomes his mentor and attempts to teach him how to con the people around him – bosses, coworkers, women – but it's evident from the start that there can only be one Simon in this creepy corporate universe.

 
Ayoade (right) demonstrated his cinephilia in Submarine, with onscreen references to Dreyer, Melville, and Roeg (and one rather obvious Godardian touch). Here the world he creates is clearly inspired by David Lynch (Eraserhead, Inland Empire), Gilliam (Brazil), Jeunet and Caro (Delicatessen), and Welles (The Trial).

The moody aspect of the film comes from the fact that Ayoade and coscripter Avi Korine (yes, he's Harmony's brother) wallpaper the Dostoyevsky scenario with Kafka-esque paranoia. Simon is a lonely, perpetually ill-at-ease individual who isn't so much an everyman as the guy we all don't wish to be. His double is impetuous, charming, and most decidedly criminal – clearly solid corporate material.

The influence of Brazil is seen most clearly in the fact that the dystopia Simon lives in is populated by a curious mixture of Brits and Americans. The company he works for is headed by “the Colonel,” a prim and proper Englishman, played by Ayoade's real-life father-in-law James Fox (The Servant, Performance). His immediate supervisor is an eager toady, played by the irrepressible Wallace Shawn.

Eisenberg excels in the dual lead roles, doing what amounts to an impression of Crispin Glover. Playing the girl of his dreams, Mia Wasikowska is the only performer whose accent occasionally “slips” from British to American and back (in real life, she's an Aussie). Making welcome cameos are Ayoade's comedy colleagues Chris Morris (who directed him in Nathan Barley), Chris O'Dowd (his costar from The IT Crowd), and Tim Key.

The Double may indeed be too bleak for multiplex viewers, but it is certain to acquire a cult as years go by. It's an odd, imaginative little picture that has evocative visuals and a moodiness that remains with viewers long after they have left the theater.

The film is currently in theatrical release, but can also be seen via Video on Demand on iTunes.

****

Bonus clips:

One of Ayoade's finest comic creations, the utterly untalented Dean Lerner, porn and horror novel publisher turned actor, from Garth Merenghi's Darkplace (2004):

Ayoade directed the superb rock-opera satire ADBC: A Rock Opera (2004). He cowrote the piece with Matt Berry and costarred with Berry, the Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt, and Julia Davis (Nighty Night):

Ayoade's best-known sitcom character, “Moss” from The IT Crowd:

For your holiday (or anytime) viewing: the comedy special "AD/BC: a Rock Opera"

The guiding principal of the Funhouse for the past two decades has been: if I find something amazing, I've got to share it. Thus, as my Xmas present to readers of this blog (and for whatever reading you do here, I thank ye kindly), I want to spotlight a brilliant creation courtesy of some of the shining lights of British TV comedy.

The program is AD/BC: a Rock Opera (2004), and it's an absolutely spot-on parody of the rock operas of the early Seventies. It's the story of the Nativity, as told by rock composer “Tim Wynde,” played by the great Matt Berry. Berry and Richard Ayoade wrote the music and lyrics, and Ayoade directed. For their pedigree, I merely have to note that both were in the supporting cast of The Mighty Boosh and later were stars of The IT Crowd. Ayoade recently directed the critically lauded Submarine, and Berry is currently starring in the great sitcom Toast of London.

Berry has made a habit of playing hammy, pretentious characters, and that serves him well here as the Lloyd Webber-like composer who also plays the innkeeper. The show is not only a letter-perfect parody of the corny “hipness” of the rock operas, but Ayoade has also wonderfully captured the visual tropes that appeared in the film versions of these works (there are wonderful recreations of the camera language and edits from Jewison's JC Superstar and David Greene's Godspell catalog of would-be “cool” effects).

[Full disclosure: As a student at Catholic school I was forced to memorize songs from Godspell, so I felt tormented by that show; I actually do enjoy the wildly-dated-even-when-it-was-new excesses of JC Superstar, but take great delight in the precision with which the tenets of both shows are gutted here.]

The cast is simply sublime: Berry as the innkeeper, Julia Davis (Hunderby, Nighty Night, Jam) as his wife, Julian Barratt (of the Boosh) as the villainous “Tony Iscariot,” Ayoade as Joseph, Matt Lucas (Little Britain) as God, and, among the chorus, Noel Fielding and Rich Fulcher of the “Boosh” and Graham Linehan (creator of Father Ted and IT Crowd).

It is fun, it is super satire, and it is incredibly silly. What more can you ask for in comic entertainment?

British Scottish Humor 9: Arnold Brown

I've been proselytizing about British alternative comedy on this blog and the Funhouse TV show for about three years at this point, and one of my favorite things about following it is “connecting the dots” and discovering even more brilliant standups whom I'd never heard of, but whose material puts the alterna-souls over here in the shade. The only problem with following this stuff “from a distance” is that it's highly unlikely these gents and ladies will make it over here. This last factor is counteracted, though, by the fact that the work of these comics can be usually be seen in profusion on YouTube and obtained on DVDs from the UK.

