How I Escaped My Certain Fate (34 page)

At the start of the nineties, being with my management
had seemed like the alternative. They represented Jerry Sadowitz and Simon Munnery and Newman and Baddiel, who, whatever detractors might tell you, at the time were in the process of forging a new vocabulary for stand-up in Britain. And when the management took on Frank Skinner in 1991, they brought a unique working-class voice into an otherwise largely middle-class comedy community that paid lip service to the idea of social equity, but could sometimes be quite uncomfortable with the reality of what that might mean. And they operated out of one room just off Charing Cross Road and the Christmas parties were in the bar downstairs. The first year I was with them, the little manager gave me Nick Cave’s
Kicking Against the Pricks
LP for Christmas, and the handful of acts, the two managers and a nice woman who’d been taken on to answer the phone, whom I later lived with, all got drunk together and then went home. Ten years later, the Christmas party was in a club in Fulham, we all got miniature tellies or some other shit, and there were dwarves, yes dwarves, dressed as Christmas elves in green tights and hats with bells on handing out canapés to fat executives and skimpily clad media women. I asked one of the dwarves if he liked being a Christmas elf. He said he thought of himself as a ‘seasonal worker’. I never went to my own management’s Christmas party ever again. When I saw Ted Chippington opening for The Fall in 1984 and decided to be an Alternative Comedian, at no point did I envisage that decision might
one day implicate me in being handed a vol-au-vent by a Christmas dwarf, whose probably dismal fee I had partially subsidised. The unknowable email was the last straw, but I’m surprised I survived as long as I did.

So I wrote nice, and genuinely heartfelt, letters to all the people who had looked after me at my management over nearly two decades, recalling all the good times, and quit, for the vaguest reasons I could think of. And there were good times, despite the dwarves and the debt and the
dis-illusionment.
My management had pulled off some spectacular moves over the past seventeen years. They had hospitalised me when I was sick, and even housed me when I was homeless, and it was sometimes a heady experience to be in their orbit when their daring schemes bore fruit. One day in particular stands out, but it didn’t involve business or bullshit or brinkmanship. In the summer of 1991, my manager had accompanied me to St Andrews, where I had a show with Frank Skinner, Jim Tavare and Richard Thomas’s double act, Miles and Milner. His father had been a famous scientist, and as we walked along the beach in the sun, he picked up various specimens and explained the biological complexities of the little shellfish stranded on the sand. But that was a long time ago now.

On my arrival home from Edinburgh, I tore up any documentation relating to
Jerry Springer: The Opera
, which was represented as a ‘property’ by my management, who also produced it, and which I was entitled to ‘further exploit’. (Such ugly language!) In the event of it ever turning a profit, I did not want to be tempted to engage in a costly legal battle to clarify my position regarding any rights I might have over the work. Instead, I prepared to sit out the six-month period during which it was legally advisable for me to remain unrepresented. I expected to be sued,
or at least shouted at, or threatened with legal action and a gagging order like other former deserters, but nothing
happened
. Harry Hill took me out for a farewell drink, where he and many of the acts I’d known for years who were still represented by the company sat around as another prop in their collective act of faith fell away. Somebody was
complaining
about how the management had fucked up booking one of his regular corporate gigs for him. The fee he had lost was more than I would hope to earn in a year.
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On the train home from Edinburgh, I had been called on my mobile by a radio producer called Alison Vernon Smith, who ran an independent company from a desk in an alcove in her Brighton bungalow. She had been negotiating for some years to get Radio 4 to stump up for the two of us to fly to New Mexico and make two half-hour documentaries about the sacred clowns of the pueblos, which had been an ambition of mine since I first read about them
in Howard Jacobson’s book
Seriously Funny
in 1997. Finally, everything was in place, and we were due to go to Taos later that month, me speaking and Alison recording on a little portable unit. But with audible unhappiness, Alison explained that we would now not be able to go. The plug was to be pulled by her superiors as my management were insisting I flew business class, a cost equal to half the tiny budget of the programme.

There was a showbiz legend that my manager used to ring a bell and make everyone in his office stand up and applaud whenever he made a TV or radio producer cry on the phone. Of course, it was not true. But it was with some relief that I was able to tell this particular distressed producer, one of many over the years, that the resignation letters were already in the post. We’d both fly economy, for God’s sake, and I’d get to do the job of a lifetime. My nineties comedy rock-and-roll management were standing between me and the shaman clowns. Was some unseen hand organising events for maximum dramatic effect? If this were a novel, this would be exactly the sort of contrived symbolic incident a good editor would delete. But it was real. In the end, seeing the sacred clowns of the Tewa people at work was to renew my faith in the point of comedy itself, just when it was in danger of being buried by the brutal business practices surrounding it. Making the radio documentary, and getting my thoughts on the Pueblo clowns in order for a
Guardian
article, filleted below, helped me enormously as I looked around for reasons to go on.

As planned, Alison and I attended the St Geronimo feast-day celebrations at Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, one of the few events where outsiders get to see the sacred clowns perform. For a long time I had fondly imagined that the
clowns of the Pueblo Indians, who take over the village for the afternoon on the second day of the festival, might be a key to understanding, on some essential level, what
comedy
is and what it is for. In 2000, I had stayed on the Hopi reservation in Arizona and seen the pueblos and plazas where their clowns would have performed, while
researching
a novel set in the region. Writing the book was
side-lined
for two years by a fascination with the Pueblo clowns, part holy men, part fools.

