Frank Skinner Autobiography (35 page)

I could see where this was going. I immediately got out of bed and put my pants back on, thinking, ‘Well, you won't be seeing that again, m'lady.' Then I got back into bed, and she went on to explain, in more detail than I needed, how she had fallen for this guy. I suddenly remembered that I had spent ten quid on a pair of earrings for this woman, and I started to laugh at the grim irony of it all. I deliberately made the laugh arch and pronounced so she'd ask me what I was laughing at. She did, and I was able to do a sort of ‘Well, what a mug I was . . .' speech, during which I adopted various body-shapes that made me appear tragic and mis-used. As planned, she was overwhelmed with guilt. ‘Oh, tell me how much the earrings were and I'll buy them off you. Oh, please.'

‘Twelve quid,' I said.

They say you come away with something from every relationship. In this case, two quid. But years later, I incorporated the earrings thing into a storyline for a sitcom I wrote, so even more good came out of it. When I bid Celine farewell the next day, I said, ‘Have a nice rest of your life': I was still playing it like some sort of Hamlet-figure. Thus, I found comedy and lost my bird. She had dumped me for a double-glazing salesman called Kevin. (In this case, it seemed a shame to change the name, so I didn't.)

When I got home to Birmingham, I decided to book my space for the following year's Edinburgh Festival virtually straight away. This was about six months earlier than people usually booked venues for Edinburgh, but I didn't know that at the time. There was a company in Coventry called Tic Toc, who I knew ran a venue at the Festival, so I phoned them up. I explained to the bloke that I was a comedian called Chris Collins and I wanted to hire a room for Edinburgh '88. He asked how long the show was. I hadn't even written one gag yet, so it was a bit tricky to estimate. ‘Oh, about an hour and a half, two hours should do it,' I said.

‘Look,' said the bloke, ‘no offence, but I've never heard of you. Even the big acts only do an hour.'

‘OK,' I said, ‘I'll do an hour.' He explained the cost and it turned out that the good time-slots were all too expensive for me. It'd been a year since I quit drinking and I'd managed to save four hundred quid during that time. All that would buy was a lunchtime slot, 12.45 to 1.45, at the 100-seater Calton Studios. I agreed. I wrote the cheque, and sent my life-savings to a company in Coventry so that, in ten months' time, I could perform an hour of comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. I had the venue, now all I needed was the show.

I should probably point something out at this stage. I had no fucking idea how to become an alternative comedian. The normal procedure, it turns out, was that you did what were called ‘open spots' at London comedy clubs, and you carried on doing these, about ten minutes each and unpaid, until some club owner or other offered you a paid spot. Once this had happened a few times, if you went well, other paid work would come in and you'd begin to build a reputation on the comedy circuit. Then, usually, you and two or three other up-and-coming comics might get together, share the cost of a room in Edinburgh, and put on a show in which you did fifteen or twenty minutes each. If this went well, the following Edinburgh you might risk a two-hander with just one other comic, and if
this
was a success, finally, maybe after another two-hander combination at the next Festival, you might bite the bullet, take the ultimate step, and try doing an hour on your own. The whole process normally takes between three and six years, sometimes much longer. I was going to do the hour show having never worked as a professional comic in my life. Not because I was brave, but because I didn't know any better.

I even toyed with the idea of writing loads of stuff, but not actually trying any of it out in public until I opened in Edinburgh, an approach that was not so much ‘in at the deep end', as ‘in at the shallow end, but off the top diving-board'. Just write the show, practise in front of the bedroom mirror so I know it lasts an hour, and then do it. Malcolm, having listened, mouth agape, to this plan, suggested that it might not be a terrible idea to try doing a bit of comedy beforehand. I wasn't sure it was necessary but I thought I'd give it a go, just to be on the safe side.

