Title: Barely Live
Year: 2003
The set-up: She called herself "the Sea Monster" to begin with, as if she were a novelty act – the mythic harridan of all those mother-in-law jokes made flesh, here to get revenge. This was in the late 1980s, when British standup had got itself a reputation as more or less the entertainment wing of the disgruntled left. The arrival on the scene of a large, ferocious and unashamedly unfeminine feminist made sense. Never mind whether that's what Brand actually was.
Until that point, Britain had never really seen a proper female standup hit the big time. Victoria Wood had been a great success with comic songs, as had Joyce Grenfell and others with monologues as well. But there was nobody over here to compare with American stars such as Moms Mabley, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Elayne Boosler and Roseanne Barr.
Donna McPhail, Jenny Eclair and Rhona Cameron were all coming through at around the same time – but Brand had the biggest impact and became the brightest target. She faced plenty of abuse on the club scene and, when she became famous on TV, elsewhere. But then, she'd also been a psychiatric nurse for a decade; whatever the audiences or newspapers threw at her, she'd had worse.
Funny, how? Part of the joke is that the whole idea of Brand as some man-hating ogre is the precise opposite of the truth. She only pretends to be, exaggerating this aspect of herself in order to mock it. "There's lots of different feminist groups," she says here. "It's not as straightforward as just looking like a plumber." Or: "I went on the pill when I was 16, and put on four stone. So that proved to be a very effective contraceptive in its own way."
Yet Brand is so languid and at ease with this material that it becomes almost inspiring. "I've got a psychological problem, which is the opposite of anorexia," she says. "I don't think I look fat." Indeed, that famously bored, monotonous voice of hers can wring laughs out of some otherwise dull lines, such as: "When you have children your house smells very unpleasant all the time." Which is not to say that she lacks zingers. "As far as I'm concerned," she says, "all women's vaginas look like Sir Bernard Ingham, and there's an end to it."
It's not that Brand isn't a feminist (although she calls herself a "liberal" one). Yet the effect of her shows, it seems to me, rather firing up her audience's anger about inequality, is to bring some humour to the subject, and draw the acrimony out. You get the feeling that what Brand really wanted, though she won't say it, is for everyone to get along. Most importantly, she's also brilliantly funny. Not to mention a pioneer for all the female British comics who have followed.
Comic cousins: Sarah Millican, Roseanne Barr, John Pinette, Jack Dee, Jimmy Carr.
Steal this: "Before you go for your smear, try getting absolutely pissed out of your head. It's a bit like an 18-30 holiday all squashed into an hour."
