The Comedy Store is in Meard Street, a rickety little alley in Soho that looks like a set from a Dickens film. The club is a tiny fire hazard of a room, accessed by an equally rickety old lift that only holds four people at a time, and one of these is the even more rickety lift operator. It’s the Nell Gywnne Club the rest of the week – a strip joint – but late on Saturday nights, when the men in raincoats go home to their wives and families, ‘Darling, I’m home!’, it hosts the Comedy Store, an idea stolen from America.
It’s a gong show – there’s a gong hung to one side of the stage, and if the audience don’t like the act they’re watching they shout ‘Gong!’ ‘GONG!’ If enough of them shout, the compère strides on, bangs the gong, and the act in question has to leave the stage. Tail between legs. So, it’s basically bullying. A real bear-pit atmosphere. All the comics are understandably concerned about the potential humiliation. Well, not so much concerned, as cacking their pants. But it makes the club what it is.
We meet other people like us: Alexei Sayle, a Chelsea Arts School graduate who’s been doing a fringe theatre show about Bertolt Brecht and is involved in a Saturday night show at The Elgin pub in Ladbroke Grove called Alternative Cabaret. He wears a porkpie hat, is rather gruff and looks like a bouncer. There’s Peter Richardson and Nigel Planer, who have a double act called The Outer Limits. They’ve been doing some kind of festival show in more or less empty fields in the West Country that features music and sketches, they now do things like ‘Are You being Severed’ – a version of the trad sitcom Are You Being Served reimagined with contract killers, and Nige does a solo spot as Neil the Hippy.
There’s a stream of acts each night. There has to be, in case the gong gets gonged so often they run out.
However, whilst we’re all fearful of the ‘gong’, there’s one act that revels in the idea. It’s an act that is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
The terrible thing is, here I am, telling you about the funniest thing I ever saw, a moment of great importance to me, and . . . I can’t remember his name. It might be Day, or Davy Day, or Davy Dave – I’ve googled it and I can’t find him. I’m sure someone out there knows, but please don’t write in, because I’ve discovered I don’t really want to find it. I want this act to remain pristine in my memory. I want it to be my memory of it, not somebody else’s. I don’t want it clouded by photos, or video, or even worse – the truth.
We all remember things differently. Remember the Numskulls.
To me it’s a work of sublime stupidity, and I don’t think there’s enough stupidity in comedy these days. Comedy’s broadly changed in Britain from people being stupid, and making fun of themselves, to people being clever and making cruel observations about other people. I prefer the former. So I want to keep this golden nugget of stupidity safe in my brain.
I feel morally obliged to try and describe the act for you, even though I know I can’t do it justice. So, we’re all going to be disappointed, but here goes: a man comes onto the stage with a music stand and a violin, but never gets round to playing it.
That’s it. That’s the act. He never says anything. There’re no words. There aren’t even any ‘jokes’.
What is a joke? I keep coming back to this and can never find the answer but I think if someone else can tell your joke, like a joke from a joke book, then it’s probably not really funny. It might be witty, but it won’t be funny. Real comedy has something to do with hysteria. The writing’s just a code for something to be doing while you try to pump up the hysteria.
But back to the act . . .
Is it a mime?
Nice try. It’s a sort of mime – but a mime with the things he’s miming. Sometimes there’re moments that echo that Carlsberg advert when Norman Wisdom tries unsuccessfully to erect a deckchair, but Dave Davy Dave’s act is never the same twice. That’s not what he’s going for. And music stands have a fiendish life of their own anyway. He isn’t trying to get a laugh off doing things badly. I think he’s trying to get a laugh by playing with people’s expectations of what he’s about to do.
Most people come on with some kind of attention-grabbing joke (I headbutt the microphone off the stand into the crowd – I’ve still got the scar tissue on my forehead to prove it), but David Davy Dave David appears with only a slight smirk in the corner of his mouth. He’s got a kind of grace – he looks a bit like Kenny Dalglish in his prime, he has a mullet hairdo and wears a light grey suit, the kind footballers wear when they walk out onto the pitch before the FA Cup final.
I hate it when people try and explain comedy. So I’m going to hate myself now. But the act lives – oh I sound like such a wanker, ‘the act lives’ – it lives in the tension between himself and the crowd. He knows they’ll eventually shout ‘Gong!’ He wants them to want to shout it. He’s daring them to shout it. I don’t think he actually has an end to his act in mind. So if they don’t, he’ll be stuck there for ever.
And why is this funny? It’s about riding the audience reaction. He surfs them. And the more he surfs them, the more they shout, but the more they laugh as well. A man arrives on the stage with a music stand and a violin . . . or was it a flute? Or a clarinet? But whatever it is, the sight of a man coming on with a music stand and – a trumpet? – is sufficient to pique people’s interest. So the audience get in. But once they’re in, once he opens that door, all he does is play them. He works solely off them. They are the material. The laughs are all on his reaction to them, OR his lack of reaction to them. But all driven by them.
The whole ethos of the club is that the audience think they are controlling his destiny, but in fact he is controlling theirs. (Oh God, I really hate myself now . . .)
But that’s the truth as I see it – it’s about being stupid, it’s about hysteria. It’s about going berserk. Because, although people are screaming for blood, they’re screaming with laughter at the same time.
Alexei, who’s the compère at the club, is bright enough to realize that the act relies on people enjoying shouting ‘gong’. And Day David Davy David turns up almost every week, so he and Alexei basically become an unwitting double act as the weeks roll by. So Dave goes on, and doesn’t manage to put up the stand, and when he eventually does, doesn’t manage to play the oboe, bassoon, euphonium, whatever it is, and the crowd get louder and louder. Really enjoying themselves. And Alexei’s head will appear round the curtain near the gong. He won’t immediately go for the mallet. He’ll play the situation. And now Davy David will be playing the audience and Alexei. So that by the time the gong is indeed struck he’ll get the loudest cheer of the evening. And everyone will have won.
It’s a masterclass in just being stupidly funny.
Christ, I hope he was trying to be funny . . . He was. I’m sure he was. Surely he was?? Or maybe he too was an accidental comedian?
The gong element of the club is eventually dispensed with, and his act disappears along with it.
The line between success and failure can be exhilarating. It’s where thinking disappears and funny can take over. It’s that moment during ‘Bottom Gas’ that I’ve previously described where the hitting and punching go on so long that it veers into failure before building a kind of stupidity that is so stupid it’s just stupidly funny.