As much as I like to think of myself as a thought-provoking social commentator with a refined sense of humour, I can be reduced to helpless laughter by the word penal. As a child, I often had to stay behind after school with my friend Kate and endure smacks to the back of the legs with a ruler as punishment for laughing so much in class.
It was a Convent School and one of the nuns, Sister Joy once demanded we describe exactly what we “found so amusing.” We were children. There was so much to laugh about. Mostly though, we were laughing at the cadence of words.
Kate had special needs and to my delight she laughed at anything I did. I just had to give her a sideways glance and point at my nose and she was off. If I combined that with a particular word, spoken in a certain way, a word that I knew she would find funny like barnacle or baboon lingering on the ‘ooooo’ sound, Kate’s giggling would escalate.
The bonus was that when Kate got the uncontrollable giggles, she would start farting.
Nuns, baboons, noisy bodily functions. Pure slapstick, my childhood.
I realise this doesn’t paint me in a good light. I am responsible for the uncontrollable giggling and farting and subsequent corporal punishment of this little girl, but to jump to my own defence, I didn’t make the rules, I was just a kid and she was my friend.
This tale of classroom silliness suggests the cliché that every comic was once the class clown applies to me but this was not the case. Somehow though, Kate brought out the worst or the best in me depending on which side of the ruler you were on.
The only way I knew how to explain myself to the nuns was by writing a long list of the words that made me laugh. I clearly remember some of this list. I have excavated it form the relics in my mind – pudding, chicken, tinkle, willy-nilly, bullock, sock, discombobulated, OK not that last one, but sock was definitely on the list. Now, socks are funny. Socks are very, very funny.
This was reinforced last month at Dr Dimaglios. It was there I saw the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. So simple. One man. Two socks.
There was the classic passive/aggressive exchange that one comes to expect from puppets of course but here it was genderless and didn’t involve beatings. Just a bit of “good sock – bad sock” routine with a little song at the end. And lots and lots of words rhyming with sock.
Yes, there’s an adult version.
What made it comedy gold was the shambolic condition of one of the socks. One of its eyes was hanging by the merest thread and swung about with every movement from the invisible puppeteer creating this whole other persona of its own.
There I am, toiling over carefully constructed written gags for days on end, wringing every inch of funny from my bones, pacing up and down the fifteen square feet that is my living arrangement and this guy comes along, sticks a sock on his hand and I’m crying with laughter. Look out for the sock and his side-kick at Edinburgh Festival, they’ll have you in stitches.
As well as the Socks I clapped my hands together joyously at Dr Dimaglios for a variety of comical genres such as Evie Anderson, a modern-day Lysistrata with a sardonic twist and the ‘only opera singing comedian on her street’, Pete Firman, (whose freakish antics could yet provoke The Magic Circle to string him up), Stand-Up from the bookish Helen Keen and Dr Dimaglios stalwart Mr Paul Foot.
The experience left me wanting to scratch beneath a bigger surface of fun. I left Dr Dimaglios wanting to reinvent myself. I want to wear high heels, a fruit basket on my head and play distorted electric guitar. I want to share my roll-call of funny sounding words. Not “one-liners”, but “one-worders”. Words like Thinketh. Go on say it. “Thinketh.” Better still, say it in the mirror. A sort of Carmen Electra, Jimi Hendrix and Pam Ayres rolled into one, with a lisp. Or a lithp. It could work. Just the once maybe. For charity.
Sometimes it would be nice to have a character with which to perform. (Or a sock.) I love performing as myself but occasionally I can be delivering the set-up to a joke with the rhythm and stealth of my chosen design and there’ll be a mimicking, taunting voice in my head going, “Na-na-na. (pause) Na-na-na.” The approaching punchline can feel so obvious. At least it’s the voice in my head doing the ‘Na-na-na’ and not a member of the audience. That would be truly awful. Especially if it was Sister Joy running her hand up and down a ruler with exultant delight.
Some comics were born to do one-liners. A good example of this on the new act circuit is Finnish comic Tomi Walamies . He’s anglicised his tongue but not his mind and the result is sharp, analytical one-liners delivered deadpan. His literal interpretation of the language affords him so much scope for wordplay.
At the opposite end of the spectrum to one-liners, there is the ‘anecodote’ and I’m in real admiration of new acts like Grainne Maguire, Brett Goldstein and Chris Pacey who don’t necessarily go for the wam-bam factor of one-liners but take the beautiful risk of telling a story. Grainne Maguire’s satirical conversation between the Pope and Michelangelo under the canopy of his homoerotic paintings in the Sistine Chapel, is fiendishly memorable. Equally, Brett Goldstein’s narrative take on an impish and drunken God, exacting revenge on mankind through the medium of global warming, is an hilariously playful and much needed antidote to a very modern mess. As for Chris Pacey’s surreal storytelling, he’s in a league all of his own and if you have a purple horse you might be able to catch him.
Recently I’ve been finding more and more uses for my love of words and little characterisations. After a year on the circuit I’ve also been able to start deciphering some of the codes used by people to tell me what they think of my act.
Sometimes you do a gig and someone will say to you, “That was excellent.” Nothing to decipher there. Another time someone might come up to you and say, “Well, that bit about the aardvarks worked”. This means, everything else was rubbish or if you don‘t have any material about aardvarks, then everything was rubbish. Another time someone might come up to you and say “Are you an actress?” This means, I hate you.
Australian comic Jim Jeffries was attacked last month while on stage at Manchester’s Comedy Store and received some significant blows to the head. I don’t think there’s much reading between the lines to be done there, do you? If his attacker was offended by his act, it might have been better if he’d simply told him to “put a sock in it.”
