BYE BYE MIRANDA

So her coming two Christmas Specials will be the last we see of Miranda Hart's sitcom character. She's done three hugely successful series and I think she's bowing out at the right time. For me, the last series was looking a little bit worn out. She's a very idiosyncratic character, not one which readily adapts to a team of writers, which is how US sitcoms keep going for series after series. And there's only so much shelf life in falling over and raising one's eyebrows at the cameras, however winningly she does it. And she's aware of the no. 1 rule of sitcom: "the main character tries to learn and then they always go back to where they were." Hart goes on: "As a woman and a feminist, I hate the thought of her not coming into her own as she gets older."

However sympathetic I am to this sentiment, it worries me. It's tough enough for women to get on in comedy without the burden of feeling their characters have to be positive women. Like David Brent, Basil Fawlty or Patsy Stone, Miranda isn't an icon or banner, she's a great comedy character. Do we think Brent, Fawlty or Stone will ever "come into their own"?

Much worse was the attack on Miranda in today's "Independent" by Fiona Sturgess. "Hart's character," she says, "conveys the message that, deep down, we women are all neurotic, incapable of behaving like sentient grown-ups and deserving of pity."

Comedy characters are nearly all dysfunctional and inadequate. If they weren't,they wouldn't be funny. Nobody ever said that Homer Simpson conveyed a message that all men were useless, childish and incapable of stringing two thoughts together. Why do some feminists pile on the pressure for women performers to do more than create brilliant comedy? It seems that female comics face a double whammy: first to overcome the prejudice that women aren't funny and, on top of that, to pass a feminist test in presenting acceptably positive images of women.

Good luck, Miranda. You've brightened our TV screens and you've made us laugh. That's plenty.

And Now For Something Just The Same?

So the Pythons’ reunion sells out in 43 seconds. There’s life in the franchise yet, but what kind of life? It is that of a reanimated zombie, or a rejuvenated second spring?

In a rather blown-up spat in the Guardian, Charlie Higson and Adil Ray took either side of the argument. To Charlie, they are a wonderful vintage act with lessons still to teach the young’uns, to Adil a fossilised bunch of old farts with nothing to say to a new generation.

I was lucky enough to see the pre-Python Palin perform at a get-together of the Oxford University Etceteras Club (their version of the Footlights). He inspired me for years, and still does. The a-logical buffoonery of “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again”, with some of the team that were to become the Pythons, spoke directly to our post-war, break-out, desperate to play generation, and when the Pythons burst out in all their glory a year later it was as if heaven had descended on earth.

It all began with them. Not surrealist comedy – that had been done by the Goons – or madcap characters – ITMA was before them – but intellectually respectable comedy. Comedy with a hinterland. Philosophy, history, abstract concepts were all jumbled in with suburban banality and random nonsense. Marx and Hegel jostled together with Arthur Two-Sheds. It was influenced by Ionesco and N F Simpson as much as by Tommy Cooper, but it was never remotely pretentious.

Spike Milligan and Galton & Simpson were the generation who fought in the war, keen to debunk the fossilised authority of the officer class, a more egalitarian society in view. But the Pythons simply exploded everything. Nothing made sense, the only fun to be had was to turn everything inside out.

That was then. Today’s standups and sketch comedians work in an entirely different landscape. Comedy is more personal and audiences much more knowing. The rules have already been broken and put together again. There is no great cachet now, thanks to the Pythons, of being clever, surreal or literate. It’s just another style choice.

Let the old boys and their audience have their fun and pay off their tax bills. Let them roar “This is an ex-parrot!” together. But let’s not pretend it’s that different from the elderly ladies who scream “Where the nuts come from!” in “Charley’s Aunt” (I love that, as well). They won’t be doing any new material, but I don’t think anyone wants them to. I wish them well, but I won’t be going along (I’d have never made the 43 second deadline anyway).

What do you mean, women are funny?

Hooray. Last weekend Bridget Christie became only the third female comedian in 33 years to win the Edinburgh Festival Comedy Award. Double hooray because her act (by reports) isn’t a lightweight crowd-pleaser but an hour of hard-hitting and funny feminism.

Why is she only the third? Is it because women are only one eleventh as funny as men? Or is it because there are eleven times as many males as females on the circuit? I’ve just done a rough count of the comics listed in the Chortle website (As, Bs and Cs only. I haven’t got all night) and there are 216 men and 57 women. More men than women, but not eleven times as many. It seems that, simply, there’s an unwillingness to appreciate female comics.

There’s not this problem with sketch comedy. Wood & Walters, Smack the Pony, Katy Brand, Watson & Oliver (they’ve come in for a bit of stick, but their last series had some wonderful moments) – no one would dare argue that they’re not as funny as men.

But in standup women struggle to be recognised. The circuit can be a testosterone-sweaty gladiatorial arena in which most men would wilt. They say that it takes balls of steel to survive on it, which, if true, cuts out half the human race. But women don’t lack courage, talent or determination. The difficulty is that, in standup, they simply have fewer choices.

