JOHNNY VEGAS is not a comedian. He s an entertainer. It s a point the fat, curly-haired St Helens lad stressed at great length throughout his smash-hit show at the recent Edinburgh Festival.
But despite his protests, despite his stage boorishness, absolutely nobody who attended one of his shows was left unmoved by the experience. His was the name on everyone s lips, he was the inspiration behind the tears of mirth on everyone s cheeks, his was the show with the queues outside, where his celebrated peers, the Frank Skinners, David Baddiels and Eddie Izzards of this world stood in line with the ordinary punters, as anxious as anybody to discover just what all the fuss was about. The posters summed it up best, The Johnny Vegas Show: more than just a night out . . . it s a memory!
Some weeks back in these very pages, it was explained that Johnny Vegas schtick is that of a working man s club entertainer who was big in the 70s, fell on hard times in the 80s and now, in the 90s, is striving to make a comeback. Dressed in flares and a flamboyantly collared shirt, he communicates by crooning, whispering, talking, and occasional shouting.
A master of the metaphor ( Comedy s like marrying your cousin, are you going to listen to your critics, or your heart? ), his coup de grace, however, is the ceramic mould he executes at the potter s wheel that occupies centre stage. Donning a smock, pedalling his wheel and wetting his clay with a handful of ale, he ll undress some young temptress in the front row with his beady little eyes, before whispering the inevitable and seductive come-on: What would you like love . . . a mug or a jug?
Midway through the Festival, over a few beers in the sun-drenched courtyard of the Pleasance Theatre complex, I ask Johnny if he s been surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to his show?
Very, I knew it were a good show but I wasn t sure how people would receive it up here, he confesses in a Howard Wilkinson-esque Northern brogue. People seem to love it far beyond my expectations. All the comics ave come to see me and they ve all been cool, even though I m taking the piss out of comedy a bit. I m not really slagging them though, I m slagging what outside forces have done to comedy. Even the critics, not that it matters, have taken it on the chin and gone along with it. It s cool that everyone s up for it. When an act you ve admired in the past comes up to you and says That were great , that s a kind of cool feedback to get.
Critics brave enough to unmask themselves at The Johnny Vegas Show (i.e. those foolish enough to be spotted taking notes), soon feel the lash of Johnny s tongue.
Comedy ain t capitalism, he ll begin, directing his glare at the offending hack. And you can t put it in competition with itself, cos then you get fear of failure and people won t associate with you. And in the three-legged race for rave reviews, nobody wants to be tied to the unfunny fat lad.
Of course Johnny doesn t really hate reviewers as much as he claims . . . does he?
Nah! I just wish acts at Edinburgh weren t as afraid of them as they are, he muses. Like, some acts will ave a sell-out show and the critics hate em now I don t see what that act s got to worry about. If it really matters to them that much what the press thinks of em, then they should write shows that they know the press will fucking like, d you know what I mean? I don t hate critics, although I must be bothered by them a bit, because I read all me reviews. I like to see the way most of them try to intellectualise everything. It s like yesterday, in The Scotsman, some bloke wrote that I get on my wheel and become my own work . I mean for fuck sake, what s e on about? (Laughs.)
More to the point, what s Johnny Vegas on about? Why has a 26-year-old Manchester-based comic developed such a bizarre alter ego?
Well I ve always been Johnny Vegas, but my real name is (laughs) Michael Joseph Pennington. That s just not showbizzy enough, is it? he guffaws. It doesn t really stick in the mind so I ditched it. But as I was saying, I were always Johnny Vegas, climbing on tables, pratting about and singing. I think it were down to the fact that I didn t want to do the mainstream stuff I can t tell jokes, and I wasn t very good at getting up on stage and doing stand-up.
I went to a club one night for one of my early gigs and I realised what I d written was shite and that I was going to die. So I got up and said My name s Johnny Vegas and I m not a comedian, I m an entertainer. So if you don t laugh it s because you re not supposed to . I was giving myself a get-out clause before I d even started. The whole thing just developed from there.
The more you get into comedy, the more undesirables you realise there are in it. It s become so commercialised that I decided it needed a kick up the arse, which is why I take the piss out of it so much. It just went from me bein a bloke on a table, to me bein a bloke with a message: a message of muse and booze! (Laughs)
And pottery?
Aye, I m a three dimensional designer, he admits with childlike glee. I messed about with sculpture in my last year of college, which I shouldn t have done. I were lured away from the pureness of drawing and went on to abstract female forms.
Seriously though, people go on about me being a great character comic, but I don t see myself that way because 90% of the stuff I talk about is true. I mean I did actually walk into my house as a child and see me dad skinning my pet rabbit. If I were to do that stuff as me, nobody would think it were funny. They wouldn t laugh out loud because me life s so fucking sad. That s why, when I do the pottery, people are amazed that I can actually do it. They expect me to be a failure at that, because I seem to have failed at almost everything else I ve ever turned my hand to.
It s probably fitting then, that Johnny Vegas didn t win the Perrier Award at this year s Fringe. (He made the shortlist, and the general consensus seems to be that he was robbed of the Grand Prize BG.) A terminal loser in life, he would have been uncomfortable with the ensuing adulation. After all, as he says himself: The Perrier s a parent, and it s got no right to tell one comedy kid that he loves him more than the others. n
Although no dates have been confirmed, we are reliably informed that Johnny Vegas will be making his Dublin debut before Christmas. Watch this space!