{"id":324,"date":"2013-02-26T17:22:46","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T01:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/?p=324"},"modified":"2013-02-26T17:22:46","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T01:22:46","slug":"about-the-footlights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/about-the-footlights\/","title":{"rendered":"About The Footlights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Footlights!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>A Hundred Years Of Cambridge Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b>By Robert Hewison<\/a><\/p>\n

Foreword by Eric Idle<\/p>\n

Comedy is a very odd activity.\u00a0 To stand on a stage in front of hundreds of other people and make them laugh is a very strange thing to do.\u00a0 For some bizarre anthropological reason, since earliest time a few people have found it necessary to be amusing.\u00a0 Why should this be so?\u00a0 Clearly when someone goes to such lengths to attract the admiration of strangers we can observe that they must feel desperately unloved, but this does not explain why we, the audience, should tolerate and actively encourage them in their weird behavior.\u00a0 Nor why comedy should prove to be so popular or so universal.<\/p>\n

It seems no coincidence that England, a land rich in absurdities, should be so rich in comedians.\u00a0 Writing about comedy is difficult, but it is not half so difficult as writing comedy.\u00a0 For example, I am writing in this room to which I have come every morning for the past few weeks, but today is different.\u00a0 Today I have only to write about<\/i> comedy, I don\u2019t actually have to write the bloody stuff itself.\u00a0 If I\u2019m wrong when I\u2019m writing about comedy then some minor critic in Penge will abuse me over his saltimbocca, but if I\u2019m wrong when I\u2019m writing comedy then \u2013 horror of horrors \u2013 nobody laughs: there is nothing but the sound of one hand clapping.\u00a0 It is this potential result that gives comedy its edge.\u00a0 It is a bit like tightrope walking.\u00a0 You really have to do it to know it, and indeed that is also the only way to learn how to do it.<\/p>\n

If it were nothing more than gilded youths dressing up as women then you could hardly be blamed for thinking of the Cambridge Footlights as an effete collection of privileged wankers.\u00a0 It has from time to time been just that, but collectively it is far more than that, for it has proved to be a durable training ground for people who have gone on to become excellent in their own right.\u00a0 This is Footlights\u2019 triumph and its justification.\u00a0 It is also preeminently a self-inventing form.\u00a0 No University Official stepped forward and said \u2018Let there be Footlights.\u2019\u00a0 In fact they have flourished so healthily without direct encouragement that this might be seen as yet another triumph for Cambridge subversion.<\/p>\n

Comedy is a shared experience.\u00a0 Without an audience it is nothing.\u00a0 Far more so than tragedy, comedy is intimately connected with the audience\u2019s response.\u00a0 We weep alone, but we all laugh together.\u00a0 It is this shared communality that makes it so powerful and so popular.\u00a0 It is constantly reminding us of our own absurdity in this vast universe.\u00a0 It is frequently to do with scale, cutting us down to size, laughing at our human weaknesses.\u00a0 For a few moments it removes us from the prison of our own personalities, the trap of our own self-created selves, and unites us in a warm shared response by making us laugh at the trivia in which we continually enmesh ourselves.\u00a0 It is an uplifting experience.\u00a0 We are taken out of ourselves, and made to laugh at ourselves.\u00a0 This is both slightly painful (laughing does hurt) and healthy (because it is done communally).\u00a0 It is instant group therapy.<\/p>\n

It achieves this effect by demonstration rather than persuasion.\u00a0 We do not decide to laugh, we find ourselves laughing.\u00a0 In the dark amidst hundreds of strangers we suddenly find ourselves united in a tribal explosion of noise, which begins in a shout of recognition and ends in the sound of a gurgling drain or a goose being strangled.\u00a0 For a few seconds we are all barking mad together.<\/p>\n

To be on the other side of a laugh, causing it, triggering it and feeling the great wave of human noise come back at you, is one of the most powerful and addictive sensations that there is.\u00a0 It is a great welcoming sound that wraps round the performer, enmeshing him in approval.\u00a0 He can learn to play with it, to toy with the audience\u2019s expectations, to tickle the laugh, to surf along it, hold it back and then finally release it, but he can learn this only by doing it.\u00a0 To be sure, such ability is partly instinctive \u2013 some people are<\/i> just funny \u2013 but it can also be learned, or at least honed and improved by experience.\u00a0 This is why a structure like the Footlights is so useful.\u00a0 It is both a training ground, and a safety net, which prevents hundreds of people who are drawn to it but are otherwise unsuitable, from pursuing it too far.<\/p>\n

This is the history of a comedy club.\u00a0 A loose association of extraordinary people with almost nothing in common except that they all belonged to it.\u00a0 Nothing dates faster than comedy.\u00a0 Today\u2019s topical witticism is tomorrow\u2019s puzzled yawn.\u00a0 From the many extracts in this book it is easy to chuckle at the sketches near our own time, but at the distant end of the century the humour is elusive and we can only stare blankly at the lines and wonder \u2018Did they really laugh at this?\u2019 I think the reason for this is quite simple.\u00a0 Comedy consists of two elements:\u00a0 the content and the manner.\u00a0 The content is the contemporary trivia of day-to-day shared experience from which the comedian draws his material.\u00a0 The manner is the secret that belongs to the performer.\u00a0 An odd mixture of \u2018timing\u2019 and a strange persuasive power which reassures the audience and lulls them into a state of confidence in which they can accept that that virtually anything he says is funny.\u00a0 Looking at old scripts we are left only with what<\/i> they said, not how<\/i> they said it, and that is to miss perhaps sixty percent of the comedy.\u00a0 A good comedian can make you laugh at almost anything.<\/p>\n

The value of Footlights for me was that, while learning about content, how to write, rewrite and cut sketch material, I still had to \u00a0go out and learn performing in front of quite difficult audiences.\u00a0 In my short time there I experienced almost every kind of audience.\u00a0 We performed cabaret professionally at least twice a week.\u00a0 We played in theatres, we played at Edinburgh Festivals, before factory audiences, before dinner-jacketed hoorays and ball-gowned debs, in Butlin\u2019s holiday camps, before drunks, before dinner, before Round Table businessmen, and ultimately in radio and television studios.\u00a0 Had one sat down to plan a crash course in show business one could hardly have bettered this as a learning experience.\u00a0 A University which permits such activity is clearly doing its job, by doing absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n

Despite repeated complaints about the Footlights \u2013 that it is somehow too professional (but then who wants amateur comedy?); that it is elitist (though nobody laughs because they are impressed by the social rank of those on stage); that it is privileged (nobody laughs out of kindness either); and that it is undergraduate (they are <\/i>after all, undergraduates) \u2013 it has nevertheless self-created its own tradition.\u00a0 A tradition which seeks after excellence, and then seeks to hide that excellence.\u00a0 (Ars est celare artem<\/i>.)\u00a0 The measure of the Footlights is that it is continually reinventing itself. \u00a0It is impressive that with no encouragement from the University, no financial support, no grants nor University premises, and with hardly any real continuity except for a few dedicated officers (take a bow Harry Porter), it should survive for a hundred years.<\/p>\n

We should be grateful to Robert Hewison, a man who has suffered the advantages of an Oxford education, for so excellently researching and writing the history of Cambridge humour.<\/p>\n

Eric Idle<\/p>\n

Sydney 1982<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/576767.Footlights<\/a>_<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Footlights!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A Hundred Years Of Cambridge Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 By Robert Hewison Foreword by Eric Idle Comedy is a very odd activity.\u00a0 To stand on a stage in front of hundreds of other people and make them laugh is a very strange thing to do.\u00a0 For some bizarre anthropological reason, since earliest time a few people have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}