Q&A with Dawn French, Jimmy Carr and Alexei Sayle

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Q&A with Dawn French, Jimmy Carr and Alexei Sayle

(extended version) - December 2007

Radio Times talked to Dawn French about her comedy documentary series, Dawn French's Boys Who Do: Comedy. And in the spirit of the show, we also brought in Jimmy Carr and Alexei Sayle to discuss the series - and answer the age old question of whether there's a difference between the sexes when it comes to creating comedy.

Dawn French: I'm always being asked about this and I've always been hesitant to say whether there is or not. I thought making these programmes might answer that question. Now I think that there isn't much of a difference. Except, when I asked the women if they'd do the show they would either say yes or no. The men, with the odd exception - like these two - were much more cagey and wanted to know who else was doing it and what the "deal" was even though there wasn't a deal. The men were harder work to get on the programme.

Is comedy a proper job?

DF: I don't think it's a proper job, but I think that's maybe to do with my stuff. I've had a bit of a telling off for saying that it's not a proper job and I'm grateful for that.

Who from?

DF: Virtually everyone. [laughs] It doesn't feel like a proper job in some ways because you enjoy it, but it is hard work. There are some people who are evangelical about it and think we cannot live without comedians.

Jimmy Carr: [adopts a mock pompous voice] "It's possibly not for us to say..."

DF: But if others choose to think we are special....

Why do people need comedy?

Alexei Sayle: I feel it's part of a tradition that you can take all the way back to a man in a cave telling stories around a campfire. That is pretentious but it's also true, that there's always been an individual with an impulse to entertain the rest of the tribe. It's absolutely timeless. We're a modern version of that, obviously, but with DVDs to sell.

DF: Cavemen with merchandise.

JC: When you hear people interviewed about comedy, you would imagine that only people getting paid to do comedy bother doing it, but in fact it's just a part of everyday life and especially in this country more than anywhere else in the world. Someone having a sense of humour failure here is a disaster whether you're a banker, lawyer or you sweep the streets. There's something peculiar about Britain and the number of comedians here. There are very funny people in everyday life. We're just privileged that we do that for a living, but it's not as if if we stopped, people would say, "We need comedy". The funniest thing you've ever heard in your life is from your mates, it's not from a comedian.

DF: Or from your family. My brother is much funnier than me but he wouldn't dream of doing it for a job. That's why I have a problem with it.

JC: I'm so grateful for that. When you talk to your friends who are much funnier than you, you think, thank f*** they're not in the game!

And why is it such a British thing?

JC: I don't think there's any one thing that you can point to and say that's why there's a British sense of humour. It's partly because of the melting pot and the rich cultural diversity and the language and social mores, hang-ups and class system. It's produced a lot of great comedians but it's also produced a lot of laughs in everyday life. You can joke in most situations here and it would seem inappropriate not to. I don't think I've ever heard a eulogy without a gag in it.

Does comedy have more prestige attached to it for men than women?

DF: I certainly think that men who are funny are prized more highly by women, than vice versa. When I was younger I remember tempering what I'd say in a group with men around because I was worried I might emasculate a man, which is a bizarre and complicated thing.

Why does someone become a comedian?

AS: I think you have a slightly abnormal desire for recognition and then you find out you're funny and so you use that. In my case, first of all I wanted to be famous, I wanted to be seen as exceptional. After that I found that I could do that by being funny. People who become successful, it's not about the raw talent, it's about that drive. There are many footballers as good as David Beckham but they haven't got his application to practice, to make those connections, to marry that woman.

JC: [to Alexei] I was very interested in your journey in all of this because you were a huge influence on me. Is it emotional maturity that stopped you being a stand-up and choose to be a writer? Because it's struck me that maybe I'm emotionally retarded because I have to do 140 gigs a year and maybe you're the light at the end of the tunnel.

Jimmy really needs you to say yes.

AS: Yeah. Which is not to say that I'd claim any mental serenity.

If you're doing 140 gigs a year, how scared do you get before you go on stage?

JC: Pretty scared. A lot of dry retching early on in the tour. You might have done it 140 times that year, but it's a new town and you want to be funny and it's two hours and you're trying to remember 250 jokes. It's not easy. I don't get used to doing that in the same way that I don't get used to this. Sitting around here seems like I've won a competition or I have some dreadful disease and I have a few weeks left. But all those nerves, you tell yourself it's just adrenaline, so that's fine.

AS: My experience of it - and one of the reasons why I stopped doing it - is that the whole day is focussed on those two hours and you just spend the rest of the day in a kind of fog.

What about the feelings after the gig? Exhilarated or something else? If you're in a band there are others to share it with, but a comedian is normally by him or herself.

DF: I think it's a very dangerous time, personally. I know that from Len. You feel a bit mighty, mightier than you are. You've had this massive approval which is real, but not at all real at the same time and it can't continue like that.

JC: The difference between comedians and rock stars is that the latter are on a pedestal, whereas comedians are seen as not that special, just like their audience. I don't think people are that impressed by comedians, which is quite nice. It makes the world quite friendly.

DF: It's like when people talk about Eric Morecambe. I wish Eric Morecambe had been my dad, although I loved my dad. People think, "Wouldn't it be great if he was in your family?" People love you for being funny in a way that they don't musicians. I don't want Mick Jagger to be my dad for instance.

What are you like after gigs?

