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Stewin' the Fat 2: With Dave Cohen
377 Plays5 months ago
Dan caught up with bona fide COMEDY GENIUS Dave Cohen (Horrible Histories, HIGNFY, Spitting Image, loads of other stuff) to Stew the Fat (yes we will continuously repeat these tedious puns) about his days as a stand up in the erly days of Alternative Comedy, establishing the now world famous Comedy Store players (with, amongst others, Paul Merton and some unknown Canadian called Mike Myers... wonder where he ended up?) and being nominated (and not nominated for an even better show) for an Edinburgh Fringe Award.
We also talk about crossing paths with a young comedian called Stewart Lee, and his thoughts on how Stew has developed and improved upon his craft since his early days on the circuit. On the subject of Stew, Dave and I spend a lot of time discussing the "character" of The Comedian Stewart Lee, Dave's thoughts as a comedy writer and tutor on what sort of work will have gone into developing the act, and a little thought experiment that looks at what sort of sitcom the "character" of Stewart Lee might fit into.
Basic-Lee (yes, that's one of Stew's, but a pun nonetheless), this episode is excellent and should not be missed.
TRIGGER WARNING: THERE IS A SINGLE USE OF A RACIAL SLUR, IN THE CONTEXT OF TALKING ABOUT THE USE OF SLURS BY WORKING MEN'S CLUB COMICS.
You can keep up with Dave's work at his website: Home - Dave Cohen
SEE STEWNIVERSE LIVE AT BRIGHTON FRINGE: Across the Stew-niverse: A Podcast About Stewart Lee - Brighton Fringe
SEE DAN'S WORK IN PROGRESS LIVE AT BRIGHTON FRINGE: Daniel Powell: Breathless (Work in Progress) - Brighton Fringe
SEE JOE'S WORK IN PROGRESS LIVE AT THE BRIGHTON FRINGE: I should be dead - Brighton Fringe
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Technical Issues
00:00:34
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Across the Stewniverse podcast, the world's only podcast about the comedian Stuart Lee. I'm recording this on my phone at the moment because I'm having trouble with my audio setup.
00:00:52
Speaker
the quality might be even worse than usual.
Interview with Dave Cohen
00:00:56
Speaker
I'm quite excited about this week because I've sat down to have a chat with comedy writer, actor, podcast host,
00:01:11
Speaker
novelist, producer, script editor, all-round stand-up, all-round comedy legend Dave Cohen. You might know Dave's work from the TV show Horrible Histories. I think he wrote the vast majority of the songs for that.
00:01:33
Speaker
He writes regularly for Have I Got News For You. He's written on Weekending back in the day for BBC. He's written a couple of sitcom scripts of his own. He's got a couple of novels out.
00:01:47
Speaker
and he has written a couple of books on the art of comedy writing and he's got a book out called The Complete Comedy Writer which I picked up at the British Comedy Guide big comedy conference a few weeks back and I met Dave there and we had a little
00:02:11
Speaker
little chat, talked about comedy writing in general and I ended up popping along to one of his script reading evenings, virtual script reading evenings that he does various patreon and we went through the first 10 pages of one of my scripts and then not so long after that I reached out to him because I realised that when he was a stand-up back in the 80s and 90s he
00:02:38
Speaker
worked quite regularly or crossed paths quite regularly with Stu, so I thought I'd reach out to him, see if he fancied a chat about Stu and about Stu's early work and his kind of memories of the circuit and those kind of things, and he was well up for it, so what you're about to hear is effectively that, that chat. Now Dave is ultra, ultra passionate about comedy, kind of in all of its forms really, comedy writing,
00:03:06
Speaker
stand up, you know.
00:03:10
Speaker
Sorry, my brain's a bit fuzzy because I'm full of cold at the moment.
Early Comedy Circuit and Content Warnings
00:03:16
Speaker
But yeah, so that, we had quite a long, quite detailed chat and I wanted to get a bit more into Dave's career, but we just kind of veered off onto all sorts of tangents and spent a bunch of time talking about the early days on the circuit and obviously plenty of stew chat within that. So, oh, and I need to mention at some point in this conversation, I seem to recall
00:03:39
Speaker
we were talking a little bit about sort of like the use of I can't remember exactly what the conversation was but it's something around the use of slurs or the use of certain words and there is one use of a particular racial slur in this chat in the context of discussing that particular thing so just a bit of a
00:04:09
Speaker
bit of a trigger warning for that. Dave and I do get into some fairly sort of heavy subjects at times and like I said there is there is one use of a slur in the in the context of discussing the use of slurs. So yeah anyway there's a really great chat with Dave so I hope you enjoy it and here's me chatting to Dave Cohen.
00:04:38
Speaker
just in case we see and say anything pertinent to the conversation that we're about to have. To be honest, I quite like a sort of, I think the term is in medias res, you know, you start in the middle of a conversation. I quite like that. Yeah, I do as well. But I think it might be a bit much to start with the, oh, are you having connection problems? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. We've got rid of all that.
00:05:01
Speaker
I've seen your little red dots and so we are recording so that's all. We're good to go. My online room management skills are the worst of anyone I've ever been on a call with to be honest with you. I've been on loads of these calls with people and it's
00:05:20
Speaker
I'm just not, I'm not very good at the whole tech thing. So I've kind of put together a little intro to append to the front of this to kind of contextualize yourself Dave, just based on sort of what I know of your career and the things that you've done and the things you've been involved in. But for people who may not know your work, can we hear a bit of that from yourself in terms of your positive history?
00:05:46
Speaker
There are people who don't know my work. How dare they? Well, it all began. Yes, I was a journalist in
London's Comedy Scene in the 80s
00:05:56
Speaker
my 20s, in the early 80s. I gave up journalism and the thing called stand-up comedy was just starting up in London. And I was fantastically lucky to be
00:06:08
Speaker
moving to London the one time when there were more clubs to play than there were comedians to play them. It was about a year after the success of the young ones. So I had sort of known them kind of from student days and I had this lovely long list of all these clubs from Nigel Planer gave me this big list of places like the Crown and Castle in Dalston and the Oxford Arms in Camden
00:06:38
Speaker
there were all these little rooms above pubs. And suddenly I turned up to London and there weren't any comedians left to play them. And so my generation, there was a few of us who kind of pretty much arrived at the same time. Myself, Jeremy Hardy, a writer called Pete Sinclair, who still writes with Mark Steele. And Pete and I broke together and still occasionally do after sort of 40 years.
00:07:07
Speaker
So we turned up and we just got gigs really. And I thought, I'm giving up my job as a journalist to become a writer. And there was this diversion along the way that you could just, I could get like three or four standup gigs a week. And you could sign on as well. And as long as you weren't working more than 11 hours a week, you could claim Dole.
00:07:34
Speaker
to be working 11 hours a week I'd have to have been doing 33 gigs a week. Yeah exactly, in five or ten minute increments. So signing on and getting paid and then going into the radio department BBC radio and writing sketches for
00:07:56
Speaker
uh week ending on radio four and so just got to know the whole system really the whole bbc i was i was kind of trained by the bbc really yeah that was when it was a genuine like open door policy wasn't it because obviously they've got this thing now where they caught you know it's an open door policy in in name and people can submit stuff whereas then from what i understand from sort of people doing it in that era you literally went in and sat at a typewriter
00:08:26
Speaker
Absolutely and by open door they they mean you know anybody could literally walk in off the street. The paradox was that at that time the only people who did walk in were white men, white English men. There were a couple of, there was the odd Scots person, an occasional Canadian I remember, but
00:08:49
Speaker
that that's the sort of the paradox then was there was there was lots and lots of opportunity to come in then yeah but the only people who appear to take the opportunity or appear to quality be qualified in whatever way were white white english people or at least taken seriously by the sounds of it
00:09:11
Speaker
It's difficult to say. I think, you know, there were women who came in, but the problem that they had, and this was like the early 80s, so we're not talking about the kind of chicken in the basket, frilly shirt, bow tie, northern quamik attitudes to women at this point. That had already been blown away by alternative comedy in the young ones.
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah, so there was a there was a desire for women to come in, but there were so few of them. So as soon as a funny woman came into the into these offices and there were like 16 producers, 15 of them were men. Yeah. And they do. I think that 12 of them had been to Oxford or Cambridge and
00:09:59
Speaker
they as soon as a woman came in they'd all go oh a woman a woman how exciting and they they sort of over promote her and so she'd be suddenly going from
00:10:13
Speaker
walking in off the street like the rest of us, if she was, if she could sort of write a gag, that would like, Oh, right, okay, you're in. And we need some sketches for this show. And we want sketches for that. And suddenly, they're writing that they're kind of without having had any of this sort of training and the disappointments that we all have to go through. And sort of small, gradual increments of success, they sort of thrown in.
00:10:40
Speaker
inevitably after like a few goes they things sort of work dries up and they have to stop. Yeah. And then they go off and then so for the people who are still there who say, well, you know, the problem is that women aren't funny.
00:10:55
Speaker
Um, it's another, you know, it's, it's, it's more proof to that. Yeah, you see told you told me that sort of age old thing that just keeps rearing its head. And I'd love to say, you know, as well that it's gone away now. Like I'm so for context, I'm essentially.
00:11:12
Speaker
What you've described there, that's where I am now, is, you know, the kind of I'm doing 10 minute tryout spots to try and get paid openers for 20 minutes. And, you know, I'm taking a show up to the fringe and doing those things to try and move the needle myself.
00:11:29
Speaker
And on the circuit that I'm on, the kind of open spot circuit, it's the same. The same thing happens. You kind of, you still get, you know, not to as great a degree, a lot's changed, but you still get a lot of three women on tonight. There's that type of thing. And I just don't know why it prevails when we've got so many funny women in this country and in other countries, you know.
00:11:57
Speaker
I know this, I mean, the classic line from promoter would always be like if a woman rang to do a gig.
00:12:07
Speaker
And they'd say, well, I can't put you on that night. We've already got a woman on the bill. Whereas, funnily enough, if a man rang, and they said, I gather you've already got three men on the bill, is it possible? Squeeze another one on. I think I've heard the term that like, funnily enough, given we're talking about Stuart Lee, this might be something I've heard Stuart say himself in that they used to consider women what was referred to as a special act.