A comedian’s stage persona isn’t created by force of will. It’s forged over long months through a compact between the comic and their audiences. Laughing at someone involves a degree of acceptance and trust. And at the moment the stock of available routines audiences are willing to buy into is far more meagre for women than it is for men.

The dysfunctional weirdo (Emo Phillips, Paul Foot). The sexual predator (Mike Wilmot). The grossed-out drunk (Carey Marx). The innocent from outer space (Milton Jones). If these comics were women, audiences – male and female - would tend to feel threatened, worried or bemused. They would have to work far harder to gain acceptance.

This is why so many female comedians fall into either bubbly/loveable, sassy/chic, abrasive but likeable/gay categories. There’s so much more pressure for them to be loveable, sweet and attractive.

Hang on. Not all women comics are like that. Jo Brand was magnificently scruffy, grungy and grumpy, not giving a toss she wasn’t going to appear on the cover of “Cosmopolitan”. But notably few have followed in her footsteps. I can’t think of anyone at the moment with the same air of simply not giving a toss. (I’d be happy to be corrected on this)

The solution is for more and more women to get up on the standup stages, to renegotiate the space with audiences and get us used to the idea that they can be whoever they damn well want to be. As Bridget Christie is doing. Let’s hope she starts an unstoppable trend.

Look up Funny Women  http://www.funnywomen.com/ who are working hard to promote female comedy. 

Funny Words

“What’s comedy all abou- TIMING!!!!!”, according to the old joke. Actually it’s about quite a lot else, and one of the main factors by which a joke stands or falls is wording. Yesterday’s flat joke may bring the house down today if expressed with just one altered word.

Some words are funnier than others. Haddock is funnier than Fish. Cake is funnier than Gateau. Grub is funnier than Larva. Why? Often comedy writers just say “Well, they just are funnier” and leave it at that, but I think there’s a science to it. Or a bit of a science, let’s not get too nerdy about this...

The first rule is that short words are funnier than longer ones. Cake vs Gateau, Grub vs Larva, Wig vs Hairpiece. A short word has a punch which pushes the breath out and causes laughter. Brevity is the soul of wit. Long words can get in the way very quickly. Then again, Haddock is longer than Fish, so you can hardly say that this is an unbreakable rule, just like everything else in comedy.

The second rule is that hard consonants are funnier than soft. Cake and Haddock both have that wonderful edgy “k” sound, the ideal comedy consonant (there we go again). Cookie is funnier than Biscuit. The “g” in Wig is fairly hard. It has impact, and adds to the punch factor. Also, and this is important, hard consonants are easier to hear. A muffled joke has no impact.

The third rule is that words with hidden, or slightly underground, associations, can work really well. Hob Nob is funnier than Biscuit because, subliminally, it sounds like part of a  knob gag. Lunchbox is funnier than Packed Lunch because it also has knobby connotations. The Fluke fish sounds funny because it also sounds like something else. It doesn’t mean these work as puns. If they did, it would distract from the point of the joke. But there’s something in all these words which makes the audience sit up and listen. Their comedy sensibility has been alerted.

The fourth rule is probably the most important but also the most obvious. The word has to convey the sense of the joke precisely. If you set up with the phrase “The butler fetched the president a hob nob” it’s distracting because we’re expecting something posh – unless the joke is about spending cuts in the White House, or something like that. This rule overcomes all the others. Unless it doesn’t. This is comedy, after all.

Are Old Jokes Funny?

The first recorded joke was written down in ancient Sumeria in about 1800BC. It went something like this:

“Something which has not occurred since time immemorial: that a young woman did not fart till her husband’s embrace.”

Got you in stitches? Me neither.  Maybe the double negative kills the laugh. Maybe something got lost in translation.

Another old joke, rather more recent, from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”:

OLIVIA  Go to, y’re are a dry fool: I’ll no more of you: besides, you grow dishonest.

CLOWN: Two faults, Madonna, that drink and good company will amend: for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry.

By anyone’s standards, that’s pretty feeble. But at least we understand the “dry fool” gag, even if we don’t laugh at it. What can we make of this one from later in the play?

“Remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of  thy grandam.”

No doubt Pythagoras and woodcock jokes were all the rage in 1600, but they leave us stony-faced.

It’s clear that context and style in comedy change drastically over the years, to the extent that jokes and sitcoms which made us hoot only twenty years ago now leave us cold. In terms of forcing us to drop our defences and let out a laugh, that is, which you could say is what comedy is all about.

But looking closer at the first two, you can see that they take the form of a joke much as we understand it today. They’re both in two parts. The first sets up an expectation (the setup) and the second subverts it (the punch line).

Our Sumerian gag writer sets things up with a pompous intro which leads us to expect something in the way of historical grandeur. What do we get? A fart.

The sense of the joke is that women fart anyway, and don’t bother too much about what men may think, even when they’re still in the market for a husband. That’s how I take it anyway. If you assume that Sumerian Society was a prim one in which women were expected to be like that, the appeal to people of the time is clear. It’s even slightly subversive. After thought, it’s rather humorous, even to us today.

Shakespeare’s gag is still terrible, but we can see the joke format OK.

Subject matter changes. The existence of the joke seems to be timeless. And long live fart gags.