I'm a Joke and So Are You (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

Tell Me About Your Childhood

When we were growing up, we were so poor that we couldn’t afford any clothes, so we had to stay in the house. But my dad saved up and saved up, and finally, on my fifth birthday, he bought me a hat, so at least I could look out of the window.

Les Dawson

I was worried about becoming a parent. As someone who ruminates too much, the potential to get it wrong seemed daunting, and the number of ways of getting it wrong seemed myriad. I would lie in bed at night, wondering if it was best that I died in my sleep and my child never knew me. If my heart gave out from an undiagnosed inherited fault, it might save everyone a lot of bother and hopelessness. The child would be brought up with a memory and rumour of me that would be more satisfactory than the clumsy living reality.

These thoughts vanished from the moment my son mewled into the world. Within the first month of his life, the weight of responsibility for trying to turn him into a good human transformed into a jagged stormcloud of abject horror. A question reared up in my head, ‘What would be my one mistake in bringing him up that would turn him into a mass-murdering serial killer?’

I imagined that day in the police cells, after he’d been arrested for killing, cooking and eating thirty different strangers from Bruges.

‘Oh, Son, why did you kill, cook and eat all of those people?’ I’d ask.

He would look at me and say, ‘Don’t you remember, Father?’

And I’d shake my head.

‘It was that day on the beach. Chesil Beach, I think. There was a sudden gust of wind and I dropped my Strawberry Mivvi and it landed in the shingle. And you shouted at me, even though it was not my fault . . . And from that point onwards, I KNEW I’D KILL!’

In the last hundred years there has been a great deal of research in neuroscience, psychology and genetics into why we are the people and personalities that we are. Such research, which shines a light on both the intrinsic make-up of our brains and bodies and on our childhood experiences, can be incredibly valuable in understanding why we end up doing the things we do – whether it’s working as a hairdresser, killing Belgians or becoming a stand-up comedian.

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Fortunately, I was unhappy as a child. This has made it a lot easier to make the transition to stand-up comedy. I am sure I wasn’t unhappy all the time, but the romantic memories of sitting alone, the outsider, in a graveyard, thinking about poetry have usurped the delightful nostalgic memories of larking about in woods and playing Horror Top Trumps.

If I think hard, there definitely are some good moments I can recall, such as the time I poured fruit punch into the hair of Tom Simpson, a boy who had made my life unpleasant at the school bus stop. The sugary punch attracted insects to his scalp, and it ended up becoming an unbearably itchy entomological menagerie. Happy days!

The biographical details of childhood can rarely be ignored these days, and it’s the rise of psychotherapy and neuroscience that has made our childhood inescapable. We’ve all been given an alibi for our lousy behaviour.

‘Don’t blame me – my parents fed me my pet rabbit when I was four. They left the ears sticking out of the pie, that’s why I’ve smashed all your collectible Beatrix Potter figurines with my hammer.’

We’ve read the childcare books and the memoirs, and we know that somewhere there is a childhood event that has doomed us.

It would be easiest to identify what such an event was, if it was one nice and neat, tumultuous emotional catastrophe that led in a direct line to a desperate need for public acclaim or just acceptance. Has your whole life turned out this way because of the day you wet yourself in art class and had to wear a pair of replacement pink frilly pants? And sometimes there really is just one such event. Alexei Sayle told me about the old saying, ‘Show me a comedian and I’ll show you someone who lost their father when they were eleven.’

Amongst contemporary comedians the most well-known example of bereavement being linked to creativity is Eddie Izzard. Eddie’s mother died from cancer when he was just six years old. He believes that everything in his life has been about getting over that; it is where his comedy comes from. His analysis of his situation is that his audience acts as a surrogate affection-machine to replace his mother. Izzard has repeatedly spoken about the effect of the sudden loss of all the affection his mother provided, and his belief that it is linked to his desire to perform and achieve. ‘I know why I’m doing this. Everything I do in life is trying to get her back. I think if I do enough things . . . then maybe she will come back.’1 His drive to do twenty-seven marathons in twenty-seven days, to learn to do his stand-up shows in fluent French, German and Russian, his political ambitions – for Eddie, all this has been a direct result of losing love so young. I think it is a convincing theory.