00:12:37
Speaker
you know like where you would you'd have a guy who's melting a block of ice and you know doing something really weird and then you'd have a couple of standard comics and then you'd have a woman and they'd be like considered a novelty a variety act you know what i mean like that that's considered diversity a weirdo a melt in a block of ice and a woman is your diversity
00:12:57
Speaker
And that was, to some extent, that was true. And I think it's worth mentioning this at this point, because this could possibly kind of touch on areas that we're thinking about. A lot of the women that I remember were apart from Linda Smith and then Joe Brown. But most of the women who sort of came through when I did in about 1984, 1985 were
00:13:23
Speaker
I wouldn't call them special acts, but they were certainly, they were character inverted commas, comedy, often playing a heightened version of themselves. And I think this was part of the problem. And then this is something that's kind of at the heart of this whole, who is it on stage? Is it you or is it? Of course, yeah. And that's where those lines
00:13:53
Speaker
are always blurred in stand-up comedy because the audience participate or there is the possibility that the audience might participate. So there is always the possibility that you will have to break out of your act and be yourself. So a lot of people
00:14:16
Speaker
who were trying to get their equity cards. So you'd have actors who would play a character and they would break out of the character that they would stay in character to deal with the audience, which was for a kind of lesser qualified performer was was a nightmare to watch really. Yeah.
Women in Comedy
00:14:36
Speaker
But then, you know, pretty soon really good people came along who were sort of great actors who were able to to break out of to deal with heckles in character. Yeah. So so you're already at this stage, you're blurring what was when we started out, you know, but are kind of my my my generation. Yeah.
00:15:00
Speaker
We kind of mostly were being ourselves, I think. Daddled up a touch, yeah. Yeah, you had a persona, but not character. It was a persona, not a character as such. Yeah, again, having said that, though, when we started, Jeremy and I, Jeremy Hardy and I started out at the sort of around the same time and we played all the same gigs together. We shared a flat together in classic sort of sitcom mode as well.
00:15:30
Speaker
But Jeremy, and Jeremy was pretty much the same person on stage as he was off, but he kind of, he sort of borrowed, if I can put an inverted commas,
00:15:47
Speaker
the persona of his comedy hero who was Norman Lovett, so he kind of used the style of Norman Lovett when he started out, sort of in the way that when you first see Harry Hill, in fact even when you see him now, and the whole look
00:16:05
Speaker
was Alexei Sayle. He had the exact same suits and it was a choice that Harry made, was to come on stage with that look. There couldn't be two more different comedians than Harry Hill and Alexei Sayle.
00:16:26
Speaker
it was it was a thing that he did I suppose and I think this is where I kind of my stand-up career which was goes back to your first question about 28 minutes ago. When did you start out? Well I started out doing stand-up and for some unfathomable reason carried on being a stand-up for 10 years and finally sort of stopped when I realized I was not kind of
00:16:54
Speaker
I wasn't really kind of going anywhere with it but I was able to make a living at it without ever really properly cracking that whole thing that you do have to crack of being an act. I think that's probably the difference between the era you've just described there or one of the differences between the area you've just described there and kind of what I'm in now is
00:17:19
Speaker
when you know and it comes back to there's a there's a broad question for me about the kind of like how people value and see you know artistic endeavors is that you're expected to do the vast majority of it for free now really you know you couldn't kind of my understanding of this circuit that you've just described is that you could sort of get by on a few ten twenty quid gigs a week
00:17:42
Speaker
you know plus a little part-time job plus a little like you say signing on money or whatever and you could sort of get by and you could live in it flat for 25 quid and share a room with someone or whatever whereas now kind of the the economics have been paid for gigs have stayed the same we still get a tenner for you know 20 10 minutes or whatever but you need to pay rent which is a grand or whatever like it do you know what i mean it's it's all the world's changed
00:18:09
Speaker
By 1986, which is sort of two or three years later, Jeremy and I bought a flat together in Clapham in South West London. On the proceeds of stand up as well. On the proceeds of stand up. I mean, we couldn't have forwarded one on each on our own, but and you know, it was basically, I think, I looked it up for research purposes the other day of a flat in the same block.
00:18:35
Speaker
which I think we paid something like ยฃ50,000 for, which we didn't pay ยฃ50,000. We both got mortgages that were three times what we were earning, and so we were able to get a ยฃ25,000 mortgage each. And the flat is now something like ยฃ750,000. They won't lend you three times what you earn now, either. I think they still do, but if I was earning ยฃ125,000,
00:19:08
Speaker
Yeah, so like I said, I find, I love hearing about that circuit. I sort of almost feel like I was born in the wrong era, in that sense, because I don't know, it just, correct me if I'm wrong, and you may have a different opinion on this as someone who was there, but
00:19:26
Speaker
it felt like it was potentially easier to take risks and you got a lot more interesting acts. I'm not saying there's not a lot of really good interesting acts around now but they tend to come from places where they've already got a little bit of money I think and you know back then you could really take a few risks because if you lost a couple of quid it wasn't sort of the end of the world you know, whereas now feels different.
00:19:50
Speaker
I mean, the number of things that were very different then compared to now. So you're absolutely right. And as I say, I do feel that I was incredibly lucky to be, it hasn't happened to me very often in life, but to be the right place at exactly the right time. And it was an accident as well, because I was convinced that
00:20:15
Speaker
my future in London was going to be as a journalist, as a freelance journalist, and that I would hopefully get the odd joke on the radio. And in my spare time, I'd
00:20:31
Speaker
go out and do some gigs because I'd always done gigs and that was the punk ethos. I'd been performing at punk gigs in the late 70s. That's when my performing career began. I had sort of silly songs and the acoustic guitar and I used to be an act in these punk gigs in Bristol and all these spiky hair
00:20:55
Speaker
people gobbing on you and all that stuff and they have the leather jacket tough guys and their audience are all you know really sort of tough looking mean looking safety pins and all that which was which was quite a shocking look back then so yeah it was quite shocking
00:21:13
Speaker
to
Punk and Alternative Comedy
00:21:29
Speaker
see one of
00:21:31
Speaker
a popular group called the Cortinas. Yeah. Who are Bristol based punk band and they had enormous following in Bristol and I was doing some gigs with them and I did this gig at the Bristol Locarno where I supported the Cortinas. There were 2000 fans in the audience and this little punk at the front of the audience shouted here are you getting paid for this and I said no I'm not and he said here's a quid fuck off and
00:22:01
Speaker
I probably, I have never had a better heckle than that. You just have to, you have to kind of applaud that when it's a good one you've got it. It was great and the gig had been going really well and he was such a part of the gig and so but I mention that because that's
00:22:16
Speaker
part of what it was was that there wasn't a circuit as such. There was no TV interest. There was beginning to be a bit of radio interest because a lot of people who went on to become radio producers had done gigs themselves, so they knew about it.
00:22:37
Speaker
And so quite early on, I was getting gigs doing five minutes of material on like Radio 4 alternative cabaret, it was called at that point. And it was. And you know, people talk about junglers as well as the sort of the kind of
00:22:55
Speaker
they sort of behemoth, the giant, you know, the kind of capitalism gone mad. But actually, Jean-Claude was an incredible gig. It was in Battersea. And Battersea hadn't quite gentrified yet. It was starting to gentrify. So you had these audiences for comedy at Jean-Claude's on a Friday night, and they were a mixture of
00:23:20
Speaker
new posh people from the city who were moving in, but also a lot of local working class South Londoners. And they all got on there and they would see stand up comedy.
00:23:32
Speaker
you also had things like you had Theatre de Complicite who are this kind of very sort of fated fringe theatre group and they've won lots of awards but yeah they were they were storming Friday night at Jean-Glo as a pissed up audience so. Well that's that's it and that's kind of what I you know and I suppose that it brings us around to obviously the Stuart Lee side of things and because
00:23:56
Speaker
you know, there is an appetite for things that go a bit further than what people might call the standard, you know, just make them laugh, stand up comedy. And what people like Stuart and you know, like the people you've just mentioned can get away with in like a jungler's type space where it's people just going out for pints on a Friday night, you can almost Trojan horse a lot of stuff into these people that they wouldn't necessarily come to if they knew what it was.
00:24:24
Speaker
I don't know, I'd say that some of the stuff Stewart does, and I think he said it himself, borders on performance art at times, but he does it to stand-up crowds. And I imagine in that era there was a lot of that kind of stuff going on, because it seems like a very artsy time.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think I mean, it's quite, it did start to change quite quickly. And the first big change that happened was in 1985. So I started in early 1984. So I had a kind of year and a half to get good. And I did get good enough to be
00:25:03
Speaker
you know, playing all the places and getting asked to play or any time a new club opened, I would be, you know, one of the first people that they'd ask. And that was that's just.
00:25:13
Speaker
as I say, there weren't that many people at that point. But I was sort of good enough. And so then in the summer of 1985, the Comedy Store reopened. It had been this sort of strip club in the middle of Soho in the late 70s, which was where all the young ones and comic strip crew kind of cut their teeth and failed.
00:25:41
Speaker
Keith Allen and all that gang, as well as the obvious, you know, Rick and Aidan, Alexia, et cetera. And so when it reopened in 1985, and so that kind of those people had long disappeared, but there were enough people now who were starting to kind of get a little bit of recognition, not recognition, but we're starting to do more gigs. So there was people like myself and Paul Merton and John Irwin, who used to work a lot with Paul.
00:26:10
Speaker
John Sparks, who, of course, you know, did the the poet Shadwell and Frank Povis. So there were quite a lot of people coming through and the comedy store. So it started up again. And that became it started to be a little bit more professional for the first time. So there was a bit of a gig in the West End that was that was sort of reaching out beyond the
00:26:37
Speaker
kind of post-punk audience that we all had that were kind of people who'd been to see punk gigs in the late 70s and went to see stand-up comedy. And you could see the line very clearly from punk to stand-up. Punk was funny and the young ones was, you know, it was a kind of celebration of punk humour.
00:27:01
Speaker
And so you had that. And quite quickly after the Comedy Store opened, so it started to become more of a thing, and then more clubs, and Jean-Gelis was already a thing, and then Jean-Gelis sort of added more days and stuff. And one by one, Channel 4 had started in 1982, so they were kind of on the case, because Channel 4 was always looking for oddball stuff.
00:27:30
Speaker
So Channel 4 were there, sniffing it, sniffing around. And so you got this period between about 1985 and 1987 when some people like Julian Clary, for instance, and Paul Merton, Harry Enfield, you know, they're coming through and they're not just coming through, they're going up several notches.
00:27:56
Speaker
I'm Jeremy Hardy, of course. Well, because around about that time, you were you were one of the founding members of the Comedy Store players. Yes, I was. Yeah, because obviously, you know, I've been thinking about the Comedy Store players a lot recently. I've only ever managed to see it once because obviously I'm not based in London and I've seen it relatively recently. I can't remember who was on that night. But then obviously just recently,
00:28:23
Speaker
they lost Andy Smart, who was obviously a massive part of that history. And then when I was looking back into it, it was like, your name popped up. And I was like, oh, cool. And with Mike Myers as well, which is...
