But, however hard Penny tries to coach her, Miranda usually ends up making a fool of herself in social situations, whether it’s by accidentally getting naked at a formal garden party – ‘The shirt’s run off with the jumper like a whore!’ – or not knowing how to respond to questions about the Chinese human rights record: ‘I think… if my thighs are sweaty and I stand up, it sounds like I’ve done a fart.’ The fact that she moves in these circles magnifies the social embarrassment as the situations have such strict codes of conduct and rules of interaction. Miranda removing her top by accident wouldn’t have quite the same comic impact if the joke had appeared in The Royle Family.
As well as examining social etiquette, the show’s class is cemented in the language it uses. In addition to using some ridiculously posh names, the sitcom has developed a lingo of its own, invented by Tilly, Sally Phillips’ character. It is the sort of language which Miranda is desperate to avoid using whenever possible. While on a date with Dreamboat Charlie, she panics and says to Gary and Clive that if she went with him she would end up with a black Labrador called Jaspar, pronounced ‘jar-spar’.
Miranda reveals herself to be a total outcast, neither fitting in with Penny and Tilly’s sort, nor being comfortable with those outside their class bubble. She gently mocks but tries to blend in with both, mimicking the voices of the girls who come into the shop as well as the shop assistants at the bed store – ‘I’ve caught her accent!’
What was revealed by this discussion was that class is irrelevant, as long as the show is funny. Galton and Simpson have pointed out what would be lost if only working-class sitcoms were commissioned: ‘If BBC1’s campaign to move away from “middle-class” comedies is successful, we’d tragically be denied the recent delight of Miranda, starring Miranda Hart, who has just collected three gongs at the British Comedy Awards.’
The idea of comedy meeting quotas or ticking the boxes of various demographics annoyed some, including writer Jeremy Lloyd: ‘I was lucky enough to write when there were few such restrictions. I was not expected to reflect the working, middle or upper classes. I was simply expected to write something that was funny. It’s comedy, not politics, after all.’
In the light of Miranda winning a hat-trick of British Comedy Awards (notably one award voted for by the public), Vicky Frost for the Guardian added her thoughts: ‘As Miranda’s hard-won people’s choice award on Saturday night showed, there’s a lot of people who find someone going on a bonkers escapade, falling down and then mugging frantically to camera hilarious. Whether Miranda is shop owner or shop assistant has very little to do with it.’
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the most insightful arguments against this class-selection plan came from former Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe. She compared the argument about class in sitcoms to how she felt as a woman in parliament – that it doesn’t matter what gender an MP is as long as they are a good one: ‘Excellence should never play second fiddle to political correctness. Why does that seem so obvious to me and so unthinkable to some media bosses and the PM’s office alike?’
Galton and Simpson concluded their opinion piece in the Daily Mail with a simple statement: ‘The best comedies are funny regardless of whether their characters operate at the depths of society or in middle-class comfort.’
And instead of avoiding middle-class sitcoms such as Miranda, Danny Cohen has in fact moved the programme from BBC Two to BBC One. So the profile of the show is only likely to rise still further.
17
THE ART OF THE PRATFALL
‘Miranda Hart deserves a medal, or better still a BAFTA, for reminding us that slapstick can be funny.’
– Brian Viner, the Independent
When Miranda arrived on BBC Two in November 2009, journalists and bloggers alike commented that it hailed the return of slapstick. It is often cited as one of the key reasons for the sitcom’s success, though that same aspect has led some to avoid it. Miranda is ridding slapstick of its labels of ‘simplistic’ or ‘old-fashioned’ by bringing it to a new audience and reinventing it for the 21st century. Its central character is a female Frank Spencer coping with modern problems such as negotiating gym contracts, getting trapped in sushi bars and trying not to end up naked in public parks.
Miranda loves slapstick and appreciates how her physical stature has enhanced her performance. ‘I like stumbling, but I prefer falling. Actually, now my height is a huge advantage. It makes slapstick comedy seem far more natural. Think of John Cleese towering over Manuel. If anything, the producers have to stop me doing pratfalls every few seconds.’