I feel that I shouldn't go any further with this until I've offered some sort of definition of ‘alternative comedy'. Bob Monkhouse once said to me that alternative comedy is the same old jokes but no one's shaved. This is funny, but not true, and is therefore not a bad example of the difference between alternative and mainstream comedy. I'm not saying that all alternative comedy is true, but it is, or was when I started doing it, generated by the comedian for the comedian. What was said on stage roughly represented that comic's view of the world. For example, I used to do a routine about taking a woman I'd met in a pub back to my flat, and being slightly non-plussed when I asked her if there was anything she'd like me to do, and she said she'd love it if I'd lick honey off her breasts. I continued like this:

Well, frankly, I wasn't keen. And, anyway, I'd only got lemon curd. And if you put that on nipples, it looks like acne. So I said, ‘I'm sorry, I don't fancy that much,' and she said, ‘Oh, for goodness sake. I've got just the thing for you.' And she reached into her carrier-bag and took out some newspaper, and when she unwrapped it, she had a dozen oysters. She said, ‘You have twelve of these and you'll be able to satisfy me all night.' Well, have you ever tried oysters? Oh, my God. Honestly, it's like licking phlegm off a tortoise. I thought, ‘Twelve of these and you'll be able to satisfy me all night?' No fuckin' wonder. After twelve of these, oral sex is gonna be a piece of piss. If you'll pardon the pun. I tell you, after twelve oysters, oral sex is gonna be like the fucking sweet trolley turning up.

Now, I chose this short routine, more or less at random, in order to make my point about what I regard as ‘alternative' comedy. Classically, so-called alternative comedy would have been a bit more worthy. They all slagged off Thatcher and bleated about Nicaragua, but my stuff was never political. However, the reason both strands qualify as alternative comedy is because they are both reflective of the comic's world-view. Political comics, like Mark Thomas or the American Will Durst, do stuff about politics because they are interested in it, and therefore spend a lot of their lives reading, thinking and talking about it. Quite rightly, this is reflected in their acts. That's why I do jokes about licking women's tits and vaginas. Their material is very different from mine, but we all believe that comedy should be true, in that it should reflect the attitudes and opinions of the comic. When Frank Carson says ‘A fella went into a pub' etc, it's often very funny, but it doesn't tell us much about Frank Carson's world-view. There might be fifty other comics telling that same joke. They can't all think and feel the same. I don't just want the jokes, I want the man behind the jokes. That's why, as I said before, character comics leave me a bit cold.

As you may have already begun to suspect, whenever I try to analyse comedy I disappear up my own arse, but here's a look at the oysters routine that says why, apart from the fact that it's written by the performer, I think it's ‘alternative' comedy rather than mainstream.

Firstly, it's a bit too rude for mainstream. Mainstream comedy tends to go for cheekiness but not graphic detail. Graphic detail is a bit too true for a mainstream crowd. The usual criticism that mainstream comics aim at alternative comedy is that it's ‘too crude' or ‘blue'. ‘Dirty' comics, such as myself, are just going for the ‘easy' laugh. This is all a bit misleading. I agree dirty jokes that aren't funny are bad. I also think that clean jokes that aren't funny are bad, but, I'll admit, a bad dirty joke suggests that the teller might have been hoping to get a laugh merely at the mention of swear-words or rudeness. In my experience this doesn't work. Occasionally, and unfortunately, an audience will laugh simply because something dirty has been said, but they won't laugh for long if that's all that's on offer. Audiences are not that stupid. Anyone who thinks there are ‘easy' laughs to be had should try doing a bit of stand-up.

I like funny comics. Clean, filthy, political, slapstick, surreal, the lot. I am quite a dirty comic but a clever dirty joke is a beautiful thing. For example, here's a gag I was doing in my early days:

I have to admit, I don't like condoms. I hate that moment, after sex, when you look down at yourself, and there's a pink, wrinkled condom, just hanging there. I hate that. Especially if you weren't actually wearing one when you put it in. (LAUGH.) Oh, it can happen, you know. Those ribbed ones will stay there for months. It's like knocking a fuckin' rawlplug in.

That is a dirty joke, but I'd defend it because I believe it to be funny and well-constructed and quite clever, if you'll excuse me saying so. If you find the joke offensive, fair enough, but that is to condemn it because of its subject matter rather than on its comic merits, such as they are. There is no comic hierarchy based on clean and dirty, only on funny and unfunny. Champions of mainstream comedy are always going on about how political correctness has killed comedy, but the antismut thing is also political correctness, just someone else's interpretation of ‘correct'.