00:28:42
Speaker
I suppose this story is kind of indicative of part of it. It happens sort of at the cusp of the era we're talking about. So we were in the summer of 1985, just before Edinburgh, and the Comedy Store has reopened. And they've done two nights. And so
00:29:05
Speaker
me and Jeremy and Paul and all these people have done the Comedy Store and that but each night there's one act that gets gets it in the neck because there's this sort of throwback of like oh yeah the Comedy Store that's where they used to shout gong and all that stuff
00:29:22
Speaker
And it just so happened nothing to do with his act or anything else at all. The one act to get that treatment the night I was on was Paul, Paul Merton. And so as far as the comedy store were concerned, Paul Merton was this guy that we won't be having him back again.
Improv and Comedy Store Beginnings
00:29:45
Speaker
Meanwhile,
00:29:47
Speaker
Then a month later, so we're up in Edinburgh and Paul and I are doing a show with American comedian Kit Hollaback. And we're on at this weird, weird bar, sort of slightly out of the main drag, which is kind of notorious only because it's the first year ever for a promoter called Karen Coran, who went on to become one of the most successful promoters. Gilded below Karen Coran.
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah, so it wasn't her club, it was like a pub and she had come in to do it. We were on at 7.30, but before us 5.45 was Malarkey and Myers.
00:30:29
Speaker
Right. Neil Malarkey and Mike Myers doing this very, very funny double act, which we knew and they knew us. We all knew each other because we'd all seen each other on the build. And like you say, hardly anyone was doing it then as well. There was a smaller network of people to get to know, I suppose. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. And Mike had been around for a few months doing this act with Neil.
00:30:49
Speaker
Yeah. And so where was this period of between seven o'clock and seven fifteen or thereabouts every night for three weeks where we all met in the bar. So Neil and Mike cleared their stuff away and Paul and Kit and I would turn up and it transpired very quickly that both Paul, both Kit and Mike had done a lot of improv in in the States. Yeah. And
00:31:20
Speaker
kit very much involved with improv in San Francisco and Mike, who'd come from Canada, but he'd been involved very much in the whole sort of second city city. Yeah. Yeah. So John Candy and John Belushi and all that crowd actually. And in fact, some of the people who turned up on Schitt's Creek, for instance, are Eugene Levy and those those people. Well, not just not just the main characters, but there's a guy I think it was called
00:31:49
Speaker
Bob or something, a mechanic who was... Mike always used to talk about this guy, John Hempel, who's called. And Mike just revered this guy. He said, oh, John Hempel, he's the god of improv years and years past. And I thought, you know, yeah, who is this guy? Finally, I see him.
00:32:12
Speaker
So we kind of decided, you know, and this is, as I say, it's a sort of point where the kind of professionalism of comedy meets the sort of ad hoc of like five people who just happened to meet in a bar every night for 15 minutes in Edinburgh. And we're saying, okay, the comedy store has just reopened. Let's do an improv night at the comedy store. What have we got to lose? So we went back.
00:32:38
Speaker
at this point Kit and I are very much in with Don Ward who runs the Comedy Store because we'd already played and done very well at the club. We said we've got to do an improv night. They said okay but we'll put we want to have comedy stand-up on first because we're a bit nervous about it. So we started that way and it was so we said yeah it's me, Kit, Neil and Mike and Paul and they said
00:33:08
Speaker
No, no, Paul. No, we don't want him back. And we really had to fight to get Paul in there, you know. So after, you know, after a couple of weeks, they said, all right, you can have Paul. And Paul sort of did it to begin with. He didn't he didn't do anything for that two or three weeks. He just sort of stood at the back and didn't say anything. It was a bit kind of, come on, Paul. And then and then one week it just sort of happened.
00:33:35
Speaker
there was a sketch going on. We were all we were all kind of acting our socks off. And then Paul just said something. Yeah. And it was hilarious. And so we were all right. That's the end of the sketch. Great. And then we did another sketch. Paul standing there at the back being Paul. And we're all acting away. We're all being a car insurance salesman from Planet Zog or whatever. Someone shouted out. Yeah.
00:34:02
Speaker
improv bollocks and nothing, you know we're all doing our bit and then again and then Paul just shouts something again and it roar of laughter and like great so basically Paul pretty much pretty well found I mean he pretty well found his stage persona in the three weeks that we were doing that show with me and him and Kit and it was like this was the first time that Paul went from being quite a good comedian to being ah right
00:34:33
Speaker
this guy knows what he's doing now. And so every time he went on stage, it was bang, funny, funny, funny, funny. And very quickly, it sort of worked out. I struggled to perform with Kit. We were quite good friends, but we didn't really sort of... Click performatively. We weren't.
00:34:57
Speaker
I think the two of us were the weak links I think in the comedy store players by quite a long way. She was a really good teacher of improv but she wasn't great at it.
00:35:11
Speaker
I was good at doing songs, I could use make-up songs and stuff like that, but there wasn't much else that I could do. And Kit was the... She devised the whole show really, so it was her kind of thing.
00:35:28
Speaker
So this takes you to like, sort of what, 85, 86? Yeah. So I left quite early at this point. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, I sort of saw your name come up a couple of times. I read through because I didn't really know the history of the Comedy Store players. Like I say, it's been on my mind a lot recently because I did get to see it. And then, you know, obviously the events that kind of happened with Andy recently and
00:35:50
Speaker
But I didn't know the history of it. So I started to have a little look into it and your name appeared and then quickly disappeared. It's almost as quickly. So I was sort of trying to work out the timeline of it and stuff. But obviously, so you were around the circuit at that time, you're doing the improv stuff, you're doing stand up and probably writing bits and pieces for the radio at this time, going in to do like weekending and things like that.
00:36:11
Speaker
So at what point then, because I don't want to kind of stop this train while we're on it, because these stories fascinate me, but at what point then did you cross paths with the comedian Stuart Lee? Because he's 89ish, I think he came around. Yeah, okay. I think this has been quite useful for context. Oh, 100 percent.
00:36:41
Speaker
quite soon, you know, really in that period, 86 to 89, I'm kind of doing sort of pretty well as a comedian. My best show, my best stand-up show was in 1989.
00:36:56
Speaker
when I very I mean I got a nomination for Perrier in 1984 but that was kind of part of being someone else's show of bit as well as not not just me my actual show was kind of in the in the long list and almost almost made it to the short list of the Perrier but didn't but was very successful in 89 in 89 a lot of people what was the name of the show so
00:37:25
Speaker
don't even remember it having a name other than just me, but I was at this place called Marco's Leisure Centre, which was again off the main drag, and it was run by a guy called John Gaunt who went on to become a sort of shock jock character, but at the time was a sort of
00:37:43
Speaker
So he went on to become a sort of very, you know, kind of right wing talk, pundit sort of person. But at the time was a sort of left wing fire brand and was enamored by Steven Berkoff and was writing these kind of pseudo Berkoff plays and things. And so he was based in Birmingham and he had quite a following. And he ran these comedy nights in
00:38:08
Speaker
one of these gym halls in this Marcos Leisure Centre. And I would just kind of hang around because I was there, you know, every night. And that was the first time that I saw Stuart performing was at that Marcos Leisure Centre.
Stuart Lee's Sarcastic Humor
00:38:23
Speaker
And I mean, we've sort of talked about it since and we've worked out he was probably still a student at that point. I did remember him and I did, you know, I saw a lot of comedy at the time and I did see a lot of people and I just remembered
00:38:38
Speaker
I couldn't remember any lines or anything, but I just thought, oh, here's somebody, you know, he's quite a funny new person. And yeah, I like he's sort of quite sarky.
00:38:50
Speaker
always like a bit of sarcasm you know being from the north we we tend to sarcasm tends to be our sort of default default position really 100% yeah and uh no you should have said oh yeah 100% Dave but uh drop the ball there Dave yeah um so you know i quite liked it and and
00:39:17
Speaker
Then over the years, I saw him a few more times, but the thing that I've sort of always remembered about that is that every time I've seen Stewart performing subsequently, it's never really been very different from that first time I saw him when he was, I don't know,
00:39:35
Speaker
19 20 years old or something so the act in terms of like because I i've seen a couple of older videos um you know bits and pieces that have excuse me and appear appeared on youtube and then there was a there's a series of clips on youtube of people sort of in their early days so the likes of stewart um adam bloom frankey boil uh you know whoever else loads of sort of prominent stand-ups of today but like it was literally called uh
00:40:04
Speaker
before, you know, before they were famous, sort of in a series of clips, and it's just them doing five minutes in their infancy. I can see today's Stewart in those clips, but something, there's an ingredient that he was missing then that he's got now, or that he's had since, I'd say about sort of 2006, seven issues when he really started to catch fire.
00:40:26
Speaker
something changed and I'm not sure what it was. I've not been able to put my finger on it yet. Well, that's the one caveat that I would make is that I did see him a lot around that period of 2006, 2007, partly because I was sort of coming back into performing a bit and I was putting on shows where I would do the first half and I'd get
00:40:55
Speaker
of somebody I knew who lived nearby to come and do the second half at the King's Head. And so Stuart was just starting at that point to kind of go a little bit beyond
00:41:13
Speaker
I mean, obviously his material got better, his stage presence got better over 10, 20, however many years he'd been doing it by then, 25 years or so.
00:41:30
Speaker
But yeah, that was the point where he started to play with the silences a bit more, and started to just be a bit braver. And I suspect, I mean, I don't know, because I haven't really talked to him about this, but I suspect he was getting...
00:41:55
Speaker
getting better at being a slightly different person to who he was in real life. I've seen this happen a lot. Again, I am both very privileged and proud to have been there and also utterly fucked off to see it because... Because you were there. The first time I saw it was Paul, Paul Merton. And on day one of our 1985 Edinburgh show,
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah, you know, you would have said Paul Merton, Dave Cohen, Kit Hollabat, three. OK, you know, pretty good stand ups. And then by the end of it, you'd go Paul Merton, headline superstar, Dave and Kit. OK, that would make a living. But it was just every every I was on with him every night and every night you got that much better.
