The Media Funhouse explores the British “alternative” comedy scene (full episode)

Since late 2009 I’ve been utterly bowled over by the amount of incredibly talented British standups who we’ve never heard of here in the U.S.  The ones I’ve become a big fan of are mostly lumped into a category called “alternative” (which is as dubious in comedy in the 2010s as it was in music back in the Nineties). I’ve been chronicling my fascination with them on this blog and the weekly Funhouse TV show.

YouTube is of course the best starting place to see their work but, obviously, you have to know who they are in the first place. Thus, I can quickly note that three gents in this group have been very good about heavily touting the work of their colleagues (by interviewing them, including them in the TV and live shows they curate, and generally just spreading their names around in their writing). Those three are Richard Herring, Stewart Lee (“I actually love Catholicism, it's my favorite form of clandestine global evil.”), and Robin Ince.

For another barometer of quality in the “alternative” standup world in the UK, one need look no further than the Welsh indie DVD label Go Faster Stripe run by Chris Evans (no, not the Capt. America guy). I’ve been very happy to review their titles on the Funhouse TV show and to talk about them here on the blog — as with my recent piece on Simon Munnery, an insanely talented comedian who has several specialties, including creating humorous aphorisms (you tell me how many comedians are capable of coining aphorisms these days….)

Consider this episode a little “101” about the three acts in question: Tom Binns, a character comic who plays “Ian D. Montfort,” a psychic who doesn’t connect you with people you know, he just finds any old specter willing to talk to him (a brilliant spoof of the live psychic “experience”). The second is Robin Ince, chronicled on these pages before.

The last act is a duo, Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden (pictured above). Golden is a veteran rocker who co-founded the Fabulous Poodles (of “Mirror Star” fame, for those who remember the “new wave” era). Cryer is a veteran comedy writer/performer (78 years old when the DVD was shot; he's 81 now) who is well-known in the U.K. for his appearances on panel shows, but who deserves endless admiration for his having written for the cream of British comedians (Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Bruce Forsyth) and even American comedians who visited England and needed some local material (Cryer wrote gags for Jack Benny, George Burns, and Richard Pryor — but not all together….).

Anyway, for the Funhouse viewers who are unable to watch it when it airs late Saturday night in Manhattan (it’s live on the Web at that time, East Coast U.S., at this URL) or who space out on Sundays (the stream of the show currently stays up at that same URL for most if not all of Sunday — just move the playhead "back in time"), here is the first full episode that’s gone up on YT in quite some time. I hope it works for both people who know who these comedians are and those who have never heard of them (although it was clearly done with the latter in mind).

Without further ado, here is one of my latest “consumer guide” episodes, this one concerning the “alternative” acts of Go Faster Stripe:

British humor 8: Robin Ince

I speak a lot about the thin line that separates high art and low trash in this blog and on the Funhouse TV show (and was glad to see our friend "Bava Tuesdays" pick up on a remark I have made frequently about the factor that unites them both). Robin Ince is a fellow traveler in the art/trash appreciation biz, and his comedy reflects his unbridled fascination with both the highest forms of literary endeavor and the most unimaginably silly schlock. And for that I salute him.

I became aware of Ince through import DVDs of Ricky Gervais’ standup. Robin is a personal friend of Gervais and was his opening act on two tours. Even in the short sets included on the DVDs it was evident that Ince had already refined his stage persona: a delightfully cranky, sarcastic middle-aged man who is very disturbed by stupidity:



Ince has refined his standup since working with Gervais (and he's no longer tormented by his prank-prone super-celeb friend). The next time I came across him was as a confederate of a few of the British comics whose work I’ve profiled here and covered in depth on the Funhouse TV show, including Stewart Lee and Richard Herring. In the last few years, Robin has carved out a niche for himself as a top-notch “compere” (the English — actually French — term for MC) and an excellent radio/podcast host.

To put it simply, Ince is an “egghead comedian,” and I say that not as an insult but as a compliment. He is an outspoken rationalist (the correct term for atheist) and now discusses public perceptions of science (good, bad, and indifferent) in his standup. The only comic in America who has similar concerns is Chris Rush, who comes from a slightly different place but shows an equal enthusiasm for supplying humorous layman’s explanations of scientific phenomena and natural oddities (curiously, his scientist hero, Rupert Sheldrake, is British, and Ince’s are Americans, Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman).

Ince currently cohosts two wonderful and different podcasts with a great degree of energy and quick wit. The free-form interview podcast Utter Shambles he cohosts with the exuberant and delightful comic Josie Long. The ‘cast finds the duo talking to the occasional author (including scientists and comics genius Alan Moore), but mostly the guests are their fellow comedians, including that Lee fellow, Mark Steel, Stephen Merchant, Tim Minchin, and “elder statesmen” Alexei Sayle and Terry Jones.