Comedian Paul Chowdhry, who – like Eddie – has built himself up to arena comedian without using the regular mass-media route, lost his mother when he was five years old. ‘You don’t quite understand it when you’re five, the only things you see are superheroes who have lost a parent and become a superhero. But that doesn’t help a child. When you’re five, you don’t get it, you think they’ll come back.’2

Comedy guru Barry Cryer lost his father in the war. Over a pint, he once told me that he never knew his father nor anything about him. With post-war stoicism and the muffling of grief, his mother never spoke of him. The only conversation he ever had with anyone about his father was at a Freemasons’ event that he’d been hired to talk at many years later. A Mason asked if Barry was one of the brotherhood and Barry was then regaled with stories of his father’s time in the Masons. I wanted to ask him how much he felt the loss of his father may have contributed to his desire to perform, but then I thought, ‘He’s got to eighty years old and without spending too long on the psychiatrist’s couch. Why ruin it all now?’ We had another beer instead. Eric Idle’s father survived the war. But on his way home, with all the trains full, he hitch-hiked instead. He was killed in a car accident on Christmas Eve. Eric’s brilliantly vicious festive song ‘Fuck Christmas’ is a far more haunting melody since I read this story.

Death and childhood bereavement aren’t the only life experiences that a psychoanalyst would have a field day with, when examining what it is that may make a comedian tick. Neither of Richard Pryor’s parents died at war, but he had an unusual upbringing nonetheless. His father was a pimp who was prone to violence, and Richard lived in the brothel where his mother worked and which his grandmother, his primary carer, ran. His mother was nearly beaten to death by his father and she left Pryor when he was five years old.

Lenny Bruce’s parents divorced when he was five and he was shunted around different relatives during his childhood. Alexei Sayle mentions itinerancy as a possible springboard to showing off. He says that a sizeable proportion of the comedians he worked with at The Comic Strip were ‘army brats’. Jennifer Saunders, Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, Keith Allen, Dawn French and Rowland Rivron all had parents with some service-based itinerancy. Peter Cook saw little of his father, as he was away in Africa for the Colonial Service. Cook recalled that his father used to receive the news six months after it was published. ‘It went to Africa by boat, then up the river. He’d then open up The Times and exclaim, “Good God! Worcester are seventy-eight for six!!”’3

Certainly, if you are moving school and location with frequency, then ‘Ta-dah’ – you have to keep making an impression on your new classmates in a desperate attempt to make new friends, so jokes and larks it has to be.

I only changed school once between the ages of five and thirteen, but that was bad enough. I was having a lovely time at the local village school, but when I was eight I was upgraded to a fee-paying preparatory school, to be moulded and prepared for a lifetime’s sense of superiority. That’s when it went downhill rapidly. I didn’t even know I was odd until then. I automatically turned from being a normal boy with a normal group of friends into someone who seemed to be carrying a contagious disease, as, it appeared, were all of the other late entries. The playground was a contamination pit. You could get ‘Calvert disease’, ‘Hagyard disease’ or ‘Ince disease’. Newcomers were outsiders, treated in much the same way that white blood cells would treat new bacteria. A few other rejected boys had been there longer and were no longer highly infectious, merely kept at a distance, as one was overweight and the other ran in a ‘funny manner’. But was this enough of a traumatic experience to set me off on a completely different course from the one I would otherwise have pursued? I don’t think so.

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‘Attachment theory’ developed out of the horrors of the Second World War, when psychologists in the US and Western Europe began to study those people who had suffered loss or trauma in their very early childhood. Psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who had himself suffered an...