As a child, Miranda was upset at being different and so clumsy, ‘because [she] didn’t realise how wide [her] wingspan was’. Now, she has made a career out of flailing her limbs in front of millions of devoted viewers. She has even jokingly cited Naomi Campbell as a fellow tall lady of slapstick: ‘Yes, I’m like Naomi in so many ways. I’ve watched her falling off her Westwood platforms thousands of times for inspiration. I guess I didn’t realise how awkward I felt about being tall until I started playing on it. And then I found that pratfalling comes very naturally to me.’
While Miranda is the first slapstick-heavy sitcom on primetime BBC for a while, slapstick is still popular, it’s just usually found in different places. Think of the YouTube videos that get passed around – even cats are becoming the new Chaplins. You don’t even need to look beyond your television set. Saturday-night listings are filled with it, but this time the public is the star. Reality television and game shows have brought a surge of slapstick to our weekend viewing. If you like Hole in the Wall, Total Wipeout or the long-running You’ve Been Framed, then you like slapstick.
But where did this fascination with slapstick start? It has been around since long before the inception of television itself, and can be found in the work of Monty Python, Vic and Bob, Mr Bean, and even the alternative comedy of the 1980s. The birth of modern slapstick came with the first-ever publicly screened film by the Lumiere brothers, who were French pioneers of moving pictures. The film, which has been imitated numerous times, was shown in a Parisian café in 1895 showing a gardener having a little trouble with his hose. A prankster steps on the hose and the water stops flowing. The gardener, perturbed, looks down the hose to see what might be the problem and – yes, of course you guessed it – the water flow resumes and the gardener is met with a forceful spurt in the face. Much fist-shaking and chasing ensues.
But we need to go back even further for the first recorded mention of slapstick – to the 16th-century Comedia Dell’Arte, when an Italian improvisational theatre group merged physical theatre with that inexplicably hilarious possibility of pain. Slapstick spread as an art form, gracing theatres and music halls across Europe – until the Lumiere brothers shifted it into a new era with the screening of their film. Moving pictures were the hot new thing and, without sound, performances needed to be visual. The perfect medium for slapstick.
Even in our own lifetimes, many of us were brought up with slapstick – watching Punch beat his wife Judy, the crocodile and the policeman to a pulp, usually over nothing but a much-coveted string of sausages. Clowns at birthday parties and at circuses throughout our childhood combine slapstick and juggling to create an act using heightened moments of violence as absurd situations escalate. And, put simply, what’s funnier than pushing your sibling over? Apart from Stephen Fry spectacularly walloping Hugh Laurie, I can’t think of anything.
But why do we find others’ pain so comical? Freud has discussed it in his ‘Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious’, but perhaps the easiest way to sum it up here is that we all have an instinctive desire to witness cruelty at some level. Slapstick gives us the chance to experience this vicariously without guilt – we can watch people suffering without it being real. The Germans perhaps put it best with their term schadenfreude, which is derived from Schaden (harm) and Freude (joy). Although it does not translate into English, schadenfreude translates to slapstick because it means we can laugh at
the pain because it isn’t happening to us. As Mel Brooks, director of comedies such as Blazing Saddles and The Producers, says, ‘Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.’
If you think this is something we develop as we get older and become more cynical, I urge you to look up the hit internet video ‘Charlie bit my finger – again!’, in which a baby laughs hysterically at his brother cries of pain after biting his finger. More than 300 million people can’t be wrong – it’s just funny.
Slapstick is a primitive, instinctive form of humour. Many think it childish or simple, some see it as a guilty pleasure, but, as audience ratings consistently prove, it is universal. As comedian Ben Miller says, it ‘gets you somewhere right in your gut’. The dictionary defines slapstick as ‘comedy based on deliberately clumsy actions and humorously embarrassing events’ and also ‘a device consisting of two flexible pieces of wood joined together at one end, used by clowns and in pantomime to produce a loud slapping noise’. So… it’s literally a slap stick.
