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Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 1:59 pm Post subject: Comedy books |
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The lad himself
Simon Callow welcomes a fellow devotee's account of his own boyhood hero
Simon Callow
The Guardian,
Saturday 27 December 2008
John Fisher gives a touching picture of himself as a seven-year-old boy in the Gaumont Southampton, glimpsing Tony Hancock - then an up-and-coming radio star - hurling himself about the stage with hilarious precision; thereafter, he followed him through his brief but momentous career, and was numbed by the news of his lonely, early death. But when the first book about Hancock appeared - a lurid account by his second wife, the publicist Freddie Ross - Fisher was utterly shocked by the unlovely details of his hero's decline.
Something of this innocence betrayed haunts the present book. Fisher, a comedy producer for television as well as a biographer, charts the comedian's rapid rise with jaunty brio, vividly recounting plots, analysing gestures and turns of phrase. But you sense that he is dreading the inevitable appearance of the snake in comedy's garden of Eden. When it all starts to go wrong for Hancock, Fisher gallantly finds a redeeming moment here, a nicely timed gag there, but he gazes on helpless as the man he refers to again and again as "the lad himself" slips deeper into the morass of alcohol and self-laceration. The final days are almost unbearable to read about because the author is so upset himself, as if Hancock were a personal friend bent on a course of doom.
In truth, Fisher is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to offer an explanation for it. He seems oddly uninterested in certain critical moments in his subject's life. We know nothing, for example, of Hancock's amorous inclinations as a young man; suddenly, he's married. Later we hear a great deal about his alcoholic benders with his wife, Cicely, but we have very little sense of what they meant to each other when young. Even odder, Fisher announces almost en passant that when Hancock was at the early height of his radio fame with Hancock's Half Hour, he suddenly decamped to Paris, to be replaced for a couple of episodes by Harry Secombe. Fisher offers a cursory explanation, but the enormity of the gesture - the career-breaking recklessness of it - goes virtually undiscussed.
In fact, Fisher is not really interested in analysis of character: it is the work that matters to him, the how and the what rather than the why. He gives us a thorough account of Hancock's early life in Bournemouth, where his parents, who were intermittently in show business, bought a hotel where Hancock helped out. His father died; he was sent to public school and walked out at the age of 14, then tried to follow in his father's footsteps as a comedian and failed at the first hurdle; he attempted a succession of hopeless jobs; then his first faltering successful steps on stage. The breaks and the disasters are duly recorded against the background of a vivid account of the variety theatre of the day. Eventually, after a dreary war as a clerk in the RAF, Hancock was discovered, like so many others, by Ralph Reader of the Gang Show and, equally inevitably, found his way to the Windmill Theatre, where he learned "to die gracefully, like a swan". His confidence was growing; people began to sense that he had something special. He got into radio as a running character in Peter Brough's Educating Archie. His catchphrase "Isn't it sickening?" was on everyone's lips, soon followed by "Flippin' kids!"; an innocent age indeed.
The crucial event in his life as a star was when he met the writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who uncannily channelled the essence of the man Hancock into the character Hancock - boastful, aspirational, intolerant, out of place almost everywhere he finds himself, but none the less possessed of a certain grandeur. This character is surely one of the great inventions of 20th century comedy, the love-child of two writers and the actor they served. Just as surely as Archie Rice or Jimmy Porter, Hancock (as created by Galton and Simpson) expressed the age - the post-war accidie, the sense of vanished dreams, of alienation and angst, the rage against conformist greyness - but through the rumpled and familiar form of the man the writers in an inspired moment christened Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock. (In one of a million astonishing details in the book, Fisher reveals that Hancock was seriously courted to play Jimmy Porter in the film of Look Back in Anger).
As a boy I was besotted with Hancock, especially after his transition to TV, for which medium his infinitely expressive, melted-down features seemed made. Indeed, I identified with him, recognising in him a middle-aged child not so very unlike the middle-aged child I felt myself to be. There is so often a child at the heart of great comic creation, and Hancock was gorgeously, outrageously infantile.
The part was bespoke: the scripts follow the contours of Hancock's natural melody so perfectly that to read them on the page is to hear them. Fisher is exceptionally good on the interpenetration of character and man, and shrewdly observes that it was this that began to gnaw at Hancock. There were times, Fisher says, "when he felt cheated of his real identity".
He began to feel that the character was merely him, and that therefore he wasn't proving himself. He started to think of himself as an artist, which, of course, he was, but a deeply instinctive one - he never read the radio scripts until the morning of the transmission, giving flawlessly timed and inhabited impromptu performances. The blitheness of radio - where scripts don't have to be learned and the actors have an easy camaraderie across the microphones - left him blissfully unselfconscious. Television, where everything had to happen for real, started the process of endless self-analysis which, his brother noted, killed him.
