Death Coach review (13/12/04) - by TudorJimbo the Clown introduces the essay entitled "Death Coaches" in a manner which serves as justification of the humour that ensues. This ad-hoc preamble is very well constructed and in parts overshadows the rest of the piece.
With the flair of a detective novel writer Jimbo portrays the protagonist and wisdom bearer of "Death Coaches" straight away and give the reader apparent intimate insight "I am a pretty normal type of guy."
Read on and you will discover other facets of an otherwise complex personality. Jimbo is a cynic (the overachiever is a loner), a humourist, a socialite in the best sense of the word and a big teddy bear avid for human interaction.
'The 12 commandments for happiness' are the good news that Jimbo the Clown brings back from the mountain. These were imparted on him by THE DEATH COACH who spoke to him as from the middle of a burning bush.
Smoke
Drink
Pay Bills and Whinge
In the interest of the planet do not reproduce
For that matter do not even settle down
Exercise
Eat junk
Converse with people
Be entertained by flashing lights
Drive fast vehicles very fast
Get a passionless job
Buy stuff
..and you shall be happy!
These commandments could be serialised as a successful Australian sitcom. One could almost imagine Michael Caton move easily from his role in The Castle to the role of Jimbo the Clown. In the first few episodes we become acquainted with the Aussie Pub, with easy going folk who make friends easily and travel the safe middle-ground of public opinion. Then a tragedy ensues and the clown becomes more isolated shying from families of friends and the amorous interest of a young and energetic girl played by Sophie Lee. The show will continue for 15 seasons beating all previous records and bringing on board such characters as Frasier the Psychiatrist who cannot cure Jimbo but likes a beer.
You get the picture!
It is easy to place in time this essay, because it abounds with references to the war of terrorism and presidential speeches. What is harder is to decide if this is indeed wisdom or Jimbo is just messing with our heads.
One moment the reader smirks and nods in agreement, another he is pushed to bow the head in quiet reflexion and yet another he shivers at to cold edge ofthe words which speak of loneliness, distance and a harsh, harsh world
Jimbo poster (05/12/04) - by Ben @ Werribee Hotel
Review of The Big Night Out - Bull and Bush Hotel, Baulkham Hills 13/10/04 - By Epod
Last night I sat in a pub and listened to a guy talk shit for five and a half hours.
The guy in question goes by the name of Jimbo
and his show is called The Big Night Out. He chats about stuff...or as he puts it: "the big issues". These are the same "big" issues that most people in the bar have already conversed about at length on multiple occasions (sex/lesbians/sex/politics/war/sex/etc). Sitting at the back of the room, on the same level as the punters as there is no stage, Jimbo blends in well - with the only exception being that he is armed with a microphone and an amazing talent that draws people into conversation and makes them laugh - that is if he doesn't offend them first with his explicit banter, and array of "f" and "c" words.
Firstly, a brief explanation of what the Big Night Out actually is (taken from the official Big Night Out site) :
Even if you've seen Jimbo's show, it's still hard to explain, without being there. Everyone is different. Jimbo doesn't write the show, he just lets it happen. What makes Jimbo's show different from any other comedian is his use, of the audience. He doesn't pick on people, he just encourages them to hi-jack the stage. The results are extraordinay. For those who stay 'till the end, the night ends up being the ultimate entertainment package: A unique tapestry of high and low art, where the crowd and performers are merged into one.
The show started at 6pm, with only me, two of the organisers of said comedy night, a couple of people who had drunk too much...and a bloke called Eddie watching. The crowd built up slowly as the night progressed, and eventually there was a room of around 30 people. Within a few minutes of the show starting this creepy guy who was with a table of pissed blokes started hassling me asking my name and then when I didnt answer he persisted with hassling me and then took to asking if I was with Jimbo (he must have seen me give him a hug when I saw him before the show - big deal...) When I ignored him he just wouldnt stop, so I then went and joined Eddie at his table who at this point seemed to be relatively harmless. Said guy and his mates continued to constantly look at me and whisper things at me for about an hour until (thankfully) said pissed bloke left.
Billy, one of the drunk guys at the same table as said creepy guy, proved to be good value through the night. After conversing with Jimbo throughout the show, Billy's wife called his mobile phone and Billy let Jimbo answer it (which in hindsight Billy probably realises was a mistake, after what Jimbo said to her hehe). Billy eventually left after a few hours of the show, very drunk and with a lot of explaining to do.
