Rob Newman makes a welcome return to the stage next week when he plays Dublin and Galway, including a three-day residency at The Murphy s Laughter Lounge. While David Baddiel, his erstwhile comedy partner on the acclaimed television shows The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Newman And Baddiel, has been raking it in recording profoundly irritating, jingoistic football anthems with those jolly Lightning Seeds, Newman has been keeping his head down, reading and writing about the serious business of global realpolitik.
His new-fangled stand-up show purports to focus on, quote unquote, structures of power, the manufacture of consent and how corporate globalisation destroys human rights . Not quite Roy Chubby Brown, then. More like Noam Chomsky with punchlines.
It sounds like a bundle of laughs, doesn t it! exclaims Newman apologetically, down a phoneline from his home in London. But, no, when you read Chomsky, it s hard to watch the news in the same way again; with the news, it s all shown as separate items, as though they re not linked in any way. With Chomsky, you see the way everything fits together.
In my everyday life, I m the most absent-minded, can t-see-the-woods-for-the-trees type of person there is, so that s why I think it s good to try and focus on the big picture geophysically, as I potter about the house trying to remember where I put my glasses.
Indeed, it s Chomsky books like Deterring Democracy, and not the life story of some sad, wizened old miserable Blasket case, that ought to be required reading in school curriculums. The problem is that Newman s newly harnessed political conscience is neither fashionable nor profitable in the current climate of bland observational lightweights who seem content to play to the rogues gallery of stag party pissheads.
I d make a lot more money if I did stuff about the difference between cats and dogs, says Newman, and flight attendants; and have you ever noticed how. . . . But I remember doing a docker s benefit gig in Durham University. It was like a road to Damascus. I remember thinking, what a privilege I can go and share my ideas with a few hundred people . I think if I didn t have that outlet, I d be running down the high street shouting my mouth off.
Given how deeply unsexy such material is considered, it s doubly commendable that Newman chooses to keep the flame of Bill Hicks s committed, confrontational comedy a-flicker.
I was a big fan of Hicks, he continues. One of the tragedies of him dying when he did was that he was just beginning to develop an ideology. I mean, he was one of the greatest people I ever saw live but he was just starting to move away from that sort of Timothy Leary counterculture thing.
One wonders just what Hicks would have made of the war in Yugoslavia. What a shame he s not here to kick against the pricks.
How good that would have been! The legacy he s passed on is that I feel that I have to write something worthy of the man. Not only was Hicks really funny, but there was this feeling that he was dealing in forbidden fruit as well. I haven t quite managed to get that into my set yet. But I think he has influenced a lot of people who have found his material an inspiration.
Newman mentions the ubiquitous Mark Thomas and is full of praise for his Comedy Product malarkey on Channel 4. Another is, of course, Rich Hall, who is just about the only comedian this writer has seen who has dared to tackle Kosovo but who, as Niall Crumlish lamented in the last issue, came up against a brick wall of drink-sodden indifference when he tried to introduce the subject at his recent Laughter Lounge residency.
That s what you re up against. Ardal O Hanlon described my stand-up routine as like a base-playing tennis player, with all these long set-ups and then boom! the punch-line. The crux is whether you can keep the audience s attention for the duration because you ve got that bit more information to get across before the gag.
In case Newman s show is beginning to sound like some sort of political science workshop, it should be pointed out that his new stand-up routine does feature what his press blurb proudly describes as quite stupid character comedy .
I ve got these two-dimensional, vaudeville characters, he says. One is Eric Catatonia, who is a very bitter, suspicious old man of 83 who lives at the top of a block of flats in Streatham. He s one of these I ve seen you, I know you re game type of people. Then there are The Lavenders, who are a really sweet couple in their 60s or 70s who actually turn out to be very sinister; and I do a character called Jarvis, a posh pervert.
Then there s a character based on a Greek car mechanic who lives across the road from me. He s very friendly. We always have these conversations that last about half an hour over a cup of tea. And I always go away thinking I ve absolutely no idea what the conversation was about. He uses language like an Impressionist painter. He s my favourite Greek philosopher. You see, I feel that I have a duty to do something funny. I ended up really hating the sort of tired, worthy, Geography-teacher comics of the Left.
Aside from trying to get a television show up and running, provisionally titled The Propaganda-Free Half-Hour, Newman is currently hard at work on his third novel. His second book, Manners, will be appearing as a Penguin paperback in September.
That novel was a bit bleak, he admits. This new one I m writing, The Bridge And Tunnel People, even though it s about globalisation, will hopefully be a bit more up and a bit more accessible. What I d like to achieve at some point in the future is a situation where there is no division between the stand-up and the novels where the characters are the same in both. I m not good enough as a stand-up or as a writer yet for this to be so. But I feel you do need novels to do justice to the complexities of the things you talk about on stage.
It s like Chomsky when he goes on television he s given two minutes to get his point across. There s no chance to give a back history of the problem. You look like a nutter if you just go on and say, America is a terrorist state . People will shout, whaddya mean? .
Newman also detects a fair amount of snobbery from the literary set towards stand-up comedians who get ideas above their station and deign to put word processor to paper.
I think both Sean Hughes and Ardal O Hanlon have suffered from that. It s a class thing. When you think of Sean Hughes book, the reaction seemed to be: who are you, you county jumper? Get back under the table . Whereas for Stephen Fry, the aristocrat world is his playground; he can do as he pleases.
For sure, Newman s comedy is more Oxfam than Oxbridge the day before the interview, he had just done a special Amnesty International benefit in Edinburgh with Johnny Vegas and Ed Byrne. I for one am looking forward to hearing his new direction. n
Rob Newman plays the Murphy s Laughter Lounge on Dublin s Eden Quay on Thursday August 19th, Fri 20th and Sat 21st with guests Gerry Mallon, Bob Reilly, and Des Bishop; and Galway GPO on Sunday 22nd .