The first stars of screen slapstick predate television and even talkies and, as the American film industry grew, hundreds of silent comedies were released between 1910 and 1929. This golden age of slapstick saw household names born, stars that are still renowned today – Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Paul Merton brought these performers back into the public consciousness with his BBC Four series and subsequent tour Silent Clowns. The comedian shared his passion for the subject with theatre audiences across the country, showing films by these four acts interspersed with entertaining and informative chat.
There was one Buster Keaton piece in particular shown on the tour that struck audiences. Keaton is well known for performing his own stunts and a set piece in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) has become one of the most iconic cinematic images ever, certainly in silent comedy. Buster is standing in the middle of a street when the front of a house falls on him. He narrowly escapes death, a window slotting perfectly over him. Merton has commented, ‘In 2007, I showed this film to 1,500 people at The Colston Hall in Bristol. The spontaneous round of applause that rang around the hall as Buster stepped safely away from the wreckage will long remain in my memory.’
Veteran comedian Barry Cryer has said of the sequence: ‘You can watch it again and again and still marvel at it, the perfection of the calculation involved and the skill of his relaxed persona.’
The danger involved in the stunt is another reason for its legacy. The front of the house was substantially weighted and, had it hit him, he almost certainly would have died. Many imitations followed on television, from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em to The Goodies, but none made quite the impression of the first wave of film slapstick stars.
While the American Keaton was astounding us with his stunts, far and away the biggest star of the era was from London. Charlie Chaplin had all the elements of great slapstick – athleticism and timing – but he also brought poignancy and satire to the genre with his feature The Great Dictator. Chaplin was a perfectionist. While his performances seemed spontaneous, he rehearsed sequences up to 30 or 40 times before he was happy with the take. Sadly, the arrival of sound signalled the beginning of the end for Chaplin. People didn’t like his voice and that was the end of his career. Fortunately, though, Chaplin inspired many future comedy stars in Britain, the closest to a silent clown being Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean. The fact that he doesn’t speak words gives him an alien quality and helps to create a purely visual comedy. It also means that it transcends language and has become one of British comedy’s most successful characters, selling to more than 200 countries worldwide. They say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but Alexei Sayle’s parody of Mr Bean, Monsieur Aubergine, played with the infuriating side of the character. ‘Monsieur Aubergine was in the real world, so it was sort of playing with that. If someone was really behaving like that in the real world, just how obnoxious would they be?’
The smoothest transition from silent films to talkies was experienced by Laurel and Hardy. Stan and Ollie’s voices seemed to suit their characters and they broadly stuck to visual comedy. Stan Laurel, who wrote the scripts, was talented in creating situations conducive to physical comedy.
By the 1950s, slapstick was sweeping across British entertainment on television, and stars like Norman Wisdom and Charlie Drake became hugely popular. Television was nearly always live, there wasn’t the option to strive for perfectionism (a luxury Chaplin had enjoyed in cinema), and so things inevitably did go wrong. In one sequence, Drake was dragged through a bookcase during a live broadcast. The furniture itself was designed to break away, but the shelves were loaded with books and were very heavy. The actor passed out mid-scene from the blow but, rather than give him medical assistance, his co-star picked him up and threw him out of the set window. The show must go on, as they say.
One much-loved British performer was Max Wall, who kept one act going his entire working life. Having started off in music halls, he would basically gurn and do funny walks right into his seventies. But it worked. His most famous character was Professor Wallofski who, according to some, performed the moonwalk years before Michael Jackson.
The biggest star of the 1950s was Mr Pastry, a slapstick character played by Richard Hearne. Though largely forgotten now, he was such a success that, in the 1970s, Hearne was asked to take over from Jon Pertwee as the Doctor in Doctor Who. However, when Hearne insisted that he should play the Doctor in the style of Mr Pastry, the producer of the show decided to go with Tom Baker instead, who has become many fans’ favourite Doctor.
The Goons were the first to bring slapstick to the radio, with their uniquely surreal brand of humour. They proved, according to Neil Innes of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, that ‘the pen is mightier than the budget’. How to make a visual joke in an audio medium? A problem Miranda Hart would face during the making of Joke Shop on BBC Radio 2.
