I can see why you might think it’d be alarming. I’m in the audience at Sam Campbell’s nutty late-night comedy show (I would say minding my own business, but that’s not quite true) when Campbell conjures photographs of three people on his upstage screen. “These are my enemies,” he says. My companion pokes me in the ribs – one of them is me. Next thing I know, Campbell (who won the prestigious Barry award in Melbourne with this show) is pointing a gun at the three headshots. I hear the crack of a pistol, and the image of my face collapses in a burst of cartoon blood. I’ve just watched a comedian blow my brains out live on stage.
In other circumstances, this might be – as they say these days – “triggering” for me. We’re permitted, I think, to be sensitive to images of ourselves being shot in the head. But I’m a live-comedy critic, I’ve got a thick skin when it comes to offence – and it’s not a new experience for me to cower in the audience while a comedian gets laughs at my expense. I remember an Edinburgh fringe many years ago when friends kept coming up to me saying: “Have you heard what Daniel Kitson is saying about you on stage?” I hadn’t, I didn’t really want to, but I soon did. Friends, it turns out, just can’t keep incitements to sexual violence towards comedy reviewers to themselves.
Ah, well – if there’s one thing worse than being talked about… What was surprising, in both Kitson and Campbell’s case, was that I’d never given either of them a bad review. I’d never reviewed Campbell at all – although I did write about the difficulties he had, two Edinburghs ago, playing to a single-figure audience. What also distinguished Campbell’s critic-bashing was that he didn’t mention me by name. Few, if anyone, in his audience will know (or care) that the “enemy” in question was the Guardian’s comedy reviewer. Using my image must have been the innest of in-jokes, for Campbell’s own amusement or that of a handful of his comedy pals.
More often, a comedian jokes about a critic because it makes them look rebellious – careless of their reputation, kicking against supposed authority. When anti-comedian Luke McQueen interrupts his gigs to try to smoke critics out of his audience – “Brian Logan? Which one of you is Brian Logan?” – the joke may partly be my discomfort (and it’s excruciating) but is mainly McQueen’s heedlessness of the consequences. His persona is that of the professional suicide; bullying reviewers fits the narrative. When Stewart Lee mocked me on stage for taking credit for the quality of British comedy (I’d suggested in print that it had benefited from a lively critical culture) – well, touché, really. I had it coming.
My oddest experience of suddenly featuring in a show I’d come to watch was when Sara Pascoe (as part of a live agony-aunt panel show with Jack Dee) discussed the recurring sex dreams she was having about the Guardian’s comedy critic. It became the show’s running joke, and how the audience laughed! Can you imagine anything more absurd than a sex dream about a critic! I shrunk into my seat, weirdly self-conscious even though – as usual – no one else present had the faintest idea that This Guy was the butt of the joke.
Or was I? In fact, what’s really alienating about my occasional comedy-show cameos is that they’re not (I hope) really about me at all. It’s the reason I can watch Sam Campbell splatter my grey matter across his stage and bat not an eyelid. For these comedians’ purposes, I’m just a prick to kick against, an establishment to bring down, a convenient symbol – like Les Dawson’s mother-in-law – of joyless authority. Comedy needs someone to do that job. It may cause me the occasional uneasy moment, but I’m happy to be of service.
