Sarah Millican--The Queen of Comedy

by Tina Campanella

  What people saw on stage was a reflection of what was happening in society. From the early 20th century onwards, women were increasingly only given supporting roles in the theatre, as chorus girls or dancers in the musicals. They would occasionally be given romantic roles as leading ladies, but the parts they were allowed to play were nearly always as objects of desire by men. In every case they played second fiddle to the male lead, who had the best songs and the best lines.

  The early 20th century saw many developments in theatre, with bigger and bigger theatres allowing for more and more lavish productions. In these new expensive theatres, impresarios couldn’t take the risk that an act might bomb – he wanted to know in advance that the act was going to be a success. As a result, increasing numbers of productions were written and rehearsed well in advance of the performance appearing on stage. The age of risqué acts, which had a chance to build up a profile over time, had long since disappeared.

  It was an age in which only musicals were able to rival the cinema. If people didn’t go to either of these, they went to see well-known comedians who had sharpened their skills in the music halls of the Edwardian era. In the 1920s or 1930s, there were very few women performing their own acts in the theatre.

  The same could not be said of the men. The comedians who broke through into film and later television after the war were dominating the theatre and seaside venues between the wars. George Formby, Norman Wisdom, Max Miller, Stanley Hollway, Arthur Askey and Max Bygraves were just a few of the men who dominated in the pre-and post-war period, who later moved on to film or television.

  The only exception, being a successful woman, was Gracie Fields who, like Sarah, was a sassy northern working class woman whose dramatic persona was usually as a character who overcame her roots to make good at the end. But, Fields was only able to succeed in a man’s world because she softened her comedy with song. In the string of films she made in the pre-World War Two years, Fields most often played characters from the tough urban north who brought everyone together, amid hard times, with a song. In Sing As We Go, in 1932, her whole town is thrown out of work when the local mill closes down, but Gracie cheers everyone up on a holiday in Blackpool.

  Gracie Fields, for all her northernness and working-class charm, was streets away from the modern-day female comedians like Sarah, with their ability to make comedy out of the most intimate of subjects and match male comics with their rapier wit.

  It would be years before female comedians and performers would be able to offer the same sort of material as their male counterparts and would take a sea change of social values and expectations before they could do so.

  In Britain, things only began to change in the late 1970s. It started with a movement that later came to be known as alternative comedy. Starting in The Comedy Store in London’s Soho, alternative comedy rejected the tired, hackneyed jokes and repertoires of the performers that had been on the scene for years, many of who were still appearing on TV years after they had come up with their routines.

  The biggest reaction was against the performers who appeared in mainly northern clubs who were known for aiming their jokes at the ethnic minorities or women. What the founders of ‘alternative comedy’ felt they were doing was overturning a status quo that had existed for years in which it appeared to be acceptable to poke fun at people from a different race or gender.

  Others used 1979’s victory for the Conservative Party in the General Election as a mandate to make material out of politics, something that had only been rarely seen up until that point on TV revue shows like That Was The Week That Was or in student unions.

  Early performers at The Comedy Store included Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton. Two others who were later to go on to huge TV success were Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. The Comedy Store performers attempted to copy a new style of comedy that had been performed in the United States for a couple of years which made jokes, not out of someone’s colour or sex, but out of their politics or out of what people found embarrassing.

  For many years before 1979, people who had hoped to have a laugh had had the choice of two types of joke teller. There was the northern club performer, like Bernard Manning, who had white, mainly working-class audiences rolling in the aisles with their one-liners about immigrants or mothers in law.

  For those who found Manning and his ilk a bit bawdy, there was always the other option; the ageing has-beens left over from the fading glory days of theatre variety in the 1950s and 60s, who had become the mainstay of light entertainment on TV. While Morecambe and Wise are one of the few acts that still stand out from that era, there were many on TV in the 1970s that have long since been forgotten due to their routines failing to stand the passage of time.

  Within months of The Comedy Store opening, its regular performers burst on to Britain’s TV screens, battering down the door of the comedy establishment to shout out loudly, ‘We are here, and we’re not going away.’

  Popularity of the TV show The Young Ones, particularly among students and young people, who had long since failed to identify with the older generation of comedians, ensured that alternative comedy was here to stay. Soon, The Comedy Store was not the only venue where so-called alternative comedy was being seen and heard.

  The Comedy Store wasn’t completely revolutionary. Student comedy had been around for years. The Edinburgh Fringe had been set up in 1947 and, together with the Cambridge Footlights, had acted as a venue for student theatre for many years before. But, like the Footlights, the Fringe only had a relatively limited middle-class audience and it tended to use the format of revue and sketch shows rather than the traditional format of standing up telling jokes.

  Stand-up as we understand it today had begun in America in the vaudeville theatres between the wars, and then quickly moved on to television as the number of sets exploded in the 1950s. Bob Hope was among those who took their act from performing in front of audiences for radio shows in the 30s, to gigs in front of troops in the war, to performing on TV after the war. But, stand-up of that style didn’t move across the Atlantic until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  What the opening of The Comedy Store did, as it grew in popularity, was show that standing up, telling jokes on a small stage, in front of an audience that was often intimately involved with what was going on, could be successful in Britain too.