I was once compering a gig and I did a short routine about the difficulty of masturbating while watching a dirty film on television rather than on video. The dirty bits are often quite short, and you never know exactly when they're coming up, so you have to sit in a state of preparation, ‘not rigid, but rubbery', to give yourself a bit of a head start. By the time that dirty bit comes, ‘you need to be half-way up the runway'. That's your only chance of making it. I went on to explain how I'd got myself into this state of preparation when Channel Four kicked off its new documentary series,
Censored
, a collection of previously banned TV films described by the broadcaster as ‘Television they said you should never be allowed to see'. As you can imagine, I was all set and raring to go. ‘Now, I don't know if you've ever tried masturbating to a fifty-five-minute documentary about the miners' strike . . . but it's not easy.'

It might not be top-drawer comedy but it got a few laughs.

However, the next bloke I introduced at the gig was very much from the mainstream circuit. He glared at me as we passed on stage, apologised to the audience, and said he wished to totally disassociate himself from the filth I had just uttered. ‘Anyway,' he continued, ‘these two niggers went into a pub . . .' Different taboos, that's the thing.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the oysters. I would say that that routine not only reflects, in some ways, my world-view but, furthermore, is, if you want to go look for it, quite political. Also, and I'm playing with fire here, I think that one of the reasons I've done alright as a comic is that I'm a working-class bloke who got educated and worked in an arts centre. Though I may sound anti-mainstream in some of my above remarks, the fact is that I dislike any kind of restraint on a comedian's work other than his own personal morals. I reckon I'm probably half-alternative, half-mainstream, half-university, half-factory. I'll show you what I think I mean, though I should warn you that this view of my stuff as ‘alternative mainstream' has only just, this minute, occurred to me, so we walk hand-in-hand along a rickety bridge that I'm very much still building.

Firstly, the woman in the routine is independent, innovative, and inclined to be the dominant partner. She is much more sexually liberated than me, happy to use any aid to sexual pleasure, be it the product of the mighty ocean or the humble bee. In fact, she sets a sexual agenda I find threatening and altogether more sophisticated than anything I might come up with. The fact that I only have lemon curd to offer makes me sound small-town, domestic, cheap and old-fashioned. The oysters represent sophistication. Rather than embrace their differentness, I am repelled by it and seek familiarity in still more small-town comparisons, tortoises and phlegm. All this is pretty alternative stuff. No bimbos or brash male behaviour here. She is Madonna, I am Jack Duckworth.

Then it turns. Having firmly established the alternative credentials of this encounter, I am now able to make a Bernard Manning-like point: that men don't like giving women oral sex because it often doesn't taste very nice. However, the point is made in a very non-confrontational, docile fashion. I think about the oral sex comparison but there is no evidence that I voiced it to her. Thus, it can be concluded that she continued to dominate, and that I did give her oral sex, be it from motives of fear or compassion, neither of which enhance my macho credentials.

Interesting, but, essentially, bollocks. I wrote the routine because I thought it was funny. Everything else is incidental. Now, can someone fetch me a step-ladder so I can get out of my own arse?

Today, Phil, Bernie and me went to the Seoul Stadium, where they'll be playing the opening game of the 2002 World Cup. The stadium isn't quite finished yet, so we had to wear hard-hats. We wandered around the press box and had our photos taken on the running track. It was thirty-six degrees in the shade. Throughout the trip, the stadium's technical people were testing out the sound system by playing, very loudly, over and over again, that Tom Waits song that goes ‘And the small change got rained on, with his own .38. And the small change got rained on, with his own .38.' It echoed around and around the empty arena. God, it was hot.

So, it was to be my first gig as a stand-up comedian. December 9th, 1987, at the Portland Club in Birmingham. Malcolm had decided he wanted to be a comedy promoter, so he got together a few local acts and a couple of turns from the London alternative circuit, Earl Okin and The Nice People, and staged a charity gig, sponsored by Mitchells and Butlers, a local brewery, at the Portland Club in Icknield Port Road. It was an ugly red-brick building that, among other things, was the home of the Birmingham Anglers Association. The idea was that I would compere the gig, free of charge, obviously, and I was very excited. Today, the Portland Club, tomorrow . . . Malcolm, of course, had a period of much-verbalised doubt about my role in the event, wondering aloud whether I was up to it, but, having pulled two or three legs off my psychological spider, he finally said I had the job. Thus, I began my preparation. Without wishing to sound like a twat, I had been getting big laughs from my mates for as long as I could remember, and I didn't see why this audience should be any different.