00:42:51
Speaker
and then that much, over 25 nights or however long it was, he was 25 times better than he had been at the start. Then when he got there, yeah. Yeah, and it's like, you could, and the next person that I saw it happen with right at the time, closest to the time that I was sort of about to give up really, I suppose, was Eddie Izzard. He was another one. Eddie was an okay performer for about,
00:43:20
Speaker
two or three years actually. I think he started in circus type stuff and he started street performing, Covent Garden, that sort of thing. And a lot of these people who come from Covent Garden, you mentioned Andy Smart, he's another good example, a lot of people who come from street performing
00:43:43
Speaker
They take a while. They take a while to find who they are, but they have enough skills. They have enough crowd handling skills to be able to stand on stage for 20 minutes and get paid for doing that. But you could see with Eddie how it started. And again, that was another
00:44:05
Speaker
was another one where I'd be on like say just because the circuit was very like it was at the time so that I'd end up being on with Eddie two or three times a week so yeah kind of eight week ten week period so I'd see and the person that I saw in
00:44:21
Speaker
on Wednesday night at some club in Richmond. And then I'd be on again with him on Saturday at the forum in Highbury in Islington. And he would have improved in that time. In those two or three days. Yeah, I could see it. And that was what I remember seeing that with Stewart. I remember seeing this thing happening to him of
00:44:46
Speaker
him going from being, yeah, Stuart Lee, he's quite funny, he does good gags, he's got this character, he's got this persona. And like you say, it's hard to put your finger on it, but I suspect that's what it was. It was like, I suspect he was going, okay, right, time to be
00:45:07
Speaker
Stuart Lee. Yeah. I saw that as being the difference because I so through doing this podcast right what I've done is with myself and my regular co-host Joe what we've done is we've taken Stuart's big pieces of work so stand-up comedian 41st best stand-up ever you know all of his kind of hour you know hour and a half two hour specials or whatever we walk through them we look at them and try and figure out
00:45:34
Speaker
what the special sauce is really and kind of pick them apart. And I noticed a massive shift. So the first one he did back, I think, 2014 on five standup comedian in the stand. And he was probably then I would say, closer to the steward of what you're describing there. He was good. He had good jokes. He had a good persona. And then he came back the next year or the year after with the one 90s comedian where it's all about, you know, seeing the ghost of Jesus. And between those two things,
00:46:04
Speaker
There was a light year jump of performance and character and like, and I suppose this is what I was really interested to talk to you about, because obviously as a kind of sitcom writer yourself and a teacher of sitcom and a teacher of comedy writing, character, the one thing I've heard you say a lot, because obviously I've attended some of your
00:46:24
Speaker
seminars, shall we call them and obviously done some of your Patreon table reads and things like that. And one of the things that I keep hearing in your voice, and it was confirmed to me when I read, you know, an extract from your book a couple of weeks ago, which prompted my email. You know, this thing about the importance of character and kind of really knowing on a deep level who the character is to be able to put them into a sitcom and know how they'll react in certain situations.
00:46:53
Speaker
And I kind of thought, I think that's the kind of work that Stuart's done to get to this character of the comedian, Stuart Lee. I kind of feel like he has almost treated it, maybe not consciously, but like a sitcom character, know what would happen if he fell in a swimming pool, know what would happen if he got stubbed his toe on a table. Do you know what I mean? You can almost imagine he's done that work. Yeah.
00:47:20
Speaker
I think you're absolutely right. And I think it almost certainly is a conscious thing. I think it's something that you learn and you pick up when you're performing all the time. You're kind of learning it 10 times better than you were if you just sort of think of it as an intellectual exercise. And it's certainly not a new thing. I mean, if we go back
00:47:49
Speaker
I was sort of thinking about this just ahead of this interview, thinking about where does this start? And I suppose it kind of starts with the thing we've talked about a little bit about, the difference between stand-up comedy and comic acting. And it's that breaking of the fourth wall.
00:48:16
Speaker
and it goes quite a long way back. I think you go back to Tony Hancock and Hancock is a really interesting starting point for a lot of alternative comedy, I think, because a lot of comedians, Jeremy was always, people always say, oh, he's the next Hancock or something, but you know, a lot of
00:48:41
Speaker
uh you know and and that whole sort of meaningless oh the next the next Hancock the next x and whatever but what was interesting about Tony Hancock was he was a he was a cabaret performer um and then but he was obviously a brilliant actor who then discovered the two brilliant writers and so you have this series Hancock on the radio and he's got these foil characters around him and
00:49:12
Speaker
but it's like he is playing Tony Hancock and he's playing, it is a version of himself that two brilliant writers who know him and understand him are able to get into his brain and kind of
00:49:32
Speaker
put out there the worst aspects of it. Yeah, turn up is worse traits. Yeah. And so you get this quite interesting way it develops and the character becomes more and more successful, massively, massively successful. And by the final series, one by one, he drops his co-stars and you can see the reason for this without
00:49:57
Speaker
necessarily saying Tony Hancock's a megalomaniac. You could sort of see how he's getting better at performing and he doesn't need, he doesn't really need Kenneth Williams there, for instance. Not only is Kenneth Williams mugging and getting all the big laughs, you know, but he's not quite in the same show as it were, you know, as where Hancock's going. And you can, you know, that's, I think that's reasonable enough. And then
00:50:27
Speaker
right down to you, you end up with just Tony and Sid and eventually he gets rid of Sid James as well. Yeah. And so again, you can say, well, you know, he's not a double act, you know, Sid James could probably find another person and do a brilliant two man two man sitcom with them. Hancock is Hancock. And so he gets to do the whole of it on his own. But then the big mistake he then makes, and those are
00:50:56
Speaker
But absolutely brilliant shows, the shows where it's just him. Yeah. Particularly, you know, the one where he's on his own and he's bored. And then there's the radio ham and, you know, the real classic ones, the blood donor. These are all the classic Hancock on his own ones. But then he says, actually, I don't need the writers as well. That's where he's wrong. Because he wants to take it a certain way and they
00:51:24
Speaker
immediately say you're wrong. Yeah. And so you have this sort of mini standoff and then basically they go off and they say, look, we we we like what we love writing is not just Hancock. We like writing the foil for him. And so Hancock saying, no, I just want to be on my own. They just say, oh, well, OK, you carry on on your own. We've got enough to write.
00:51:51
Speaker
this character that we know very well as, and that's gonna be Harold Steptoe. And we're gonna have our new Sir James, that's gonna be his dad. And so, you know, off they go. Steptoe and Son, fantastic, huge hit sitcom. And Hancock, you know, career decline, booze, everything, you know, and he's dead within three or four years of that, you know.
00:52:20
Speaker
So it's interesting, and that's a very good example of an actor who has some self-awareness, but not quite enough. And so you kind of then get the people who come through
Influences of Comedy Legends
00:52:36
Speaker
from that. You get the sort of the American, well, I suppose you get the kind of, John Cleese, Faulty Towers, feels like it's the next fifth in line.
00:52:47
Speaker
And then, and, you know, Steve Coogan, Ricky Gervais, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, these are all kind of performers who can write themselves. Yeah. Who aren't really, they're not stand-up comedians. I mean, Ricky Gervais makes a living as a, partly as a stand-up comedian and is a very successful one, but I think
00:53:10
Speaker
It doesn't, I mean, you know, I'm not, it just, maybe it's my personal taste thing. No, I think I agree. I mean, very, very influenced by Stuart Lee in his early days as well, and sort of happy to kind of admit that at the time and then went off in a slightly different direction. And I think, you know, I don't want to, you know, there's a market for everything, isn't there? Obviously, but
00:53:36
Speaker
different to you know i remember politics and animals and those early stand-up shows that he did that were thematic and they weren't necessarily about um they weren't necessarily about uh controversy or whatever whereas the the style now seems seems to be a bit of a shift you know all i imagine all stand-ups who do it long enough will will go through a shift of into something else and yeah i mean i i think what ricky's your face
00:54:04
Speaker
has and does brilliantly, Ricky Gervais is absolutely fan led. And I say this in awe of him, you know, it's brilliant, you know, he can do absolutely what he wants. And nobody is going to have any control over him at all. And that's because you don't want me. Well, okay, I'll go somewhere else with my
00:54:32
Speaker
million, two million, three million fan base. And you know, good luck for you.
00:54:40
Speaker
He is in the ultimate position of an artist. He has, I would say, 100% control. And so that's why I don't think of him as a stand-up. I think of him as, you know, you either like Ricky Gervais or you don't, I think. And the people who like him love him and they will go and watch him
00:55:05
Speaker
just to be in the room with him. And I totally get that. You know, I have...
00:55:11
Speaker
I had that fandom about certain people when I was, you know. Yeah, well, ultimately, you know, this this is where this came from, this whole podcast thing is because I feel very similarly about the work that Stuart does. Like, you know, you know, obviously there's a slight step back there in that. I think Ricky's character or I'm making assumptions here, but I think Ricky's character on stage is slightly closer to Ricky in real life than perhaps the character of Stuart Lee.
00:55:36
Speaker
although that you know again that might have changed recently i think he's he's been much more gregarious on stage the last couple of times i've seen him than the shows of old and i'm thinking about that mid period now of like so you talk in 2010 if you prefer a milder comedian carpet remnant world 2012 and then sort of content provider those three shows
00:55:59
Speaker
sort of 2010 to 2018-ish and then Comedy Vehicle and all that, was where the character for me was at his densest, you know, it was... There was a clear barrier between him and the audience of, you know, being the character, whereas now I've seen, you know, his most recent tour and obviously Snowflake tornado, and there's more of a willingness to step outside of it and meet the people, not halfway, but you know what I mean, kind of...
00:56:28
Speaker
come to them a bit more than the character would. Yeah, I mean I'd be interested to hear what he would have to say about that because I haven't really talked to him much about, you know, I know he has this sort of feud thing with Ricky and you know I find all of that stuff a little bit kind of
00:56:54
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, we did actually, you know, we had a bit of a fallout once, some years ago, maybe about 10 years ago, I think, or something. I was writing comment pieces in Chortle and I kind of didn't really, I was just
00:57:16
Speaker
I suppose I was still at that point kind of still working through my own inadequacies as a stand-up. Feelings towards stand-up, yeah. Yeah and so and the thing that always I felt very strongly about from my stand-up days was you know there was there were people that you liked more than other people and there are people that you disliked intensely but there was kind of no
00:57:45
Speaker
there was no uh you know what what happens in what happens in stand-up stays in stand-up there was nobody yeah going out dissing other people i mean there were horrible feuds horrible feuds really but nobody went out and
00:58:02
Speaker
And I sort of felt a little bit kind of precious about it. I sort of thought, actually, this is another thing that's quite nice about this circuit that makes us different from the old school is that we're not just slagging each other off and people getting excited about it.
00:58:20
Speaker
Reality is people love feuds. Yeah, I mean it's an interesting one for me and that's obviously that's a part of his I don't call it a trope of his but it's certainly a big part of his work is there's usually a routine about a Target if you like that, you know, I think about the The Mark Watson or the one that was directed towards Mark Watson in if you prefer a milder comedian You know the the famous hundred percent pair routine, you know, I think about that one
00:58:50
Speaker
being a bit, you know, a bit of a dig towards a certain, a certain type of stand up. And obviously he's done material about like Russell Howard and things like that. But sort of listening to, excuse me, listening to him talk about it, it's interesting in that how he frames it is that, you know, the character's frame of reference. And again, he talks about himself in the third person, the character of Stuart Lee.
00:59:16
Speaker
The character's frame of reference for everything in life is stand-up, so if he's irked about something.
