Who Am I, Again

by Lenny Henry

  It’s time to bid farewell: to my mama, my papa and my brother Hylton; to the clubs, cabarets and entertainment palaces of my youth; and to you, my gentle reader. What this exercise has taught me is that we do stand on the shoulders of giants. People achieve their dreams by relying on the advice and support of their elders, betters and predecessors. And I am no different. I am the sum of my enthusiasms, obsessions, tastes and weaknesses.

  So here I am back in the taxi where it all started, and I’m wondering if I’d change any aspect of this first section of my life. All the hard knocks that assailed me as I fell through the tree of life: hidden origins, racism, fighting at school, integration, mates, nurturing, winning New Faces, losing New Faces, the Black and White Minstrels, meeting all those great people in clubland, learning how to put together a set, figuring out why 1970s-style clubland comedy wasn’t really my bag, the complete joy of children’s television and being hit repeatedly by buckets of water and custard pies thrown by a rather large man in a black leotard. Of course, the answer is no. It had been a hell of a life … but there was much more to come.

  Notes to a Young Comic

  I didn’t know I was going to be a comedian. I was too busy impersonating teachers, friends, actors from movies and comedians from television. I was a consumer first. When I was starting out, there was no Obi-Wan Kenobi figure to lead me to the comedy Death Star. I was on my own. Now, having worked as a comedian for over thirty years, I thought it might be pertinent to pass on some stuff about performance, stand-up and the rest. I hope that some of what follows may come in useful to you if you’re a young aspiring comic.

  1. Be a Fan, a Customer, a Consumer

  Most of the people you talk to in the UK business have stories about listening to The Goon Show on the radio, or watching Monty Python and learning all the sketches off by heart, or watching Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, or listening to shows like Round the Horne or Hancock’s Half Hour. It helps to be a fan because you’re making a choice: you’re figuring out what your taste in comedy might be, and by choosing to be a fan, you’re immersing yourself in different types of writing and performance.

  Spike Milligan’s bravura run as creator and chief writer of The Goon Show led to several nervous breakdowns, but he also called upon his co-creators – Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Eric Sykes, Larry Stephens, Maurice Wiltshire, John Antrobus – to assist with the continuing process of moulding the bizarre logic of that insane universe. Listening to them and the way they play with time, surprise and voices, you get the sense that Milligan’s methodology was to riff and improvise comedically, like the jazz musician he actually was. Watching the Pythons is another story, six brains in service to unified ideas: organised chaos, no punchlines, multiple characters and an animation style that crossed classical Greek imagery with Victorian postcard smut. The Pythons mixed the intellectual with the mundane, visual slapstick (just think of the Ministry of Silly Walks) with the articulate set-up and punch, the straight-forward sketch (such as ‘The Argument’) with the impossible premise (as in ‘Summarise Proust’). They were all great performers too. You’re buying into something when you admit to a liking for a particular style of comedy.

  Dave Allen was a storyteller and an aspiring actor. His stories were always coloured with ornamentations and skilful illustration, whereas someone like Steven Wright, the dazed and confused, stumbling Boston comic with the appearance of an acid casualty but the mind of a rocket scientist, makes every joke a kind of haiku:

  I bought some dehydrated water, but I don’t know what to add.

  Each Steven Wright joke is like a mini-sketch, his delivery a kind of mumbled, semi-apologetic drone that belies the work that has gone into the construction of each routine.

  I have a half-twin. I also have a Siamese stepson.

  This is a mind/thought process of which an audience desperately wants to be a part.

  There have always been genre comedians: Hope and Crosby with their road adventures; Abbott and Costello and their frenzied encounters with werewolves, Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. Compare this to the League of Gentlemen’s extremely detailed horror comedy.

  So being a consumer is important, because even though you might not know what you’re doing, your constant drinking from the well of The Young Ones or French and Saunders or Goodness Gracious Me or Saturday Night Live or Beyond the Fringe or Hancock’s Half Hour means you’re making a choice. You’re editing continually. And with those choices you’re nailing your colours to the mast for the future.

