I ’ve been doing a stupid amount of travelling recently. First
to Dublin to appear on The Late Late Show, the world’s longest running chat show. It’s a televisual extravaganza; Ireland’s answer to Parkinson, Question Time and Trisha all rolled into one. I was the final guest, and when I arrived at the studio the previous ‘act’ was already being interviewed by the host. He was a convicted paedophile. Fortunately he had found a new purpose in life: giving advice to parents on how to keep their children safe from people like him. I felt the comedy gods were testing me: ‘Follow that, funny man!’ I did my best but the blue-rinsed audience was in an understandably sombre mood. In the course of my set I asked a rhetorical question about the Irish health minister. She’s a big-boned lady — a good 17 stone, I’d say — and I simply pointed this out while wondering how, in an age when tackling childhood obesity is such a big fat priority for the developed world, she got the job. To my amazement, this observation made the front page of the next day’s papers. I am sorry if I hurt the health minister’s feelings, but it’s surely not exactly news to her. Unless her house is full of carnival mirrors.
Ifled the scene of the scandal in timehonoured Irish fashion by crossing the Atlantic. I wanted to persuade some Americans to buy a book I’ve written with an old friend of mine. Don’t worry, it’s not a novel. I think stand-up comedians who write serious novels are very brave, but to my mind the novel form doesn’t leave enough space for one-liners. So we’ve engineered a new genre: a study of jokes and joking which doubles as a joke book. In the UK they’re putting it firmly in the ‘Humour’ section, but the Americans seem to think it’s a hefty piece of sociological analysis, and they’re aiming it at the popular science market. Perhaps it’s because they can’t spell ‘humour’. I’m actually surprised that they don’t already have a special niche for hybrid non-fiction/joke books, given that I ate dinner in a restaurant in New York’s East Village called The Risottorant. You know you’re approaching the event horizon of consumer choice when the restaurants get that specific. And that probably means that the end of the world is nigh. I didn’t really care at the time, because you can face just about anything with a bellyful of cheesy rice.
The day the book went on sale I was in New York, so I went to the biggest bookstore I could find and asked for a copy. I made the most of my J.R. Hartley moment by surreptitiously signing several copies and replacing them on the shelf. I’m hoping to start a trend for guerrilla book tours, where authors arrive unannounced and leave their ‘tags’ in their books like a young hoodie with a spray can. Shortly after my signing spree I was recaptured by the publisher’s PR and locked in a windowless basement room for six hours doing regional radio interviews. I tried my best to make conversation with the Delaware drivetime DJ and the Houston breakfast show crew in the face of a bewildering barrage of in-jokes and local dialect. ‘Would you mind going “Quack quack” for our competition?’ All right, then, if I really have to.
In LA I did a stand-up gig which, it’s fair to say, was not over-hyped. The promoter had placed just one advertisement, in a free paper called the LA Weekly. I had a funny feeling that the evening might not go to plan when I picked up a copy of the paper, expecting something along Metro London-Lite lines. In actual fact the LA Weekly is financed entirely by advertisements for massage parlours ... and my show. Happily, a grand total of 11 of its readers scanned that edition and thought ‘Hmmm — no grubby knocking shops here that I haven’t already tried. I was really after some executive relief, but I guess I’ll go see this British guy doing stand-up instead.’ Istarted out doing live stand-up and I still regard that as the core of my job. With shows round the country almost every weekend, my car clocks up an awful lot of motorway miles. My knowledge of the UK’s service station network is so detailed and extensive that I sometimes find myself bypassing a perfectly convenient pit stop on the grounds that the one at junction 18B sells Krispy Kreme doughnuts and I’ll definitely make it that far on an eighth of a tank. Fortunately the audiences are more unpredictable than the services. The other day in Brighton I asked at the end of the show whether they had any questions. A man put his hand up and said, ‘I don’t know how to propose to my girlfriend. Can you help?’ An odd question to ask, given the nature of much of the material in my show. I gave him a quick recap: one in three marriages ends in divorce. They’re the lucky ones — the other two get carried out in a box. But he was still feeling romantic, so I invited him to join me on stage and ask her there and then, which he did. She had a long, hard think about it. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Finally, she said yes. I’m delighted I was able to further, in some small way, the inexorable upward creep of the UK’s divorce rate.
The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves is published this week (Penguin/ Michael Joseph, £12.99).
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