00:59:22
Speaker
he's going to funnel it through the prism of stand-up. And if he's irked about, say, advertising, or he's irked about people selling out an inverted commas, going back to the punk thing, he's going to funnel that through the prism of stand-up. And that became like a routine about, OK, Mark Watson's done this advert. And he didn't name him, but he knew it was out.
00:59:48
Speaker
I don't know because obviously it's only what he said in interviews and what I take from reading the transcripts of them and watching them but I do feel like certainly he might suggest that the character gives him a bit of license to poke at things in the way that he might not do himself in real life.
01:00:12
Speaker
this this was sort of the thrust of my argument and this was you know I hadn't really thought about things like I hadn't really thought about you know the Hancock thing or yeah Larry David of being Jerry Seinfeld being the next sort of iteration of it I suppose and I thought a little bit about it because of course I knew you know I've worked a lot with Al Murray who of course shared a flat with Stewart and they were
01:00:39
Speaker
students together and things but I did feel that he was being a little bit disingenuous by by saying well look it's not me it's not me slugging these people off it's the character Stuart Lee and in fact I sort of chatted to Richard Herring a little bit about this and I think Stuart has said
01:01:02
Speaker
Stuart has said, Richard has said on some time or other as well, I think he says that, you know, well, I've met both of these, Stuart Leeds, I know both of them very well and I don't think they're exactly different people or something like that. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things, you know, obviously as someone who's not, as an outsider to all of this, obviously, you know, yourself, Richard, whoever,
01:01:27
Speaker
were there and you've kind of been exposed to both sides of the coin, the Stewart and the character Stewart and
Creating Comedic Characters
01:01:33
Speaker
all that kind of stuff. From an outsider's perspective and just purely from a fan perspective, you know, there are two clear different versions, but of course, I can't remember who it was, it might be Stephen Fry or someone like that. Funnily enough, probably on Richard's podcast, as said, you know, everyone presents a version of themselves
01:01:52
Speaker
to the steward who sits after gigs and signs DVDs and stuff like that for people like myself presents a version of himself that he wants his followers or fans or whoever to see. So there's many different versions of kind of a character and then what people who know him truly know him getting private will be different again. But I suppose that goes back to again, just how for me, how much thought
01:02:20
Speaker
um would have gone into the creation of this character or at least the perception that it's a character you know the the thought around it because to kind of bring it back he i've heard him say before before he starts each piece of work he has to think where is the character now in the world so like to use content provider as a um as an example i think he said this on stewart goldsmith's podcast something like
01:02:48
Speaker
At the start of the content provider process, he was a clearly famous television comedian. He'd had four series on the BBC. He'd been nominated for a BAFTA and all that kind of stuff. So he'd riding high on this success, the character, Stuart himself, but obviously the character as well.
01:03:04
Speaker
and then the BBC cancelled it so he took that as okay the character can be a bit more boisterous and he can be a bit he can push things a bit further because he's coming from a lower status place because he's just had his tv show taken away from him so he can behave like a toddler essentially um and that sort of thing fascinates me in that he's obviously looked at that like okay this is an episode of a sitcom where you start from one place and you have to get him back to that place by the end of it
01:03:33
Speaker
know what I mean? I've heard him describe it in that way before where the character doesn't grow as such throughout the hour, but then it's a slightly different version of the character when he comes to do the next hour. So in that sense, it's kind of like a sitcom character. Yeah, yeah. No, I get what you're saying there. And just as you were saying it as well, I was thinking, I mean, it is
01:04:01
Speaker
I'm a nerd. I can happily talk about comedy and comedy characters till the cows come home. But I do understand that for certain people, when you get to a certain situation, it can really mess with your head. And I think about people I've known in this situation over the years. And again, I mentioned Al Murray there.
01:04:30
Speaker
you know he was a sort of okay stand-up he was getting regular gigs he was doing this sort of odd routine and he was doing sort of funny noises and things and yeah machine guns wasn't it yeah yeah and then he did this sort of
01:04:47
Speaker
You know, he kind of came up with this pub landlord persona with a show he was doing at Harry Hill. And it just, you know, it the more it developed, the more you could see him becoming not becoming that person, but you could see his ability to write humor.
01:05:09
Speaker
was improving exponentially because he'd found this character that he could just write and write and write. And it was okay because he knew these people and he wasn't one of them. But then it becomes so successful that it starts to become successful with the people that he is taking the piss out of.
01:05:36
Speaker
So for him, you know, he can't, you know, he could just stop doing it. But it's massively successful and people love it. And depending on which part of the country they're in, they're either in on the joke or they're not. But people are just finding it funny regardless. And I think it's a really
01:05:58
Speaker
Well, there's that debate about any sort of, you know, Ricky's another good one and it's obviously come out recently with him releasing a new special on Netflix. He got into, I wouldn't say he got into trouble because as Ricky Gervais, can you really get into trouble? I don't think so in that sense. You know, he had some, let's say he had some articles written about him, about a routine he did about transgender people or something like that.
01:06:22
Speaker
and you know he can say as much as he likes uh okay it's irony and and it's all this but i suppose again to steal another phrase from chu i think i've heard him say something along the lines of you can't control context um you know in that you don't get to choose how people receive that information and you don't get to choose how on what level the people coming to see you are laughing at it or are they laughing directly at the thing you're lampooning ironically
01:06:50
Speaker
Are they laughing ironically because they know it's a stupid position? You know, and there's that argument obviously has come up with Al Murray in the past, as you've just said. Yeah, well, it came up. It came up for me personally, because, you know, I had I had a line back when I was still doing stand up quite regularly. And I was doing doing quite well, having come from nowhere to be doing quite well. Yeah. And I said, you know, I've got a bit
01:07:18
Speaker
posh in my old age, you know, I become a bit of a hooray high me. And, you know, I was doing this line that was all fine and everything, then one midnight comedy store, I did that line, and I could, there was something in the tone of the way that somebody laughed at it that was, I thought, ah,
01:07:37
Speaker
you're not laughing at the joke, you're laughing at the animosity to a Jew. You've just come up with a very funny insult to a Jew and I could never do that line again because I just thought if I do this line it's being perceived by other people as racist. Now that was me and that's probably the reason why I do what I do and I'm not a successful stand-up comedian because I
01:08:06
Speaker
basically there is a line that I will not cross. Recently I wrote a book called The Sellout by Paul Beatty which won the Booker Prize about 10 years ago and he's a black guy and it's a satire, it's a
01:08:24
Speaker
I think it's a very, very funny satirical book. This black guy in 21st century southern US state sets up a segregated school and takes a slave. And you sort of hear that and you go, what? What the hell? You can't say that. And it did cause a lot of problems. But actually reading the book,
01:08:52
Speaker
it's really funny and it does really, really play with those things. I think there's just a whole area to explore. I wouldn't presume to talk to Stuart about this, but I'd sort of imagine that there's ways in which he is sort of challenging
01:09:13
Speaker
that the content, the idea that, well, you can't say certain things. I haven't seen, I think the last thing that I saw of his was about three or four years ago on BBC, it was a show.
01:09:30
Speaker
Snowflake tornado. So that yeah, that came out funnily enough around about the time that the Queen passed away because it was because it was delayed. So I would say I'd not seen it because I'd missed it live, obviously, because of the pandemic. I had tickets to go see it in Wakefield and then they were due to the pandemic. I couldn't make it when it was rescheduled. But
01:09:51
Speaker
So I was waiting to see it and then it kept getting pushed around because of the schedules around the Queen. You know, is it appropriate to make jokes on the day that the Queen dies and all that kind of stuff? So I did finally see it. So yeah, it will have been that one. Snowflake tornado, I think. Yeah, I think and I did think I thought it was quite interesting. I did feel to me like it was kind of going into slightly out of places that are
01:10:18
Speaker
so comfortable that might be what could be he would consider his comfort zone. I, you know, I admire that he has always, he has always pushed that. Yeah, he's always, he's always done that thing of sort of winding up people who don't get in. Yeah. And
01:10:41
Speaker
at the same time, I sort of feel like, for instance, you know, who used to do the whole thing about the Scotch people. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And, you know, I appreciated him doing it, you know, I appreciated it on an intellectual level. I thought, yes, this is quite interesting. But I'm not quite sure
01:11:06
Speaker
what the point is of this, you know. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the only, I suppose, it's like anything, the only person who knows the reason why they're doing the thing is the person that's doing the thing, unless they outright come and tell you. But the thing for me, and so I did a live version of this podcast at Leicester Comedy Festival, just gone with the comedian Michael Legg.
01:11:30
Speaker
who, you know, obviously he's worked with Stuart in the past and all that kind of stuff. I was a big fan of his work and we were talking about this. And he turned the question on me and he sort of said, well, why do you like Stuart Lee? You know, he's like, why, why, why, why Stuart Lee, why have you done this? And the only answer I could come up with, the thing I thought, I like to know that a comedian has made an effort
01:11:52
Speaker
and thought about the things that they say. Do you know what I mean? Like for me, there's two things to it. A, do I find it funny? And you know, obviously the vast majority of Stuart's material I find very funny, but I also get the impression of having watched so much of it and kind of really dive, excuse me, into it and stuff that he really deeply thinks about.
01:12:15
Speaker
the words and why he's saying them. It might not necessarily be apparent to the viewer, but he, you know, like we said about the character, he's put that thought into it. He's put that effort into thinking about why he does the things. And that's kind of what I think I like most about it. Because I've done projects in the past that I've not necessarily put that effort into. Do you know what I mean?
01:12:42
Speaker
I mean, I have to admit, you know, there's lots and lots of comedians whose work I absolutely adore, you know, and I've kind of since I stopped doing stand up, I've sort of kept, kept out of it really, but I've kind of kept up with a few of my friends and people. But I've never really
01:13:03
Speaker
kind of carried on watching but apart from Stewart and I think there is something and it is the nerd in me I think the comedy nerd in me that is interested in the process of creating comedy and you know I'm obsessed with that and I can't deny it. It's not just your career Dave you've kind of lived it haven't you you know what I mean it's
01:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, I just can't, I mean, it's not, and it isn't just that it's also that it's my career. It's that, I mean, I've done various jobs and things over the years, but actually, if I'm sitting down to create something new, there's literally nothing more exciting to me in my life. And if I, and I really have to be careful,
01:14:00
Speaker
with myself to not get too involved because there's a whole world out there of literary that I could... You could really dive down the rabbit hole on stone. I could go into it really and it does absolutely fascinate me and I do feel that he
01:14:19
Speaker
Obviously, it's not just me. There are enough people like that who will just love to go to see Stuart in the same way that there are people who
01:14:36
Speaker
will just love somebody like Mark Rothko, for instance, who, as far as I'm aware, paints kind of big slabs of black on a camera. So that's 30 of them and puts them up as an exhibition.