  2. Know the Difference Between Being Funny and Telling Jokes

  I’ve never really got on with jokes. I like them, but as a laughter delivery mechanism there’s an element of dissatisfaction about them that I’ve never quite been able to shake off. They’re old-fashioned. A man walks into a bar … I went to the doctor the other day … An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman … Two blondes walking down the street … A Jamaican guy stops at the traffic lights … I knocked on the door, a Pakistani bloke answered it …

  As you make your way through the hundreds and hundreds of jokes available online or in dusty old books, there’s a feeling of victimisation about a lot of the material. Someone has to be the butt of these jokes (the Irishman, the Pakistani, the Jamaican, the blonde, the gay guy, the lesbian, the Jew, sometimes the disabled person). There’s no level playing field here; someone’s going to get a kicking. It’s as if joke-tellers are in a heightened position when they do their thing. They are superior, always the observer, always the person pointing out the stupid thing that the minority/unfortunate individual did or said. Some of these jokes are really harmful.

  When Bernard Manning used to say about his Pakistani/Irish/Jamaican-type jokes that ‘It’s just a bit of fun,’ or, ‘If people can’t take a joke …’, it must have been difficult to be in the audience and not feel victimised. Don Rickles, the Las Vegas comic who regularly roasted Mexicans, Jews, Poles and so on, walked the same path. There’s something a bit miserable and bullying about this type of comedy. If I go out to see some comedy, I don’t want to be shat on from a great height.

  Much as I respect some of the old-school comedians, I find myself preferring people who can do something else. Someone told me yonks ago that it’s really important to do things that the audience can’t do, and that has always stuck with me. If all you’re doing is telling a joke – ‘A man walked into a bar …’ – then you’re basically repeating something that anybody could do.

  The big battle is deciding whether you’re going to be a funny person or whether you’re going to tell jokes. Groucho Marx had fantastic one-liners:

  They had to pull you down and put up a building in your place.

  A child of five could understand this. Send someone to get me a five-year-old kid – I can’t make head nor tail of this.

  Go, and never darken my towels again.

  I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.

  All funny one-liners, but Groucho also walked funny, talked funny, looked funny and sang funny. Everything he did was funny. That’s the challenge for all comedians. It’s one thing to stand there and churn out old jokes; it’s a completely different kettle of fish to come on stage and communicate with every tool you have at your disposal, to be prepared to do anything with voice, movement, costume, dynamics and tension to get laughs.

  Lee Evans, Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, French and Saunders, Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, Kevin Hart and Sarah Silverman all seem to be willing to park the notion of the strictly verbal short-story form in favour of characterisation, visual humour and general silliness. The commitment to an all-encompassing funny vibe pays off better in the long run. As many people have pointed out, Steve Martin presented himself as ‘showbiz incarnate’, which is a complicated way of saying that he pretended he was doing the best show you’d ever seen while wearing an arrow through the head, making balloon animals and juggling pretend kittens.

  Richard Pry
or migrated from doing routines and jokes in the style of Bill Cosby to presenting stories and anecdotes from his life in the most honest way he could, like a forensic documentarian. Many people have followed in his footsteps. I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to do that. It takes a huge amount of courage to embark on a style and structure that means that everything that comes out of your mouth and is displayed by the movement of your body must be as honest as it can possibly be.

  Being funny means going with the flow, reading the room, picking up on what’s going on, not just sticking to the script. It’s dangerous, but it can lead somewhere. It can be incredibly funny and true.

