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| Comedy legend, Joe Pasquale. Costume is model's own |
JOE PASQUALE IS MAX LOLS
Hands down, one of the funniest bits of panto I've seen was in 2021: Joe Pasquale playing Wishee Washee at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth. The man is hilarious. As actors are fond of saying, he's got "funny bones" (a phrase which always reminds me of Mr Soft from the softmints commercial) or perhaps that he has "comedy chops" (which sounds like something a butcher would get struck off for.)
As well as doing all the 'classic' Joe Pasquale lazzi (ride on toilet, anyone?) he delivered the best rendition of "If I weren't in pantomime" I have ever seen. This is no mean feat, as it's a bit of old shtick that I usually hate, because:
- It bears no relevance to the plot
- It's usually shoehorned in at the end so the actors are knackered by the time we get to it
- When you see 20 pantos a year, the tune starts to haunt you in your nightmares
- It's looooooooong - not only for the audience, but for the actors, so by the time all our shows are up and I go round seeing everyone else's, the actors are typically just running through the motions
- You need the comic timing of Joe Pasquale to pull it off, and very few people do!
Fortunately for everyone in the audience, Joe Pasquale does indeed have the comic timing of Joe Pasquale. And a lot of tattoos - which is a piece of knowledge that I only acquired after witnessing him dance in a tutu.
Fun fact: Joe Pasquale was a great friend of my husband's uncle, another ferociously funny man: Terry Seabrooke. I have Terry's patter book upstairs in my office. We inherited it after his passing in 2011. Aunty Hilda had put it to one side for us amongst a slew of photos of Uncle Terry cavorting with celebs.
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| Uncle Terry (left) and former UK Prime minister John Major (Right) |
I have met Joe Pasquale - and can 100% attest that he is a lovely, lovely chap. Funny, warm and generous. If you get a chance to meet him - do it! You will not be disappointed.
Comedy Controversy
My admiration for Joe Pasquale and his work is so great, that it is endlessly annoying for me that one of my favourite comedians does a 'bit' making fun of him. On Paramount Comedy Edinburgh and Beyond (2006) the very dry, and decidedly not-pantoesque Stewart Lee did a great bit recounting an incident during the 1995 Royal Variety Show in which Joe Pasquale told a joke that was originated by Irish comedian, Michael Redmond. It's really tightly written and expertly delivered (if you haven't seen it already, you can watch it here.)
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| Stewart Lee, Mr Eyebrows (West Midlands region 2011-2013 & runner-up 2018) |
The premise of the routine revolves around a juxtaposition of philosophical positions regarding the ownership of jokes and comedy.
Nowadays we are used to stand-ups reflecting on their lives and experiences to make us all laugh - but this was not always the case. It is a sharp observation that up until the alternative comedy revolution of the 1980s, the prevailing paradigm framed comedy as an inherited folk art.*
*I can't quite remember who I first heard making this observation... possibly Charlie Brooker, possibly Stewart Lee, possibly some other clever bloke who doesn't smile when they're telling a joke...
In this comedic paradigm which we inherited from our forebears, comics 'tell jokes' or 'do routines' which they draw from a communal pool of material. The same joke might very well be told on the same night in working men's clubs up and down the country - by Jim Davidson, Tommy Cooper, or Jimmy Cricket... each performer adding their own spin, but the punchline remaining the same. This state of affairs goes back in time further than you can imagine.
The 'misidentified twin routine' in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors is really just a rehash of Manaechmi by Plautus (who I dare say got the idea of a Phoenician bloke he met downn the pub, who in turn read it in Sargon of Akkad's 1001 Mesopotamian Jokes for Kids)
This is important to understand when it comes to panto, because the genre draws its roots from a time when the folk-art paradigm was prevalent.
Skits and Bits
The "comedy bits" so synonymous with the genre, (ie the ghost gag, the baking scene, the schoolroom scene, the haunted bedroom) may be performed in the style of the company, but the punchlines are the same.
It is impossible to watch the hilarious Morgan Brind of Little Wolf decorate the bedroom in his Sleeping Beauty slop scene without being reminded of his references to Chaplain's 1915 masterpiece Charlie the Decorator.
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| Morgan Brind, Sleeping Beauty (Loughborough Town Hall, 2016) |
Structurally, these scenes ape the semi-improvised lazzi that typified Commedia dell'Arte. These scenes don't belong to any performer, nor to any panto. As a case in point, here is a clip of Cannon and Ball performing the lovers on the wall skit with Iris Williams in 1982.
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| The rarely performed spear-up-the-bum variant of the ghost gag |
For many people, panto wouldn't be panto without these 'bits.' They are the scenes they remember from childhood. These are the laughs that parents seek to pass onto their children, just as their grandparents passed them onto them.
However, producers/writers are well advised to consider these scenes carefully. Cut and paste them into the script and the scenes feel disconnected from the rest of the play. Include too many and there won't remain enough time to develop the plot.
While the inclusion of these genre defining lazzi may be a necessary convention of the genre, producers must avoid the temptation of extending this folk-art paradigm too far. Lazy writers recycle dialogue, or even whole scenes from show to show (watch out for tell-tale sign of scenes scripted as comic: / dame: rather than Trot: / Jack:). Lacking appropriate support from the script, some performers fall into ruts of performing the same jokes year on year. I heard one Dame explain that he didn't need to change his speech as he'd been doing the mushroom joke at the same venue for 10 years, and the audience loved it - which was certainly true... but the audience was small, having self-selected itself by pruning out those who had tired of hearing the same old shtick too many times. The venue changed production company the following year.
Star Turns and Familiar Faces
As did the Commedia performers of 16th century Italy, some performers come pre-prepared with tried and tested 'bits' that are audience hits. A prime example is the ever popular Andy Ford who is presumably hired with the expectation that he does his 'literal nursery rhyme' bit amongst others. This model makes most sense for large production companies that can rotate celebs between different towns, preventing any one local audience seeing the same bits twice. Andy is a great clown, and I was delighted to see him perform the bits in person at Peter Pan in Dartford (QDos, 2019). My enjoyment was hampered a little by the fact that I'd seen him do the bits in other pantos - all via the magic of YouTube (in fact, there are some great clips of logical nursery rhymes on his YT channel here.)
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| Panto legend Andy Ford in action |
Now admittedly not everyone is as big an Andy-Ford-aholic as I am. Certainly the audience in Dartford lapped it up in the same way that I did when I first saw it.
Truth be told, I have never been a particular fan of the lego-brick "insert star turn bit here" dramaturgy that is popular with some of the bigger pantos. It's certainly a model, and the big producers that employ it are playing bigger houses than me, so they must know something I don't. For a start, they know how many tickets they have to sell... which is a hell of a lot... in which case a name is a must have. In fact, when you go in for big tenders, one of the frequently asked questions is precisely: which celebs do you have a good relationship with? (Which is why you see producers making a beeline for the TV crowd in the bar).*
*However, IMHO there's no reason why you can't your cake and eat it. I have seen celebs turn out beautifully crafted panto performances that both conform to the genre and commensurately communicate pathos, comedy and character (Sue Delaney in Cinderella at the Oldham Coliseum, 2018 anyone?!)
But not every performer is a star-turn, with a fresh audience in a new town each year. Part of the appeal for many audiences is seeing familiar faces from year to year. Particularly when it comes to the comic trio, the actors often become as much a part of the tradition as the venue.
How many people go to the Hackney Empire each year in order to see Clive Rowe? A fair few, I bet. He is their dame, they are his audience. It is this relationship between performer and audience that the producers of Dick Turpin Rides Again at Grand Opera House, York hoped to exploit when they teamed up with Berwick Kalor who had built a pre-existing fan base at the Theatre Royal down the road. (OMG... Berwick Kalor.. do you remember that speech?!)
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| Cockney, noun - defn. a person born within the 2 tube stops of Clive Rowe playing the Dame |
For these familiar faces, novelty of performance requires the support of novelty in the script. The very best pantos I see are full of fresh, innovative comedy, written for characters as opposed to archetypes. How can we expect performers ad directors to find any truth in performance if there is none on the page?
An example -
Watching Peter Pan at the Litchfield Garrick, 2021 it seemed to me like every scene started with a non-plot related cut-and-paste gag of the form:
Dame: "Sorry I'm late, I've got caught behind a ship that was carrying brown paint that crashed into a ship carrying red paint."
Comic: " You got caught behind a ship that was carrying brown paint that crashed into a ship carrying red paint?"
Dame: "Yes. All the survivors were marooned."
I mean. It's not awful. But it's filler. The thing is once you've had the shtick for the fourth scene in a row it starts to grind. It's the feeling you get when you notice that all the jokes in Blackadder are similes... and "the stickiest situation since sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun' starts to sound exactly the same as "as cunning as a fox who has recently been made professor of cunning at Oxford University."
Admittedly I am a writer, so maybe I'm a harsher critic than most. But you don't need to train at RADA and the Royal Court to yearn for something a bit more that you'd find in a cracker. Especially at £30 a ticket! I remember the feeling of dissapointment... after all, the script has come from the pen of the same writer as Mother Goose at Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury (2019) which remains, to this day, one of the best pantomimes I have seen.
The cookie-cutter approach becomes ever more evident the more pantos you see. While it is a little disappointing to watch pantos by the same writer only to hear the same jokes, it is eye-opening to hear the same gags trotted out by companies at opposite ends of the country.
