Page 113 - The Language of Humour

100 STAND-UP COMEDY
persona and act—is this a case of getting in first to sidestep any abuse?)
The poems and songs, which are carefully scripted humour, also break
up the stream of talk and reduce the stressful weight of a monologue, both
for the speaker and for the audience. Some comedy acts, the late
Tommy Cooper for example, are based around juggling or magic, which
allow similar breaks in the focus. The visual aspects of the comedy
cannot be covered in this book, but it is interesting to see whether this
affects the type of humour used in the spoken interludes. They tend to
be short gags, relying on ambiguities, which would seem corny if the
entire weight of the performance rested on them:

My wife. I always call her dear. She’s got antlers sticking out of her
head.
I’ve got a sore head. (Wearing a saw through head)

Female comedians often use a character for their act. Caroline Aherne
went on stage as the nun Sister Mary Immaculate, and later adopted the
persona of Mrs Merton for a successful television series. This is Pauline
Melville, in character as ‘Edie’.

I’m in the Women’s Movement, you know. I am. I mean, I’m not
in the most militant branch—I’m just in the branch that pulls
faces behind men’s backs… My friend Eileen’s had a horrible
year… She came into my kitchen in absolute floods of tears the
other day thirty years of marriage and she found out that her
husband’s a monetarist. I said, ‘Listen, Eileen,’ I said, ‘sit down—
I think all this monetarism’s just a cry for help, you know.’

As well as being a vehicle for their humour, going on stage as a
fictional character offers a degree of protection. Jo Brand used to suffer
personal abuse from hecklers in the audience. She recalls one gig at
Loughborough University where the audience were predominantly male
and even a bouncer ‘was heckling me, but it wasn’t in a lighthearted
way in any sense. It was really serious, really vicious. It was like being
heckled by Peter Sutcliffe.’

Activity
List the comedians who are popular on the current stand-up circuit and
categorise them according the degree of naked confrontation with the