HITTING FUNNY - Why

"Never apologise, never explain."

On the surface this is an eminently sensible maxim. But is it simply an excuse to avoid responsibility for one's actions? I for one would relish an apology and an explanation from some of the world's politicians. With that in mind, what follows is the latter:

Hitting Funny was born out of anger. A deep and strongly felt anger that I believe is not simply personal to myself but is shared by many people in this country and around the world today. It is as an attempt to address a part of that anger and to articulate it in a dramatic and 'entertaining' way that I wrote and now perform this play. You'll notice that I placed the word entertaining in inverted commas in the previous sentence and this is because the notion of entertainment, its definition and purpose, is at the heart of what I am trying to express.

I'll start by looking backwards. When I was a young man, I worshipped stand-up comedians. The word worship is apposite since I decided from an early age that I didn't believe in God and that no organised religion provided me with the answers I was looking for regarding life and its meaning. I was born in the early seventies and my political sensibilities were formed under the long Thatcher government following the dark days of the winter of discontent. I recognised that many believed that what she was doing was evil and wrong but that nobody seemed to want to stop her. So-called 'alternative' comedy came into being as I entered my teenage years and I embraced it for its anti-establishment stance, as any good teenager would. Thatcher was the 'baddie' and the alternative - The Labour Party (I was too young to grasp the notion of socialism) - were the 'goodies'. If we could only get rid of Thatcher and vote in Kinnock then all would be well. I bought and adored the stand-up comedy of Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, the Comic Strip etc. What they were saying felt vital and important to me.

Whilst this was happening I fell in love for the first time. With theatre. Initially it was a love of the art of acting but as I have aged I realise that it is actually with the artform of theatre that my true affection lies. It is unique in its ability to touch us and to move us. The live interaction between performer and audience is to be found in no other form of entertainment and the march of technology and the disassociation that comes with it proves this time and again. I embraced this new love with a passion and was fortunate enough to win a place at the prestigious Royal Academy Of Dramatic Art and, in 1992 after three years training, I entered the acting profession where I have remained ever since.

In the meantime, Thatcher was ousted by Major and finally, in 1997, right thinking people everywhere dragged those corrupt, self serving people from the seats of power and the Labour party took their place. Truly, 'things could only get better'

… And then the scales really fell from my eyes…

My political education began on that gloriously optimistic day and it has been in exponential growth ever since. I realised that we had replaced the Tories with something far worse - a bunch of middle management marketeers whose sole purpose is to hold onto power by any means possible. They outflanked the Tories on the right to make themselves electable, they went much further in the direction of capitalism and consumerism than the Tories would ever have dared, they lied and cheated to get what they wanted, and their mastery of the communication of their message meant that there was no longer an alternative voice for their opponents.

But despite all this I knew that all would be well because the stand-up comedians that I had worshipped as a teenager would be there to speak out and to tell us the truth about what was really going on. Wouldn't they?

When I looked around, I realised that those comedians were still there but they had been subsumed into the Establishment. They all had five-figure salaries and had bought houses in Hampstead. Their material had no edge, no bite - perhaps it still made us laugh but it did little else. They had talked the talk but they had not walked the walk. Their carefully constructed façade of dissent and opposition had crumbled in the face of Mammon. In short, they had sold out.

And who had taken their place? The second generation of 'alternative' comedians were a different breed altogether. Frank Skinner, Jack Dee, Eddie Izzard - these, and many more like them, are the comedians we love today. And why do we love them? Because they are all very funny men. But that's all they are. They seek to entertain us with their wry and sometimes cheeky observations on the absurdities of the human condition. They make us laugh. But they do not make us think.

Feeling a void but not understanding why, I looked around for someone, anyone, to fill the gap - and I landed upon Bill Hicks. I had come across him in the early nineties and, although I had admired him then, I didn't spot him for what he was. When he came back to me in 1997 - almost by chance I found some tapes of his at a bookshop I was working at to make ends meet between acting work - I found that his was the voice I was missing. The only slight problems were that he was American and he was dead. He had died tragically young at the age of 32 in 1994 of pancreatic cancer. But his material was a revelation. Angry, bitter, cynical, despairing - his was the voice I longed to hear. He looked at the world as it really was - a place where marketing men seek to divide us by the things we own and the things we can afford, a place where governments seek to make us fear each other and numb us with the mass media so that we will continue to consume. He was fired by a burning hatred of the human race along with a burning love for it. He was terrifying and utterly hilarious. I could not listen to Bill Hicks' material with complacency, as I could with all the comedians I saw around me, but rather with shock and awe (there's a phrase to juggle with), with my sensibilities being jangled and my emotions being played with. He inspired me in the truest sense of the word - he filled me with the desire to change things - something was wrong, the way I was living was wrong. Comparisons have often been made between Bill Hicks and Jesus (in fact anybody who stays to see the second half of Hitting Funny will see this comparison taken to its logical extreme) and these comparisons make sense: he is preaching. And I was listening. But he was still dead.

Then I learnt that Bill Hicks wasn't the first person to have taken the direction that he took. Forty years previously, still in America, a Jewish comic had walked the walk and talked the talk and the Establishment had hounded him to his death - Lenny Bruce. Bruce's material - shocking, dirty, hilarious - is still relevant today in the same way that Bill Hicks' is. But Lenny Bruce was also dead - he died in 1966 of a morphine overdose, after being driven to distraction by arrest after arrest, court case after court case. I listened to his material and heard it again, the same voice I felt was missing, the same voice I'd heard in the 'alternative' comedians before the power of money and acceptance got too much for them. And finally, I realised that this voice has a name:

Dissent.

What these comedians do is disagree. Like the boy in the story they tell us that the Emperor has no clothes. They examine the things that they are told and shown and given, they look at the world as they are told it should operate and they evaluate what they see - and then they disagree. But they don't just disagree for themselves. They disagree for all of us. They provide a service. When we feel shitty about our lives or our day, when we think that the world is unjust or corrupt - then these comedians allow us the freedom to think that way and in so doing they say the unsayable.

And saying the unsayable is vital to a healthy society. You don't agree? Look at Germany under Hitler. Unpopular speech was taboo. And by unpopular speech, I mean, speaking out against Hitler's government. 'Popular' doesn't necessarily equate to being 'good'. After all, Pop Idol is popular…

Without the freedom to dissent a society becomes drone-like - think 1984 or Brave New World - in fact, without the freedom to dissent a society becomes obsessed with trivial minutiae - celebrities, pointless technology, home decoration - without the freedom to dissent a society numbs the pain they don't comprehend through alcohol and drugs and crime and… hang on, that sounds exactly like our society!

But, I hear you cry, we have the freedom to dissent. Think Rory Bremner, think Have I Got News For You. Think any other form of satire widely available through the mass media… hang on… Let's face it, satire as a form of dissent is now toothless. It's an Establishment-sanctioned form of dissent that allows us to let off steam and convinces us we can change things without actually giving us the ability to do so.

So, with this thinking rapidly coalescing in my head, another question posed itself - if dissent was vital to society, then how come nobody was doing it?

The answer is because it's not commercially viable. Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks were never incredibly successful in their lifetimes. Their work, like the work of Jesus, has grown in influence and popularity since their death. But when they were alive they found it hard to get gigs, their audiences were either small and uncomprehending or small and a preach to the converted and, on top of that, they were both prevented from saying what they wanted to say by the powers-that-be - Bruce by the courts and Hicks by the media's indifference and censorship. Comedians - and by that I mean the majority of working comics who tour the country playing clubs and student unions - make a pretty meagre living. Why would they want to jeopardise that by alienating their audience? They wouldn't. And so - following the glorious capitalist mantra - they give the people what they want.

And what do the people want? Do the people want to be challenged? Do they want to be asked to think about uncomfortable truths that may cause them to change their whole outlook on life and society? Of course they don't. They want a bit of a laugh. A giggle. Some chuckles. And while they're laughing they want to be reassured that everything is alright.

They want to be entertained.

This is where my love of comedy and my love of theatre came together and Hitting Funny as a show was born.

What is entertainment? Why do we need it? Why do we seek it out

I've spent the past twenty years of my life entertaining people in one way or another, both as an amateur and as a professional. I've appeared in countless stage productions of dramas, comedies, musicals and I've watched as the medium that I love has become more and more obsolete. Audiences become smaller and smaller and the people that do come to the theatre fall into specific groups: older people who are looking for an evening out with friends, perhaps a meal before the show, a drink in the interval and something to talk about at a dinner party; School kids who have been forced to come because they are doing the play for GCSE and either sit through the show (more than likely yet another production of Romeo & Juliet) with their heads constantly buried in their notepads, unable to take in the story since they need notes for their essay and can't write it from memory - or they sit, bored, texting their friend two seats away, eating sweets, talking, longing for it to be over. There are other groups too but the quality that unites them all is boredom. People come to the theatre because they have bought a ticket for something and they know precisely what experience they will have. If it's Shakespeare then the evening will be long and they won't be able to catch all the words but they will feel that they have done something 'worthy' by coming. If it's a comedy then they will laugh and forget the evening by the time they get in their car, etc.