Such is the case with Arnold Brown, a “godfather” of British alternative comedy. I first heard about him when he was cited as an influence by Richard Herring and Stewart Lee in interviews. It's quite obvious why the former Fist of Fun partners looks up to him: Brown is a quiet, soft-spoken standup who regularly turns his jokes on their side, sometimes deconstructing and toying with them as he's telling them. His sarcastic edge is wonderfully lethal, and is enriched by his Scottish burr.

A little bit of history: Brown began his standup career in the late Seventies at the Comedy Store in London while still working as an accountant. He became a regular performer at the legendary Comic Strip club after it opened in 1980. There he performed alongside the club's other mainstays, which included The Young Ones set and French and Saunders.

Brown appears in the 1981 short film by Julien Temple called “The Comic Strip.” He is seen onstage doing his act from 1:25-4:15 in this section of the film:

His laidback stage presence counterpoints the weirdness of some of his remarks (“I come from Glasgow... why not?”). He was the exact opposite of the spirited (and superb) Alexei Sayle and the broadly comic Mayall and Edmondson. Through the alternative “cred” he built up doing his act at the Comic Strip, he eventually wound up opening for bands across the UK, something he discusses in one of the extras on his new DVD – more on that below.

From the Eighties to the present day, Brown has kept busy as a standup, an actor in both film and television, and a commercial voiceover artist. He could be seen by American viewers playing a psychiatrist in Bill Forsyth's Comfort and Joy (1984), and he also played different small roles during the run of The Young Ones.

Funhouse TV viewers will have seen him guest-starring as Stew's veteran granddad in clips I showed from the “Crisps” episode of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. He also shows up in an episode of the caustic comedian/magician Jerry Sadowitz's The Pall Bearer's Revue (1992) – although you'll find no clips from that online, as the brilliant and very explosive Sadowitz (another colleague of Brown’s who’s his polar opposite) is adamant about not allowing any performance footage of himself online (he makes the reclusive Daniel Kitson seem like Russell Brand).

Here is another vintage clip of a younger (read: middle-aged) Brown performing his unique material on an unidentified variety show:

As the years have passed, Brown’s delivery has gotten even more refined and laidback. Like a confident magician (should we raise the name of Sadowitz again?), he often peels back the layers of his jokes, as he does here in one of my favorite bits of his:

A short clip with Arnold offering his wry take on quotidian comedy (“pretended empathy with audience…”):

Brown can finally be experienced in the U.S., thanks to the folks at Go Faster Stripe, the Welsh mail-order DVD company that has done a terrific job of preserving the acts of both younger and older UK alternative comics, and making them available at a low price in supplement-laden releases. Befitting his act, Brown’s disc Jokes I Have Known, peels back the layers of his act, as he is seen alternately onstage and in a living room home alone, seated, performing straight to the camera.

At first, I thought the effect of intercutting the two different spaces was jarring, as if a DVD extra has crept into the main program. As the disc goes on, however, you realize that Brown is proud of his material and wants to communicate directly with the home viewer. As Stewart Lee has done in his Comedy Vehicle, Brown is acknowledging the big difference between performing for a nightclub audience and trying to entertain the TV viewer.

But all the above is theoretical, and this is comedy (which, as Steve Allen noted, can never make a person laugh once they’ve analyzed it). Brown has worked as a writer for other comedians, and that comes through in Jokes I Have Known: he has his own distinctly mellow-yet-sarcastic delivery, but the jokes themselves do not depend on his persona, they’re just funny.

He also doesn’t shrink from making his age a subject for laughs — at one point he stops, walks to the rear of the stage, and consults a legal pad to see if he’s left out any routines he wanted to do. He then remarks that the home viewer will never see him do that, it will be cut (but of course it wasn’t, intentionally).

At one point, he casually slides in as a side-note to bolster a joke the fact that he is 76 years old — with most entertainers (nearly all?), that would be a sad attempt to garner applause, but Brown uses it instead to shore up his slow-moving-but-fast-thinking comic persona.

As is always the case with Go Faster Stripe releases, the disc includes interesting extras, the main one being a very funny mutual interview that Brown carried on with fellow “mellow older gent” comic Norman Lovett (their GFS DVDs were shot back to back).

In the interest of *full disclosure* (and with great pride), I will note that, yes, the other extra is a “Consumer Guide” episode of the Funhouse TV show in which I reviewed three terrific GFS releases (Simon Munnery’s Hello, Nine Lessons and Carols for a Godless Xmas, and Stewart Lee’s 90s Comedian).

Two samples of the Arnold Brown DVD are available on YT. The first one shows the counterpoint between Arnold doing jokes onstage and at home (btw, fellow Yanks: “Strepsils” is a British lozenge):

And possibly the SINGLE BEST example of Brown’s wonderful deadpan to be found online, his piece on the potential desirability of sheep: