DEREK BAILEY/RUINS/ARISTOCRATS - EPIPHANIES
WIRE MAGAZINE COMEDY ISSUE - JUNE 2005

At the Royal Festival Hall in 1997, Derek Bailey played a double header with the Japanese duo Ruins. I seem to recall a moment where septuagenarian genius, lost in concentration, actually bumped into the back wall of the stage, his guitar making a resonating clang. Looking down, he appeared to consider what had happened, and then playfully bashed the instrument into the wall a second time. I laughed, and despite the wealth of different responses Bailey’s music had already offered me, I never though it would provoke laughter. But something great music shares with great comedy is the capacity to surprise, to take us out of ourselves and engender a joyous, and not necessarily mean spirited or cynical, laughter. I’ve subsequently learned Bailey once played in the pit band for Morecambe and Wise, when they toured theatres before their 60’s and 70’s TV success. Banging your guitar into a wall by accident, and then doing it again on purpose in a spirit of clownish curiosity, seems to me like a classic Eric Morecambe move.

There’s a great documentary about stand-up comedy currently winning awards all over the international film festival circuit. The Aristocrats, directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, shows sixty or so stand-ups telling a shaggy dog story enjoyed privately by American comics, but never inflicted on the public. In essence, The Aristocrats, as the gag is known, goes like this, and includes a central section which can be infinitely expanded and altered. A talent scout visits a Broadway booker to sell him a new vaudeville act he has seen. It involves a husband and wife, usually depicted dressed in formal finery, performing acts of escalating obscene sexual violence on each other, and then on their children, and perhaps on any animals, or birds, in the vicinity, to the accompaniment of sophisticated classical music, or cabaret show tunes, or light opera, or whatever. At the end of this description, which Gilbert Godfried is seen spinning out for over an hour, the baffled and sickened booker says, “That sounds appalling. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to see that. What is this act called?”, to which the talent scout replies, with a smile, or a wink, or an attitude of profound regret, or a showbiz snap of the fingers and thumbs, “The Aristocrats.” It’s hilarious. But perhaps you have to be there.

I’ve never subscribed to the idea that stand-up is, along with jazz and comic books, one of America’s great 20th century art forms. This seems a blinkered and isolationist observation. But The Aristocrats started to swing me. Halfway through, soon after one of the comics has gone off on a tangent involving the father repeatedly slamming his penis in a draw for the audience’s edification, somebody makes a case for stand-up’s relationship with jazz. The distinct variations different performers can extrapolate from The Aristocrats tells us that stand-up is about ‘the singer not the song’. Just as John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things is different to the Julie Andrews version, so George Carlin’s Aristocrats, told with a world-weariness that suggests he has been compelled against his will to relate this horrible event, differs vastly from Billy Connolly’s, which is delivered with typically infectious relish.

Carlin, a Fifties Catskills hack, turned Sixties radical, turned elder statesman of American stand-up, wisely draws the distinction between ‘shock’, a term that comes with pejorative overtones, and ‘surprise’, which has no obvious moral dimension. Though the endless variations in different versions of The Aristocrats mainly involve stacking up increasing levels of scatological or sexual symbols, what’s really making us laugh is the pleasure of surprise, of things being simply unexpected and wrong, of reversing the usual order of things. Surprise is the reason a one year old child laughs if you put a shoe on your head. Shoes are for feet, not heads. Even a baby has a sense of inappropriate behaviour. Respectable looking families shouldn’t smash their genitals into draws on stage in the name of entertainment. And guitars shouldn’t be banged into walls by elderly musicians, and then banged again. But how exciting it is to not know what’s going to happen next? Sometimes Derek Bailey’s music makes me feel like a kid on a roller-coaster. And Carlin, like some Native American shaman-clown, makes the need to subvert expectation, to continually surprise, sound like an artist’s Holy Obligation.

It seems to me there are two broadly different approaches to stand-up, and by association to all art, each with their own strengths. At commercial British comedy chains like Jongleurs or The Comedy Store, performers tell you about your life, and things that always happen to you, and you may feel comforted by this. Go beyond the usual venues and you may see acts advance ideas that would not normally have occurred to you. In his book, Improvisation, Derek Bailey assumes a position in opposition to the very act of musical composition itself. But there’s a kind of social need both for songs we can all sing, and for jokes about buses always being late, and men being different to women, and dogs being different to cats. Only the most extreme Wire subscriber would deny the potential of all-embracing, utilitarian art. It just that all-embracing, utilitarian art tends to be a bit shit. When millions wept for their own mortality after the death of Princess Diana, all they were offered was an Elton John song with the words changed a bit.

Great art, whether it’s laboriously crafted or spontaneously generated, tends towards the surprise factor that Carlin describes, and Bailey embodies. Derek Bailey is bold enough to refuse to gloss his work with emotional signifiers, just as George Carlin doesn’t tell jokes as if they’re supposed to be funny. Both make us do the work, and we get the reward of appearing to surprise ourselves. But the breakthrough moment, for me, of seeing Bailey bash his guitar into the back wall of the RFH, was realising that I could be made to laugh, against my will, in an atmosphere of high seriousness, in the temple of culture, by the simple childlike joy of surprise. Derek Bailey, it seemed, was giving me permission to laugh.