The Hopi clown’s function was to manufacture inappropriate behaviour. The clowns would spend months studying the social tensions of their pueblo before, on special feast days, exploding them with carefully considered transgressive acts – simulated sexual assaults, absurd interruptions to sacred ceremonials, parodies of their oppressors’ Christian services, incoherent reinterpretations of the life of Christ, and obscene scatological acts. The American army officer John G. Bourke’s 1881 pamphlet
The Urine Dance of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico
was one of many texts that led to the invading powers’ active suppression of the pagan comedians of the pueblos, driving the clowns literally underground, into kivas, the sacred ceremonial chambers used by the Pueblo clowns and other secret societies of the community. In those close-knit communities, perched on the high mesas, the Pueblo clowns pushed at the limits of socially acceptable behaviour and showed the people, for better or worse, what lay beyond. Could comedy act as both a social barometer and a social pressure valve? Was there a purpose in it?

The drama-student recreation of the medieval fools’ day I’d seen five years previously near Béziers in Languedoc was a construct, but the performance Alison and I were about to see was the real thing, and research suggested the Pueblo clowns seemed to have a more pronounced
philosophical
dimension. Just after lunch, ten figures appeared, silhouetted against the blue sky on the roof of a stack of brown adobe buildings. They were naked but for loincloths, their bodies painted in rings of concentric black and white stripes, their hair decorated with jagged stalks of corn. They screamed and bellowed. Children ran away, afraid. After a while, the clowns made their way down into the plaza, where they spent the next three hours running between the stalls and houses, intimidating and entertaining, overturning every social norm at hand and reshaping the rules of Pueblo life. Babies were snatched from their parents and thrown into the river for clown baptisms. Food was stolen from stallholders and redistributed. We were shouted at, shoved and shocked. Our drinks were flung on the floor.

We followed the clowns into the chief ’s house, where an absurd tourist-type Indian dance was performed at the dinner table for the benefit of his white guests. Back outside, white men were forced to face off in mock cowboy
gun-fights
, and white teenage girls were forcibly press-ganged into ungainly Britney Spears dance routines. Beautiful Pueblo women were mocked and made to wear
different-sized
shoes, so they struggled and stumbled as they walked. Handsome young men were clad in dresses and forced to skip. Elderly women were gracefully wooed or crudely propositioned. And when confronted with someone in a wheelchair or a mentally handicapped onlooker, the clowns would fall before them on their knees in worship.

Despite our BBC credentials, Native American commentators were reluctant to explain the theory behind any of this practice in detail, the folk memory of the white settlers’ suppression of Pueblo clown ceremonials perhaps still strong, but gentle pressure revealed the suggestion of
a social, maybe even moral, purpose at work. By reversing the norms and breaking the taboos, the clowns show us what we have to lose, and what we might also stand to gain, if we step outside the restrictions of social convention and polite everyday discourse. This core idea holds whether it is played out up close in the plaza of a New Mexican pueblo or miles away by the tiny dots of television stars on the stage of a vast arena.

That autumn I was getting married. Things were a bit difficult financially as I was supposed to be writing for the BBC series that now wouldn’t happen and I hadn’t set up any live work. So I did some of those TV panel games for the money. You get about £600 for
Have I Got News for You
after commission. I’d been offered these kinds of shows before but I didn’t really thrive on them, as you have to be snappy and tight, rather than slack and monotonous, and I realised they weren’t really for me. The weekend after
HIGNFY
, which gets millions of viewers, I was in Aberdeen, on the way to our foolishly chosen mid-winter honey moon destination, Shetland. Drunk men recognised me from the telly and shouted ‘Quiz show cunt’ and such like at me in the taxi rank. It’s a lot of aggro for £600.

In January, I pulled together an experimental theatre piece,
What Would Judas Do?
, for a month’s run at the Bush Theatre on Shepherd’s Bush Green in London, again having ‘scratched’ it at Battersea. It was produced in a double bill with
Product
, by Mark Ravenhill, the terrible child of British theatre, who is really a nice
Doctor Who
fan. I got paid Equity minimum, £375 a week. To have developed the same piece in Edinburgh in the nineties would have cost me thousands of unrecoupable pounds. Radio 4 drama dithered around trying to decide whether to broadcast the show, but time was passing, so I taped it and Go Faster
Stripe put it out as a triple CD for sale on the internet. By the time it had sold two hundred copies it had paid more than Radio 4 would have done, and I had not had to
compromise
it in any way.

Edinburgh was looming. I had a new promoter, a flam-boyant and disarmingly straightforward Soho face who had brought various American legends of stand-up to Britain in the nineties and claimed once to have dined with the surrealist occultist Ithell Colquhoun. But most importantly, he didn’t have a TV production company on the side, meaning the live books had to balance in my favour as there was no Jim Crow system in place for me to work off any losses picking cotton on the boss’s plantation. And Underbelly wanted me to play their big tent, The Udderbelly. The show I’d thought of last year,
The Decommissioning Process
, had
with-ered
on the vine, and I was now committed to an idea called
March of the Mallards
. A preview was booked in under this title in the Glasgow Comedy Festival in March 2007, which Tommy Sheppard of The Stand very kindly allowed me to cancel when it became clear to me, days before the proposed debut of the piece, that it wasn’t really going to work. I was hoping to hinge a show about scientific truth and religious lies on all the tonal and factual fudges of the hit documentary film
March of the Penguins
, but couldn’t make it fit, and instead was left with reams and reams of facts and a deluge of liberally biased opinion which I was to try and make funny by delivering in a sarcastic voice. I had no wish to tread on the toes of the comedian Robin Ince, who has made an art form of exactly this chaotic approach, and so decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
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