  I recently got into Charlie Chaplin. I was on tour, and a friend of mine recommended that I take the opportunity to watch a couple of Chaplin films. I shrieked in horror. I’d always found The Tramp to be cloyingly sentimental. Chaplin was too involved in his dancer’s physicality, and there were not enough jokes. But on rewatching I found in Chaplin a total commitment to storytelling, to encapsulating comedy and tragedy. He was whip-smart and ingeniously balletic when performing physical comedy. There’s a moment of heart-stopping bravura in Modern Times when he roller-skates blindfold, showboating for the object of his desire, skating ever more precariously towards a hole in the floor.

  Being a funny person means you perhaps tend more to spontaneity than to rigid structures. You might start off with an hour’s template, but once you’ve learnt it and know where all the laughs are, the funny person’s inclination is to play with the text and the structure to see what happens. The traditionalist will stick to the same wording/structure/rigidity for the entire lifetime of that routine.

  This is a story against me now. I saw a comedian at the Improv in LA in the early 1980s. She was very funny and had a routine about being on a roller-coaster ride in Florida, where ‘you went forwards in a loop-the-loop, and then came backwards at speed through your own vomit’. I loved that joke and may even have borrowed it from time to time. Imagine my horror when, six years later, I revisited that nightclub and saw the same comedian hit the stage. She did a couple of topical things, and then launched straight into a well-practised and honed routine about roller coasters. Word-for-word came the thing about the vomit. I had to quickly explain to my girlfriend that this was the person I’d nicked that joke from. Shame was heaped on me that night, and I vowed never to borrow material again. But in a wider sense this was a perfect illustration of the joke-teller versus funny person argument. This comedian had shaped and crafted a twenty-minute set from which she hadn’t veered for six years! Where was the fluidity, the variety, the experimentation?

  When I was doing stand-up, I had a very strict structure, but I would always improvise around it whenever the opportunity arose. I loved the feeling and confidence of doing material that worked unfailingly, but I also loved the idea of playing with an audience. To mine a particular seam for comedy gold whenever possible is not only a way of generating material, but also a way of keeping yourself on your toes. No question, the text is important, and the honing of one-liners is a basic tenet of stand-up survival, but to a funny person with comedy bones the well-honed/crafted joke is like when they do a serving suggestion in a magazine – it looks great on the page, but it might come out very different in performance.

  And the performance is everything.

  3. Performance: What I Want from a Comedian

  When I go and see a comic, I want structure. You don’t pay all that money for a ramshackle mess, some dude having a nervous breakdown on stage and repeatedly saying, ‘Err … that got a huge laugh last night. I don’t know what’s the matter with you guys. Why do you even bother to come out? OK, this next bit usually sets the bar for what kind of an audience you’re going to be. If you don’t laugh at this, you’re scum …’ etc., etc. On the other hand, you also don’t want Mr Set-Up Punch reciting jokes in a bored monotone, with exactly the same pauses, tics, twitches and embellishment that they had on day one.

  I’m looking for something else: either the attempt to speak honestly and from the heart, with smart intelligence and physicality; or the attempt to tell an enormous story with very few resources, like Patrick Barlow and Jim Broadbent in the National Theatre of Brent, or the kind of performer who says, ‘Hey, we’re going this way,’ and then completely wrong-foots you and takes you all the way to a place you didn’t ever want to go to.

  In the last few years I’ve learnt that acquiring the skills of timing, endurance, memory, improvisation and structure – and questioning all of those things with your performance – is the big brass ring for a performer. Question everything with every aspect of your performance, maintain honesty as much as you can. Don’t just monitor the audience, but also your performance and that of your colleagues.

  The main thing I want from a performance is the sense that anything can happen, that the performer can go anywhere, do anything, unhindered by structure or text. This, as Robin Williams found during his stint in Waiting for Godot, is tough, but achievable. I think Williams, Jack Nicholson, Russell Brand, Amy Schumer, John Belushi, Richard Pryor and Will Ferrell all have this quality.

  But if you want to be a comedian, you have to ask yourself whether you want to tell jokes or whether you want to be the joke. That’s all you need to be thinking about.

