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.

Ratz leaving a sinking ship: the pope resigns

I am an ex-Catholic who takes great delight in making fun of the church because... well, it is so certain it is right, and it isn't. It also pretends to be moral and isn't, and is often about as far away from the teachings of Christ as it's possible to be and not be a Nazi. Oh wait...

I'll get back to the Nazi aspect of this latest pope below (“he didn't want to be – everyone had to join the party back then....”). I'll also get around to the fact that the guy knows more about sex abuse in the church than any other pontiff ever has and did nothing to stop it or to punish (or even just excommunicate) the guilty. That stuff just ain't funny, and this is supposed to be a humorous blog post.

So I'll start with the light stuff and then bring on the heavy material toward the end. First and foremost, the media attention given to the abdication... er, resignation of this high-hatted fool has fascinated me, in that it's always fascinating to watch the news media fawn over a leader who literally exists in a dimension where the past is always present and what “we” say is always right (and everyone else? Why they're ALL going to hell....). The coverage has died down, but is sure to be ratcheted up again when the cardinals do their arcane wizardry (puff of smoke, my ass).

I find it very hard to laugh about the cruel realities of the church, but I can enjoy those who speak about its rampant hypocrisy and its backward-looking mindset – and yes, I do think that the other key religions have their backward-looking, we-are-completely-right-on-everything sects, and I have as little regard for them. I was brought up Catholic, however, so I can personally attest to the stupidity and tunnel vision of that faith.

So what is there to laugh about? Well, there is one humorist who always mocked the Catholic clergy in a pretty friendly way. I'm talking of course about Don Novello, whose “Father Guido Sarducci” character I first encountered on a Smothers Brothers comeback variety series in the mid-Seventies (I believe Fr. Guido first appeared on a David Steinberg LP called “Goodbye to the '70s”).

Father Guido is a priest who talks common sense, a gent who will never be promoted to archbishop or cardinal (that stripe “gets you the good veal in restaurants”), most likely because he's been the “gossip columnist” for the Vatican newspaper for the past 35 years. Novello infused the character with brilliant bits like this one, explaining how we all do literally “pay for our sins”:

He also came up with a foolproof way to learn only the stuff that you're left with after a regular education is over. Novello's routines as Fr. Guido have always been impeccable (that sadly misguided bit at the what-was-all-that-about “Rally to Restore Sanity” excepted); Novello's other work, on the Laszlo Letters book and as a comedy writer, has always been spot-on.

With all the affection I have for the Fr. Guido character, I should be doing a whole mock campaign here to get Signore Sarducci to be elected pope. He reported on the selection of Pope Benedict for the Al Franken radio show on Air America; the segment heard here is actually the weaker of two appearances I heard – his explanation of how the pope was chosen was far funnier (as I remember it, the process included being hit in the head with a hammer), but that particular appearance on Franken's show has not been preserved online.

There you have it – there's one guy in a priest's garb that I do love and have loved for over a third of a century. As for my evolving religious beliefs – that went from agnosticism (a discovery made in Catholic high school, mind you) to atheism – I tend to side more with the angry ex-Catholics who know how to sum up the situation in a pithy way. Guys like George Carlin, who pretty much was the poster boy for an evolving consciousness (evolving away from the church).

George inspired many standups over the years, and one who has professed his devotion and debt to Carlin is Louis CK, currently helming the best comedy series being produced in the U.S. Louis has been directing short films for a few decades now, but one of his finest hours (well, four minutes) is this little item from 2007 about the true “point” of the Catholic church:

Yeah, Louis' contention that the church “exists solely for the purpose of boy rape” may seem like a comic exaggeration – but only a little. I personally never was never raped by a priest, but was taught religion in grammar school by a priest who was arrested on child pornography charges (he was arrested in an alley off Times Square, no shit).

He was not excommunicated, merely shuffled off to another parish. My parish was abuzz for a few days with this “outrage,” but all the crazy people who believed kept believing that the church needed our collection-plate dough and all was soon forgotten. (By the way, he had also been running the parish branch of the Brownies.) A small handful of the priests and nuns I was taught by in twelve years of Catholic school were exemplary individuals; the majority, though, were afflicted with alcoholism, sadism, or flat-out insanity.

Thus we arrive back at the soon-to-be ex-Benedict, a man who served in the Hitler Youth and who, according to many, was “complicit in child sex abuse scandals.” To quote a Guardian article from last week, Pope Benedict (according to David Clohessy, the executive director of the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests) “read thousands of pages of reports of the abuse cases from across the world. He knows more about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups than anyone else in the church yet he has done precious little to protect children."

Back when he was just Cardinal Ratso Ratzinger, the Pope was put in charge of investigating sexual abuse problems in different countries (among them Ireland and the U.S.; as Pope he also ignored major cases in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria). In each case, the perpetrators pretty much got off scot-free. To quote the Guardian one last time, I cite Jakob Purkarthofer, of Austria's Platform for Victims of Church Violence, who says that "Ratzinger was part of the system and co-responsible for these crimes."

So this pope is not a good, moral human being, he's a bureaucrat and administrator. And therefore I felt that the monologue and sketch about him from the first season of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle needed to be online. The series in its entirety was up on YT at one point, but now exists only as small shards.

One would think the Comedy Vehicle sketch about Pope Ratz would be up online, though, since it interestingly enough links the Pope to Jimmy Savile. Lee and his producers are not accusing the Pope of pedophilia at all – the gag is that Il Papa wanted his strikingly garish red shoes and received them thanks to Jimmy Savile on his “Jim'll Fix It” TV series. But yeah, it seems like a fascinating link to make anyway, between a man who made a habit of molesting young folk and another gent who did nothing to stop the abuse he heard about.

Savile is played by the master Scottish comedian-provocateur Jerry Sadowitz, who did material on Savile being a pedo way back in the late Eighties – that material (less than two minutes worth) got his CD “Gobshite” completely pulled from distribution.

Lee also devises a commercial use for a likeness of Benedict's horrifyingly mean-looking face. (Those racoon eyes, man, those eyes....). Please enjoy:

Note: some of the illustrations in this piece came from http://www.gospelaccordingtohate.com/

British humor 1: Stewart Lee

American comedy is in quite a neat little rut these days. There are a handful of standups and regular TV series that I think represent actual quality and innovation, but for the most part there are arena-filling standups (the “Blue Collar” comics, Dane Cook) and the “alternative” comedians, a few of whom are brilliant, but most of whom are looking toward a really lucrative movie deal, no matter what the script is (lookin’ at you, Zach Galifianakis). The pleasant but exceedingly dull Judd Apatow (Spielberg with vulgar teen jokes!) and the absolutely heinous Lorne Michaels (guilty at this point of several decades worth of horrendous TV and movie comedy) shape most of what passes for mainstream American comedy these days, so we really need to look elsewhere for something new….

Thus, my recent immersion into British humor, which has its own share of mainstream crap, but also has fostered an incredibly talented group of standups and humorists who are totally unknown over here. I detailed my discovery and deepening fascination with a few of these gents here, but I felt that a few personality profiles and clip “surveys” might be in order. Thus, I complement my recent “summer of British humor” on the Funhouse TV show with a trio of entries, which will undoubtedly be followed by more in the near future. I start off with the standup whom I’ve become the most fascinated by in the last year, Stewart Lee.




Lee began his career as a half of a writing-performing team with Richard Herring. The duo played their sardonically wiseass straight man (Lee)/smut-minded troublemaker (Herring) roles for more than a decade, to best effect in a radio and subsequent TV series called Fist of Fun. Thankfully, for all of those who weren’t in the U.K. in the Nineties, some devoted fans have posted pretty much the entire radio archives of Lee and Herring at fistoffun.net.

I highly recommend their sketch series Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World with L&H and Armando Iannucci (the producer-writer-performer who has been involved in a significant amount of influential BBC comedy shows, including I’m Alan Partridge) and Rebecca Front (a versatile actress who starred in Iannucci’s Thick of It series); also the Fist of Fun radio show. Lee and Herring also were also among the writers who scripted On the Hour, the trendsetting fake-news radio show starring Chris Morris and produced by Iannucci that spawned the Alan Partridge character (for whom L&H wrote some original segments).

A fan-favorite clip from the Fist of Fun radio show:



Lee’s official website also offers a busload of good material, including links to every episode of the two seasons of Lee and Herring’s Fist of Fun TV series and their subsequent TV show This Morning with Richard Not Judy

Here’s a great explanation of the “theory of relativity” from Fist of Fun:



Fist of Fun wasn’t a major hit when it was on, and it has never been issued on DVD or VHS in England, but it was very influential on the teens and twentysomethings who watched it. The Lee and Herring team did score one more BBC series, a two-season-long Sunday-afternoon mock chat show, This Morning with Richard Not Judy, that was mellower in is approach than Fist — in fact, I was surprised watching it how mellow (but still bitingly sarcastic) Lee became around this period. The show’s best bits were the duo’s deconstructive abuses of lazy journalistic clichés.



and also lazy comedy clichés:



Lee and Herring amiably severed their partnership in 1999, but Lee had already served something of an extended “apprenticeship” as a standup comic, performing both on his own and as the solo opening act at L&H gigs. His material was both sarcastic and slightly surreal, due to his deft use of repetition.



Lee has admitted that his very unique style is an outgrowth of his youthful fascination with “alternative” comedians who challenged and provoked their audience, foremost among them a guy named Ted Chippington, an “anti-comedian” who seemed intent on pissing his spectators off. Lee interviewed him a few years back for an arts TV show:



Lee’s standup was not catching on post-Lee and Herring, so he began going in other directions. He wrote a very good “road” novel called The Perfect Fool, about a bunch of disparate eccentrics looking for the Holy Grail in the modern era. The book has a wonderful overlay of “alt” pop-culture references, with one character being a Roky Erickson-ish burnt-out psychedelic musician, and the main character accumulating a full collection of Jack Chick comic “tracts” (dear to our heart in the Funhouse).

The most important project Lee worked on when he wasn’t doing standup was the experimental and downright strange musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, which got great reviews, won British theater awards, and attracted large audiences, but underwent constant protests from fundamentalist Christian groups because of its really provocative second act, in which Springer is dragged down to hell to moderate a debate between Lucifer and Jesus (and Mary — all singing!).



The Jerry Springer: the Opera experience inspired Lee to return to comedy with a vengeance in 2004, and at this point he became a “road warrior,” working on his material with constant gigs all over the U.K. Like Rodney Dangerfield and Jackie Mason over here, Lee has continued to do the sort of material he had done as a young man, but has found a bigger, more receptive audience as a (slightly) older person. Perhaps it’s because he looked like a sarcastic punk in his 20s, and has now acquired more of a “cranky uncle” look in middle age. Perhaps it’s also a result of his honing his work impeccably, and finding what I hear as almost musical refrains in his dogged repetitions and brilliant asides.



He is a social commentator of the first order, whose work links him to Will Rogers and Mort Sahl, both of whom I’m sure he wouldn’t count as influences. But the material he’s doing is not observational, nor is it the deeply personal “open wound” dissections of self common among American “alternative” standups. Lee eviscerates political, religious, and show-biz figures, and openly mocks everyday truths in a quiet but lethal fashion. Here’s a great bit about Americans’ lack of curiosity:



One of the most entertaining, and I’m not going to say post-modern, aspects of Lee’s standup is his acknowledgement of the form itself. Most comedians will mention when a bit is bombing, but Lee discusses how he’s reusing and reworking older material. He also takes the chance of deflating a whole routine by footnoting it, or noting how it does or doesn’t fit with what he’s been talking about.

In his terrific Comedy Vehicle series, which is basically a half hour of standup punctuated by short silly sketches, he has also taken to “melting down” for comic effect. Unlike American comics who yell for emphasis, though (from Bobcat and Kinison to Lewis Black), he only does it once per show. The result is disjunctive, since Lee ordinarily speaks in such a deadpan manner, but the meltdowns are highlights of the Comedy Vehicle eps (with Stew most often riffing on the phrase, “what is it you want?”).

As a final, personal reflection, I should note that as a comedy fan I’ve always wound up becoming a camp follower of those whose work I’ve loved over the years. The way it used to be, years, and in some cases decades, passed before I had gotten ahold of all their recordings, films, or writings. As a teen, when I was following Carlin and Pryor (and later, Lenny Bruce), it took many years to acquire and thread through their work (admittedly, they were still making the recordings at that point). In this new digital/cyber era, a fan can literally acquire and absorb an entertainer’s body of work in a matter of a few months (or a few days, if they’ve just popped onto the scene).

Thus, I discovered Lee somewhere late in 2009, and in a year’s time have heard the bulk of his radio and CD recordings, watched literally hours of his standup and British TV appearances, and read his rockcrit journalism, his novel, and a passel of print interviews. Being around Lee’s age myself, I’m always dazzled by the ability to delve so deeply into someone’s work through their official site, fan sites, the invaluable YouTube, a few of the “off-road” download locations, and the vendor sites.

I look forward to Lee’s new material as it appears (a new book and CD have just appeared, for which I’ve put in orders, and a second season of Comedy Vehicle has been commissioned by the BBC for 2011). True to the bottomless well that is the Internet, and especially YouTube, I continue to discover “new” old material, and offer this blog post as a “101” for those who have never heard of this Stew fellow.

The single best intro to his work is the 41st Best Standup Ever concert DVD which has been uploaded to YouTube in its entirety by a fan. Pick any segment and you’ll be seeing prime material. The references may be specific to the U.K., but Americans don’t need to think too hard to find U.S. equivalents:



Another routine that has become a fan favorite is this item about comedy theft where Lee rifts about a comedian named Joe Pasquale:



The Comedy Vehicle TV series offers Lee holding forth on a number of topics, from the skewed reality offered in March of the Penguins…



…to the atrocities of Andrew Lloyd Webber:



Most of the six Comedy Vehicle episodes from the show’s first season are up on YouTube in their entirety, but I would heartily recommend first and foremost the “Toilet Books” episode (which a certain YouTube poster put up alongside a bunch of horror movies and an Andrew Dice Clay concert vid — no comment):



And as final offering, the “Religion” episode which includes some beautiful slams on Pope Ratzinger, as well as an exploration of how one can (or can’t) tell jokes about Islam and a magnum reworking of a classic Lee routine:

Atheists, Assemble! A stew of brilliant English and Irish comics for Easter

It’s all about the sharing of pop-culture obsessions in the Funhouse, and so I have to offer you one of my latest preoccupations, exploring the world of British standup comics. This particular excursion began when I encountered the work of a number of American standups who seem to be “children of Bill Hicks,” meaning they’re following in the path of the late cult comic who made some very great performance work of his own personal obsessions (that word again!) and insights.

I found a few really solid examples of standups over here who are following in Hicks’ footsteps, albeit with less of the poetic and whimsical touch (I tend to think of them as the “open wound” school of comedy). Their work is indeed funny and absorbing (especially when there is a “trainwreck” performance, as there seems to have been a few times with really hard-edged standups like Doug Stanhope). Since the extremely American Hicks became a cult figure in the U.K., though (his birthday was actually pitched to Parliament as a possibility for a holiday), I was curious to hear if there were similar comics over there.

And so I went back to (where else) YouTube and consulted the uploads of “Padraic 2001eire”, who is an Irish fan of Bill’s, and had put up some great (now unfortunately gone from YT for copyright reasons) compilations of how his work was stolen by Denis Leary and seemed to be “lifted” on occasion by George Carlin (whom I of course worship from way back — check this Deceased Artiste tribute, with many links now also sadly gone from the Net).

“Padraic2000Eire” clearly has a fine-tuned sense of comedy, and is also clearly inspired by intelligent arguments for atheism (but more on that below). His montage post ”My Top 10 Favourite Comedians” introduced me to the work of five English and Irish stand-ups whom I became instantly fascinated by (one other, David O’Doherty, I like, but he’s a bit “gentle” compared to the others in the list). And thus I provide below the fruits of my months-long excursion into the work of these gents, with many thanks of course to the posters on YT and blogger JimG, who continues to post some truly mind-warpingly rare old vinyl and CDs.

For those who are completely unaware of Bill Hicks’ work, I heartily, heavily recommend watching his best performance video here. Just to run down the aspects of his comedy I’ve seen in other standups of his age group and younger, I’ll note that the American comics who open their emotional closets on stage (Marc Maron, Doug Stanhope, Janeane Garafolo) owe a big debt to Hicks, as do those who analyze the process of standup comedy while performing their act (not the standard Johnny Carson/Borscht Belt acknowledgment that a gag has failed, but a literal deconstruction of their own standup set — as when the very funny Maria Bamford, a comedian who does dozens of voices in her act, has her “mother” chime in and summarize what she's doing: “we know what your act is: low voice/high voice. We’ve got it!”).

The other dominant characteristic of Hicks’ comedy besides its highly personal content (in this regard, he was preceded by the twin gods of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, no question) was his fierce Left-wing politics and devout atheism. The English and Irish comics below are all in the same camp politically and in religious (or should that be “superstitious”?) terms.

Always best to start out with a song, so I’ll first spotlight the work of Bill Bailey, who plays the keyboard and various guitars onstage while he does comedy. He also has done a touring “Essential Guide to the Orchestra” which cannot be sampled on YouTube, sadly. In fact, YT contains very little of his standup, favoring his appearances on talk shows and the famous Never Mind the Bullocks gameshow. But you can check out his playing of a theremin on The Jonathan Ross Show, his bit on hard rock and the city of Milton Keynes, and his mock Brel/Scott Walker love-has-left ballad .

Here is a chunk of his stand-up, including the nice insight that certain types of jazz horn playing sounds like a “surrealist car alarm”:



From England we move to Ireland, and comic Dylan Moran, who is very straightforward and wonderfully deadpan, and discusses the more pleasant (or is that deadening?) forms of hypocrisy as his main theme. Here he summarizes religion as “people talking about their imaginary friend”:



Some more standard standup, as with this discussion of the battle of the sexes. Moran’s pleasant demeanor lets him get away with acidic insights:



And actually, there is one other element that links these comedians to Bill Hicks: their razor-sharp takes on Americans (Hicks’ standard line on whether he was proud of being an American was to note that the U.S. “was the place where my parents fucked”).



Setting aside atheism for a moment (although I have the feeling this next comedian is pretty much on that page too), Padraic’s montage helped me discover the work of Robert Newman, who was part of a well-loved team with a comic named David Baddiel (and did impressions of British rockers like this one), but who has worked on refining (bad pun — you’ll see) one long and brilliant set of material on world history, and the U.S. and U.K.’s devotion to oil, into a really tight piece of television, called from “Caliban to the Taliban,” or “The History of Oil.” Some helpful soul has put the entire show on YouTube — the video and the audio are slightly unhooked (the video lags a few seconds behind), but the show is definitely worth your attention. Part one can be found here. Here’s part four of the “History of Oil” show, summing up Newman’s political take on politics in the 2000s:



And now, we hit the comedy team that was a major discovery for me, Lee and Herring. The team did some amazingly funny work for BBC Radio and TV — their “Inexplicable World of Lionel Nimrod” show is just excellent, and they co-scripted episodes of "On the Hour," the absolutely brilliant Chris Morris radio news send-up that spawned the Alan Partridge character.

Stewart Lee has become an utter obession for me in the past few weeks, but his ex-partner Richard Herring also does top-notch standup, and he qualifies as the U.K. comedian who seems the most interested in delving into joyously blasphemous waters (I have no idea what his upbringing was like, but the man is obsessed with puncturing Christianity, and for that I salute him). Herring’s onstage persona is that of a sort of chubby shlemiel, but as a result of that playful-dolt front, he can get away with some terrifically nasty humor. Here is a sample of his standard, non-atheist standup, on the ever-popular topics of the phys. ed teacher at school and sexuality:



Herring did an entire set of material about Jesus, called “Christ on a Bike,” that can be found at the “Fist of Fun” website,” which contains lots and lots of free downloads of audio material from Herring and Stewart Lee. The opening part of the “Christ on a Bike” show can be found (as audio with a still picture) on YT here:



Herring has professed his love of the genius comedy of Cook and Moore in their “Derek and Clive” guises, and the single most Derek and Clive-ish bit of material I’ve heard him do is this slice from his “Collings and Herrin” podcast with fellow comic Andrew Collins (their blogspot blog is here). UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I've discovered Herring's solo podcast, As It Occurs to Me, which is a fast-paced sketch series that he writes and gives away for free on the Net (I love these kinds of artists!). You can download that terrific show here. And now back to the regularly scheduled slice of blasphemy from the "Collings and Herrin" 'cast:



And an amazing piece of stand-up by Herring, where the title is only the beginning of the gorgeous blasphemy. This is some of his latest material, with you-know-it’s-2009-or-10 references to Susan Boyle and Tiger Woods. And Rich asking Christ, “wank me off with your stigmata”:



Finally, there is Herring’s ex-“straight man,” Stewart Lee. Lee is one of the most deadpan comics and one of the funniest I’ve seen in years. His comedy is smart, yes, but he also works a concept thoroughly, through wonderful repetition and a sublimely straightforward sense of the absurd.

One of his nastiest routines routines about the English (he’s also done some superb U.S.-bashing) is a longer piece on the commemoration of the death of Princess Diana. He also weighed in on the Harry Potter phenomenon. As for Lee’s own reading habits, he is indeed a fan of William Blake, and also loves comic books — one of his interview “scores” was Alan Moore, whom he’s talked to more than once. Audio of a radio interview of Moore by Lee is here .

His tale of meeting a homophobic taxi driver is a fine piece of post-Hicks storytelling that also has much resonance for Americans, if one thinks of the “party of no” and their crappy debate tactics:



Lee tackled the touchy subject of joke-stealing in this terrific routine. I’ve never heard of the comics involved (although a Michael Redmond clip on YouTube is worth a look), but I’ll forever know the name of Joe Pasquale now.




The Pasquale routine, like another one Lee does on a comic named Tom O’Connor, shows his superb way of driving home a comic point. Here he works in a similar vein, eviscerating the Celebrity Big Brother show, and the TV advertisers:



One of Stewart’s most durable routines, which he’s reused and even done a fourth-wall commentary on, is a bit called “Jesus is the Answer”:



Lee wrote and hosted a serious tele-docu meditation on religion in modern society, “Don’t Get Me Started,” that can be found in its entirety here. Lee goes on about his own connection to Jesus in this routine (audio only). The “not him, I’m not” stuff is just terrific:



The fullest comic flowering of Lee’s thoughts on religion is this episode of his show Stewart Lee’s Comic Vehicle:



And because I’m posting this two days before Easter Sunday, and yes, because I was raised Catholic and now really don’t want anything to do with the religion, I offer a link to the YouTube poster named “Atheist Reference”, who seems to have quite a large video collection, including much “heathen,” non-believer comedy.