The rise of the underdog

Stand-up comedy is one of the few vocations where failure is no impediment to success. It’s a quirk that the following gamma males offer thanks for on an almost nightly basis, and never more so than during the Edinburgh Fringe, when hour-long shows encourage them to admit their deepest flaws, fading dreams and relationship woes to rooms full of strangers.

“Well, we all like a bit of schadenfreude don’t we?” reckons Rhod Gilbert, who will be recalling the near-breakdown he suffered encountering The Award-Winning Mince Pie. “Comedy needs a victim and with me, the victim has always been myself, I’ve rarely done jokes at anyone else’s expense. My character is a buffoon who misinterprets everything and tends to react almost violently in a completely inappropriate manner.

“When I started out, whenever I told audiences I was Welsh I would get all those sheep noises. So I found it natural to play on the back foot, as if the crowd had me pinned in the corner and I was a kid lashing out at all these bullies around me. I still feel like that.”

In America, the dominant tradition has been for stand-ups to assume superiority over the audience, ‘playing high-status’, as exemplified by the Def Jam school of comedy. Taking its inspiration from hip-hop, its worst exponents of all races tend to establish their pre-eminence with stereotypical digs at other ethnic groups, genders and sexualities. As a parallel, consider Richard Pryor’s influence on Eddie Murphy. Murphy’s stand-up appropriated all of Pryor’s swagger yet none of his vulnerability, the acknowledged weakness of a heart-attack suffering, junkie womaniser. There’s no question as to whose stand-up is ageing better, with much of Murphy’s live work from the 1980s now looking unpalatably homophobic.

In the UK, our national flair for self-deprecation confuses status positions. Comics like Jimmy Carr and Simon Evans look down upon their audience from impeccable middle-class perspectives, yet remain tongue-in-cheek enough to generally escape disapproval, with both acknowledging their physical peculiarities as a way of ingratiating themselves. Miles Jupp abandoned his Laird of the Manor character to perform as himself and now interacts far more easily with an audience. Interestingly, the likes of Daniel Kitson, Josie Long, Russell Howard, Alun Cochrane and David O’Doherty employ hip-hop bragging and mannerisms to varying degrees of irony.

Messing about with power relations was integral to We Are Klang!’s success. “We always wanted to be the three biggest idiots in the room,” Steve Hall explains. “It was almost an attempt to dispense with status games, because whichever one of us was ‘winning’ at any point, we were still the three biggest losers. Once everyone bought into that, huge amounts of fun would follow because we were prepared to do anything.”

By his own admission Klang’s “least memorable member”, Hall takes being a joke’s butt literally and is best known for his yapping bare backside during the sketch troupe’s 2006 if.comedy-nominated run. His debut solo show, Vice-Captain Loser, derives its title from an insult the 14-year-old Hall once received from his father, no doubt spurring Hall towards whoring his “slight, unremarkable” body for more Klang stage time.

“We work on a bartering system” he explains. “I get to smuggle in my jokes and show my commitment by being the one who’s prepared to humiliate himself the most. It’s more subversive if the quiet one you haven’t necessarily noticed suddenly reappears as a talking arse. Though, I’ve occasionally met audience members who haven’t understood it was my arse that was speaking.”

Both if.comedy award winners, long-time UK-based foreigners Brendon Burns and Phil Nichol, are extrovert performers whose triumphant shows revealed them at their most pathetic.

“It’s certainly strange in Edinburgh,” says Stephen Grant, who split from his wife recently and lost his top ranking on Google to an American namesake who succeeded in murdering his, “because you need to downplay the fact that there is a big room full of people who’ve only come to see you, by absolutely not coming out and blurting ‘fuck, I must be brilliant, me!’”

Grant maintains “there are more runners-up in the world than winners” and that with Second he’s “appealing to a larger demographic”, trying to prove that “second is the new first” and that “in an increasingly winning-obsessed society, under a Labour government that seems, bizarrely, to have created more class divisions than ever, ultimately the person who strives hard and nearly does well, yet doesn’t quite make it, has the best stories.

“Laughing is a defence mechanism, just as for some people it’s getting angry or wasted and for some comedians it’s all three. Usually, comedy is a fairly cooperative industry and it's only in new act competitions and Edinburgh where the need for other comics to perform badly rears its ugly head.”

Luke Toulson embodies such sentiments in There Are So Many Things That I Can’t Do. A 2005 Perrier best newcomer nominee with sketch partner Stephen Harvey, the dyslexic former supply teacher earned mixed reviews for the pair’s 2006 offering, subsequently lost his agent and his fiancée and believes that the nomination “snared us with too much attention before we’d really had time to develop”. He’s since re-emerged as a solo stand-up, winning the Hackney Empire New Act Award, and as Captain DJ on Cbeebies Space Pirates, failing to impress his son, who prefers Angelina Ballerina.

Nevertheless, Toulson’s niche television stardom and semi-pathetic state of affairs have been catnip to young single mums, a trend Gilbert recognises and identifies as the “mothering instinct.

“It’s definitely to do with vulnerability up there. I’m not a sexy comedian, I’m the type you want to mother. But I do feel vulnerable on stage, so it’s natural to play that angle for me.”

Not A Lover, Not A Fighter is the first solo show from Gilbert’s countryman and flatmate Lloyd Langford, who reckons that many comedians’ insecurities emanate simply from “losing thousands of pounds performing at the Fringe”.

A melancholic blues fan, the 24-year-old Welshman enjoys “a bit of fragility with my comedy” and feels that stand-ups are inherently outsiders. He only recently began performing material on sex, acknowledging that “you get comics with braggadocio or machismo, whereas all I’m saying is that I’m a bit useless”. He makes a point of mentioning he has a girlfriend in his set, but to no avail with female admirers. “Yeah, it happens” he admits.

“When I first started performing,” concludes Hall, “I thought I’d love to be this Bill Hicks dark poet, as many misguided young comics do. It took my fiancée to make me understand that my vulnerable side was what she liked about me, rather than me being Mr Edgy. So I started working on it aggressively to make her fancy me more.

“She then said that I was going too far and looking like a charity case, walking onstage and saying ‘Hello! I’m the biggest loser that’s ever lived!’”