01:14:54
Speaker
showing I'm showing my ignorance there. I'm sure there are thousands and thousands of people who could explain to me why Mark Rothko is such an interesting artist. Yeah. In a sense when you asked me to do this and then my first thought was, you know, I sort of feel a little bit queasy about doing this because, you know, I know Stuart and we bring. Yeah.
01:15:22
Speaker
you know, we have a sort of relationship that is more than just about, you know, the comedy side of things, but that is obviously a lot of it. And I sort of thought, this feels a little bit kind of self-referential, you know, up, up, up. Which is very in Stuart's wheelhouse, obviously.
Potential Sitcom for Stuart Lee's Character
01:15:44
Speaker
Yeah. And I sort of thought,
01:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it just does because in fact, the last time we met was actually you mentioned Andy Smelt was at Andy's funeral. And that was about a year ago. We just had a very, very long chat about a lot of other other stuff. And I sort of came away and I just thought exactly what you've been talking about at the beginning there was I thought, you know,
01:16:13
Speaker
This student should be doing a sitcom now really he should be doing he should be being Being this character in a sitcom that this could he could at least be you know Yeah, I mean because what I've been doing independently. I've been having a lot of a lot of Kind of I've been thinking a lot about The comedy thing going right back to what we were talking about at the beginning how those doors were open and
01:16:41
Speaker
and you know the doors were open but only white middle class people yeah were allowed in to go through them yeah now anyone can go in you don't have to be white middle class you can be old male you can be female you can be disabled you can be black you can be all these things and you have got an absolutely equal chance but
01:17:06
Speaker
The door is so tight now. Well, the door's smaller because I think I remember, you know, obviously we spoke briefly at the British Comedy Guide big comedy conference and I got the sense from that, from all the panels that I went into.
01:17:22
Speaker
one of the drums they all kept banging whether it was producers panel or agents panel or writers panel whoever they all kept saying about six shows get produced a year like they were like when it comes to sitcoms it's a tiny number of them mate it's like you know it's like the odds of a sperm getting through if you like you know to use a horrible analogy it's kind of like that and so we can all write like i've got 12 scripts that are sat in my drawer and one that i'm working on at the moment and
01:17:52
Speaker
The odds of any of it getting through are tiny, but I do it because I enjoy it. And, you know, if something gets through, great. And if not, I'll do a podcast about Stuart Lee and I'll do some stand up and I'll do all that kind of stuff. I just like to create stuff like you said, that joy you get from starting a new thing. Yeah. But if I could, great. Well, what I've been thinking about more recently and
01:18:18
Speaker
was, you know, that I sort of feel that our generation, and I include Stuart in this, I think it stops round about the late 90s, I think, for people starting out in the early 2000s, we, there was a career ladder. And it was the BBC, and it's been taken away, and there are nothing has replaced it, apart from the internet. But
01:18:43
Speaker
The other thing that has happened though, as well as all those doors being closed and there being no training, is that the means of production have become such that it is now possible to make stuff out of fraction of the cost and also
01:18:59
Speaker
you know, for things like podcasts, things like this, which is basically you in your room and me in my room. And, you know, it's not BBC quality, you know, I've got a decent mic and you've got a decent system, but it's not
01:19:16
Speaker
broadcast quality, but if suddenly the world wants to listen to the Stewart Lee podcast and you suddenly get million listeners for your podcast, there's nothing about this show that people go, well, I'm not listening because the quality is not good enough or something. So the means of production, the costs of making stuff has really gone down. And I also believe that
01:19:41
Speaker
the idea that to make an audience sitcom that you have to absolutely recreate a living room or a kitchen or whatever. I believe that you can make an audience sitcom now without, you know, that's like a sort of live show, really, that's like Live at the Apollo, or like those shows that Stuart did for BBC in the early... Comedy vehicle, yeah. Yeah, the vehicle one, that's right, yeah.
01:20:10
Speaker
And I've been thinking about that a lot and I'm starting to kind of develop an idea of a new model really of comedy but I mean I'm at the very early stages with it. But I mean that's the sort of thing that I kind of think
01:20:28
Speaker
one could do. And I've been thinking a lot about it and I chatted to Stuart and I just thought, you know, Stuart should be making this show. And I nearly got in touch with him about it. But it just so happened that it was around the time that I had promised myself, I'm not going to write any more sitcoms.
01:20:45
Speaker
because I know that nothing's going to get made. It's the time endeavour that it takes. I suppose from your point of view it'd be slightly different to mine because obviously you've spent a good chunk of your career writing and in some cases making successful sitcoms and then obviously all the stuff you do around teaching people how to write sitcoms, how to
01:21:07
Speaker
you know break into the industry all the things you did with sitcom geeks podcast and and all that stuff i can kind of see that um from your point of view obviously for myself i'm still in the phase of
01:21:19
Speaker
okay let's crack how to learn how to write a sitcom and I've written 12 of them and you know and each one gets a little bit better incrementally and hopefully by the time I'm 60 I might have one that someone wants to read um and that's fine but uh oh by the way excuse me I wanted to mention as well the the because I put my
01:21:38
Speaker
my last script into the BAFTA rock cliff and I didn't get anywhere sort of with it, it didn't make the shortlist or anything like that but the feedback that I got of it because obviously I spent some time on that via your Patreon, we did one of those table reads which I would genuinely recommend to anyone to get involved with. I've already sort of said this to a few of my comedy writing pals because
01:22:01
Speaker
I think you suggested one big change and it was purely moving one plot point further forward in the story in the first 10 pages. And that was like the big kind of hook and it really, in the feedback, they were like, we really like this. So if anyone's listening who is, you know, considering, given what we just said, the door's really small and whatever, but if you want to learn how to write sitcoms,
01:22:27
Speaker
I've had the pudding that proves it, if that makes sense. You know, I've had genuine actionable feedback from yourself that then someone has turned around and said, this bit here, which in my mind, I thought, yeah, that was Dave's bit.
01:22:40
Speaker
Well, I'm deeply honoured that, you know, I managed to spot moving a line somewhere. You spotted a thing that fundamentally changed the mecha for me. But anyway, right. So I'm a comedy genius. That's the takeaway. That is the absolute takeaway. Dave Cohen, comedy genius. I'll take that. So we've kind of dropped neatly into this thing because we discussed this over email potentially just having a chat about this. And I don't want to take up too much more of your time.
01:23:11
Speaker
Let's just, as a little thought experiment, and I know you say you've thought about this anyway, is if we were to take Stuart Lee the character and put him in a sitcom, what kind of sit would you think would be perfect for that character to build? So we've done the work, we've developed the character, Stuart's done the work, he's developed the character. What sit best shows him off?
01:23:40
Speaker
I didn't give it a huge amount of thought and I can't remember a lot about it. And I, you know, as I say, I thought, if I just contact him about this, it's just going to be one more thing. And I just thought, forget it. But I think I, I think I thought he's going to have to be somebody who has some, he's not a comedian, but who has a kind of
01:24:06
Speaker
You know, he's got enough income coming in. He's like maybe he was a landlord. He bought a lot of properties in London in the 90s. Yeah. And he's never really had to do a day's work again. So he's just an opinionated person. Right. And I just thought the principles, the two principal characters who I thought would play well against him are
01:24:37
Speaker
the person who just doesn't get his sense of humor. And then there's the person who just thinks that everything he's saying is for real and just argues with him. And it sort of feels like it's whatever the story is, I think, there's a story each episode that's
01:25:04
Speaker
that's around him being a landlord and having a different tenants and things and kind of going about his world, but not really, you know, he, I don't know, he wants to be a painter or something like that. I don't know. But, but this idea of him, you know, he's one of these kind of
01:25:25
Speaker
philosophers in the pub who just says what, you know, says counterintuitive stuff. And he's got one person who's, and I sort of think it might just sort of be a teenage son who just, or who kind of sees through it and just says, you know, you're just, you're just saying all this stuff, aren't you, to wind people up? But I said, that was, that was kind of the thought that I had. So I've got the three characters, but I hadn't really,
01:25:53
Speaker
I hadn't gone much beyond that. Further in terms of building a sin around them, yeah. Yeah, I could imagine it being filmed in that same pub in North London where he filmed the comedy vehicle thing. Or was it the Moth Club? I'm not sure, but you don't have to have like somebody's kitchen or something. There might be like
01:26:23
Speaker
the one of the characters might be a wife or a girlfriend or something. Yeah. And it's just like each each week he's determined to kind of better himself somehow. Yeah. Just understands that actually
01:26:43
Speaker
What's the point of bettering yourself? Yeah, by the time he gets to the end of each episode, he's given up on bettering himself because he's failed again. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, the next week he's he's back to doing it again for some reason. And I think at that point I start to think, well, that's kind of if I if I was to do any more of this, then I'd be writing
01:27:04
Speaker
something that's for an actor who's playing a part. And then I would invent this, this, this, this. But this is the point at which you'd say, OK, here's what I've got. What would you do with that when you were on stage being that character? And that was the point at which I thought, well,
01:27:27
Speaker
you know, he's doing what he's doing. And yeah, I don't he's probably presumably crossed his mind to do something sort of like that. So yeah, I'm not going to waste.
01:27:41
Speaker
all of our time going and saying, oh, here's this idea. Let's meet and discuss it, because I just... I mean, I think it's one of those things where it's definitely got... I can imagine it, obviously, because it's kind of calibrated to, you know, I can imagine the character of Stuart Lee being that person and doing those things and with those two kind of foils against him. I can instantly visualize that. I've remembered more about it now. And that it's a very traditional sitcom.
01:28:10
Speaker
OK, that's what I think is the key. That's the key element is that it really, really closely follows the sort of audience sitcom plot thing of of it starts off with an idea and he has an idea and he tries it and it fails. But at the end of it, he hasn't learned anything, but we're all smiling and we're all happy again. And so it's a sort of it's like a kind of
01:28:42
Speaker
It's like a world that we're all happy to turn the telly on and become a part of, even though we know it's a kind of twisted world. It's cynical and it's sneery and it's sarcastic. And we love it. So in your mind then,
01:29:02
Speaker
because obviously we watch stand-up and we watch sitcom and we watch them on different levels I think so obviously I watch a Stewart Lee stand-up piece knowing
01:29:17
Speaker
broadly that he's going to come on stage, he's going to be trying to talk about something, he's going to encounter some problem that prevents him from talking about something, either he'll get hung up on his own neuroses or some perceived slight that someone's given towards him and by the end of the piece the character will have had a bit of a breakdown.
