WHY I STOPPED BEING A STAND-UP COMEDIAN

Chapter 4

I once had a phone call from a promoter who asked me, “How would you like to take part in a festival of Dangerous Comedy at the Purcell Rooms?”

 And I thought: Where's the danger? Certainly not in the choice of venue. I mean, if you're going to have a festival of ‘dangerous’ comedy at least have the courtesy to stage it somewhere dangerous. Like the fast lane of the M25. But the Purcell Rooms? Where's the danger? And where's the danger in the choice of performer? Nothing I did on stage was dangerous. That's what I hated about the comedy scene. The relentless hypocrisy of it all. I was considered to be dangerous because my act went: Sex sex sex sex sex. Drugs drugs drugs drugs drugs. Sex sex sex sex sex. Masturbation. Sex. But that didn't make me dangerous. Stupid, maybe, but not dangerous. If you want danger, get Joe Coleman.

 I was inspired to become a comedian by Spike Milligan. Joe Coleman was inspired by Charles Manson. Joe Coleman said he had a simple choice: Become a performer or become a mass murderer. He used the art of performance to get the desire to murder people en masse out of his system.

 I've started leaning in the other direction…

 I read about Joe Coleman in a magazine RE/Search. Edition 9: Pranksters.

 He would give performances, some impromptu, some not, which generally involved explosives – “anything from dynamite to firecrackers” which he strapped under his shirt beneath protective gear. He used to gatecrash parties, insult the guests, then blow himself up and leave. He once went to a High School reunion party for a school he'd never attended, wearing a name-tag identifying himself as a student who'd been killed in a car crash three years before, danced with the High School Principal on stage, then blew himself up and left.

 Word got around about his activities and some poor soul decided to book him.

 Joe Coleman:

            After these boring poetry readings and other crap, they introduced me. I came out with a cigar in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. Before I said anything I put the cigar out on my forehead, flipping it into the face of a photographer who was trying to take a picture, poured the bottle of wine over me and then busted it on my head – that's how I got this scar – and then I went into a fit.

Meanwhile, one of Joe's assistants has been strewing entrails and rotting food amongst the audience.

            My girlfriend is in the audience with explosives too. When I came out of the fit I blew myself up onstage and she blew herself up in the audience. We ran towards each other, we rolled around in this mating ritual, twisting and turning in the entrails and food.

            Then I came back with a shotgun in one hand and a box of live rats in the other. I was wearing a pig's head. I had given my assistant some live snakes and a cow's head, so he came out wearing the cow's head and threw the live snakes at the audience. Then I got the box of rats and poured them on my head so they were crawling all over me. Then I started biting their heads off.

            I had the shotgun in my hand — blood all over me — I had just been biting the heads off live rats — and I yelled to the audience – “Get the fuck out of here”. They split like Moses parting the Red Sea.

            The woman who was running the place was freaked out, crying. And I'm standing there: my head's bleeding. I smell like explosives. I still have one of the rats crawling on my shoulder and I have a shotgun in my hand. I put the shotgun to her head and said, ‘How did you like the show?”

Now that's the kind of performer that I consider to be dangerous. And if I'm going to be described as a dangerous comedian then I really ought to be doing something that actually is dangerous. Otherwise, I'm a hypocrite.

Which is why I always hated being classified by the label Alternative Comedy. Because, Alternative Comedy, in my day, constantly defined itself as being ‘Non-Sexist and Non-Racist”. Now, I don't mind aspiring to those states, but to claim to have actually achieved them…

When my son first began to talk I used to push him in his buggy and if he saw a woman he'd point at her and say Mummy. And if he saw a man he'd point at him and say Daddy. He never once said Black Mummy. Or Black Daddy.

 I once saw a comedian on television doing jokes mocking the stupidity of Sun Readers. And I remember thinking, Am I the only person on the planet who can see that these are just Irish jokes wrapped up in a Politically Correct framework? Isn't the Sun Reader joke just another, more subtle, form of racism? And if you're going to make jokes about the Sun, haven't you picked the wrong target? Because I don't have a problem with Sun readers. People can read what they like. The problem I have is with Sun writers. Because they know exactly what they're doing. And one of the things that they're doing is hurting people.

 When I was being a Nine Year Old Boy I discovered how easily, how casually and how often grown-ups say things to each other that hurt. Things like, “You're crap.” But, being adults, we suppress the hurt.

 A friend of mine told me a story about her nine year old son. He'd been helping the grown-ups at a birthday party for his younger brother. He did a good job. He joined in the games, stopped all the fights, cleaned up the mess. After the children had gone, his mother went into the kitchen – and found him in tears. She couldn't understand why.

 He told her why: he hadn't won a single game. All the other kids got prizes, but he didn't. And afterwards everyone got a party bag with goodies in it except for him. And then, through streaming tears, he defined the grown-up world in one single sentence – a one-liner. He said, “I know I shouldn't be upset – but I am.”

 For God's Sake! If you're going to be upset – be upset! Don't be a grown-up! The grown up philosophy is: “I know I shouldn't be upset so I won't be.”

