Book review: Beyond a Joke: Inside the Dark World of Stand-Up Comedy

I nevER knew what a strange, dysfunctional life the comedian Bob Monkhouse had. He had an obsessive urge to collect things – old films, tins of food, and copies of the Radio Times. At one point he had more than 50,000 taped TV shows, which he stored, according to Bruce Dessau, in an outbuilding. A compulsive womaniser, he was continually stalked by his writing partner Denis Goodwin, who eventually committed suicide.

Beyond a Joke: Inside the Dark World of Stand-Up Comedy

by Bruce Dessau

Preface, 304pp, £18.99

At one point he had more than 50,000 taped TV shows, which he stored, according to Bruce Dessau, in an outbuilding. A compulsive womaniser, he was continually stalked by his writing partner Denis Goodwin, who eventually committed suicide.

Nor did I know much about George Formby. To me, Formby was a cheerful man who sang about being a window cleaner. Actually, as Dessau tells us, he was also a compulsive shagger, a depressive alcoholic and an obsessive collector of cars. He bought his first Rolls in 1937, and then bought 130 more cars over the next 20 years. He collapsed on stage; he became addicted to morphine; he had heart attacks; he became terrified of performing but drove himself on, singing his ditties, seducing women, buying cars, until he died of a heart attack at the age of 56.

Dessau shows us that comedians tend to be weird, or compulsive, or obsessive; they veer easily towards depression; and they mostly find themselves, at least for a period, desperately out of fashion. Beyond this, he doesn’t over-analyse. He simply lines them up, and recounts their strange lives. He starts with the 18th-century clown Joseph Grimaldi, and whistles through the history of comedy, all the way to Russell Brand and beyond. It’s plain, even stark. But we can see what happens to comedians. Comedy does them in.

Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s because, when you tell a joke, you force the collective mind of the audience to take a short-cut through parts of their brain that are normally forbidden or taboo. This is fun for a fleeting moment. But it must be a desperate place to live. Reading this book, we watch them all, reaching for the limelight, bathing in it, and burning out. Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers, Lenny Bruce, Peter Cook, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper – sublime moments of brilliance followed by self-doubt, drink, psychological unbalance and untimely death.

Reading this, you think: this must be the hardest job known to man. And almost all of them are men. Night after night, these guys, and a very few women, live on their nerves, trying to find a connection with a room full of strangers. Sometimes they “kill”. Sometimes they “die”. Sometimes they vomit before they go on. Afterwards, when the audience is gone, they face a terrible void – which might easily remind them of the void in their souls, the very thing that drives them to perform. It’s not difficult to see why they drink, take drugs and seek sex.