I’ve been listening to Liam Williams’s recent Comedian’s Comedian podcast interview with Stuart Goldsmith, which is packed with interesting stuff – about Williams not actually enjoying performing standup comedy; about how comedy that channels difficult personal feelings can become a prison, a means of getting trapped with those feelings long after they might naturally have dispersed. But I was also grabbed by an exchange at the end of the interview, when Goldsmith reminds Williams of a poetic turn of phrase deployed in his first standup show. “Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?” it goes. “Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off?” Goldsmith had thought the line was Williams’s, and been duly impressed. In fact, as Williams freely admits, it’s a quote from Philip Larkin.
There follows a discussion of Williams’s right to use Larkin’s words; Goldsmith’s interest is in the degree to which the standup passed them off as his own. But more interesting to me is the naturalness with which Williams defends the use of high-culture references in his (some would say) low-culture artform. Elsewhere in the interview, he cites the seamless integration of intellectual and silly as Monty Python’s most attractive quality. Goldsmith’s concerns about his use of Larkin’s verse are airily dismissed: “I do enjoy having a magpie approach to high literature, [to splicing] high culture into standup. I like the effect that creates, having something very poetic next to a joke about wanking.”
Does it matter that Goldsmith didn’t recognise the sample? Casting my mind back to Williams’s first show, I don’t think I recognised it either. But it’s a win-win. Goldsmith, I and other Larkin un-initiates got to encounter a standup with a remarkably lyrical facility to go with his jaundiced take on modern living and generational angst. Others get a frisson of pleasure from Williams’s droll, postmodern cultural cut-and-paste job. And if we Larkin innocents later discover what Williams was up to, so much the better – the richness of his comedy has been added to belatedly, and we’ve also been introduced to something excellent that we may never otherwise have encountered.
Why wouldn’t a standup, then, make erudite references in his or her comedy? Assuming, of course, that they’re interested in those supposedly loftier artforms in the first place. Most standups are; they’re usually pretty smart people. Some make a cheerful virtue of it: Stewart Lee, obviously; Sara Pascoe. Josie Long’s Walt Whitman routine leaps to mind. And yet, more often I see comedians apologising for being intelligent, faux-mocking their own presumption, lest this or that allusion to ballet or opera or art alienate their mainstream crowd. Witness Russell Brand on his Messiah Complex tour, seeking the audience’s forgiveness for all “the clever things” in his show. Or Imran Yusuf excusing himself for using the word “nonchalant”. Or Jimmy Carr making a joke about Marlowe’s supposed authorship of the works of Shakespeare, then instantly apologising for being “a bit clever”.
More than other artforms, there’s something about comedy that is committedly demotic. It’s the artform that punctures pomposity, right? That reveals the emperor’s new clothes. There’s an unpretentiousness about it, but one that too easily shades into anti-intellectualism. Factor in the financial/career opportunities made available by the mass-market comedy boom and you have another reason why comedians are terrified to seem elitist. Then mix in the wider trend alluded to by Tom Stoppard last year when he complained that audiences no longer pick up the cultural allusions in his plays. “It’s very rare to connect to an audience except on a level lower than you would want to connect them on,” said Stoppard. “You could raise it a notch and you might lose an eighth of them. It’s to do with reference and allusion.”
It’s hard to disagree with Stoppard when he reports that audiences are less fluent in high- or classical culture than when he started writing. It’s not for me to say whether that’s a good or bad thing; there are other types of equally valid culture, and Stoppard’s idea of what audiences should understand will be different to yours or mine. But I think it’s a good thing in principle that artists and entertainers don’t self-censor when they find a “reference [or] allusion” (or even a polysyllabic word) that enriches their work. Not the least of the things comedy can do is widen our perspective on the world and introduce us to new ideas. Something inside me dies when a standup apologises for saying something only averagely erudite: it’s depressing, and it shores up anti-intellectual prejudices. Long live Williams’s Larkin quotes, whether they’re followed by a wanking joke or otherwise.
