Chubby Brown

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I used to be a fan of Brown's when I was a teenager, but over the past 10-15 years he's become really racist and I just couldn't be arsed with his comedy any more... here's an interview he did on the Frank Skinner show in 2005.

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Making sense of humour
Chris Arnot discovers what a gay academic finds to enjoy and admire about a homophobic northern comic
Tuesday November 6, 2007
The Guardian

The abrasive stand-up Roy "Chubby" Brown would be startled to learn that one of his most avid admirers is a gay academic from Brighton. "The most important comedian of the past 25 years," is the verdict of Andy Medhurst in his new book, A National Joke. Indeed, the final chapter is entirely devoted to that ribald stalwart of northern clubs and seaside revues, whose video oeuvre includes such classics as Clitoris Allsorts, King Thong and Chubby Goes Down.

Medhurst is senior lecturer in media, film and cultural studies at Sussex University. Earlier this summer, he was a "talking head" on BBC2's British Film Forever. He has lectured at the British Film Institute and been invited to speak at seminars on humour in the unlikely setting of All Souls College, Oxford.

But has he ever seen Chubby Brown live on stage? "I have," he says, leaning back in his rather cramped office where academic tomes rub spines with enough videos to stock several charity shops. "Saw him in Great Yarmouth, and he was suitably bracing." Uncomfortably so, at times? "Yes. It was just after Kenny Everett had died, and a homophobic joke drew me out of my enjoyment of his astonishingly skilful technique. It was the enthusiastic reception of the joke, I suppose. There was an assumption that everyone in the audience was heterosexual."

Then why is Brown so important? "He gives a voice to people who don't have one. He sticks up two fingers at the liberal-progressive consensus, and stands up for the white, predominantly northern working class that Tony Blair liked to pretend doesn't exist any more. He says things that they've been told they can't say and, because of that, he's a hero to them."

Much the same used to be said about Bernard Manning, I suggest. "Yes, but his comedy was more defensive. He was trying to hold on to a world where white people were in control. His act was a bolthole for audiences refusing to acknowledge the changes around them. Like Chubby, he was a very talented joke-teller but less aggressive, more laid-back - a bit like Les Dawson with added racism."

In A National Joke, Medhurst spans the 20th century, from music hall to The Royle Family, and uses comedy to pin down that most elusive of things, the English national identity. "There are differences within the regions. But comedy gives you a mythology that helps you to smooth out those differences." Or, as he puts it in the introduction to the book, "it contributes significantly to how English culture has imagined its Englishness".

Side by side

When he was assembling his bibliography, the serendipities of the alphabet placed Larry Grayson - "once the most unjustly vilified of English queer comedians" - next to Stuart Hall, "the single most influential voice in the development of the field of cultural studies". Later entries drove Grayson and Hall apart but, as Medhurst puts it in chapter three, "this book remains an attempt to eavesdrop on the conversation they might have had if they had been left side by side".

As with any discussion about Englishness, class is the issue. Medhurst wears his allegiances on his sleeve. He accepts that he has joined the middle class, and enjoys the tolerance afforded him and his partner in Brighton. But he resents the way people there routinely talk about northerners "with a contempt that they would never bestow on Asian people". He's uneasy about the "self-satisfied assumptions" of a city that increasingly sees itself as London-on-Sea, "but only certain parts of London. Camden, for instance".

Medhurst's roots lie south of the Thames, in Docklands. He grew up in a council flat. "I encountered the middle classes for the first time when I went to grammar school two bus rides away," he recalls. "If I'd gone to the local comprehensive, I'd have had my head kicked in for being overweight, not good at sport, and queer."

What saved him on the mean streets of south London was an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music, and an ability to tell jokes. He listened to radio comics and has fond memories of Sunday lunch with Round the Horne. "I can't think of a comedy that so perfectly captured a moment of change in social history," he reflects. "You could almost hear the corsets coming off as listeners woke up to the 1950s being over." It ran from 1964 to 1968, and Medhurst marvels that the BBC allowed Kenneth Williams to get away with so many in-jokes for a suppressed gay community. "Mum and Dad and myself were laughing over our roast beef, but we didn't understand everything at the time."

When he first arrived at Sussex as an undergraduate in 1977, it was the heyday of punk, and the beginning of the end of radicalism in the student body. "I now take seminars in rooms I once occupied," he confides with a wry smile. But he also found time to enjoy his English degree, and seriously considered specialising in Jacobean drama.

What eased him away from classical literature in the direction of the modern media was attending evening classes at the British Film Institute. "One of the lecturers told me about a pioneering MA course in film studies at East Anglia," he recalls.

