I can't stand stand-up

goodlifedeathgrief.org.uk

Last Friday I was at a Fringe event in support of Good Life, Good Death, Good Grief, a charity working with death and bereavement (goodlifedeathgrief.org.uk). Appropriately, it was held in an old anatomy hall in Edinburgh University; the audience sat in the same steeply tiered rows from which generations of medical students, including  Arthur Conan Doyle, have peered down at cadavers cut open to reveal muscles, bones and viscera.

Good Life has got together with eleven Fringe productions examining death and dying from different perspectives. Five offered excerpts from their shows; the full list is on deathonthefringe.co.uk. First up was Duck, Death and the Tulip, which uses puppetry to help children understand and come to terms with death. Duck was followed by stand-up comedians and songs from Alba, a musical about a young man’s return to rural Scotland to scatter his father’s ashes. Were the songs any good? Sorry, I can’t tell you. For years my taste in musicals has been bogged down somewhere between South Pacific and Sondheim and I’ve never been able to extricate it.

Mr Cassidy

Which brings me to the stand-up. I’m not a fan of the genre and Nathan Cassidy and Robyn Perkins only confirmed my prejudice. From each we had ten minutes of breathless, rushed speech, nervous pacing on the small stage, each line delivered with a smile, a brief moment of tension, then relief when laughter came, followed by another line, more tension, uncertainty when the response was poor and so on and so on. I smiled a few times, laughed perhaps once and hoped they would soon go away.

I’m not picking on Robyn and Nathan – they’re no different, no better and no worse than most stand-up comedians I’ve endured over the years.  It’s an age thing. I’m over 60 and I have no interest in young men and women who want to work out their personal issues and insecurities in public. It’s like seeing children discover the world around them – it’s highly meaningful for them, but I’ve been there, done that and lost the t-shirt.

Of course the younger members of the audience laughed; it’s their world Nathan and Robyn were describing and for them it’s familiar and funny. But for those who are older, there is little new under the sun. Your young son stuck his finger in his bottom and then sniffed it? All children do something similar. It’s funny to you, but I don’t need to hear it. Your sex life after the death of your boyfriend? It may be important to you but it doesn’t tell me anything new about the world.

Of course the commonplace can be funny, but few stand-up comedians have the talent to reveal that humour in a way that entertains both young and old. Exceptions that come to mind are Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Dee and Eddie Izzard, entertainers who fade into the background as their carefully crafted and confidently presented humour comes to the fore.

I know – stand-up is the new black. Comedy clubs overflow with wannabes. Big name comedians fill huge auditoriums. I come across them from time to time in a pub or channel-surfing and I’m seldom impressed. The wannabes are the nervous ones with the stories I’ve heard before. The big names are over-confident, irritatingly smug and convinced that their ability to command large audiences sets them above the common crowd. No, it doesn’t, Jimmy Carr, Russell Brand and all the rest of you; there is nothing special about you except your overblown ego.

I love comedy. Good comedy gives us profound insights into the human condition. Good comedy helps us forget the often troubling world that surrounds us. But really good comedy seldom comes from stand-up. You're more likely to find it in films and theatre, television sitcom and radio. Nothing could be funnier than Beyond Our Ken or The Big Bang Theory, Whitehall farces or an Alan Bennett play, The Life of Brian or Shaun of the Dead. I love to laugh; I just can’t stand stand-up.