Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  I also write with my friend Mark Kelly from time to time because my life got to the stage where it was so busy that if I had a benefit coming up or telly that I needed jokes for, I simply didn’t have the time to do it all myself. Mark, who is also a comic on the circuit, writes some excellent lines for me. We have a similar hit rate. One in ten ideas seem to work but I am very grateful to him for coming up with brilliant one-liners like this:

  ‘My husband never learned to drive… in my opinion.’

  Making It to the Top

  There are many great comics who should be household names yet who remain in the shallows of comedy renown. The fame achieved by some people in the world of comedy is not really about how good a comic they are, it is more about a combination of several things. The most important of these are:

  1. Luck

  Being in the right place at the right time and representing what the important people in television perceive to be the comedy zeitgeist. Let’s take Russell Brand as an example. Although Russell is a good comic, stand-up is not his forte. Russell happened to grab people’s attention, when he was on the show that followed Big Brother — Big Brother’s Big Mouth — in which I think he was genius. He is very good at responding on his feet, he has huge charm and his use of slightly Victorian, literary language just happened to sit well in this particular show, because he was impudent, imaginative and quick. Added to this, he was perfect tabloid fodder, being the contemporary equivalent of Beau Brummell, a mercurial ladies’ man, who seemed somewhat other-worldly like a modern-day Oscar Wilde. And so it was this platform from which he was launched into the firmament, rather than the platform of his stand-up.

  America has grasped him to her bosom. That’s because America seems to love a British fop and Russell is that irresistible combination of a highly intelligent, ordinary, working-class guy who has a foot in both camps. It’s a shame to me that he has been tempted to appear in films that I can’t even be bothered to see because they sound so middle-of-the-road. The same goes for Ricky Gervais. Why has he gone to America? Why has the subtlety of his dark, malevolent wit been shovelled into the gaping, uncompromising, populist maw of the Hollywood machine, which can only result in a watering-down of his strength? Is it money? Is it global fame? I don’t know. Am I just envious? I can honestly say I’m not — and so maybe the problem is mine, in that case!

  2. Talent

  I have put talent second because I believe it is less important than luck. The list of neglected comedy talent is stuffed with extremely funny, potentially huge comedians: Johnny Immaterial (Jonathan Meres) John Hegley, Boothby Graffoe (James Martyn Rogers), Hattie Hayridge, Linda Smith (God rest her lovely comedy soul, even though she didn’t believe in Him), and many others who seem to have missed their opportunity as it passed silently by them.

  3. Television execs

  Those powerful people in television, who get to point to a comic as if they are laid on a table like a buffet, play a huge part in who makes it and who doesn’t. And if they don’t like you, you’re going to struggle, unless you’re so popular, they cannot ignore you.

  4. Not being like another comic

  No aspiring comic should base their act on someone they admire. Individuality of thought and performance is what TV people are looking for, and if you model yourself on, say Jack Dee or Billy Connolly, it’s obvious that if those people have already become household names, a wishy-washy version of them, which you will invariably seem, is not what’s required.

  I have narrowed down my favourite comedy moments to half a dozen, leaving out an incident in a hotel with two comics which I am sworn not to repeat.

  One of my all-time favourite comedies is Fawlty Towers. Despite the race and gender stereotypes, which have been retrospectively condemned by many, there is so much to admire about this series. Basil Fawlty is a supreme comedy character, and there are some sublime moments. We all have our favourites, but one of mine is the scene when the grumpy old guest complains about the view, and Basil launches into a rant about what she’d expected: ‘Hordes of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain,’ for example.

  Just recently I stayed in a very upmarket hotel en route from Cornwall. I had performed at a lovely small theatre near Liskeard and was travelling to a village near Hastings where I was opening my brother’s fete, because ex-Doctor Who Tom Baker had pulled out at the last minute. (Probably too many Cybermen encroaching on Winchelsea.)

