I’m about to write about the importance of surrealism in stand-up comedy. And I’m nervous, because it’s remarkably easy to be pretentious when discussing comedy. Are comedians modern day philosophers? Are they holy fools? Are they the last ones standing on the bulwark of free speech?
I would say: no. Philosophers are modern day philosophers. Comedians are people who travel around the country noticing funny things about motorway services. And I know this because I’ve read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and he doesn’t once mention going to Greggs. I also know it because I’ve been a stand-up comedian for more than a decade. I’ve toured the UK; I’ve performed across Europe; I even got to appear on the Mock the Week, immediately before the BBC cancelled it.
But long before I dreamed of killing a beloved TV panel show, I was a film student. Hey, why be penniless and obscure in only one medium?
Early in my student days, I remember attending a screening of Un Chien Andalou. I sat in a poorly ventilated lecture hall full of faintly bored 20-year-olds who did not really know what to expect from a 1929 surrealist silent film. The lights went down and, for the first few minutes of the screening, people around me laughed. They laughed at the film’s disturbing imagery, at its non-sequiturs and at the actors’ mannered performances.
And, as the film went on, they stopped laughing. As a stand-up, that’s happened to me at loads of gigs. If only I could have taken Buñuel and Dali aside and given them a few pointers. “Ask the front row what they do for a living, Luis. Make a crack about your moustache Salvador, get ’em back on side.” Somehow, the surrealist pioneers got by without my advice, though not without causing a few riots.
Thinking back to this screening, I realise that the weirdness of the film made people laugh because it jarred with their expectations about how films and stories were supposed to work. And the deeper the film drew the audience into its dream logic, the less amusing they found it. What this first taste of surreal cinema taught me was that something funny was happening when the absurd collided with the mundane.
There are many comedians who are more avant-garde and experimental than me (you can go to see Harriet Dyer or Joz Norris on tour if you want to check). But I’m always aiming for that spot where something dreamy and half-forgotten meets something completely normal and prosaic. From Leonora Carrington to David Lynch, there are many surrealists who are also pretty funny, but Monty Python was my first taste of what tends to be labelled “surreal comedy”. And many of the Python’s most memorable sketches involve making something weird out of quite ordinary ingredients. A cheese shop. A bicycle race. Half a bee.
There’s also a kind of unremarkable weirdness to the stock jokes we all tell. “A horse walks into a bar” is both a surreal, uncanny premise and the setup to the stalest dad joke in the world.
I’m never quite sure if “surreal” is the right term for weirdo humour. Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto is over forty pages long, whereas more than one comedy club has the words “don’t be shit” scrawled by the entrance to the stage. Our ambitions, as comedians, might appear modest by comparison. We are trying to make people laugh. The punters have had a hard week working a proper job. They’ve been tilling the soil or mining spreadsheets. Or, in the case of my audience, playing Settlers of Catan with their anarchist polycule. The point is, they’re weary and need someone to cheer them up.
The marvellous thing about stand-up comedy is – as long as people are laughing, you’re doing it! There’s an enormous amount of freedom to be strange and subversive. The fascists of the 20th century hated surrealism, not because it represented a coherent political threat, but because it was weird and didn’t make sense. In the same way, the reactionaries of the present day are repelled by any comedy that doesn’t reinforce a neat hierarchy with the right people at the top.
We often ask, how can you joke at a time like this? How can we squander hours of our lives on something as frivolous as comedy, in a world full of tragedy and injustice? And I have no answer to that. It’s true that comedy is frivolous. It’s a silly, meaningless waste of everybody’s time. And that’s what I love about it. I love having my time wasted and I love wasting other people’s time in as many uplifting and ingenious ways as I can devise.
As a 20 year-old film student, I thought the point of watching experimental films like Un Chien Andalou was to work out their meanings. As if films were puzzles to be solved or codes to be cracked. But I now realise that the point is simply to experience something. To be provoked, horrified, amused, bored. To have an honest reaction that belongs to you.
Similarly, I think the point of comedy is to experience something that is utterly pointless and wonderful at the same time. Comedy is a waste of time and I love it.
Alasdair Beckett-King is a stand-up comedian. His show King of Crumbs will be at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from July 20th – August 11th.
