Upping the anti

In comedy, the stuff that's not there can be as important as the stuff that is. The long pauses, the awkward silence that meets a joke that doesn't quite fly, the sight of a performer trying to wing it after their material vanishes from their memory; all of these things can be excruciating to watch, but employed creatively, they can also be among the most effective tools in a comedian's arsenal. These techniques are the weird dark matter of stand-up, creating tension and contrast to give maximum effect to the humour that surrounds them. 'Anti-comedy', when you start to look for it, is everywhere.

Yet there are some who take these techniques to a whole other level, whose entire acts are based on frustrating the audience's expectations of jokes, of entertainment, of even being amused.

One such self-professed 'anti-comedian' is Edward Aczel. His act contains no gags, no real observations or opinions, nothing that could easily be called a 'routine'. And yet he can be very funny indeed, as the enthusiastic audiences and rave reviews for his first full-length show at last year's Fringe attest. He's back this year to deliver, or perhaps not deliver, more of the same. So how does he do it?

"The idea of anti-comedy is, it's the opposite of a confident stand-up telling jokes which the audience laugh at on cue," Aczel explains, on the phone during a break from his decidedly non-comic day job at a marketing company. "With anti-comedy you make them laugh almost with the tension you're creating by being there and the moments, the pauses, all that sort of stuff... I kind of strip away all the bullshit of, you know, telling a funny anecdote or being amusing in some way, or telling clever, complicated stories."

It's a style that Aczel developed almost by accident, stemming from his very genuine lack of material when he first started in stand-up four years ago, at the relatively advanced age of 37. "The act developed because I made strength of the fact that I didn't have much confidence and I hadn't done any real preparation," he admits. He decided to point these weaknesses out as soon as he came on stage, a potentially disastrous strategy that would make most performers' hair stand on end. But he found that the audience liked it. "If you tell everybody what's going on, it does make people laugh. I think four years down the line, that's started developing into a proper idea. Initially it was just being pushed out on stage and seeing what happened."

Rather less accidental were the anti-comedy activities of a group of young British comics in the mid '80s, who include the now-famous Fringe regulars Stewart Lee, Simon Munnery and Richard Herring. At that time, says Lee, "we had a sort of 'scorched earth' policy to comedy. You know, I'm not going to do any jokes, I'm not going to have a personality, I'm not going to do anything that could be construed as entertaining." Inspired by the likes of Ted Chippington, a now mostly forgotten comic who used to come on stage and deliberately wind the audience up by doing one or two bad jokes over and over again, they decided to "reject everything and see what's left when you stomp all over it."

"We were just bored of jokes," says Munnery, and wanted to see what else they could get away with in the context of a comedy gig. At the most extreme end of this philosophy were people like Jimbo – a short, slightly odd-looking man who, according to Lee, "used to come to the mic and just stand there until the audience got bored, and then walk off." Although sometimes he went down terribly, it was such a counterintuitive thing to do at a stand-up gig that often the audience couldn't help but giggle. "Part of the fun of it," says Lee, "is making everything else around you look ridiculous by choosing not to cooperate with it."

Aczel is keen to point out, though, that the same principles apply as in any stand-up gig. "You're just trying to make them laugh" he says. "And if you can make them do that by whatever means, by the opposite of humour, then, you know, they're still laughing."

Simon Munnery concurs, and says that in fact this is easier than you might think. "There's something about the fact that a venue is set up and people come along to laugh, they're sort of going to laugh anyway. So almost anything can be funny." His own gigs remain a case in point: a section of his last Edinburgh show involved him showing a film of himself, going round Scotland and tapping various railings with a spoon.

This threw a large part of the audience into unexpected hysterics, and Munnery explains that, despite appearances, there are some fairly typical comic techniques at work here. "A lot of comedy works on tension and then the release of tension," he says. "So there's tension when you see the spoon, and then whatever the sound is, there's the moment of revelation, which is the equivalent of a punchline. So it has the right rhythm, and if they don't laugh, that's their problem."

If it all sounds a bit high-minded and pretentious, that's because it can be. But as Stewart Lee points out, "it's like really extreme avant garde music or art – you might not like it, but it does at the very least help to define the edges of what's possible."

As for Aczel, the miracle of his act is that it doesn't seem pretentious at all. The lack of jokes is part of an overall shambolic, everyman persona that, far from alienating his audiences, tends to bring them closer. "There's a group of people, and there is somebody standing there on the stage, and that's about it," he says. By destroying the dynamic of a brilliant comedian outwitting everybody else in the room, he creates a sort of egalitarian atmosphere that fits with his worldview. "What I try to do is to imply: here we all are, let's have some fun. And that's all there is."

Edward Aczel - Explains All the World's Problems ... and Then Solves Them   Edward Aczel – Explains All the World's Problems...and Then Solves Them Underbelly 7-30 Aug, 7.25pm, SIDEPANEL No joke: Other anti-comedians past and present Andy Kaufman To many the original anti-comedian, Kaufman confused and amused '70s America by appearing at comedy clubs and doing things that resembled nothing else at the time. His filmed performances, like the one where he just stands next to a record player and sings along to bits of the Mighty Mouse theme tune, still have a raw hilarity that Jim Carrey's impersonation in the biopic Man On The Moon doesn't come close to matching. Ted Chippington "The most significant British anti-comedian," according to Stewart Lee, Chippington had a particularly extreme attitude in that he deliberately set out to go down badly with audiences. "To call it an act would be to dignify it beyond what it was," says Lee. "He just didn't really have any material." He stopped performing 20 years ago when he became too popular, but is now back on the circuit. Charlie Chuck A self-professed son of "the old-time music-hall and vaudeville circuit," Chuck (real name Dave Kear) is a master of frustrating the audience's expectations of joke structure and punchlines, to brilliantly funny effect. He claims ignorance of the anti-comedy genre, but told Fest that "anyone can put on a red suit or a green suit, prop up the microphone and just read out gags... It's too obvious." He's taking 'Chuck' to Medieval England for this year's Fringe show. Brian Gittins Another anti-comedy character act at the Fringe this year, 'Brian' is a frustrated roadside cafe owner attempting to make it big on the comedy and light entertainment circuits. His complete lack of jokes and talent are his only drawback.