 I think it was E.M. Forster who once said: “No Englishman should display emotion enough to cause his pipe to fall from between his clenched teeth.”

 Another one-liner I've always admired came from Bernard Manning. He said, “I see there aren't so many Paki's on the street now the Chinese have found out they taste like chicken.”

 That's what I call a good one-liner. Not because I approve of its morality, or because it’s offensive on about fifteen levels. I admire it because it sums up the Bernard Manning personality absolutely precisely. It tells us all we need to know about Bernard Manning and his view of the world. And, if I was any good as a stand-up comedian, I should have been able to come up with a one-liner that would sum up my personality and my view of the world just as well if not better.

 But I couldn't.

 Ozzy Osbourne could. Ozzy Osbourne was holding a press conference, with his massive entourage, and a reporter said: “Mr. Osbourne, I notice among your 40-piece entourage you have a dwarf. Could you tell us please, what purpose does the dwarf serve?”

 And Ozzy Osbourne, to his eternal credit, replied, “We hang him during the ballad.”

 One of my heroes is a four-foot actor called David Rappaport. Three years ago he shot himself — in the chest. Not the head. The chest. I don't think David Rappaport would have objected to Ozzy Osbourne's reply. But I'm sure David Rapport would have objected strenuously to the question.

 This is what David Rappaport had to say about himself.

             From the age of five I realised that life is a joke.

            A joke is anything that changes our minds about anything. That helps to make us see things differently. That makes us laugh. The unexpected. The surprising. Under that definition then, I am a joke.

            I am surprising. I am unusual. I make us look at the world in a fresh way. I am a joke. And I hold that position with honour and pride.

            Now that might seem painful to some people. To most people. But it only hurts if you don't get the joke.

            As a child of four or five years the main difference between me any my playmates was that I was six inches smaller. No big deal.

            On trips to the circus I would marvel at the lion tamer, the jugglers, the trapeze acts and the dwarves. My parents would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would reply without hesitation, “A lion please.”

            As I grew older my friends seemed to grow away from me. My friends who for years I had laughed and fought and played with were leaving me behind. They were growing upward. Something I knew I would never do.

            As a teenager I got on well with friends who knew me as a person. But with strangers of my age and older, there was a gap, a distance both physical and social.

            With the “grown-ups” I found many barriers. I was different-looking. I was below them. Child like. Not to be taken seriously. A threat.

            Little me, a threat?

            What happened to grown-ups that made them view me so differently, what happened in the growing-up process to completely alter attitudes towards a small person? Was it a question of age and all that that entails, or was it just one of height? Was the whole human world ruled according to how far one's head was from the ground?

            Now I don't mind being less than the rest if indeed the rest are greater than me. But it really galls me to think that I might be considered less by a bunch of people that I began to suspect are really semi-intelligent morons desperately trying to be “normal”.

            Normal. That word. That civilizing concept that shapes the whole of our society. The driving urge to be the same as, and hopefully safe in, the crowd.

            It seems to me that the people in charge, the people responsible for all the major ills in this world, are extremely normal and big. The big people are screwing up in a big way. Something is very wrong. We are being over-run by big people with small minds.

            The dinosaurs ruled the world for an extremely long time. Over millions of years they grew larger and larger and stupider and stupider. They became extinct within just a few years.

I think any child would understand exactly what David Rappaport was talking about.

When David Rappaport died, the Sun ran a headline: Tragedy of Movie Midget.

I read the headline over somebody else's shoulder on a train. When I read the headline my instantaneous reaction was: “I hope it's that little shit from Loveboat.”

 That tells you all you need to know about me. That I am the kind of person who'd wish grief on another man's friends and family simply because I didn't like his acting.

 I think I'd better get that attitude sorted out. And, if I do, maybe then I could become non-sexist and non-racist.

 But first a song.

 THE RAPPAPORT BLUES.

I woke up this morning.

Tears were in my bed.

A man I never met is gone.

A man I love is dead.

I love his friends and family.

His brother and his son.

Strange how so much love comes in

when someone good gets gone.

Dave Dave Dave.

Why'd you have to be so brave?

Why'd you have to never give in?

Cause Dave

You were born to win.

The world's a stage. The worlds a cage.

A penitentiary.

Built with bars of ignorance

And bricks of banality.

He opened a door never opened before.

And then he threw away the key.

Maybe someday the world will say:

He's the kind of man

I ought to be.

Dave Dave Dave.

Why'd you have to be so brave?

Why'd you have to never give in?

Cause Dave

You were born to win.

Before you criticise someone

Spend one day in their shirt.

Then fight a war on a battlefield

Where every victory hurts.

A war where you never know

Who has lost or won;

Where heroes are not heroes

Until they're dead and gone.

But heroes always leave us with

The strength to carry on.

And a war is never over

Until the fighting's done.

Dwarves, Cripples, Blacks, Jews.

Why do we persecute ourselves

With the words we use?

And what I got this morning

I will call it the Rappaport Blues.

People like us need a warning.

People like us can't afford to lose you

Dave.

Guess I'd better be as brave.

Guess I'd better never give in.

Cause Dave:

We were born to win.