After an eventful 18 months away, Zach Zucker is back on a London stage, and making a mess of it. His hapless standup alter ego, Jack Tucker, dances into this trendy Dalston bar in an intriguingly damp suit, then stumbles, plummets and catapults his pint across the room quite spectacularly.
It’s a perfectly executed bit of business, but few tonight will be thinking: “Now there’s a man to entrust with lots of vital, fragile kit.” And yet that happened, last summer, on his return to Los Angeles. A professional clown helped run one of the highest-profile vaccination centres in the world.
“I was like the head of training and recruiting for this entire operation at Dodger Stadium,” says the proud, still slightly incredulous comedian. New colleagues were sceptical, but years of performing and promoting proved surprisingly transferrable skills: “The CEO, and Sean and the mayor, told me I created the culture onsite,” he says. “Bringing lightness to extremely heavy stuff.” Sean is the actor Sean Penn, co-founder of CORE, the non-profit behind it. This capable clown arranged food donations, vehicles and major concerts, too.
Now though, with that high-status mission complete, Zucker is back wearing Tucker’s sweaty suit. Which raises an interesting question for such offbeat character acts: what compels you to play these idiots?
Zucker – trained by Philippe Gaulier in France, and now also a clown teacher – is defiantly leftfield, and Tucker actively divides audiences. Initially created to parody lazy standups, he’s become more than just a boorish, boozy hack. Zucker’s hang-ups have seeped in too. “My buddy said that Jack Tucker is the perfect character for me, because it drains all of my bad habits to make me look like a genius,” he says. “The similarities: that fear of ‘am I just bad?’ That desperation. There’s a part of me that feels the sadness that Tucker has. He’s a sweet guy. He just desperately loves to perform.”
Perhaps Zucker represents all live entertainers, post-lockdown? “He’ll never quit, and I’ll never quit. There’s nothing that will make me stop performing. No matter how many people stop coming.”
Made-up characters can be oddly inspirational. Jay Bennett’s jobbing 1980s singer, Yasmine Day, has a similar origin to Tucker: both began as silly solo experiments when double-act partners were busy. While Bennett admits to fearing onstage embarrassment, the indefatigable Day is pure budget showbiz, and her talc-puffing entrance is particularly splendid. It may be in the blood.
“My mum was a Benny Hill dancer,” Bennett reveals. “A Hill’s Angel. I grew up watching this weird background stuff, the smoke machines. So I really liked the idea of putting on a really big show, but with such limits.”
Day initially covered 80s classics – Toto’s Africa, with just the vowels – but now belts out Bennett originals. Singing was the original plan, and there’s a deeper message here, “how older women in the entertainment industry slowly become irrelevant. I do think there’s an innate fear in myself, that once I get older the industry won’t acknowledge me. Yasmine doesn’t care and keeps going.”
Does she envy Day’s mentality? “I think you do have to be slightly delusional, in quite a tough industry. I definitely feel more confident after I’ve played her. To do such ridiculous things on stage, it does make me think in my day-to-day life I can just tackle anything.”
That character could potentially grace big stages, but others prefer niche corners. Currently prepping a decade-celebrating show at the Soho theatre is Paul Vickers’ oddball puppet master, Mr Twonkey. Vickers previously fronted John Peel favourites Dawn of the Replicants, but now airs his inventive songs and soundscapes via absurdist comedy. Which sometimes feels like a high-wire act.
“I’m a vulnerable man, my show involves a big leap of faith, as it’s like believing in a fairytale,” Vickers admits. “Those that go with me enjoy the ride; get something out it. Those that don’t try and attack me, or Chris Hutchinson.”
Hutchinson is Vickers’ puppet lion, and onstage foil. At one bus-based family show “I asked ‘what shall we do with Chris?’ And a young boy shouted out ‘Burn him!’ And that started a chain reaction of the whole bus chanting ‘Burn him! Burn him!’”
It can be painful, but Twonkey prevails, and you sense that Vickers would be lost without him. “It’s important to play, even as an adult,” he concurs.
You can overdo it, particularly when online streaming. Last year Bilal Zafar enjoyed unexpected lockdown success as the fictional “gaffer” of a video-game football team, PES United. But spending hundreds of hours in character, as live gigs also returned, recently forced an overdue break. “I woke up one morning, like, ‘I can’t do anything,’” he says. “My brain stopped working.”
Usually, getting to be someone else for hours “really cheers me up”, he says. Zafar has even made a whole PES United film, with a tour planned soon, but he’ll not play the gaffer live, yet. As a standup, he never envisioned doing characters – “I didn’t have the confidence” – but as these lockdown streams progressed, PES United’s personnel developed personalities. Which allows for some low-key satire.
“My guy, he’s definitely a Brexiteer, but doesn’t really know why,” says Zafar, who cites the faux-furious US comic Tim Heidecker as one influence. Both often tweet in character, which could cause confusion, but tone is everything. Early on, Zafar’s stream attracted a “laddish-type crowd, saying inappropriate jokes,” he admits. “They’ve all gone as it got more surreal.”
These varied creations can also deal with more personal matters. Jack Tucker’s hectic shows regularly pause for poignant interludes about how comedy caused issues back home, “something that also rings true for me”, Zucker admits.Tackling family dramas head-on, meanwhile, is Sooz Kempner, via some innovative character interactions. One live show featured the comic Skyping her teenage self; another framed Kempner as “a deluded loser”, then introduced a significant guest in an almost Shakespearean twist.
“I arrived as a version of my dad,” she says. “I’d already talked about him in a previous show – I cut ties with him in 2011 – and it was sort of an Easter egg for people who’d seen that; and a character-based explanation for some of my insecurities.”
Ironically, Kempner and that character then bonded. He developed into Malcolm, “an anti-woke clueless recently divorced man who believes he’s a big online superstar,” she explains. Kempner also grew a healthy lockdown audience online, and now does “two-hour-plus streams as him on Twitch”. To much bigger crowds than that live show. But how does her real mother find Malcolm? “Excruciating,” she says, “and hilarious.”
Characters can evolve, or become awkward. Zucker plans to shelve Jack Tucker soon, before the alter ego completely takes over his live shows “and it terrifies me to be myself, again”. But he’ll return. “I would love to do Tucker at 70 years old,” muses the comic. “I’d be so curious to see what that show is like.” Fewer spectacular pratfalls, presumably.