  At the hotel, a very sweet young man took me to my room and showed me where everything was, and he commented particularly on the wonderful view before drawing back the curtains to show me. Unfortunately he had forgotten it was midnight and there wasn’t a bleeding view, but it was very entertaining nevertheless.

  Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders gave me another top comedy moment when they came up with their pervy, fat old geezers who would attempt to shag anything (and it didn’t even have to move) including the side of an armchair. I remember first seeing them and laughing till I cried. Every detail was so accurate, right down to the fact that so many men of that ilk seem to think that women are ‘gagging for it’ and they are the blokes to give it to them. Sublime.

  Monty Python was woven into the fabric of my teenage years, and most of the sketches I loved featured Terry Jones dressed up as a woman. There was something about the floral fifties’ dress and wrinkly stockings on his skinny legs that was hysterical, and in The Meaning of Life, as a pregnant mother plopping out babies at the sink while washing up. I laughed every time I thought of it, even slightly inappropriately in public from time to time.

  Airplane is one of my all-time favourite comedy films, because it is so silly and has so many gems of funniness in it. I think my favourite character was the one played by Lloyd Bridges who works in the airport and is a typically stressed and out-of-control man. Throughout the film we return to him time and time again, as he says the immortal lines, ‘I picked the wrong week to give up smoking/drinking/amphetamines/glue-sniffing’ and sinks back into a mire of substance abuse. As an oral person who has the potential to be addicted to all these things, it was my perfect kind of comedy.

  Richard Pryor was a comedy genius, and to some extent many of the comedy acts that followed him drew upon his brilliant evocations of ordinary life as a black working-class person in America (even though a lot of the comics were neither black nor lived in America). No one could possibly fail to laugh at his anthropomorphising of his pets and how they fitted into the family hierarchy.

  Only Fools and Horses is another comedy that is full of stereotypes, and although I love the supreme timing of Del Boy’s fall backwards through the bar after the barman has unwittingly left a gap there, my favourite episode involves the crash to the floor of the priceless chandelier, because Grandad has loosened the wrong one while Del Boy and Rodney wait haplessly beneath another one with a sheet.

  And that — as they say in the biz — is your lot, folks.

  Doing stand-up abroad is a bit weird given that in some countries the cultural gap is so enormous that the audience is completely puzzled by your jokes. Of course, the major barrier is language, which means that British comics are confined to those countries that speak English as a first language or fluently as a second language.

  Therefore the main countries available to us are America, Canada, Australia and a vast selection of other countries in which ex-pats live such as Dubai and Hong Kong.

  My limited experience includes only Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe such as Germany and Holland, where you will find that the natives speak better English than we do most of the time. (I exclude Australia from that statement.)

  Canada

  I have been to Canada twice, both times for the Montreal Comedy Festival, which has intimate connections with Edinburgh and the big comedy agencies over here. Every year, a scout from Montreal will come over to England to watch comedy and then invite various comics to go over and perform at their festival. At the time I went, there was a comedy programme linked to it
which was shown on Channel Four, called Just for Laughs.

  I was invited following an Edinburgh performance and despite my dislike of flying I decided to grit my teeth and go for it. Rumour had it that some of the big American agents wandered around Montreal, which was obviously easier for them to travel to, rather than coming to England, and you might get yourself an HBO (Home Box Office — big comedy channel) special or something even better.

  I didn’t really want to go to America and work, but decided it would do no harm to my career if I at least showed up. So I found myself queuing at Heathrow, somewhat anxious about the nine-hour flight but determined to mitigate the nerves with a bout of extreme smoking. (There is more about smoking later; it gets its very own chapter. See A Nasty Habit, page 244).

  This was in the early nineties, and at that point everyone was still smoking their heads off on planes, so as I reached the desk with my friend Sue, I confidently requested a smoking seat up the back, just like being at the back of the school bus.

  The woman on the desk — sneeringly I thought —informed me that it was a No Smoking flight and at that instant I hated her more than I have ever hated anyone. In the few seconds I had, the idea ran through my head that I might just as well go home and forget the whole bloody thing. However, I reasoned I had got this far, and decided to batten down the emotional hatches and go for it.