  At first, the number of female ‘alternative comedians’ was very small. French and Saunders went on to appear on The Young Ones and also on The Comic Strip Presents a few years later, but they were initially almost the only women on the circuit. When they appeared, they made sure they left their mark. Jennifer Saunders left audiences aghast when she appeared on stage wearing tampons in her ears. It was something that people in Britain just hadn’t seen before.

  Almost the only other woman on the stand-up circuit, who came from a slightly different background, was Victoria Wood. Wood had won a talent show called New Faces in 1974, but didn’t start appearing in front of audiences telling comic stories until the early 1980s.

  Having written a series of sketch-based TV segments, shows and plays, she was allowed a shot at her own stand-up and sketch show in 1984 with Victoria Wood As Seen On TV. In many ways though, Wood’s show was more in the style of the comedians of the 1970s, with its light-hearted observation humour and reliance on pastiche. While her musical numbers frequently referred to sex, they often held back from the frankness and honesty later successful comediennes would be known for.

  Meanwhile, in the United States, several women were also championing a new type of comic material – born out of the new feminist ideas heard in magazines like Cosmopolitan.

  Joan Rivers had been fashioning her routines for years, so in the 1970s and early 1980s, she felt able to let rip in a way that female comedians had never done so before. She had started in the early 1960s in the small, in-your-face, comedy clubs of Chicago and New York’s Greenwich Village. By the middle of that decade, her irreverent style caught
the revolutionary mood of the time, and she began to appear on TV, with slots on The Tonight Show and the Ed Sullivan Show.

  Roseanne Barr, who started later, at the end of the 1970s, probably did more to make the idea that women could be funny and popular acceptable than anyone. By taking on men directly, using her lightning wit in a way that women were just not supposed to do, she made half the audience suddenly sit up and think ‘I wish I could say things like that!’

  When Roseanne’s eponymous show, which was modelled on her real life and children, became one of the most watched shows of the 1980s, those who booked comedy started to finally believe that women could be funny.

  It had taken nearly a century to re-establish something that audiences in Victorian times had taken for granted.

  Before the First World War, women had been nearly as important to stage audiences as men. Artists like Marie Lloyd, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Vesta Tilley were in every way regarded as equals to the male comedians of their time. Many could command huge audiences in the Victorian music halls. The massive demand for tickets to see them drove the development of music hall theatre into larger and larger venues.

  Marie Lloyd (1870-1922) broke all taboos by making a career out of a mix of comic songs like My Old Man Said Follow The Van and comedy routines packed full of innuendo and double-entendre, at a time when women were not supposed to talk about sex, let alone enjoy it.

  Jenny Hill (1868-1893), like Sarah, used the breakdown of her marriage as inspiration to take to the stage where she openly subverted what was expected of women by dressing as a man to comic effect. Another female comic, Vesta Tilley did the same, appearing regularly as a male impersonator. She ended up on the bill of the first Royal Variety Performance in 1912.

  Meanwhile, Bessie Bellwood (1856-1896) developed a saucy stage persona which was often thought highly abrasive – she would often argue down hecklers until they couldn’t come back at her – but always remained loveable, using a style that many of today’s top female comics would identify with.

  All these artists were accepted by Victorian audiences, despite going against all the conventions of their age, because they were hugely entertaining – mostly because they ignored what was expected of them to make people laugh as much as possible.

  As the Edwardian age dawned after 1901, society began to change and women were increasingly expected to ‘know their place’. Any challenge to that orthodoxy, like women appearing confidently on stage, had the potential to upset the established view. Theatre impresarios began booking acts which upheld the mainstream way of thinking, and female comedians of the sort like those mentioned above gradually faded from sight.

  With no women around to prove otherwise, it was no wonder that people were left asking the question: ‘Are women as funny as men?’

  It took not just French and Saunders and Victoria Wood to open the way, but other even bolder performers like Jo Brand to pave the road for more women to attempt to standup and make jokes on stage alongside the many men already doing so. A former psychiatric nurse, Jo Brand took up comedy as she approached 30 – the same age as Sarah – after feeling her life was wasting away. The Independent, in 2009, said that at her first gig, a male heckler started shouting ‘F*** off, you fat cow’ and kept up his tirade throughout her entire performance. It ended without applause.

  She decided to call herself The Sea Monster, to preempt the inevitable abuse about her weight, but still faced, during her early appearances on the alternative comedy circuit, having a pint of beer thrown at her, having her face slapped and being pelted with food.

  Despite that, she persevered and by the late 1980s, had a regular slot on Channel 4’s Saturday Night Live, which had been started a few years earlier as a springboard on to TV for alternative comedians. She then went on to have her own show, Through The Cakehole, and thereafter made regular appearances on panel shows through the 1990s and into the noughties.