But none of this is what entertainment is for and it is why theatre as an artform is dying. The purpose of entertainment, to quote Shakespeare, is to "hold the mirror up to nature." And nature, in all her glory, is a pretty extraordinary, ugly, terrifying, beautiful, appalling thing. When I buy a ticket to a piece of theatre I believe I am buying a piece of the unknown. I want the evening to take me by the scruff of the neck and force me to look under the stone that I'd really rather not look under. I want to be shaken, enthralled, appalled and delighted. I want to feel something. In short, I want catharsis.

And this is where theatre and comedy meet. The purpose of stand-up comedy is catharsis. We give the comedian licence to say the unsayable for us and, by doing just that, the comedian gives us licence to free all the pent-up emotions that we have built up. It's a pressure valve for society and a vital one. So vital that it predates either comedy or theatre. In ancient civilisations, the shamans were a vital part of every tribe. They gave catharsis and cast out the evil spirits by performing and 'entertaining' around the campfire. They were the proto-actors and comedians - as I talk about at great speed in Hitting Funny. The purpose of comedy and theatre is the same since they sprang from the same root - catharsis. But the two branches went in different directions - theatre towards narrative and comedy towards anarchy. Clowns (again discussed in the play) were the first comedians and the true spirit of the clown is anarchy. He is the id, the eternal child who will not do what he is told and his spirit lives on today in stand-up comedians.

Or at least it should do…

So, these are the seeds of the play. How to articulate this in a dramatic way? How to create a hybrid of stand-up and theatre? I needed to articulate the dilemma in a character. The dilemma is the perennial one: Art versus Commerce, Idealism versus Pragmatism. Or as I say in the play - sell out or sell in?

So, I created the character of Chris Rich - a young (well, as young as I am), ambitious comedian who is in the grips of this dilemma. Should he take his material into the darker, edgier realms that will fulfil his role as an ancestor of the clown but lose him his audience? Or should he 'give the people what they want' and provide them with safe, nice, funny observations about the difficulties of making a toaster work?

The play falls into two halves: set up and punchline, if you will. In the first half, Chris is grappling with the dilemma in front of the live audience, he is pulled this way and that. The material is sexual in nature since this mirrors exactly the majority of stand-up comedians' 'lowest common denominator' material. But the tone continues to darken and, like a comic suicide bomber, destroying himself to be reborn, he takes it to its logical extreme into the wholly reprehensible. It is only then that the debate can become real and present for the audience who are (hopefully) no longer merely passive observers but active participants. How far is too far? How low is too low? What is comedy for? Simple entertainment or something more? And finally (and perhaps most importantly), who is responsible for the content of the entertainment we receive? Is it the comedian or is it the audience? Which comes first - market or product? Chicken or egg?

So within this structure the first half of the play sets out to offend, to stimulate, to infuriate, to embarrass - the second half then questions, demands, rages and pleads.

The purpose of the play is to inspire debate. Plain and simple. And you cannot inspire debate without challenging opinions. And you cannot challenge opinions without forcing people to look at things they would rather not see. If an audience member leaves Hitting Funny and they are angry or appalled, invigorated or disgusted - but they talk about the play for the next hours, days, weeks - debating whether it was right or wrong - then I consider that a success. If they get in their cars and wonder where they can pick up some chips then I have failed. As someone said to me after a recent performance: 'Rather this than apathy.'

This is what I set out to do and I believe the piece succeeds on these terms. Anybody is entitled to disagree with me, of course, since that is the nature of debate. But, if they disagree, I hope they will recognise that this doesn't mean that my argument is without validity. To quote a line that has now been cut from the script: "I may be wrong … but that doesn't make you right."

So much for the explanation - what about the apology?