  It wasn’t a pleasant experience; there was a fair bit of turbulence and I arrived at the other end feeling jaded and thrown about. Montreal seemed like a slightly smaller, nicer version of America with its glass towers gleaming in the sun, the centrepiece being a huge pink tower which was immediately named by one wag ‘The Jolly Pink Penis’. On the flight with me were Frank Skinner, Jerry Sadowitz and Craig Charles … all ready to fire a handful of jokes at the Canadians and see if they laughed.

  We were put up in what I considered, with my limited experience, to be a very flash hotel and immediately set to what comics are famous for — a lot of drinking.

  In order to crank ourselves up for the Comedy Gala (in Canada it is pronounced ‘Gayla’) we had the opportunity to try out our material in smaller clubs to see if it worked. I found myself in one show called The Nasty Show (in Canada pronounced ‘Nair-sty’) and it couldn’t have been more apt, making me seem very mild. It displayed the talents of some most unpalatable racist, misogynist comedians, and when one of them vomited out a really horrible joke about Oprah Winfrey I began to wonder if I was in the right place.

  That night, pissed and fuelled by righteous indignation, I picked up my phone about two o’clock in the morning and called the room of the comic in question to protest about his material. I’m afraid I only managed the two words, ‘You’re shit,’ and then put the phone down. Yes, not exactly a well-reasoned academic argument, I know, and much as I’d like to apologise for my appalling behaviour, I’m not going to. He was a deeply unsavoury man and I hope Oprah appreciates all my efforts on her behalf. I do realise I could have been more grown up about it, but I’m not very grown up when I’ve had a few — or when I haven’t.

  Incidentally my material wasn’t going down all that well either. It was around the time of the Gulf War and I was doing some stuff about Saddam Hussein. When the audience looked blankly at me as if to say ‘Who the hell is Saddam Hussein?’ I gave up and went back to the fat jokes, which they seemed to like.

  During this trip we attempted to do some sociable things to get to know our surroundings, and apparently one of the must-dos was a trip on the rapids. We all arrived down at the riverside one morning and were kitted out in life-jackets and shepherded onto a big boat which seated about thirty people. There then ensued what seemed like a combination of being shaken about so much that your bones rattled whilst continuously having buckets of water thrown over you. It was good fun. However, it was too much for one of our party who, fuelled by extreme anxiety went into a sort of catatonic state of paralysis. A little boat bustled over to our bigger boat and he was taken off, poor sod, as stiff as a board.

  I came up against a few unlikeable comedians on that trip. Each Montreal Festival flies in an elderly statesman of comedy and for my first trip there it was Milton Berle. To be honest, I’d never heard of him, but people assured me he was dead famous in the States. Also, as I am not at the nerdy end of the comedy world, I haven’t assiduously studied the lives of all comics going back to the Ice Age which certainly some of my peer group have done. Milton Berle looked about 150 but he may only have been in his eighties. He was to compere the Gala show I was doing. This involved bursting out of a big box at the back of the stage, and as it’s not something we all do every day we had to go to the 3,200-seater theatre to rehearse it in case we walked out of the box backwards, I suppose, or accidentally burst out of the side.

  We were all introduced to Milton Berle at this point and his interpersonal skills with women seemed to be somewhat lacking. As someone gestured at me and said, ‘And this is Jo Brand,’ he moved towards me, saying, ‘Well, come here then, girl, I’m not going to touch your titties.’

  First of all, I hate that word ‘titties’ — it’s a word children and pervy old men use — and he obviously fell into the latter category. I was in another country, faced with a very famous American comic, and tongue-tied for those reasons. I regret not giving the old fart as good as I got.

  The night of the Gala arrived and terrifying it was too. I had never performed in front of such a big audience before and was nervous as hell. However, I managed to come out of the front of the box and deliver my words all in the right order, to some nice laughs and applause.