He was invited to appear on the notorious Face to Face series in which the invisible John Freeman, shrouded in shadow, interrogated him as the camera dwelt on his face. It was a form of public confession (without absolution)which did him irreparable damage, tipping him over into a sort of anguished contemplation of his own limitations and an obsessive determination to innovate. He yearned to be an international figure, like Chaplin or Buster Keaton. This meant the dismantlement of Hancock as we knew him, the departure from East Cheam, the abandonment of his co-stars (Sid James the first to go) and, catastrophically, the dismissal of his writers.
From then on - despite occasional successes such as his film The Rebel - it was a slow and increasingly excruciating professional suicide. His consumption of alcohol while on the job, which had begun when he was playing in variety theatres, began to destroy his talent: he could no longer remember lines and, most poignantly, that uniquely expressive mug became as rigid as Mount Rushmore. In life, he and his wives and mistresses plunged headlong into a sea of booze; at one point he chained himself to the railings of Primrose Hill. Often things turned violent. One wife happened to be a judo expert, so he rarely inflicted any damage on her; the other protected herself by serially (and with diminishing impact) attempting to kill herself.
In Australia to shoot a TV series, he gave a dazzling read-through of the first episode, then retired to his dressing room to tank himself up on vodka and pills, and after that "he didn't know who or what he was". Finally, he did sober up, but one day he went down to get something from his neighbour, only to find him out. That sudden reminder of his aloneness was enough, it seems, to have tipped him over the edge. "Things seem to have gone wrong just too many times," he wrote, and then administered a lethal dose of the vodka and pills that had been his constant companions for so many years.
The roots of this epic loneliness are hard to deduce from Fisher's pages. In them you will find a brilliant and much-needed account of Hancock's extensive theatre work and its originality, a celebration of the audacity of the television work, with its formal originality and its constantly Pirandellian playing with the frame, and a kind of voyage round the comedian's mind and the nature of his comic enterprise. But he fails to probe his crucial relationships, especially with his mother, Lily, to whom he was immensely close. She supported him financially in his early years in the business; she was the go-between when his marriages broke down; she was the last person in his mind when he killed himself. A year before, when she had come to stay with him, he had walked into her bedroom to tell her that he had just drunk a bottle of brandy in five minutes, and passed out. What was that all about? Fisher lets slip the astonishing fact that, two weeks after her son finally did for himself, Lily took a pleasure cruise to Turkey. There's something horribly complex in that relationship which remains for future Hancock biographers to probe. Meanwhile, Fisher has written an indispensable book about the man he rightly calls "the most expansively idiosyncratic of recent British comic heroes".
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I'll post other comedy-based book reviews in this thread in future... |
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Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 4:54 pm Post subject: |
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“Comedy At The Edge,” Richard Zoglin
By Trevor Seigler
December 26, 2008
Stand-up comedy is one of the most underappreciated art forms in America, for good reason. For every Robin Williams or Steve Martin who emerges from the pack, there lurks a Dane Cook or Larry the Cable Guy just waiting to ruin the party. But stand-up had a brief run of relevance in the ’70s, when comedians exposed bitter truths and defied expectations of what constituted “comedy.”
“Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America” is Richard Zoglin’s attempt to afford the stand-up profession and some of its best practitioners the respect they deserve. Lenny Bruce saw his career ruined by obscenity charges, but his banner of free speech taken up by worthy successors. George Carlin and Richard Pryor went from safe, middle-of-the-road Vegas performers to counterculture heroes who used language as a weapon against the repressions of Nixon’s America. Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman exhausted and exasperated their audiences. And the future kings of late night (Leno and Letterman) earned their dues by working the seedy comedy club circuit of the era. In the end, Jerry Seinfeld was left to restore stand-up not as a means to an end (sitcom stardom, movie roles, endorsements) but as the reward itself, after nine years of headlining America’s most popular show about nothing.
Zoglin structures his book around the various personalities who populated the world of stand-up, starting with Carlin and Pryor. Before both men threw away their conventional success for uncharted waters, stand-up was all about punchlines and playing to the crowd. Carlin and Pryor, working independently of one another, opened the door for more edgy, daring commentary on America. And the comedians who followed set the standard for the following decades.
Aside from the heavy hitters, Zoglin also profiles those comedians who had to wait for their time in the spotlight. Albert Brooks abandoned stand-up to become a unique voice in cinema, Robert Klein suffered from being a trailblazer whose style was imitated by lesser lights for more success, and Andy Kaufman ended up as the spiritual inspiration for Tom Green and MTV’s “Jackass” series. Women made inroads in the primarily male stand-up world in the ’70s, but they had to struggle to be heard in spite of (or perhaps because of) the women’s liberation movement. The comedy club owners provided showcases for their favorite comics, but not paying showcases. And in the wake of the singular success of the ’70s comics, every class clown or wannabe star took to the stage on open-mic nights, diluting the product with overkill.
But Zoglin isn’t a cranky old-timer; he simply points out that the era itself was unique for comedy, a time when the fates aligned to provide many with a chance to make their weird and wonderful humor heard. “Comedy at the Edge” is like a great line-up at a comedy club, where the best around get their chance to tell their stories unfiltered and uncensored. That’s nothing to laugh about.
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This sounds a great read for standup fans. |
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