Jimbo had a chat with Eddie who was a regular attendee of his other Big Night Out shows (Eddie actually told me later that he was stalking Jimbo). Eddie was wearing his very classy "I fucked a goat" shirt which he had got from Jimbo at one of his past shows. Jimbo said he was having trouble selling them so thought that maybe he could sell some more shirts if for example he made goat sized shirts that said "I fucked a human". Hehheh. Maybe. It could work... Eddie's "big issue" was about the fact that there was no pool table which of course was right up there with all the other big issues discussed that evening. Eddie bought Jimbo a present (a dickhead cap), and also dutifully re-inflated Jimbo's inflatable sex doll when ever it went down on him...er...I mean deflated...*wink*.
A chick was there who admitted to having a 5 year relationship with another chick. For the remainder of the night she and her friend were referred to as "The Lesos", even though her friend said she wasn't one. Basically this chick had dumped her boyfriend because he was a prick and then gone out with the chick. Anyways, she eventually broke up with the chick too cause she had cheated on her, and now she is back to blokes. Jimbo fired a couple of relentless rounds of questions at her, which covered pretty much every question that every bloke would ever want to know about lesbians. Classic.
Skye and her boyfriend, who are a couple and also regulars at other Big Night Out shows copped a barrage of very personal questions from Jimbo about their relationship, each of which were answered albiet with some hesitation. Skye offered one of the funniest comebacks of the night after being asked one too many personal questions, when she said with some concern, "Um, Jimbo how long has it been since you have had a root?".
One of the punters Jimbo spoke to said that he was a loans officer and when Jimbo asked him what he would need to apply for a loan, the loans guy said "Well, the first thing I would ask you is what you did for work". When prompted by other punters as to what he did for work, Jimbo just said that he was one of the plasterers working on the renovations at the hotel who thought he would give this a go. The show is so deceptively simple, I think a lot of punters left the show that night thinking "gees, that plasterer was great", not realising that The Big Night Out is his job and what he does as a living.
There was a couple on their first date and the chick said that she had just had a root outside in the carpark. When further quizzed by Jimbo on this, she admitted that she had made it up and it hadn't really happened. Jimbo then said with mock disbelief that he had been to heaps of pubs, but this was the first time someone had made up a story in a pub. The chick then went on to tell another story and instead of swearing, she said F'n, C. This not being acceptable in Jimbo's show, he took the mic back from her for a second and said the actual words, then she was able to get back to her story.
Eddie the Iraqi is, as the name suggests, from Iraq and yet another regular was also there. He said his real name was actually Aheed (not sure if thats the right spelling though, so I will stick to calling him Eddie). He suggested to Jimbo that he should go to Iraq and do some shows. Jimbo seemed all for it until Eddie said that he wasnt going to actually accompany him and that he would give him a friends address and would need dye his hair and get him a moustache and a horse?! Jimbo (who has his own dvd) says "Yeah Eddie, the next dvd release will be of my beheading". Eddie who was also acting as a bit of a waiter holding Jimbo's beer was saying "have a drink, come on hurry up get a move on". Yeah said a punter, that's what he will be saying at your beheading, "come on hurry up get a move on".
Admittedly, as the description above says, it is hard to explain without being there. There is a heap of other things that happened, but just hard to describe without, "being there". This is the second time I have been to The Big Night Out and yep, as the description says, every one is different. The thing that both shows had in common though were that there was no cover charge - and - they made me and the punters laugh.
"So Epod, was it any good?", I hear you ask. Yup, sure was. One of the coolest, most amazing gigs I have ever seen :) Hey, I listened and observed intently for the entire five and a half hours, so it *must* have been good!
Sins of Humour - By Stewart Lee - Sunday Herald - 10 October 2004(Original article can be viewed at the Sunday Herald website here)
Billy Connolly sparked outrage when he joked about Ken Bigley, the hostage since murdered in Iraq, during his stand-up act. But couldn’t it be argued that a real comedian has to take risks to be a radical critic of society, a wise man as well as a wise guy?
DURING the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few years ago, a cab driver asked me who my favourite stand-ups were. I mentioned Billy Connolly among the usual international top 10. The cab driver explained that he hated Billy Connolly because he was “too English”. I didn’t know what this meant exactly. Was it perhaps that Connolly had given money away to charity, rarely ate shortbread, and was no longer an alcoholic? Whatever, I understood being “too English” was not a good thing. Nevertheless, “too English” or not, Connolly remains one of my favourite comics, though as a stand-up comedian myself, and also as the son of a Scottish man I have never met, perhaps I see in Connolly some kind of idealised father figure, and would forgive him anything.