  Unfortunately Jerry Sadowitz didn’t fare quite so well. This may be to do with the fact that he opened his set by saying, ‘Good evening, moose fuckers.’ I’m not sure the Canadians were particularly enamoured with that title, since a man right at the back got out of his seat, strolled nonchalantly down the steps, got up on stage and lamped Jerry right in the face. Jerry got up and was hit again before a security man ambled across the stage and removed the offender in as congratulatory a way as he could possibly have managed. It was the talk of the festival, of course, and most of us felt relieved that it wasn’t us.

  I was on my way to the after-show party when an audience member cornered me in the corridor.

  ‘Well done,’ he enthused, ‘and I thought it was particularly funny that you have two balloons down your front. They looked so natural.’ Well, I didn’t have any balloons down my front and, worried he was going to do a Milton Berle and check, I legged it.

  After we’d had a few drinks, we went for a meal at a restaurant nearby where lots of the comics and agents hung out. As I was heading back from the toilet to join my friends, I passed a table that appeared to be populated by the Italian Mafia: lots of guys in sharp suits doing the wearing-sunglasses-inside thing. No women. As I passed, one of them stared straight at me. Well, I think he was looking at me; his face was turned in my direction. He initially pointed at me without a word and then curled his finger in a supercilious, beckoning motion.

  Maybe he thinks I’m a waitress, I thought, but instead of politely informing him I wasn’t, and fuelled by a couple of sherries, I looked at him and said, ‘Piss off, you twat.’

  On arrival back at my table I asked a Canadian comic who the group of Mafia lookey-likeys were that had attempted to detain me.

  ‘Oh, they’re all really important American agents,’ he replied.

  Goodbye, Hollywood.

  Montreal 2

  Weirdly, I can’t recall much about my second Montreal trip. I took my friend Waggly with me that time and it is only a very stressful epic journey I remember — a trip to the Niagara Falls, which I decided I really wanted to see in person, as it were.

  We intended to hire a car and drive there and back in a day on my day off. We had failed to take into account a few very important things. Firstly we didn’t really know where the fuck we were going, secondly I’d never driven an automatic car on the wrong side of the road, and thirdl
y it was roughly a 900-mile round trip.

  Getting out of Montreal itself was like some sort of nightmare odyssey I made several wrong turns, entries down one-way streets and at one point we ended up on what appeared to be a massive building site. A bloke in a fluorescent jacket approached and I thought with some relief that he was going to redirect us. So I wound down the window to apologise and ask directions. His words:

  ‘Move, bitch.’ I did.

  After roughly six hours of driving we neared our destination. The Niagara Falls is set in a big park and we could hear the roar of the water as we entered.

  ‘Look,’ cried Waggly, all excited. ‘There it is!’

  ‘It’ turned out to be a fountain, and after some gentle piss-taking from me, we parked opposite the great whooshing waterfall itself. Unfortunately by this time it was getting dark and I was already worried about how long it was going to take us to get back. So we must have done the quickest surveillance of the Falls anyone has ever done, before we got back in the car and drove for another six/seven hours, arriving back in Montreal exhausted and very slightly tearful.

  Waggly and I had a lovely time in Montreal, mainly staying in bed very late, mooching round town admiring the architecture, sitting in cafés doing bog-all for hours on end, and recovering from our odyssey to Niagara Falls. Waggly was the perfect companion, happy to go with the flow, pleased to be there, endlessly entertaining and cheerful.

  One evening when I had a night off we trawled the bars and clubs together, getting more pissed as we went. We ended up in a sort of wine bar-type place and sat down at a table and ordered a bottle of wine. Two guys moved in and started trying to chat us up. This was most unusual for me, not so much for Waggly who is lovely-looking and slim. But as a fat person you soon learn that your role is to be that of the quirky joke-cracking friend and that you are going to get the flawed friend or God forbid what they call ‘a chubby chaser’, and down that road lie untold horrors for me. Even to this day I so resent being judged by my appearance on first meeting, that it makes my blood boil when on-sight assessments are made of me and I cannot help but turn into a piss-taking, offhand old harridan.