01:29:34
Speaker
you know, he's lost his temper. Like there's the, again, the bit in Mildy comedian where he jumps off the stage and starts ranting at the audience about pairs and, you know, there's all that stuff. You know, broadly that it's going to follow this thing, right? So you're not necessarily rooting for him to do well. You are
01:29:54
Speaker
I suppose rooting for him to fail in a sense, you like it when Stuart Lee the character fails because it makes the stand-up funnier. What I'm interested in with Stuart Lee, just again to take this thought experiment a step further, that Stuart Lee, the sitcom character, if you put him in a sitcom and he's bitter and he's high-minded andfalutin and all this kind of stuff that Stuart Lee the character is,
01:30:21
Speaker
The question I keep getting asked from people who give me feedback on scripts is why should we root for this person? Do you know what I mean? It's a key question that I always sometimes struggle to answer with my protagonist because sometimes the protagonist is the least interesting character. Whereas with this one, he's already an interesting person, but is he likable necessarily in this context, do you think?
01:30:43
Speaker
Yeah, I hate that word likeable, by the way. Most writers do. And I think it is a misnomer in comedy for a person who has to be likeable.
01:30:57
Speaker
I think there is another way of looking at it would be maybe talk about the sit. You often hear about when we talk about sitcom, we talk about fish out of water or you talk about a mad person in a sane world or a sane person in a mad world.
01:31:19
Speaker
That was the one you gave me. That was the advice you gave me. My person was a mad person in a mad world and you were like, yes, there's no contrast there. Yeah, you do need that. And so let's think about this for a second. So my instinct would be to make him the mad person in the sane world.
01:31:44
Speaker
In other words, he's got he is this opinionated person who's I mean, I suppose what I'm saying is put him into
01:31:57
Speaker
Carla Lane's butterflies. Yeah. So you've got this sort of perfectly nice, sweet family, one of whom is Stuart Lee character wise. Yeah, that's that's so that's mad person in the same world. That would be quite an interesting thing to discuss. Or if you called him if you put him the same person in a mad world. Yeah. I don't quite think that worked because that makes him the kind of
01:32:27
Speaker
voice of reason. The voice of reason yeah exactly and that makes him everything when around him is sort of the the uh weird or odd or something. I think him being in in a sane world would vindicate him and I don't think this character suits being vindicated
01:32:51
Speaker
I think if he was saying it in a mad world, do you mean? Yeah, yeah. So if he was the voice of reason, that's him being vindicated. And I just don't feel like we are laughing at another one. I always kind of listen to a lot of interviews and a lot of people talk about Stuart, which is probably upsets him greatly. But
01:33:12
Speaker
I try to always talk about him just on a level of the work really, but the comedian Russell Kane talks about him, because obviously he's done a routine about Russell Kane, about how Russell Kane did a dead dad show and lost his temper saying, all our dads die, you idiot, you know, all that kind of stuff.
01:33:29
Speaker
And Russell Kane actually said, Oh, I found that really funny. And he said, I just looked at it as like an impotent toddler saying, why did you win an award? Why can't I win? Why can't I win an award? Like that, that's kind of how Russell took it. Whether or not Stuart intended it that way. But that's kind of how I look at it is that it's like he's petulant. You know what I mean? Yeah, you don't necessarily want to vindicate him by him being the same one.
01:33:55
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the other thing as well, which we mustn't forget is that, you know, all of us, I don't know, you know, obviously I don't, can't speak for your generation or anything, but you know, the whole generation of the people that I knew. Yeah.
01:34:13
Speaker
We're all a bunch of extremely egotistical, you know, singular people, you know, the job of stand-up comedy, which didn't exist really when I started doing it, apart from the Northern club scene or the kind of, you know, the American cool satire scene. And we were just this sort of punk comedy thing. But we were, you know, we just wanted to be
01:34:40
Speaker
whatever it was, we wanted to be famous. I wanted to be a rock star and most comedians wanted to be rock stars. And I had unlimited amounts of success on the whole sort of punk circuit doing comic music and comedy. So it's a
01:35:02
Speaker
It's not really a kind of the most honorable of, I mean, we can look, a lot of people could say, look at comedians and great comedians and say, oh, these are great people who, you know, they speak truth to power or this sort of thing. But basically we just want people to find us really fine. We want big audiences of strangers to laugh and validate us because something is missing in our lives that normal people had.
01:35:28
Speaker
on some level you know and i can guarantee you know you say you don't want to speak for my generation and i can for a lot of the comics that i'm and funnily enough because i'm i'm 38 years old right so i started quite late um but i so i'm a little bit older than a lot of the people that i'm on the open spot circuit with you know a lot of people start out at 20 or whatever so you know i'm i'm i feel removed even from those people but what i can say to you is
01:35:52
Speaker
the current, whatever that word is, circuit as it stands that I'm on. It's not changed. If anything, it's got worse. You know what I mean?
Comedy in the Age of Social Media
01:36:02
Speaker
Because obviously we've had all the social media TikTok. People wanted to put their opinions out there. I'm doing a bloody podcast about Stuart Lee. On some level, we're all saying, look at me, listen to me.
01:36:14
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? Like if you're getting up on stage, you are asking an audience, you're saying to them, I am worth listening to, listen to me. I guess and I guess social media, I mean, that's another thing. God, people weren't filming in 1991 and 1992, my last two years as a stand up, because there would be, you know, if ever I stood for political office or something, there'd be something about some would find stuff. I mean, there were
01:36:44
Speaker
somewhere out there someone has got film of me tanking horribly because you know I did a couple of TV things around that time that absolutely stank the place out. You talk about you talk about Chortle you mentioned Chortle earlier I did their student comedy awards because I was a student a couple of years ago you know mature student obviously but
01:37:04
Speaker
So I did their student comedy awards and I stunk the place out because it was five minutes to an audience where I was the oldest person there by at least 16, 17 years. So all of my references, they didn't get any of it. And I can stand here and sort of say that ultimately I wasn't good enough on the night, but they don't take that video down.
01:37:28
Speaker
That video is there forever and anyone who may want to can go and find it. It's awful. And it's just me telling them just how significantly older than them I am. I even accidentally turned up in my slippers because I was in a rush to get to Salford from Leeds and forgot to put my shoes on. I just jumped in the car and I literally turned up in my slippers. It was like the teacher was having a go.
01:37:54
Speaker
And yeah, so those videos stay for like, it's still there now. And I'm not getting rid of that. I've asked them to and they're like, no. Yeah, you're quite lucky in that sense, I would imagine.
01:38:10
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm sure someone will find something somewhere, but you know, a lot of people from that era are undocumented, which is disappointing to me as a nerd who wants to see, you know, I want to watch a video of, I don't know, Arnold Brown or whoever, like, you know, I want I want to watch videos of these people in their earlier days and the footage just isn't there. Yeah.
Impact of Technology on Comedy
01:38:32
Speaker
I mean, the point was as well was that you could never
01:38:37
Speaker
It was never possible to capture. So one of the reasons that stand up took a long time to take off was because the technology and the know-how of production teams was not there until about 1990. And that was when this thing called Beast Sky B started.
01:39:00
Speaker
which we became B Sky B and it was basically free money was thrown at us by some by telly people and then Murdoch came and took it all over and it became Sky. But for this sort of glorious nine month period, we all turned up every day to this office in central London and made a daily news programme and made loads of other sketch programmes and all sorts of things.
01:39:27
Speaker
every day we were being paid proper TV rates and the shows would go out and be watched by three people. It's a great training ground as well. I remember that was where Steve Coogan first did Alan Partridge which brings us back to the subject.
Impressionists and Character Autonomy
01:39:52
Speaker
He asked me to come out in the first place because I was remembering that as well.
01:39:56
Speaker
Basically, Steve turned up with three or four, these three or four characters. Yeah. And there was one that I remember as well that I was found really funny was he was a kind of DIY bloke called Ernest or something like that. I don't know if he ever did it again, but
01:40:16
Speaker
And Alan Partridge was just one other who was just a sports and it was like a two minute sketch with him. And, you know, so it had sort of quite quite modest starting point. And that's an interesting point as well, is that where, you know, that that character developed slowly. But I think the impressionists have always been a kind of they they found their character through the people who were in their head, I suppose.
01:40:46
Speaker
And a person I worked with an awful lot in the late 1980s, who I became very close friends with was Phil Cornwall, who was astonishing and impressionist, but unlike the sort of the Rory Bremners and Chris Barrows and things, he didn't sort of, he wasn't a blank slate who would just come on and then beony or kinec or be
01:41:14
Speaker
Mike Kialwood or be whoever he was being. He was Phil Cornwell whose act was, I'm Phil.
01:41:24
Speaker
I've got these voices in my head, and they're driving me mad. And that sort of was him, really. I kind of described it. And so these voices would come in, and they'd do these brilliant, you know, he did like, David Bowie was his kind of famous one, I think. But they'd come in and just say weird things, you know, they weren't satire or anything, you know, just sort of, David Bowie always,
01:41:50
Speaker
where's my sausages yeah yeah like a non-sequiturist yesterday surreal nonsense totally surreal that you could the more i got to know him the more i thought actually
01:42:06
Speaker
This is him, you know, he's got these, he can't get these voices out. He just wants to be himself. And I suspect with Partridge, you know, that was a sort of, how that kind of gradually, oh, go on, Steve, say what you think. Well, I can't really, but Alan Partridge can.
01:42:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting one. And like, you know, Partridge has taken on a life, a life of his own, obviously, completely to the point where people don't realise that Steve Coogan as a person exists on some people, you know, they think Alan Bartridge is the guy.
Comedic Characters and Controversial Opinions
01:42:42
Speaker
And, you know, to the point where like, and again, going back to what you were saying about
01:42:47
Speaker
you know Al Murray and again Ricky Gervais and this thing about context is that so there's a couple of groups again on social media on Facebook where people who enjoy the work of Alan Partridge will throw quotes at each other and things like that and you know people enjoy quoting things that they like and I do the same with Stu and all that sort of stuff but in these groups what you find is then someone will put up for example a picture of I don't know a black person that's in the news
01:43:16
Speaker
and they'll say something that Partridge ask about Acton or whatever you know and you know that the root of that is them just trying to get away with being a racist by using Alan Partridge to and you know people call them out on it in the comments section and stuff and they'll say well
01:43:35
Speaker
It's just that some people found what you said a bit racist, you know, again, to use non partridge quotes, like that people use these characters, I think sometimes as a Trojan horse for their, you know, for their what they really want to say. You know what I mean? And I see a lot of that on social media. That is the difficulty. And I think that's that is where you kind of have to. I couldn't I couldn't allow it. Yes, there was a part of me that would not accept
01:44:05
Speaker
the people kind of finding me finding a line that I did funny because it was demeaning to Jewish people. Yeah. And so I but I kind of just going back to that book, The Sellout by Paul Beattie, the black writer who's coming for huge, huge criticism from the black community for writing this book because because it's
01:44:35
Speaker
because it shows of a black person in, you know, as a human being with all their faults. And that's like that's for a liberal sensibility, you know, it's that's a difficult thing for you to kind of accept. And I didn't have any trouble reading that book.