JC: I stick around normally for a couple of hours and sign things. It's like being a country vicar after a service. You go out into the lobby and sign things. Lovely service, thanks very much. Then I tend to drive home. There's nothing like your own bed. And thank God for Sky Plus.

Do you think it's an unhealthy profession, you put yourself through a lot of stress, big highs and then the comedowns, etc?

AS: Yes. I think it's very bad for you. Bad for your soul. [laughs]

JC: Of course, I sold mine so that's not really my concern.

DF: On the programme, Jackie Mason described comedy as a sickness. Everybody involved in comedy is somehow sick and you have got to feed this need. A kind of delicious sickness.

JC: You know Jackie's only 34?

DF:[laughing] He's very sick.

JC: Getting back to what we were saying about whether this is a serious profession, I was running full pelt away from a proper job when I got into this. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful.

Dawn and Alexei, you were both pioneers of "alternative comedy" in the late 70s, and in fact you, Alexei, were partly responsible for taking on French and Saunders for the Comic Strip. What are your memories of them back then?

AS: What was unique about you and Jennifer and what we really valued about you and why we took you on at half the pay of the rest of the group...

DF: [shrieking] Yes! You did!

AS: You didn't have any ideology. There were so many women whose routines were just, "Tampax, tampax, men are s***bags, tampax, periods, men are s***, ban the bomb. Goodnight." You and Jennifer were unselfconsciously funny. You didn't do anything about being women and that was rare and still seems rare. You had no ideology, you just wanted to be funny.

DF: We didn't know that you were supposed to be saying something important. Because of being part of that group, we were suddenly being described as politically aware and we were just doing jokes about fish.

JC: I think rather than the difference between men and women comics, there's actually a bigger difference between comics who have something to say and comics who have nothing to say. And I don't mean that in a bad way, because I put myself in that latter group very firmly. You won't come out of my show with any fresh insight. I'm adding no value to your life whatsoever. There's great political comics around today like Rob Newman who's making extraordinary, erudite points and being very funny.

Do you analyse everything to see if it's funny, to the point where you drive yourself and others mad?

JC: I find I get incredibly irritating when I'm doing panel shows, like QI. I get very nervous doing that because I always feel outgunned, so I'm in quiz show mode for about three days before the show. If I go to buy a paper in the morning I'm firing zingers at the newsagent, hitting him with one-liners and put-downs. Tough to live with I think.

AS: You start looking at things like a terrible plane crash in Indonesia and think, could I get a couple of minutes out of that?

So do you feel that you can explain why something is funny?

JC: Well, I wrote a book about it so try me.

A joke I heard yesterday told by Paul Merton. A man comes home and says to his wife, "I've just heard a shocking piece of gossip. Apparently our milkman has had sex with every woman on this street apart from one". And she says, "Yeah, that'll be that stuck-up cow at number 17". Why's that funny?

JC: It works in the same way as every other joke. Two stories in one. The first story makes you make an assumption and you realise that the assumption is erroneous in the punchline. It's the sudden revelation of a previously concealed fact.

DF: [Laughing, but clearly impressed] OK!

JC: The amazing thing is that nearly all jokes work in the same way. It's, "Oh I didn't realise that that was what you're saying. Oh, that's what was happening."

AS: I think you might just have killed the impulse for comedy in me.

JC: There's a great quote from a French writer, "Analysing jokes is like dissecting a frog. No-one's that interested and the frog dies." That's about right, isn't it?

DF: What about the man who had an orange for a head? Barman asks him why he has an orange for his head and he explains that the genie gave him three wishes. "With the first I wished to be rich as Croesus and I am, and then I asked for peace in Northern Ireland and there is. Then the genie said, "Do something for yourself", so I wished that I had an orange for a head.

JC: That works because you've heard loads of those "three wishes" jokes before and it's a joke on the joke. It's meta-humour. It's like I always say, "If I had three wishes, by the third wish my penis would be back to its original size."

What's the worst things have got at a gig?

AS: Well two of my gigs in the early days turned into quite serious riots, and I remember seeing Keith Allen throwing darts at the audience...[to Jimmy] Doesn't it ever get violent these days?

JC: It never does as far as I know. I've seen some quite risky material performed, but it's a well-trodden route these days. It's a motorway now, it was a gravel track when you were there. Audiences know what to expect now.

What are the taboos today?

JC: Don't do anything about race unless you're Chris Rock. You don't want to be involved in that.

AS: When people are in special interest groups, the thrill for them is to control the behaviour of other people and to take control of their language and the national discourse. People have found that being outraged - whether you're a Muslim or a Christian or a Zionist or animal rights or pro-vivisection - being outraged is the shortest route to controlling other people and everybody's getting into that now and it's a horrible facet of modern life.

Do you find it hard to switch off from being funny or do you know people who are like that?

DF: Well, one moment that happened in my life was when my husband who I'd just married ten minutes before, decided to use his chance to get up at the wedding, to do a routine. He had a microphone, he had a captive audience and he didn't want to waste the opportunity. Didn't mention me, the wedding, anything about the day. He'd been on tour and he had some gags in his head and he went straight into it. Luckily, Alexei made the proper speech that day, thank God.

JC: My only question there, genuinely, is how did he do? Good gig?

DF: It went down well with everyone except me.

JC: Well that's fine. There's always one in every audience.

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