4 STARS ****

STANDING JOKES - ANDREA HENRY FINDS COMICS' TALES A GIGGLE

Saturday 9th August 2003

PERFECTLY pitched for the Edinburgh Festival, this is a collection of short stories by stand-ups put together by comedy legend Malcolm Hardee.

Don't know the name? Cast your mind back to OTT's late-night nude balloon dance and Hardee's face - and backside - will come back to you.

His quirky intro explains how, as proprietor of the Tunnel Club, which had its heyday in mid-80s Greenwich, he booked a lot of the collection's contributors when they were young hopefuls being hounded off-stage by beer glasses.

Hardee relates how Jim Tavare once walked on stage with the words: "Hello, I'm a schizophrenic," and was greeted by the famous heckle: "Well you can both f*** off, then!"

All the comedians - ranging from the East End to Oxbridge - are no strangers to TV and radio. Many have been a hit in Hardee's latest club, Up The Creek, also in Greenwich.

The likes of Stewart Lee, John Hegley and Dominic Holland have recently become known for their novels. Others, including Arthur Smith and Jenny Eclair, need no fanfare.

Stewart Lee, the man to blame for Jerry Springer: The Opera, takes us on a road trip with a has-been comedian who performs one last gig before disappearing. Written as loosely rhyming verse, it's quite odd.

But it's got nothing on Simon Munnery's tale about how Sherlock Holmes accidentally came to be a great detective.

John Dowie gives us a wrist-slashingly brutal account of a Bernard Manning-esque comic who, throughout life, has over-compensated for being despised by his father by worshipping his mother. When "the Princess" suffers a heart-attack brought on by the success of her son's arch-rival he plans blood-thirsty revenge. Funny? No, not really. Disturbing? Very.

Arthur Smith, pretty much an establishment figure at Radio 4 now, presents the man with two penises, revealingly named Ant and Dec.

What I Don't Tell Journalists is a piece of non-fiction by Ed Byrne detailing his most embarrassing moment. It's about getting lost in a hospital and having to ask for the STD clinic and feels more like a routine than a short story.

And, as red-faces go, it's pretty lame compared to Ricky Grover's tale - fictional, I hope - about an unfortunate incident involving an urgent bowel movement in a posh girlfriend's family home.

Hardee says the book isn't what he anticipated: "But if you commission people with original minds to write anything they fancy, you're bound to get something unexpected."

The stories are a million miles from the light, laugh-out-loud comedy of John O'Farrell or Nick Hornby. They're left-field and brutal and, when it comes to expletives, make Tarantino look like Mary Whitehouse.

And while there's no knowing quite what's coming next, it's usually about sex or death. Or sex and death. It's juvenile. It's sophisticated. And while it's not exactly funny, it's entertaining.

PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK

CABARET TURNS -
STEPHANIE MERRITT ON SIT-DOWN COMEDY

Sunday 31st August 2003

With the exception of journalists, comedians must be the profession with the highest quota of novels per head. There's a certain logic to this; most of them write their own material for performance, so it's reasonable to assume that they're equipped with the ability to put a basic paragraph together. In fact, the phenomenon has grown over the past few years to the extent that, rather than being seen as an impressive extra-curricular achievement, the novel is fast becoming a basic professional requirement for comedians who want to be taken seriously.

Malcolm Hardee, compere and founder of the Tunnel Club in Greenwich (considered the birthplace of alternative comedy), has compiled an anthology of short stories by some of the best-known names in live comedy. The standard is generally high, though the flavour of each piece is very different. There's also a clear divide between those who are, or could, be fiction writers, and those who simply have a talent for writing good comic prose.

The short story is a difficult form, and often harder to get right than a longer exercise. Playwright and stand-up Owen O'Neill demonstrates how it should be done, with a neatly crafted story of a day in the life of a man whose wife is dying of cancer.

By contrast, Stephen Frost and Ed Byrne, both excellent stand-ups, have contributed pieces that feel more autobiographical and closer to a transcript of a stage monologue. Though enjoyable, you don't feel that you've entered the realm of the imagination. Arthur Smith manages to combine the two in 'Dishonourable Discharge', about the strange little community that bonds in a hospital smoking room, and Stewart Lee, already an acclaimed novelist, offers the only story about stand-up comedy: a fictional account of a young comic's debt to his mentor.

The gem of the collection is Simon Munnery's 'The True Confessions of Sherlock Holmes', in which the revered detective's coke habit is his defining feature and he only solves crimes by accident

If you didn't get to Edinburgh this summer, this anthology is the next best thing to a comedy cabaret, and only half the price of the average ticket.

RELEASE OF THE WEEK
4 STARS ****

review by
Carson Howat Saturday 30th August 2003

AS MALCOLM Hardee, the "father of modern alternative comedy" puts it plainly, "it’s actually not quite the book we expected". Nevertheless, Hardee and fellow co-editor John Fleming have managed far more than just a wheeze to get lots of money out of a publisher.

That they should be stunned by the writing ability of modern comedy circuit names such as John Hegley, Stewart Lee and Jenny Eclair, is no surprise, however, as it turns out, Hardee and Fleming are spot on about this not being the usual "comedian who thinks he can publish a novel" fodder. Former Johnny Vaughn sidekick Ricky Grover is the standout by far with a deadpan gem in the shape of an autobiographical piece about his first job (as an armed robber) but throughout these tales of psycho adventures, life on stage, lyrical dreams and a sudden beheading it is the pleasure of seeing proven talent. What Hardee and Fielding have done is given a bunch of comedians the freedom to run with their ideas on the page. As alternative as comedy gets.