Playing the Fool ... Sylvester McCoy and David Weston in King Lear. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Shakespeare's jokes: what's the point? How many times have you seen a Shakespearean fool be funny? I've watched plenty of groansome performances by actors frantically telegraphing the indecipherable wordplay, as if meaning might be communicated by mugging alone. (Note to thesps: it can't.) I wonder if these comic routines - topical gags in Jacobean idiom, often low on dramatic or poetic value, and tailored to specific actors who've been dead for four centuries - are always worth persisting with. Nowadays, these once-entertaining scenes can be harder to enjoy than the serious stuff they were designed to offset.
A case in point: I interviewed the original (and still the best!) Scottish Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy, a few weeks ago. McCoy, improbably enough, is playing the Fool to Ian McKellen's current King Lear. It's promising casting as McCoy is no mere actor, but a professional gadabout with a vaudevillian's CV - not to mention notoriety for stuffing ferrets down his trousers. But even he confessed to having difficulty because Shakespeare's jokes were "of their time, and humour doesn't last as long as tragedy".
By way of a demonstration, McCoy cited the following quip: "If a man's brains were in's heels, were't not in danger of kibes?" It's the kind of one-liner that makes lead balloons look featherweight in comparison. McCoy had devised an intricate strategy to make it, if not actually amusing, then as painless as possible: "You tell that joke to the king as if it's their joke. The king knows [what it means], and the Fool knows. What the audience are appreciating is their enjoyment of a private joke."
"It's like the audience are looking in at a performance that is not necessarily performed directly to them," McCoy explained. "Whereas before you could [tell the joke] openly to an audience, and they could laugh because they knew exactly what you meant." But are audiences happy to be (further) excluded by the very sequences Shakespeare constructed to be most audience-friendly? As its writer knew, plays like King Lear need light relief. If the comedy isn't funny, or even comprehensible, then the play is reduced to a far less rich experience than he (presumably) intended.
Can these jokes be made funny? Or are we retaining them out of misplaced respect and academic accuracy? Are we going to the theatre for a lesson in linguistic history or for entertainment? I'd prefer that, when it comes to the jokes, we practice fidelity to Shakespeare's theatrical sense - not exclusively to his words. Clowns should be cast where he wanted clowns (Lee Evans springs to mind) and licensed to devise new pieces of nonsense that are as funny to us as the above King Lear rib-tickler was to the audiences of 1607. As things stand, too many Shakespearean gags, far from generating comic heat, give the 21st-century funny bone kibes. Or should I say chilblains?
