Humour me.
'Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humour to console him for what he is.' Francis Bacon
I spent the weekend with aching cheeks. Not from dropping squats (although they do feature heavily in my current fitness drive), nor from valiantly completing the London marathon - an experience so out of my orbit it inhabits another galaxy. My cheeks were aching from exercising those muscles so many of us neglect: the ones responsible for smiling and laughing. Two sources were responsible: clicking on the multitude of clips all over social media of Barry Humphries in full throttle Dame Edna Everage mode, and spending Sunday afternoon with Fran Lebowitz (along with several hundred other people at the London Palladium).
Watching the Dame Edna clips catapulted me back to my parents’ living room (or ‘lounge’ as we called it in the West Midlands) where we tried to avoid choking on corned beef baps as Dame Edna deftly skewered her celebrity guests. She was mistress of the side-eye before it became ‘a thing.’ That sing-song voice shot through with a dangerous gravelly growl was perfection, luring its celebrity prey in for the comedy kill. Suddenly, everyone was being addressed as ‘my lil possum,’ without knowing what one actually looked like.
The living room of my childhood was bathed in comedy cathode rays: The Good Life, Not the Nine O’ Clock News (where I still say, ‘Wild, I was absolutely livid,’ from Gerald the Gorilla, Not the Nine O'Clock News), Morecambe and Wise, Victoria Wood, Clive James. In the days before the advent of the video recorder, every Saturday night, my parents would set up the tape recorder to record Fawlty Towers while they went out. Grandad would be over babysitting and, after allowing me to pull the cushions off the sofa (or ‘settee’) so I could perform a lame forwards roll and raid my Mum’s ‘Agnetha from Abba’ blue eyeshadow stick, we settled down to watch FT with our cheese and piccalilli sandwiches. The catch-up experience for my parents was sub-optimal as they often couldn’t hear the episode thanks to our audience participation. Who needed canned laughter when you got us snorting in the background for real?
I loathe the phrase ‘love language’ much as I loathe the word ‘tablescaping’ (see previous post), but if we did have a (eurrgh) ‘love language’ in my family, it was humour. Magpie-like, we collected golden comedy nuggets that would be trotted out at apposite moments. Dad often used Julie Walters’s ‘you’ve the look of Eva Braun’ as a mumbled aside when encountering unhelpful people. We had our own comedy code; a whispered phrase from something we had seen or read and a certain look connected us.
Nothing impressed upon me more how deeply embedded the humour was (no matter how dark) than a hospital room. During a visit to Dad following a massive heart attack, Mum passed out sitting in the chair at his bedside, clearly a result of huge amounts of shock and stress. As she was attended to and wheeled off to be checked out and I felt the world crumple a bit more, Dad, clearly just immensely grateful to be alive, laughed at the absurdity of it all and made some quip about her diverting attention away from him. During the further seventeen years accorded to him, we often revisited that moment.
Fran Lebowitz provided a good balance to my wallowing in a bit of comedy nostalgia with her characteristically incisive take on present events. I have acres of time for anyone who knows how to work a blazer (as a fellow blazer-obsessive) and owns 12,000 books (and has actually read them). It was also a reminder that the people who write all those tedious articles on how to wear jeans when you are no long relevant (which appears to be anyone, mainly female, over thirty) had clearly never come across Fran, who wears turn-ups with cool aplomb at 72 years old.
I feel like I came across Fran woefully late, but better late than never. During the final throes of the pandemic, like many, I binge-watched Netflix as structured life fell down a crevasse. I watched Pretend It’s A City which then led me to read The Fran Lebowitz Reader which had me howling. It was refreshing to read such an unapologetic voice that was genuinely funny. I mean anyone that writes, ‘Breakfast cereals that come in the same colours as polyester leisure suits making oversleeping a virtue,’ has a place at my fantasy dinner table (along with David Sedaris, but sans said breakfast cereals)!
I was slightly aghast that the people occupying the seats next to my friend did not return after the interval. What were they expecting? How could they? But it’s the random Q&A part, fraught with potential peril! After all, this is where someone shows their true mettle. Excited members of the audience yelled, ‘Fran! Fran!’ and then often launched into a monologue expertly countered with, ‘But what is your question?’ You could feel the cloud of bafflement settle over the audience when one person asked what Fran thought of psychopaths. I was impressed that she didn’t immediately come back with, ‘Why, are you one?’ but I suppose a true psychopath wouldn’t have answered that.
I was shocked to learn from the author herself during the show, that only the UK publisher had apparently taken out chunks of her book. I had visions of intense meetings about declarations such as, ‘A salad is not a meal. It is a style.’ Would it upset the ‘Greys for Greens Society’? Would nutritionists write learned articles on why precisely a salad is a meal? Mercifully, I read that in the book so it must have been deemed inoffensive. Even mordant observations on brown rice made the cut. Phew!