The Goon Show, which ran on BBC Radio throughout the 1950s, was a hugely influential show, especially to an exciting new breed of Oxbridge-educated future comedians who would later call themselves Monty Python. Since their groundbreaking TV series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74), they have been routinely regarded as comedy heroes by comedians, but the Pythons themselves were inspired by the Goons. The Goon Show added surrealism to slapstick, and the Pythons added to that intellectualism and a level of sophistication. Where they used slapstick, they would confound expectation and play with established rules of the form. Their unique take on slapstick was successful worldwide and they sold out the Hollywood Bowl with their 1980 live show.
The rise of Python coincided with that of The Goodies (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden), with a brand of slapstick which appealed to all ages. The whole family from kids to parents and even grandparents enjoyed this silly show. Some critics suggested it was a kids’ show, but – as with Miranda – high ratings proved that this is what the audience wanted. Miranda’s Sally Phillips (aka Tilly) has remarked that slapstick is ageless. ‘[It’s] something adults and children can share – chases and smacking each other over the head.’ The childlike nature of The Goodies made for great escapism and the way the trio played with tradition showed their familiarity with the old greats.
But undoubtedly the biggest family favourite of the 1970s, and a huge inspiration to Miranda Hart, was The Morecambe and Wise Show. They used slapstick throughout the show, from Eric smacking Ernie round the head to carefully choreographed set pieces. Their impeccably timed breakfast routine has become one of their best known, and many present-day stars acknowledge the influence of Eric Morecambe. Mathew Horne, star of Gavin and Stacey, is one: ‘The way he moved his body was funny and he knew that. He knew how to use it as a flourish on the end of jokes.’
The 1970s was the golden age of television slapstick in Britain but the biggest and most memorable character in sitcom was the hapless, clumsy Frank Spencer, played in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em by Michael Crawford.
Crawford, a huge star on stage and screen, performed his own perilous stunts. He has become an iconic slapstick star and some journalists have made comparisons with Miranda, referring to her as ‘Francesca Spencer’.
By the time the 1980s came around, audiences were ready for change. It came in the form of ‘alternative comedy’ from the likes of Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle. The Young Ones continued the slapstick tradition but took it to new heights of violence. The nation was politically divided and the anarchic students expressed the anger of many through their aggression and hostility. The stars of the show were Rik and Ade whose act ‘The Dangerous Brothers’ had become much talked about on the cabaret circuit. With no stunt doubles, the cast regularly got cuts and bruises. In the 1990s, the pair went on to create their sitcom Bottom which pushed the limits of slapstick. The extreme violence of their work adhered to Freud’s theory of our desire to see suffering, and making the characters so pathetic – but likeably so – made them perfect victims.
Even though Bottom finished on television in 1995, live shows continued until 2003, and in Let’s Dance for Comic Relief 2011, the pair reunited in a frying-pan-to-the-face version of Swan Lake. Their Young Ones co-star Alexei Sayle has said that, during the show’s original run in the 1980s, he thought ‘they’d be doing that stuff until they were 90’. And he may be right. Fans are excited about a rumoured forthcoming sitcom set in a nursing home that Edmondson describes as ‘like Bottom, but we will be hitting each other with colostomy bags’. Even a life-threatening quad-bike accident in 1998 didn’t seem to stop Rik Mayall for too long. In his autobiography Bigger Than Hitler, Bigger Than Christ, he joked that he ‘rose from the dead’.
The 1990s brought the joyous antics of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, with cartoon-like slapstick which was so absurd and likeable that they went from student cult hit to running series after series of Shooting Stars. And they’re still at it today. Their comedy comprises elements of Jacques Tati, Laurel and Hardy, and even Max Wall’s absurd body movements. Vic Reeves has described the act as unjustified violence: ‘There’s no reason for it. It’s almost like we enjoy doing it. When we hit each other, we do actually hit each other – we’ve got the scars to prove it.’
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