TOP TIP: If your joke contains the phrase "wrinkly things on sticks" or has the punchline "Now why dance?" it's time to write a new one.
Scripts which unthinkingly regurgitate the inherited joke book of yesteryear are the hallmark of lazy writing. Not only do lazy writers risk boring their audience, more importantly they risk alienating them by perpetuating the outmoded societal norms upon which these jokes were based.
Our Inheritance - the Folk Art Paradigm
A great friend of mine recently bequeathed to me a fascinating book entitled Make 'em Laugh: A Comedians Handbook by Michael Kilgarriff. Published in 1973 it is a compendium of gags, comebacks and comedy skits that typify the folk-art paradigm of comedy that panto has inherited.
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| The Bible of 1970s Comedy Antics |
The jokes are hit and miss... mostly miss. Perhaps 5% hits. Some of the jokes, it's hard to imagine were ever very funny, but you don't have to be as old as the ancient mariner to remember a time when many of the sexist and xenophobic gags it contains were the bread and butter of popular comics.
There are some real doozies, and you don't have to work hard to connect the dots between the gags of the seventies and some things you see in panto today:
"There's not much money in this gig. Money! If this was China I'd be picketed by coolies!" p33.
Hello otherisation-of-people-of-Chinese-descent - I recognise you from a few recent productions of Aladdin. Those of you who have been following the blog will know that I am a big advocate of retaining the Chinese setting for Aladdin, but there are ways of doing it that don't make the audience feel yellow. For those of you buying the book, p140-147 gives a particularly detailed description of The Pig-tail of Li Fang Fu by Sax Rohmer including script and directorial annotations! Admittedly I've never seen it in a panto, but I can attest that at least until very recently The Chinese language test lived on (cough... Darwen Library Theatre).
"She reminded me of my wife's mother - short and fat with a big moustache" p 78.
I recently spoke to a woman who said she doesn't like panto because it's men making jokes about women being fat. Unfortunately it often is... which is odd for a commercial art form in a country where nearly two thirds of the population are overweight.
"I wouldn't say she'd been a bad girl but they buried her in a Y-shaped coffin" p82,
and not forgetting...
"What about the women round here, though! I left here last night and this girl came up to me and said, 'Want a good time?' Said, 'Sorry, love, I've only got fifty pence on me,' She said 'That's all right, I've got change...' p105.
How many Aladdin scripts have I read that describe Widow Twankey as the biggest scrubber in Peking? Too many. NEWSFLASH: the sexual liberation of women started in the 60s... if you still think that women having sex is gag-fodder, you are 60 years out of date.
"You could tell he was Irish by the shamrock in his turban" p88.
This joke has aged particularly poorly, not only because trans-continental immigration has ended the racial homogeneity of Ireland, but because the prime minister of Ireland himself is half-Indian.
"She's as ugly as a bag of chisels. At Christmas we hang her up and kiss the mistletoe." p104.
Many (possibly most?) pantos I see, at some point, seek to get comedy milage out of describing the Dame as ugly. I've heard the justification that as a man in a dress makes for an ugly woman it's too obvious a lampoon to be offensive. But you can't blame women who may feel uncomfortable with a man pretending to be a woman, judging femininity in terms of ugliness/beauty. Schools spend all year teaching kids to judge people by the content of their character, not by their looks and then they take them to a show where a female character is made the butt of a joke because she isn't very pretty. In my mouth at least, it leaves a sour taste. With the recent uptick in drag performers crossing over to panto, we must all be particularly aware of avoiding such pitfalls - acerbic witticisms that play well in a gay bar can be unnecessarily cutting when delivered in a family show.
It's not all doom and gloom. There are Drag queens that get panto really really right - if you want some examples, look no further than Miss Jason or LaVoix... coincidentally, both characters played by absolutely lovely chaps with warm hearts and humour that welcomes-in rather than puts-down.
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 Miss Jason (top) and La Voix (bottom). Proof that Drag Queens can also be BRILLIANT DAMES |
TLDR;
Our audiences deserve better than the same old shtick. In large part, the proliferation of recorded media has sounded the death knell of cookie cutter gag-based comedy.
As modern audiences have become more sophisticated consumers of comedy, expectations have evolved away from gags towards character comedy. Furthermore, the inherited joke book, on which previous iterations of panto drew so heavily, is a vestige of an earlier era that doesn't translate particularly successfully to our rapidly diversifying and liberalised society. Lazy writing which continues to rely too heavily on this joke book risks perpetuating the outdated societal views prevalent at the time the joke book was established. Better writing is character led, inclusive and drives the plot.
As far as comedy goes: stand-up moved on in the 1980s; panto is behind the times. Our whole genre needs a paradigm shift.
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| My Twopenceworth |
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