These days film and media studies courses are well established. Medhurst, however, still encounters a certain defensiveness among colleagues in the face of sniping from academics in more traditional disciplines and, indeed, from the media itself. "Snobbery against people who write about comedy is alive and well," he says. But he relishes dissecting jokes in the way a biologist might cut up a frog. Only what he calls "weak comedy, lazy comedy, over-hyped and merely modish comedy (Absolutely Fabulous, say, or anything involving Steve Coogan or Armando Ianucci) may buckle and crumble under sustained study".

Northern camp

His next book will be about Coronation Street, another programme that brought down the curtain on the 1950s by featuring working-class people as three-dimensional characters. He still shows sceptical students those groundbreaking early episodes created by another gay man, Tony Warren. "One of the things that still intrigues me is the persistent strain of northern camp," Medhurst ponders. "Sometimes the script sounds like downmarket Alan Bennett."

A whole section of A National Joke is devoted to Bennett, who has been "thinking about Englishness for over 50 years". In 1984, he wrote the screenplay for A Private Function, the 1940s as viewed from the 1980s and as much about Thatcherism as it is about rationing, Medhurst maintains. "I use the film a lot in teaching, and find it odd that Bennett has been so neglected by the academic world."

Not half so neglected, one suspects, as the earthy oeuvre of Roy Chubby Brown.

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You twat, bastard!
Comic storms off stage after just 4mins
11th December 2008
Daily Record

FOUL-MOUTHED funnyman Roy "Chubby" Brown almost sparked a riot last night when he walked off four minutes into a packed Scots gig. The outrageous Geordie infuriated 3000 fans who had paid £21 each to see him at the Clyde Auditorium.

It was the second night in Glasgow for bad-tempered Brown, 63. The first night was dogged by abuse from the audience and the comedian vowed that he would walk out if it happened again. Bouncers at the venue - known as The Armadillo - removed 16 people for heckling on Tuesday night. Last night, several fans had complained that the volume was too low and shouted out to get the sound turned up. But then one punter started to give Brown abuse after he made a joke about the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

He snapped and said, "F*** off. I'm away," before storming off the stage.

Fans - including Rangers greats Ally McCoist and Ian Durrant - were left stunned. Former Celtic ace Frank McAvennie's ex-wife Laura McArthur went to the gig on a Christmas night out. She said: "It has ruined our night - he is supposed to be a professional. You would think he would have developed a thick skin after being in comedy for so long. He was on for four minutes and went off in a huff and a voice said his appearance had been cancelled. It is a disgrace."

Another fan said: "People were furious. They had to close the merchandise stall because they were afraid it might get looted. People were saying they weren't going to pay the £5 charge for the car park so the management had to raise the barriers and let people out free. Everyone has been told to contact their ticket provider to get their money back."

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Chubby Brown denies assault
chortle.co.uk
11th March 2010

Roy Chubby Brown has appeared in court, accused of hitting a woman in the face during a furious dispute in a supermarket car park.

The comic denies common assault against Kelly Oliver after almost colliding with her grandmother's car in Middlesbrough last September. Oliver, 21, told Teesside magistrates Brown swore at her after reversing his silver Lexus – with the personalised number pate RCB – within an inch of her car. The altercation continued at the ticket machine, where Brown is said to have hit her across the face.

The court was shown CCTV images of the row, but magistrates said it did not help ether side; while the prosecution produced a witness who said she saw the blow, the BBC reports. The hearing was adjourned until Tuesday.

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Chubby: I took offence at bad language
Comic's defence in assault trial

Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown might be known for his filthy club act, but he has claimed he was ‘gobsmacked’ at the bad language used by a woman he is accused of punching in a car park. The comic then went on to brand 21-year-old Kelly Oliver an ‘uneducated scumbag’ in court.

Miss Oliver claimed that Chubby – real name Royston Vasey – shouted ‘Who the fuck are you looking at?’ after his Lexus came 'within an inch' of hitting her grandmother's car in a Sainsbury’s car park in September. But Vasey clamed the confrontation began when Miss Oliver's swore at him, and he asked her to show some respect.

He told Tesside magistrates: ‘I needed to tell her that the person she sees in the car park and the person she sees on the DVD are not the same person. You would not be allowed to use foul language in my house. I’m married to a lady. She doesn't like anything of that nature. I just think that people who use language like that in a car park at one in the afternoon are just uneducated scumbags.’

The trial, in which 65-year-old Vasey denies common assault, continues.

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I wonder if he's just a racist twat on stage then?

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There's a new 4 minute interview with the twat here...

CLICK.