The other podcast, The Infinite Monkey Cage, originates as a Radio 4 show. Ince cohosts with physicist Brian Cox (whose documentaries are on American cable, if ya can find ‘em). Ince and Cox tackle a specific issue in each episode (“Is Philosophy Dead?” “Science and the Supernatural,” “The Origin of Life”) with guests from the scientific community (who get to show their humorous side) and at least one comedian (who gets to show his/her serious side).

Ince’s premiere achievement, however, has to be the annual live show “Nine Lessons and Carols for a Godless Christmas.” This rationalist celebration of the Yuletide season is something that Americans can only see thanks to YouTube postings and releases from the invaluable independent DVD label Go Faster Stripe. In addition to the Nine Lessons… events, GFS has released a full-length standup DVD, Robin Ince Is as Dumb as You, which has some wonderful material on it and a lot of extras (including outtakes and a spirited interview), all with an audio commentary from Ince (who can be quite a loquacious gentleman and is very fond of footnotes).

Dumb as You is a lot of fun, but if you’d like a more succinct intro to Robin and the world of talented and dauntingly brilliant folks he hangs around with, I’d recommend checking out the DVD of the 2009 Nine Lessons show (there is also a CD available of the 2010 show ). As the host, he offers some of his best routines in between the acts — including a gem about getting caught in a “YouTube loop,” which NEEDS to be on YT itself.

The Nine Lessons shows — which take place in two weeks in London and are already sold out for this year — boast an impressive roster of performers that is split between scientist-authors (Cox, Simon Singh, Bad Medicine writer Ben Goldacre, and the man who drives “the faithful” crazy in a wonderful way, Mr. Richard Dawkins) and comedians (Herring, Lee, Long, Peep Show's Issy Suttie, and the indescribably weird and wonderful character comic Waen Shepherd).

Here’s a nice slice of Robin talking about "boring science" at Nine Lessons:



*****
Ince’s melding of rational thought, fun scientific anecdotes, and cranky comedy is impressive, but the reason I’m writing this profile is to call attention to a concept I consider his premiere achievement — especially for folks like myself who both love and have copyedited some very bizarre vanity-press books. The concept is the “Bad Book Club,” and Robin provided the back story for it in the interview found on the Dumb as You DVD: how his precious collection of records was literally covered in shit (no joke) by a plumbing problem that found his neighbors’ waste entering his house and destroying his stuff (as a fellow collector, I cringe even recounting the tale). His efforts to recreate his record collection, with the help of Stewart Lee, were detailed on a radio special called “How Robin Got His Groove Back” (that was up online on the essential fistoffun.net, which is very sadly not online at the moment I write this).

This traumatic event jarred him into looking in a different direction for entertainment, and this is when the always relaxing and mind-warping pursuit of schlock came in. Ince haunted charity shops, looking for the most insane and outré titles he could find. He began to read excerpts from these books onstage, and set up entire shows around them, simply called “the Book Club,” in which the audience was encouraged to bring their own terrible tomes. There isn’t much footage of Robin doing his “book club” readings, but a few clips have surfaced. Here is the finest visual sample available, done for New Humanist magazine:



The best way to enjoy this wonderful concept is to read his book Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club, which finds him ruminating on the high weirdness he found on charity shop bookshelves. His rules were simple: he never paid over £3 for a book, and he even found some choice items left on trains and in waiting rooms. The fact that he wasn’t looking for a specific piece of crap-lit meant he discovered things that were so wildly marginal as to make his book-club tome a must for deep-fried kitsch enthusiasts. Among the oddities:

—guides to help women find husbands, and to aid men in “picking up sexy girls”
—UFO encounter screeds
—inappropriately lurid studies of the sex lives of animals
—awful, un-ghost-written, celebrity bios
—specialist poetry collections (including a book of Elvis poems and odes to TV news anchors)
—a two-fisted "men's novel" about a hardboiled cop who has to overcome his hatred of particle physics
—(the finest) a Christian gynecological romance called The Sign of the Speculum

Ince summarized his choicest finds in a best-of short list for The Guardian, but there are items in his book that are just too wonderful for words. Among them is Starlust, a Eighties collection of fans' sex fantasies about pop stars. He cites the book’s main pull quote — “If there was a nuclear war I’d be thinking, is Boy George safe?”— and tells us the heartbreaking story of a woman who cried herself to sleep at night because her husband wasn’t anything like Barry Manilow.

The one fantasy that is going to stay with me for some time is from a woman who confesses that she’s excited by pain, and thus wishes her favorite pop stars were in torment so she could be turned on by it. Her most complicated scenario involves Debbie Harry and Chris Stein suffering from fatal diseases, with the only cure being intercourse. The sex would be excruciatingly painful for both of them, but that would only serve to turn this fangirl on more…. Tales like these offer sufficient proof as to why Ince refers to these insane books as “printed heroin.”