  The fact that Jo, a large woman with a laid-back laconic style, could survive in the quick-fire world of male-dominated comedy, proved a spur for many woman who looked at her and said to themselves, ‘If she can do it, maybe I can too’.

  Jo’s success, as well as that of the other early female comedians, opened the way for others to come after. Stand-up night organisers, as well as TV producers, began realising there were audiences out there who wanted to hear what female comedians had to say.

  In the late 1980s and 1990s, a slow trickle began to turn into a stream of talented women coming through. Helen Lederer, Morwenna Banks, Caroline Aherne, Mrs Merton, Jenny Eclair, Rhona Cameron, Donna McPhail and Mel and Sue all broke through to feature on TV programmes that showed off their talents. But they still only represented a fraction of the number of men on the circuit.

  In the last decade, there have not only been repeated calls for more to be done to put more female comics on the stage, but efforts have been made to provide forums to allow give them the chance to do so. Initiatives like Funny Women, a competition which has been criticised for charging an entrance fee, have championed all-women line ups, highlighting talent that might not have emerged had the contest not existed.

  Despite what Sarah told The Guardian after her second Fringe run, she admits that although things are much easier now than they have ever been for comedians like her, the nature of what stand-up requires, will always be a barrier that prevents as many women taking part as men.

  In 2011, Sarah told The Observer: ‘When I look at my audiences, it’s 50-50 and that’s not all women who’ve brought their boyfriends – often it’s the other way round. If you talk about funny things that happen during sex, blokes can identify just as much. Maybe it’s just that women don’t get their side of the story told as much at comedy clubs.

  ‘I think, if you’re funny, you get on. If you’re not, you don’t. Gender doesn’t come into it. And it’s too easy to use it as an excuse. If I don’t do well at a gig, I could come off and go, well, it’s because they don’t like women. But it’s more likely to be because you’re jokes weren’t good enough. Or you didn’t have the confidence. Or it’s just a hard gig. There’s a million reasons why an audience might not like you and it’s almost never to do with gender.

  ‘The reason why there’s not so many women doing it, is because of the lifestyle. It’s quite solitary. There’s a lot of driving around, at the beginning, staying in not very nice hotels or on sofas. Maybe it’s not a life women are as suited to. Some women do it and have families. I’m in awe of them.’

  In The Guardian a year later she added another point that suggested it could just be about the practicalities of booking acts. She said: ‘Bookers will spread you out. Maybe, because there’s only about 10 to 12 [women] at [a particular] level. A bit like, they might spread out the one-liner guys. You’re kind of in a bracket of your own – which is fine. I understand that people want variety on a bill. It’s also positive discrimination in a way. They may like to have women on the bill.’

  So, if women can be as funny as men, if more of them can put up with conditions on the road, there could be a fantastic queue of them waiting to step up to the mic and impress everyone with their wit and timing.

  But, it is important to remember those who came before. Sarah said the comic who went before her who she is most to be grateful to is Jo Brand. When asked by The Guardian whether Brand inspired her, she said: ‘Absolutely. She’s our queen. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her to do stand-up on stage when she was such a rarity. But I’m grateful that she did, because it has made my life so much easier and it’s definitely paving the way for the next lot. Who’s to say? Maybe at some point in the not too distant future, there’ll be no paving that needs to be done. It will be entirely paved.’

  Maybe Sarah doesn’t realise just how responsible she herself has been for some of that paving. In 2011, fellow comic and pal Jimmy Carr told The Sun that Sarah was remarkable precisely because she isn’t seen purely as a female comic. ‘If anyone’s reading th
is as a female thinking, ‘I want to get into comedy’, you’re pushing at an open door… I think Sarah Millican will do extraordinarily well. She’s a funny comic. She isn’t a funny “female comic”. She’s just a really funny comic.’

  CHAPTER 13

  A Walk On The Wild Side

  ‘Meet Chief Brody, who is settling in nicely. Though my slippers appear to be the enemy…’

  By summer 2009 Sarah already had a wide and growing fan base. Not all of them could travel to Edinburgh to see her second Fringe run, Typical Woman, so they must have been pleased to hear a familiar voice on the television half way through August.

  The busy comedian had somehow found the time to fit yet another TV appearance into her busy schedule. And it’s safe to say this one would be remembered as one of her favourites – as it involved things that were small and furry…

  Sarah had always been a pet lover and often talked about her encounters with the animal kingdom on stage. ‘I sometimes get lonely, and I think I could do with an animal – a pet would be nice,’ she mused in one show. ‘If I could have any animal I would probably have a cat, but I can’t have a cat because my boyfriend’s allergic.’ She paused and her face fell in mock sadness…

  It was a stage move Sarah had truly perfected, and she often employed it to great effect in her performances. Fresh-faced and innocent looking, you couldn’t help but feel for her in those silent moments. The audience was duly sympathetic…

  ‘So I can’t have a cat till we split up,’ Sarah continued, instantly brightening. ‘Most people don’t have something to look forward to at the end of a relationship – I can’t wait till he starts f***ing other women: “I’m off to the pet shop, sod off…”’