The material in Hitting Funny is offensive. I know it's offensive and any right thinking person should know it's offensive. But it is so for a clear purpose - as I hope I've articulated above. Because the material is offensive the company have taken the step of billing the show as being 'For Adults Only' meaning that the play is unsuitable for anyone under the age of eighteen. Beyond this point, how far should we show our hand? Should we, as cinemas are now forced to do, give a detailed breakdown of the show's content? "If you are offended by jokes about paedophilia and coprophilia then please stay away"? Perhaps the notice should read: "If you don't understand irony, then this isn't the show for you"? Our society is now so litigious and 'blame obsessed' that it would seem that every eventuality of what a person may feel must be guarded against. "Warning! You may feel several emotions whilst watching this show!" Also, were we to provide a more detailed warning of the show's content, then we would have the same problem as when theatres are forced to put up signs saying: "There will be a gunshot during this performance." The audience would be waiting for the offensive moments in exactly the same way that we wait with our fingers hovering over our ears for the gunshot. This would completely neuter the purpose of the play. Debate comes when people's beliefs and ideas are challenged and the only way to challenge is to surprise. I want people to experience this play - to feel raw and exhausted at the end of it, I want to take them on a journey and give them food for thought and the only way to do this is if it's a 'Magical Mystery Tour' - if they know where we're going then it'll spoil the surprise.

This leads me on to a wider point: the very nature of what is or is not offensive - something of an obsession in the country in recent times. Offence is subjective. How can it not be? What's offensive to you is not necessarily offensive to me. For example, I am not offended by coprophilia. I don't practice it and have no desire to but what two (or more) consenting adults choose to do in the privacy of their own homes is entirely their concern. And if they choose to display their activity on the Internet then that too is entirely their concern. I am not offended in any way. Provided that no one is forced to do anything against their will and that all the participants are adults then, in my opinion, they are free to do whatever they please for pleasure. I am also not offended by the notion of a comedian (or anyone else for that matter) describing such an act to me in graphic detail. I might find it distasteful and shocking but I would not be offended. Because they are words and I am not offended by words. I am not offended by swear words or any form of derogatory language, I am not offended by racial abuse or the bastardisation of language in any way. Words don't offend me and nor should they you. It is only in the intention behind a word that the offence occurs. The suppression of a word is where the offence occurs. The sweeping under the carpet of words or notions that we don't like is where the offence occurs. As the old children's taunt proclaims: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

So what does offend me? Well, just off the top of my head…

I'm offended that I live in a society that values people by their financial worth and nothing else. I'm offended that I can't walk into a newsagent or turn on the television without having my sexuality manipulated to try and sell me something I neither want nor need. I'm offended that our politicians complain of voter apathy when our political system of 'first past the post' won't allow the voter's true voice to be heard. I'm offended that what passes for entertainment in this country is simply a badly made, ill-thought-out marketing tool. I'm offended that my telephone rings ten times a day with people trying to sell me things I don't want. I'm offended that the word 'choice' is thrown in my face day in day out whilst more small shops close and more supermarkets open. I'm offended at the way the news media and journalists in general boil down complex information to 'we're the good guys and these are the bad guys'. I'm offended that we continue to believe that we are the good guys when we've systematically raped the developing world to prop up our lifestyles. I'm offended that we are unable to understand why someone who is desperately poor and disenfranchised, who believes their religious beliefs are being flouted by the West and has watched their culture be utterly destroyed might want to take some kind of revenge. I'm offended that I live in a country that trumpets its human rights record whilst holding people without charge or trial. I'm offended that my government should seek to erode the human rights of any person, regardless of their views or opinions. I'm offended that I live in a country that is still unable to provide a decent level of sexual education to its young people, leading to STDs, the spread of HIV and the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe, whilst Page Three girls smile at me from the newsagent's shelf. I'm offended that the so-called 'moral majority' can dictate what I may or may not watch on my television. I'm offended that I live in a country that sanctioned an illegal war, didn't keep count of the number of civilians it killed, is in bed with one of the most insidious, imperialist regimes the world has ever seen, and claims to have done it all in the name of freedom. I'm offended that one single person has more than their fair share when one other person has less. I'm offended that I live in a country where people care more about the minutiae of a celebrity's sex life than they do about their next door neighbour's well being. I'm offended that I live in a country that is systematically selling off its public utilities to the private sector when we know categorically that profits always come before people. I'm offended that we had to invent the term 'compassion fatigue'. And I'm offended that we blame so much and understand so little.

All these things and many more offend me daily. But there's one other thing that offends me…
That anybody should think I respect people so little that I would write and perform a piece of theatre with the deliberate intention of offending them simply for its own sake.

That really offends me. In fact, it makes me incredibly angry.

And to anybody who thinks that - I'd like an apology.

Copyright © Philip Ralph 2005