The Right Way to Get It Wrong: What's the Secret of Doing Something Badly?
The Trick, Say
Comedy Duo The Right Size, Is to Get Good at It First
The Guardian, 2 November 2001
Bring me sunshine . . . Foley and McColl as Morecambe and Wise
Some people do things badly much better than others. The question is, how badly do you want to be bad? There is an art to doing things badly. Tommy Cooper, whose act was built on his inability to do a magic trick successfully, was in fact a consummate magician and a member of the Magic Circle. Les Dawson, whose piano-playing delighted the nation with its missed notes and sudden mad cadences, was in fact a gifted player. The secret to doing things badly is to be able to do them brilliantly first. The first circus clowns were the best acrobats and horse riders; people who knew their trade so well that they could begin to mock it. For a number of years we did a number called Crap Acrobatics, where we would begin the most daring lifts, only to end up in an undignified heap on the floor. It was only after extensive acrobatic
training with the vaudevillian Johnny Hutch - it left us both black and blue - that we had the confidence and ability to try that number.
Doing things badly is the stock in trade of a comedian. Despite their better instincts, people like to laugh at the misfortunes of others. There is nothing better at the end of a hard day than laughing, from the safety of a living room, cinema or theatre, at some poor fool undergoing the kind of public humiliation that would put most of us in a padded cell for the rest of our lives. The comedian has learned to exploit this. He walks on stage and falls flat on his face. The audience laugh.The comic's brief journey from the vertical to the horizontal can be done in a million ways, but it always involves one thing: loss of dignity. If the audience feel that the comedian has fallen over in order to get the laugh, they will never laugh as much as they will at the man who falls over and instantly tries to hide the fact. The comedian who can convey that he is as upset at falling over on stage as his audience would be if they fell over in the supermarket is the one who most often wins our hearts, and gets the best laughs.
This ability to hide one's real intention is the same when it comes to the art of bad acting, which must immediately be separated from its close cousin, coarse acting. In coarse acting, the actor joyfully celebrates how awful both he and his material can be. This is the world of panto: primary colours, overblown histrionics, mock heroics, lewd sound effects and comic in-your-endo. It is loud, lairy, an art in itself, but often more fun to do than to watch. Self-congratulation is not something people like to see in actors, and we have all sat in an audience feeling our initial smiles of indulgence hardening into a rictus grin.
Bad acting, by contrast, has no such self-consciousness. Like the man who tries to hide his fall, the bad actor is always trying his hardest to get the acting right. The thought of celebrating his failure to do so would never occur to him. He has his sights set on success, acclaim, awards; nothing less will do. As his performances stumble from bad to worse, he struggles above all to maintain his dignity. This is what makes him really funny - the fact that he would much prefer not to be funny at all. It is not surprising, then, that a lot of bad acting is seen in straight plays. People trying to convey weighty themes and ideas is fertile ground for comedy, because the gap between lofty aspiration and execution can be so huge. Comedy is not welcome here; it is like laughing in church. Straight actors regularly rupture in
their efforts to quell the giggles for the sake of high culture.
The comic version of bad acting can be more invited and controlled. The National Theatre of Brent are perhaps the best exponents of the art form today. Seemingly unaware of their grammatical gaffes, appalling taste and public catfights, they present to the audience an evening of what they clearly feel to be stylish erudition and interesting dramatics. Like so many of the great clowns, they try to do things to the best of their abilities and aspire well beyond them, even when all around them has long since collapsed into catastrophe.
This sense of self-delusion was Ernie Wise's problem when he tried to put on one of the "plays what he wrote" with Eric Morecambe. In "The Play That I Wrote", a comedy that we are currently performing about ourselves and Morecambe and Wise, there is a play at the end of the show in the same vein as Ernie's famous period pieces with the likes of Glenda Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave. Like them, we have a real-life celebrity join us on stage for the play, which in our case is a French revolution masterpiece called 'A Tight Squeeze for the Scarlet Pimple'. The source of the comedy is immediately clear. Ernie's pretension was to believe that he was a world-class playwright. His sycophancy with the guests was the perfect foil for Eric, a comic who treated prime minister and milkman with equal nonchalance. Eric's stage persona was a man constantly aspiring to things beyond him, and in the plays what he wrote, he treated us to the art of bad acting at its best. Bad sets, bad lines and tasteless costumes were all contained within our understanding that Eric thought they were terrific. It is a revelation to us that in
"The Play What I Wrote", in front of a theatrical set representing the dungeons of the Bastille, you can try to act your way to the Oscars but all you can do is Bad Acting. The saving grace is that it brings the house down.
When we began performing together over 12 years ago, we had ideas of producing work that would be intelligent, resonant, and make us popular with women. Our first show, 'Que Sera', was described by the Guardian as "making failure into an art form". Perhaps, like Ernie, our pretensions were wide of the mark.
Ever since then, in one way or another, we have been making comedy about people who don't think they're funny and would much rather not be in the terrible situations they find themselves in. There is nothing like hindsight for rationalising your life into a watertight theory, but perhaps we're looking for a little dignity.
The Right Size are Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. "The Play What I Wrote" is at Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2, from Monday. Box office: 020-7369 1736.
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