I heartily recommend Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club, and only wish it had sold well enough to encourage him to write a follow-up. In the meantime, I can content myself with the knowledge that there is a kitsch-culture obsessive who is as taken with awful prose as myself and Funhouse viewers.

In Robin’s infrequently updated but very funny Wordpress blog he documents an experiment he attempted in 2010, to shed some of his thrift-shop book and DVD acquisitions by reading the first chapters of different books each night (ditto with watching the first chapters of DVDs) to see what he could easily give away to his standup audiences. The joy comes not only from his wry observations about these odd items, but also from the sheepish confessions he makes about keeping the bulk of the books/discs he looked at. One could expect no less from an obsessive collector.

*****
Two of the best Ince clips available online. First, a fine bit about TV news that is timely when I write this, as he addresses the fictitious "war against Christmas":


Log TV: News Log – Robin Ince Hates News

And perhaps his best routine, about “intelligent design” (I'm not sure who the accordionist is, but the geeky-looking fellow doing an interpretive rendition of Ince's words is Lee and Herring colleague Ben Moor):

Funhouse flashback: "The strange world of vanity publishing"

I'm currently reading, and thoroughly enjoying, the obsessive and very funny bibliophile chronicle Robin Ince's Bad Book Club (more on Robin in a later blog entry), which includes in its front matter the following statement “He does not believe the books described within are bad books. They are just different.” This put me in mind of my own favorite “different” books, the vanity press titles I used to copyedit, proofread and write cover copy for (yes, I've had a few odd jobs in publishing).

I won't attempt to offer wry observations on these works, since they don't need them; they speak for themselves. I let them do so a few times a number of years ago on the Funhouse TV show.

I hereby present the pertinent two-thirds of the fourth (and best) early episode, from 1996, where I presented vanity-press books. Included are numerous unusual covers, several mind-boggling titles, and extremely ripe and bizarre prose. I repeatedly assert on-air that I'm not making fun of these books, because I do know that in many cases they are the fruit of many, many hours of labor by their utterly sincere authors. Plus, the writer of the above title lives in NYC and might've seen the show. I know how easily fetish-folk take offense and didn't want him running after me on a city street brandishing a wet rain slicker.

The first part of the presentation features a raft of eye-catching covers and unusual titles:



The second part finds me sifting through more covers and reading from two of the more memorable items, a book of “observations” and a very strange fictional narrative written by a woman who has a fiendish plan to stop her daughter from having premarital sex. You can't make this stuff up:

Have Yourself an Atheist Xmas: "Nerdstock"

The Yuletide resounds with weighty, sometimes oppressive sentiments, so it is important to just settle back and have a good time. I can think of no better way to do this than to view the British TV special called “Nerdstock”.

The show, which is properly known as “Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People,” has taken place annually for the last three years in London. This week on the Funhouse TV show, I’ll be featuring a review of, and show short clips from, the DVD record of the first “Godless” event in 2008 (from the indie label Go Faster Stripe). Comedian Robin Ince hosts and organizes the program, taking care to balance the bill among standup comics, musicians and scientists. The intention is to create a “rationalist” celebration of the season that drops the supernatural religious aspect of the holiday in favor of a calm, optimistic view of this planet and those bright lights around us. And yes, the comedians are free to be downright sacrilegious — what fun would a rationalist holiday be without that?

Comparing the reviews that exist online of the live events, the Go Faster Stripe DVD, and the “Nerdstock” broadcast, it becomes evident that the last-mentioned was abridged and sorta carefully edited for telecast, and is thus missing some of the more lacerating (read: seriously atheist) comedians including Funhouse fave Stewart Lee (his former partner Richard Herring does a very sharp routine on the 2008 DVD, but is noticeably friendlier and fuzzier on the 2009 telecast), and one cult figure who appeared at the event (comics genius Alan Moore). Also not on TV special is Ricky Gervais, noted atheist celeb, who has done a number of these Godless gigs, since he is a friend of Ince’s (Ince served his opening act as his standup career began to skyrocket).

In any case, the show is well worth your time, because I can’t imagine it for a single second being aired in America, where we theoretically have “separation of church and state” — except in the minds of Xtian fundamentalists. Please do partake of ”Nerdstock”, and if you’re interested in the further adventures of host/producer Ince, check out his inteview podcast, cohosted by comedian Josie Long, called “Utter Shambles.” Ince and Long interview a mix of comedians and the occasional scientifically minded individual. Their guest list so far has included “alternative” comedy god Alexei Sayle, Stewart Lee, Mark Steel, podcast duo Richard Herring and Andrew Collins, and the one and only mystery man of Northampton, Alan Moore. Listen here. And here again is the "Godless" "Nerdstock" special: