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:

Time Out: Deceased Artiste Dave Brubeck

A quick DA salute — I know, I know, I missed a bunch of 2012 departures, I hope to catch up soon — to the great Dave Brubeck, who died this week at 92. I was lucky enough to see Mr. Brubeck at Carnegie Hall back in 2003 (free tix from a friend, the only way for me to score great seats at that venue since Harry Chapin left us), and it was a terrific concert, with a master pianist plyin’ his trade at the tender age of 83.

The obits ran through the details of his landmark life — son of a cattle rancher, he ditched working with cows to play the piano; formed an integrated quartet that played college campuses throughout the Fifties (if the deans found out they had a black member and told them the main stage wasn’t open to them, they’d play the cafeteria instead); upon the quartet breaking up in ’67, he devoted himself to writing concertos, oratorios, ballets, and cantatas.

But what was this oh-so-calm-and-dedicated musician best known for? Creating two of the melodies that we have come to know as “signifying” the cooler side of the Fifties in films and TV episodes. They both were featured on the 1959 million-selling album (first jazz LP to do so; by now it’s sold two million) Time Out, and you KNOW them even if you can’t name ‘em.

The first one, the perfect “Take Five,” was a hit single that reached #25 on the pop chart. The notion of a jazz instrumental hit (that was not a movie theme) in the post-big band era was a rarity indeed, but “Take Five” is just so infectious that it actually made jukeboxes around the country. It now is THE go-to song for movies and TV eps that want to convey the hipper side of the Fifties (even though it was released just as the decade was ending).

Here is the Dave Brubeck Quartet performing the song on German TV in 1966. On the sax is Paul Desmond, who wrote the song and willed the royalties from it to the American Red Cross (who reportedly receive $100,000 a year in “Take Five” money).

The other, super-evocative piece that has been used in several films depicting the "beatnik era" is “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” the opening track from the same album. Here the Quartet perform the track on a TV show called The Lively Ones on July 25, 1962:

“Blue Rondo…” has been used in a LOT of film and TV shows trying to evoke the Fifties, my personal favorite being Paul Mazursky’s charming  Next Stop, Greenwich Village. Mazursky clearly felt the tune was emblematic of an era, so he shifted it chronologically — Next Stop takes place in 1953, but the Time Out LP didn’t materialize until ’59.

As a bonus, here’s a song that doesn’t show up on movie and TV soundtracks, but is equally ear-worm-ish and was “visualized” via dance on an unidentified Sixties variety show. Here, kats and kitties, is the “Unsquare Dance”:

The Funhouse interview: Marina de Van and Bertrand Bonello (on Jean-Pierre Leaud)

I’m very happy to revisit the interviews done for the Funhouse TV show, as they often involve people who are honest to a fault (as is the case with the first subject here) and other times shed light on not only the interview subject’s work, but that of their colleagues (as is the case with the second).

Marina de Van is an actress-filmmaker best known to American “arthouse” aficionados for her terrific work in films by Francois Ozon (See the Sea, Sitcom, and the script for the very moving Under the Sand). She’s written and directed three features as of this writing (the second, Don’t Look Back, has come out on DVD in the U.S.; the third remains unreleased).

Her first feature, In My Skin, is a fascinating and very disturbing character study that focuses on a woman (played by de Van) who is “losing control” of her body. As a filmmaker, she offers up some impressively stylish scenes (that owe a bit to both Cronenberg and Bunuel) and a few quite harrowing ones in which her character, feeling alienated from herself in the extreme, begins to cut herself. When I interviewed her in 2003, upon the film’s NYC debut, I asked her about this aspect of the film. Her bluntness was quite refreshing:

Bertrand Bonello had a big arthouse success recently with House of Pleasure, but that was not his first piece of cinematic erotica. His 2001 film The Pornographer is an extremely well-acted character study that includes one hardcore sex scene that made certain the film would never appear on “arts cable” in the U.S. (to think, it was only a few years ago when we did still have such a thing).

The film starred the great Jean-Pierre Leaud, perfectly cast as a former radical filmmaker who has turned to commercial sex cinema. He has several superb scenes in the film, particularly a final monologue delivered to a reporter (Catherine Mouchet). I asked Bonello in my 2002 interview with him to talk about his motivation for casting Leaud in the film and what the “New Wave” icon was really like in person. I was fascinated by his answer:

The Funhouse interview: Kathryn Leigh Scott and Gerrit Graham

There are a number of interviews that I’ve featured on the Funhouse TV show that have fallen through the cracks in terms of Net exposure. I’m aiming in the next few weeks to get clips from these chats onto that nefarious (see below) Net-nexus, YouTube. Below are two such items, one from an interview that hasn’t previously been online and one that was online and had a “worldwide block” (!) put on it by the morons at a major movie studio owned by the Murdoch Empire.

The first interview is with the charming and talented actor-author Kathryn Leigh Scott, best known for starring in Dark Shadows (the classic daytime gothic series, not the recent Tim Burton film that has already faded from memory).

In the Eighties, Ms. Scott became an independent publisher with the company Pomegranate Press. Here she speaks about the moment when Dark Shadows was transformed into a “horror soap”:

The second clip is one that was previously on YouTube and received tens of thousands of hits. The first time I uploaded it, I appended to it a 45-second clip from the film we’re discussing, The Phantom of the Paradise, that illustrated what Mr. Graham was talking about. This 45-second sliver made the Kopyright Kops at Twentieth-Century Fox, the studio that owns and distributes the film, put a “worldwide ban” on the clip.

Two facts make this a mega-moronic move: first, several other clips from the film are on YT and have stayed up for years at a time (including a ten-minute chunk of the film’s rock-opera segment); second, the clip provides promotion for, and background information about, the film.

Then again, Fox has chosen to release this hardcore cult film on DVD in the U.S. with NO extras, whereas there’s a full-length documentary about the film (in English) on the French DVD, as well as other supplements. So, in essence, they care about the film enough to ban my interview clip, but not enough to provide it with a proper DVD release….

The interview took place on the premises of the Chiller Theatre convention in 2006.

The true essence of America: Robert Vaughn and his clown friends

Each year at this time I return to a piece of footage that really sums up America for me. Herewith, the annual presentation of Robert Vaughn being mocked by clowns (no doubt Macy's employees whose one goal was to be seen on TV) as he read the Constitution at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in the late Eighties. I used to show this clip at every "video night" I hosted and aired it annually on the Funhouse TV show — this week I'll be doing a tribute to the work of George Kuchar, so there wasn't time (although I'm sure George would've approved).

I share it again, in the hopes that all of the world will someday know that THIS is the very essence of our country:

Disc-o-rama: My latest DVD reviews

Readers of this blog might be unaware that I also review new DVD releases regularly for the Disc Dish website. I'm quite proud of the work I do for the DD site, so herewith are the reviews of mine that have appeared in the last few months.

Godard's end-of-Sixties masterpiece Weekend

Robert Aldrich's taut political thriller Twilight's Last Gleaming

British comedian-ventriloquist Nina Conti's documentary about her relation to her very unusual (and funny) act, visiting a ventriloquist convention, and the grieving process, Nina Conti: Her Master's Voice

She sits, she stares: Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

The great cult anti-sitcom starring Chris Elliott, Get a Life: the CompleteSeries

Robert Bresson's portrait of disaffected youth in the Seventies, The Devil, Probably

Terry Southern co-scripted Aram Avakian's unforgettable The End of the Road

Maidstone and Other Films by Norman Mailer contains all three of Mailer's compulsively watchable “experimental” misfires

Aki Kaurismaki's simply sublime Le Havre

Bergman's trend-setting Summer With Monika made a star and a defiant sex symbol out of Harriet Andersson

John Cassavetes' most personal and disturbing “work-for-hire,” Too Late Blues

Pearls of the Czech New Wave showcases six great Czech films of the Sixties, including the mind-melting Daisies

The French biographical drama The Conquest offers a non-too-flattering look at former French pres Nicolas Sarkozy

 

The Rat Pack spirit runs through Who's Got the Action?, a totally ridiculous yet very entertaining big-screen sitcom episode starring the one and only Dean Martin

Gainsbourg: a Heroic Life, the Serge Gainsbourg biopic

Fassbinder's complex and brilliant sci-fi telefilm World on a Wire

And proof that Frank Tashlin was the filmmaker who was best able to make Jerry Lewis charming and even (gasp) loveable onscreen, Rock-a-bye Baby