Either way, even in the light of recent events, we Scots should be proud of Connolly and rally around him in his hour of need. If the tabloids are to be believed, in the past week Connolly has committed an even worse crime than being “too English”. Two inopportune comments about the Iraq hostage Ken Bigley have incurred the wrath of both his audience and a far more important group, namely journalists and opinion-formers who weren’t actually at the Hammersmith Apollo gig where the outrage occurred. The assumed funniness or non-funniness of Connolly’s comments is, of course, further complicated by the subsequent execution of Ken Bigley himself, adding an especially bleak coda to a previously not especially significant story that would perhaps otherwise have blown over.
Remember, it is not Billy Connolly’s fault that Ken Bigley is dead. Don’t make the Big Yin the receptacle for your misplaced anger. Given that we went into Iraq in defiance of UN regulations, international opinion and common sense, to transfer blame to a stand-up comedian while Blair and Bush remain in power, even when the WMD excuse has been entirely discredited and the subsequent liberation of Iraq so terribly mismanaged, is patently absurd. When writing comedy about real events, whether serious or trivial, there is an inherent risk of those same events overtaking you.
In 1999, my one-time double-act partner Richard Herring and I filmed a dozen sketches for BBC2 in which Rod Hull kept suffering fatal accidents due to having a false arm permanently wrapped around his Emu puppet. Three days before the first one was due to be broadcast, Rod Hull fell off a roof while adjusting a TV aerial and died. Luckily we had time to re-edit the show to avoid sullying the memory of a comedian we both greatly admired, and looking like we were chasing an adolescent notion of deliberate bad taste, but it was a close thing. Admittedly, Ken Bigley’s beheading is more significant than Rod Hull’s sudden and unexpected expiry, but it is important not to judge Connolly’s comments in the light of Friday’s news. Before pontificating on the rights and wrongs of what Connolly may or may not have said, let’s remember what a special comedy case Scotland’s best stand-up comedian actually is.
Many comedians feign spontaneity. The actor, comedian and transvestite Eddie Izzard is a master of it, and one cannot help but be impressed by the way he makes tried and tested material sound as if it had literally just occurred to him. Personally, I like prepared material and have a huge admiration for the beautifully constructed routines of Victoria Wood, Reginald D Hunter or Glasgow’s own Arnold Brown. But I also love seeing comics caught in the actual act of creation, and Connolly is one of a very small sub-section of stand-ups, including Ross Noble and Johnny Vegas, who will actually go on stage with no specific idea of what they are about to do. I doubt any of the above even owns a pencil, let alone a word processor. But this often ill-prepared spontaneity is both Connolly’s major strength, in that you genuinely feel caught in a once-in-a-lifetime experience when watching him, and his major weakness, in that his stand-up shows are all far too long, lack any shape or structure and, as with the Ken Bigley lines, sometimes charge headlong into complex areas that might have required more preparation.
Apparently the Bigley material was a bit Connolly had been toying with on previous nights during his London run. Whenever I am working up a new routine, especially if it involves controversial subjects, I try it out in small venues, within the context of new-material nights. I have a piece at the moment wherein I hold the crisp advertiser and footballer Gary Lineker accountable for the deaths of hundreds of obese children, and chased the idea around from many directions before it settled into an acceptable shape that drew disgust and laughs in equal measure, rather than just appalling everyone. But as a relative unknown with a sustainable and small cult following, I have the luxury of anonymity denied to Billy Connolly. Nothing I say will make the news. Nevertheless, I don’t believe that the literally thousands of fabulous hours of stand-up that Connolly has generated out of thin air are compromised or undermined by this one apparent error. And, arguably, the Bigley lines were not an error at all, but actually an essential part of what comedy is for.
There are jokes to be made about the Ken Bigley situation. The sickest, stupidest and most inexcusable ones are already being made by you, the public, privately, to each other, drunk in bars or via e-mails at work, while you simultaneously maintain a high moral tone in judging a professional comic’s attempt to cover the same ground in a more intelligent and responsible fashion. And you know it. Cast the first stone, I dare you.
