School of Comedy
Module One
Last autumn I found myself asking: now that my kids are old enough to chat, back-chat and question everything, mostly the gap between what I say and what I do - What now? How do I bring value to their lives as more than the crashing bore who tells them to look after their one and only set of adult teeth? What can I teach them?
Lessons in cultivating a moral compass were ongoing: Don’t Be a Dick, Fight for What’s Right, Work Hard, Be Kind etc… But by their nature, such lessons were packaged up in the everyday and deviated from and returned to a thousand times before starting to sink in. The were/are hard-won, sometimes joyless and ongoing.
So I looked at my own limited qualifications and made an announcement to them one night:
I’m going to educate you in the in-exact science of comedy, I said. We’re going to watch more live comedy. More TV. More films. Get yourselves a pad and a pen and we’ll work out what makes a person funny.
Great, one of them said. But why do you need to make it sound like school?
I followed them to the sofa where they both sat down and turned on YouTube.
What do you mean by that? I said, quietly balling up a piece of paper with notes spanning everything from taste to delivery and timing, and the power of good comedy writing.
Maybe they had a point. Maybe I needed to be less prescriptive. Less scientific. So I left them to the TV, promising that the days of YouTube were numbered.
Module One. I noted.
Narrative and character comedy. Live, TV, Radio and film
Context is everything.
How could I make a list of reliable comic excellence without remembering how my own tastes were formed? Mum and Dad made each other laugh. Sunday lunches and dinner were mostly about how much my dad could make his friends laugh. Humour brought joy. It was also communal: we watched Spitting Image as a family at 10pm on Sunday nights, chuckling at the rubbery out-sized features of Thatcher, Major and Richard Branson in puppet form. There was Hancock’s Half Hour (repeated on the BBC at some point) Monty Python, The Goon Show, The Good Life and The Two Ronnies. Dad did impressions of Victor Meldrew (One Foot In The Grave) and Basil Fawlty (Fawlty Towers), delighted by their existence – reassured, even, to find people who found the world as perplexing as he did. Comedy made the unpalatable, palatable and the challenging, manageable.
By thirteen or fourteen I’d branched out, finding favourite comedy shows that came to define a generation: The Comic Strip. Bottom. The Young Ones. French and Saunders and The Lenny Henry Show. Later, Absolutely Fabulous. I spent hours learning catch-phrases, delivery and timing and even dressing like Jennifer Saunders for a couple of months. Meeting French and Saunders was one of only two times I’ve been starstruck and the only time I’ve been lost for words. The other involved David Boreanaz who played Angel in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but that’s for another day.
And then I thought about all the years I worked in comedy as an agent and I began to make my list for Module one: Narrative and character comedy. Live, TV, Radio and film
That winter we worked our way through it, watching live shows over Christmas and an episode of a show, or a film, at 9pm every night:
Nick Mohammed’s Christmas Show
Tim Key at The Roundhouse
Tim Key’s Late Night Poetry on BBC Radio 4
Jonny Sweet’s Wicked Little Letters
Party
Taskmaster – not character comedy but with a huge range of amazing comics including Bob Mortimer, Alex Horne, Mark Watson, Sally Phillips and Aisling Bea
Diane Morgan - in Mandy, Cunk, everything
Ted Lasso
Gavin and Stacey
Seinfeld
The American Office
And finally, The Ballad of Wallis Island which only just came out and which I will take my whole family to see in the coming days for the second time. It is a laugh out loud funny, poignant and beautiful film which I recommend with all my heart.
That winter was a bleak one, full of illness and grief following the death of my dad. In the end, I decided not to lecture the kids about theory and joke structure. I realised as I sat watching these shows - laughing during the bleakest of times - that if comedy does its job well enough it will make you feel connected in the loneliness of grief. It will remind you of friendships formed in humour, and how good it is to laugh. It will reassure, by reminding you of someone else’s humour, of their own laughter and the things that brought them joy. And how you may never the remember the joke, but if it resonates, you will always remember how it, and the person who made it, made you feel. And how - because of all that - the best comedy gifts you not only joy, but a form of resilience.
Both my kids love to laugh. And they love to joke. And they are looking forward to module two this summer: stand up and sketch comedy. The lesson in the end, was mine. Sometimes you just need to sit next to someone you love, and laugh. There’s no greater joy than that.