  4. Craft

  The recently deceased Sir Ken Dodd was not only a genius-level comedian, but a student of comedy, a funnyman who encapsulated an articulate verbal flow, a ridiculous and colourful appearance, an artful manipulation of hair, buck-teeth and a barrage of double entendres. Doddy also sang, perhaps in the canny knowledge that non-stop gags can sometimes be too much of a good thing. He had books and books of jokes, whether overheard, received in good faith for free or paid for. However, Doddy’s almost unerring eye for the naughty McGill’s postcard-style punchline, as well as for the well-crafted topical gag, meant that he never went out of vogue. Although he might have become more conservative in his old age, his appearance, wit, style and mode of attack meant that he was never boring.

  When he came to your town he’d always done a bit of research and would deftly cock a snook at any particular aspect of the town that its inhabitants were proud of. Doddy’s craft, the sense that he had worked on this material without pause, was never really evident to his audience. They were too busy laughing. And that’s my point. All the work he put in, that all us comedians put in – collecting jokes, writing down funny thoughts in one’s journal, practising silly walks in the park when you think no one’s looking, trying out routines on open-mic spots, casually slipping material into conversations with friends and family and watching their response – all of these things are legitimate actions for someone who wants to be funny professionally.

  For many years Doddy had a lady who came to every performance and marked in a book which jokes went really well that night, which did OK and which ones tanked. She had been doing this for years, and if Doddy so desired, she could go back five years to when they were last in that town and see which jokes had gone down well that night. She was, in fact, a one-person focus group.

  It’s really important to have some system that judges the impact of your material, whether you tape it, listen back afterwards and make notes or a close friend makes notes during the performance. This kind of input is invaluable. Nobody tells you this stuff when you start out. However, within a couple of years I discovered that all the older comics were desperate to share information about craft and performance.

  So I would advise young comics to go to comedy clubs – a lot. Watch the comedians, get a sense of who they are. When they’ve finished, get up the courage to talk to them after the show. Ask them questions about what you just saw. I’m sure they’ll be happy to fill you in on technique, writing, mic control and hydration – especially if you buy them a drink. All of those things are important, but it’s up to you to find out why.

  Bob Monkhouse was similar to Doddy. He collected joke books and had a wide-ranging understanding of joke struct
ure. He approached me once at a BBC light entertainment party and quoted my characters back at me:

  ‘Yes, PC Ganja, very good. “Good evening, my name is PC Ganja. This my dog, Selassie.”’

  Or he’d do Delbert:

  ‘The policeman pulled me over. He put his head through the window. Then I wound it down. That must’ve hurt.’

  He knew everybody’s jokes and routines. I’ve heard rumours that he taped American comedy shows from the wireless when he was a young boy, and in adulthood kept journals of almost every comedy show he’d ever seen, taking particular note of his favourite gags and the comics who told them.

  Bob’s attention to craft regularly spilled over into performance and was boosted by his immense confidence. I would often watch him and wish that I had his attention to detail. Although he wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, I always thought he was supremely professional. He had always done his homework – which is what craft is, I guess. In the way that chefs know that only a certain type of pan is acceptable in a proper kitchen, and mechanics realise you need the right tools for the right jobs, comedy performers understand that there are many approaches to their craft, but there are key tools they will need for their particular journey.

  Jerry Seinfeld sits down and wrestles with subject matter and premises for a couple of hours every day without fail. (It’s worth watching his 2002 DVD Comedian to glean an insight into his process.) Richard Pryor would go woodshedding at the Comedy Store. He’d get up on stage late at night and start riffing on whatever subject came to mind to see if it was worth pursuing. Robin Williams would film all day and then go out at night looking for a comedy venue that would allow him to get up on stage. Tommy Cooper collected stupid tricks and would spend weeks crafting a silly narrative that would allow him to do that stupid trick on stage. I would sit in my dressing room listening to the audience on the intercom, while writing a journal about my journey to that venue, some of which would be included in the opening ten minutes of the show.