The best Ken Bigley jokes, like Chris Morris’s Brass Eye paedophilia special, tell us something about our own hypocrisy and that of the newsgathering services we put our trust in. I believe that Connolly’s lines, as reported in the press, allude to both these areas. In opining, “Perhaps I shouldn’t be saying this ... aren’t you the same as me, don’t you wish they would just get on with it?”, Connolly is referencing our inability to stick with a story, and the media’s self-sustaining interest in spinning one out. Afghan istan is still a wreck, but we rarely see it reported any more. It’s old, boring news. And global tragedies that unfold over years, rather than days, suffer a lack of public interest that aid-workers and fundraisers identify with the phrase “compassion fatigue”. The line, “What is it with him and that young Asian wife?”, I believe, deliberately addresses the fact that whenever we see an elderly British businessman on TV with a young Asian woman it’s usually in the context of a story about mail-order brides. This isn’t to suggest that the Bigleys’ marriage itself was anything but loving and genuine, but at least let us admit that an image our inherent racist suppositions have made us suspicious of is currently being represented to us as the emotive, human-interest angle in a bigger story.
Of course, Bigley’s family, Connolly’s audience and the press have every right to be upset by these lines, but Connolly has every right to say them. I directed Richard Thomas’s Olivier Award-winning blasphemy musical Jerry Springer The Opera, which was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002. At the moment, Las Vegas hotels want to stage it but are caught in an unprecedented legal loop. After Linda Ronstadt criticised the Bush administration on stage in Vegas earlier this year, to some audience disapproval, casino owners are seeking to indemnify themselves against showcasing acts their customers may be offended by. Is this reactionary American cowardice a mood you want the UK to be engulfed by? Inevitably, challenging work won’t get shown. There at least appears to be some righteous moral anger behind Connolly’s comments, and an intelligence in identifying a danger area.
You don’t have to be a student of comedy to realise that if the same lines had been said by the nation’s favourite, Ricky Gervais, in the character of David Brent, with a small posse of office workers looking disapproving in the rear of the shot, they would have been consumed and analysed in an entirely different way. In The Office, Gervais’s Brent character is a pantomime burlesque of the unacceptable in all of us, but we appreciate that it is a character. To his credit, Connolly didn’t gloss the lines, put them in inverted commas, wear a costume in order to deliver them, or defuse them with the dramatic conceit of having some authority figure on stage to condemn him. He merely offers them up for our consideration, and in so doing credits us, wrongly it might now appear, with intelligence, judgement and some sense of irony.
But to get too bogged down in justifying Connolly’s lines morally and intellectually is to miss a bigger point. Namely, should comedy need to be morally and intellectually justified anyway? What Connolly did at Hammersmith, and did brilliantly, was to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. He has a genius for inappropriate behaviour. It’s not such a long journey from what journalists are already calling Bigleygate back to Connolly’s 1975 Parkinson appearance, when he joked about a Glaswegian man burying his wife with her bum sticking out of the earth so that he would have somewhere to park his bike. Parkinson wept. My mum wet her pants. And, the sterling work of The Beatles and Monty Python notwithstanding, it was finally clear that the 1950s were at last over. It is moments like this that bring that stand-up comedian close to the status of the holy fool.
In the year 2000 I finally brought a mild obsession with Native American clowns to a close, having stayed on the Hopi reservation in Arizona and seen the pueblos and plazas where they would have performed. I’d been researching a novel set in the region, but became sidelined for two years by a fascination with the pueblo clowns, part holy men, part fools. Soon afterwards I gave up stand-up for three years, due in part, though not exclusively, to anxieties about my own role raised by my reading.
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. Likewise, in 1975, Connolly, who had previously urinated on stage whilst dressed as the Pope, was escorted to a Belfast theatre by armed policemen. And now he’s under siege once more.
But look at the Native American model. 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. Great comedy can act as both a social barometer and a social pressure valve. Connolly, more than any other performer in recent months, has shown that.
Our sympathies must go out to Ken Bigley’s family. But we must also back Billy. Increasingly, opinions are manufactured and distributed by the same giant media machine: broadcasters like Fox are in bed with the Bush administration and, post-Hutton Inquiry, the BBC is running scared from the might of the Blair government. On some small level, people like Billy Connolly stick a spanner in the spokes and, just for a moment, make us aware of the mechanism. Nowadays we need him more than ever. Support your local wiseman.
About the author:
Stewart Lee has written for television, radio and newspapers and has performed stand-up comedy all over the world. He published his first novel The Perfect Fool in 2001 and is also the co-creator and director of Jerry Springer The Opera.