01:45:00
Speaker
partly because, well, you know, I've worked a lot with a lot of black comedians and I understand how hard it is for them because when you're a black comedian and you start to do well, you're not just playing to
01:45:15
Speaker
the audience that likes you. You're also being, you know, you're being judged by your community. The community is sort of holding its breath whilst you're becoming successful and going, oh, please don't, you know, you've got to be, don't sell out that, you know, because
01:45:33
Speaker
However, whatever you do, if you do something wrong and you're a black comedian, it's 10 times worse than if you're a white comedian. Well, it's like, you know, you saw it years and years ago now. The thing that kind of Chris Rock blew up over was that routine that he did, didn't he? That was less than complimentary about the black community. I won't. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the name of the the name of the routine obviously contains that slur, which I'm not going to use. But, you know, he got a lot of flak from from the black community for that.
01:46:03
Speaker
But, you know, he was kind of willing to say, well, OK, I think I'm allowed to hold a mirror up to my own community. I'm allowed to talk about my own community. This is my experience. I'm allowed to do that. I think it gets even trickier, though, when you get, you know, to go back to the partridge example where
01:46:23
Speaker
Alan Partridge, the character, he's obviously saying these clearly ridiculous things about black people or, you know, he'll say, what was the famous one we said about transgender people or at the time, I think he called them transvestites or whatever it was at the time. And he said, fascinating creatures like that. And it's. You know, that that's a tricky thing because he's not part of that. And we're invited to laugh at him on the level of how he's a buffoon, but
01:46:53
Speaker
there's still not everyone, like you say, laughs at it on that level.
Evolving Comedy Standards
01:46:57
Speaker
Everyone looks at it and goes, yes, I agree with that. You know, it's really tricky, which is why, you know, I don't know your thoughts on this, but I tend to only ever do stand up about myself, if I can help you.
01:47:11
Speaker
I think and again this is another thing about going back to what it was like in the 80s it wasn't under the glare of telly and we were out there we were kind of making up our rules as we went along and it wasn't
01:47:27
Speaker
there was nobody on high deeming thou shalt not do sexist material, thou shalt not do racist material. But what happened was the audience who were like us and they'd grown up through punk and they knew black people and they also, they were women as well as men in those audiences. And we'd grown up watching jokes about people who
01:47:56
Speaker
didn't we didn't recognize I mean I recognized I mean I loved Les Dawson when I was growing up I recognized you know he's the mother-in-law character that he described which he which is actually it's it's quite it's very nuanced I would say his his mother-in-law character yeah but the lesser in the hands of a lesser comedian it just becomes jokes about fat old ladies yeah exactly yeah
01:48:25
Speaker
But, you know, coming from around there and knowing that the people in Les Dawson jokes were familiar to me. Whereas the people in Bernard Manning jokes, yeah, that sort of the pakiness and all that, you know, and the using using those words and things. I found it wasn't that I felt, oh, you're not allowed to say that. It was more, I thought,
01:48:56
Speaker
I don't really, it's not in my world really. And so when we all started, we were doing alternative comedy. There were loads of us whose world it wasn't. It was an old world, a world where you were just kind of demeaning to the local shopkeepers and stuff like that because they were from different countries, because they were different color or from different countries. That wasn't a kind of,
01:49:23
Speaker
And it wasn't even just our generation. I mean, it was interesting watching that get back sort of eight hours of documentary about the Beatles. Yeah. And there's a whole section where it's quite quite soon after Enoch Powell made his famous speech. And you just get the sense that they have
01:49:45
Speaker
They just find Enoch Powell baffling. What is that world? And they've moved. So the Beatles had already moved beyond that world. They did this whole jam session of singing a song about Enoch Powell being a complete asshole. And so by the time we were doing stuff, we were just sort of saying, well, we don't do jokes. We don't do racist jokes because the audience
01:50:11
Speaker
won't find them. It's market forces, really. If the audience laughs at something, then you do jokes about it. If they don't laugh, then you find something else to joke about. They didn't like jokes that were sexist, although they seem to
01:50:28
Speaker
that that seemed to kind of change quite quite quickly but they've never very very rarely was any racism allowed certainly yeah sexism seemed to come back pretty quickly actually I think but but yeah so so it was I've
01:50:44
Speaker
rambled on so much now, I can't remember the original point. It is about the rules. I think we were just talking about using a character to perhaps, you know, I think it started with the Partridge thing of, okay, Steve can't say what he thinks, but Alan can say these things. Yeah. You know, it's that kind of thing. Yeah.
01:51:05
Speaker
I think also these things, these rules about what you can and can't do comedy about. And for us, it was always audience led. It was, well, you can't do that. And, you know, I've written about this as well on Chortle as well when I started out writing jokes for Weekending on BBC Radio.
Personal Growth in Comedy
01:51:25
Speaker
And I wrote something about the church and the producer said, you can't do you can't do jokes about the church. And it was like,
01:51:34
Speaker
My first thought, why is this some BBC pronouncement from on high? You're not allowed to do it. He said, no. He said, if you like that sketch and it goes out, I'm going to get 300 handwritten letters of complaint from people saying, how dare you do this? And I'm going to have to write to every one of them. And I do not have the time to sit down and hand write these letters back to all these people. So we're sorry.
01:51:59
Speaker
we felt that it was appropriate, blah, blah, blah. So you weren't allowed to do jokes about Christianity in the 1980s. Now you can because, you know, people don't complain about that anymore. Well, I mean, you know, that quite obviously, quite neatly somewhat brings us back to Stuart in that obviously he did that show and 60,000 born-again Christians tried to have his work banned and all that kind of stuff. So
01:52:25
Speaker
you know i suppose it's one of those things and i always think about this and i've had conversations with um you know i've i've done jokes where i've not necessarily been aware you know and this comes back to doing the work and you know you learn from things but i've done jokes where i've not necessarily been aware of the the wider context of them and i've been asked by other comedians like oh maybe don't do that joke again it's like oh can you explain to me why and then they do and you're like okay fine
01:52:51
Speaker
you know. So
Internet's Role in Comedy
01:52:53
Speaker
I've had lots of conversations about stuff like this and what I find interesting is obviously everybody's got their own line. There are still people out there who don't like jokes about religion, there are still people out there who won't put up with, excuse me, the type of stuff that say Frankie Boyle does or whatever, but then there are whole huge audiences as we said earlier about like Ricky Gervais and things, millions of people who want that stuff and want transgressive and kind of
01:53:20
Speaker
I don't know. I don't want to use the term offensive because what everyone finds offensive is different. But you know, that kind of shocking type. I can't believe he said that sort of thing. There's a market out there for it. But the trouble is now because we've got the internet, all of those people are able to speak to each other and tell each other just how much they're upset by what the other side's doing.
01:53:41
Speaker
yeah
Adapting Comedy Material
01:53:42
Speaker
it does yeah it is a trick you want to navigate yeah and you know and i think it's i think when you've got on top of that as well when you're going out on stage every night and you're being a persona that is probably 90 percent you yeah i think i can see how you can get into all sorts of i mean i still have this thought about you know i've been
01:54:06
Speaker
The first song that I wrote for Horrible Histories was about the four King Georges. And my idea was basically to just do them as take that, basically. And so there was a line of, you know, I was the sad one, I was the mad one, I was the bad one, I was the fat one. And, you know, this was in 2008 and
01:54:36
Speaker
never crossed my mind at the time that I'd written that. And it became a, you know, viral hit and everybody loves that song and nobody, nobody has ever taken me to task about it. But sometimes I think what would happen if they were to do that song again? Would I, would I want those lines to go out and that, you know, song about someone being mad and someone being fat. And I sort of, I sort of feel a little bit uncomfortable now about those lines.
01:55:04
Speaker
But that's, you know, like you say, 2008, that's not an insignificant period of time ago. And even as someone, you know, someone can get deep into adulthood and still learn things, you know, you can still kind of feel, you know, if it's true, what they say that you're a different person on a cellular level every seven years, you know, we all always have things to learn. And I've only been doing stand up now for about four years. I've been writing for a lot longer than that.
01:55:32
Speaker
The rate at which you learn is massive in those early first few years, or at least it has been for me. It's like I look back on, like I say, even the chartal video that's only a couple of years ago.
01:55:45
Speaker
Oh, makes me feel sick. But two years ago, it's not that long ago, you know, and it's but you look at it and you think, oh, I wouldn't do that now. And I used to have certain jokes. I think it's a bit eggy. I wouldn't do that. That's that's clearly there just to get a get a bite. And I'm not that type of person, really. But when you when you're learning how to write jokes and when you're learning how comedy works, every joke is precious. So if you've got one that works, you know, you kind of keep it.
01:56:12
Speaker
even if it's not necessarily the best the best thing in the world but from your case it's it's slightly different obviously because i dare say you know that you can write much quicker than i can you know and you probably be a lot quicker than i would be to get rid of a thing if you didn't feel like it was up to par um deadlines that's all you need being paid to do something via deadline
01:56:39
Speaker
That was my journalist trading. Yeah, well, that's essentially the only reason that I ever, because Edinburgh is very expensive, but the only reason I ever book myself into doing it is that it forces me to write new stuff. Yeah. Because you're not going to put that amount of effort, time and money into doing a thing just from an admin perspective and a cash perspective.
01:57:00
Speaker
to then take something up there that's crap. People could still say it's crap, but you know you haven't made the effort on it. I do Edinburgh purely so that I'm like, right, I must write a new hour now.
Comedy Resources and Recommendations
01:57:16
Speaker
That's my way of putting a deadline in place until I get to the point in 20 or 30 years' time where someone wants to pay me to do it.
01:57:25
Speaker
Oh might at least be 15 if you're lucky Daniel. Yeah well that's it and that's that's I suppose that's what I'm hanging my hat on is that by the time my my youngest child goes to high school I might have I might have been paid to do something in comedy.
01:57:41
Speaker
Well, keep, you know, keep taking those nuggets of genius advice from Dave Cohen, I think, on your scripts. Well, on that, like I say, I would genuinely recommend the Patreon. I must let you go now, Dave, because I've taken up so much of your time. I really, really appreciate this. But what I also want to say is what kind of spurred me on to this is this, is reading the character section in your book, The Complete Comedy Writer, which I got from you at the BCG.
01:58:10
Speaker
event. So if anybody who hasn't got a copy of this, I would recommend going to, you get it on your website, Dave, or what's the... Yeah, davecohen.org.uk. And yeah, I'll do a fortnightly newsletter as well. And you know, I love...
01:58:28
Speaker
talking about comedy. And hundreds of episodes of sitcom geeks that are out there as well. Please listen to that because that's another invaluable thing for me I've found just recently. Unfortunately we don't do that anymore. No but there's you know there's a repository there of episodes. 122 episodes there. Yeah it's exceptional stuff so yeah no I really really appreciate it Dave. Thank you very much for for doing this.