On the very first day of our lives as professional comedy writers, my partner Maurice Gran came to work, had a cup of tea, looked at his watch, and said to me, “It’s half past nine. I suppose we’d better go upstairs and make 15 million people laugh.”
Anyone who has ever attempted to write, let alone perform, comedy knows that only neurosurgery requires more skill. So when I was watching Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globe awards this week, my first instinct was to raise my hat to him. How funny it was having some kid from Reading really sticking it to those Hollywood celebrities! And when all hell broke loose the next morning, I knew it was only because Ricky had hit his target – namely, the overpaid and over-sensitive actors sitting in front of him.
But there’s a strange double standard in show business. Here was Ricky giving a brilliant performance – using material he’d written himself – yet he’ll never win an award for it. There was even a joke about this at the Oscars a couple of years ago, when Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John O’Reilly sang a plaintive song about how comedians never get the respect they deserve: to get Oscar’s attention, you need to resort to scripts about guys with no arms and legs who teach Hamlet in the inner cities.
In Hollywood, however, that’s not the full story. It’s not just that the Golden Globes do give out awards for comedy, too – it’s that where it counts, the executives know which side their bread is buttered. When Maurice and I went to work in Hollywood, the first piece of advice given to us was that comedy is king. Or, as one executive put it, “Funny is Money”.
In Britain, however, comedy has always been the poor relation. Over the past month, I have watched at least 70 movies in order to vote in the Baftas. What struck me was that among these three score and ten, I didn’t find one comedy. The closest I came was The Kids Are All Right, about a middle-aged lesbian couple trying to bring their sperm donor into their children’s lives – but you’d have to stretch your imagination somewhat to consider it a comedy.
This year’s Bafta and Oscar favourites are probably Black Swan and The King’s Speech. But if either of these mediocre, small-scale films had been comedies, they would have stopped shooting on the first afternoon of rehearsals. What is their raison d’être? To make us feel sorry for a king who has a stammer, and a ballet dancer who is undergoing a nervous breakdown. Well, let me tell you, that ain’t difficult to achieve. Keeping your audience laughing for half an hour, let alone 110 minutes – now that’s some achievement.
If you want conclusive proof that drama is king, and always will be, you don’t even need to check the honours lists, which are invariably festooned with serious thesps and only lightly speckled with beloved comedians. Just consider the night that Maurice and I collected a much coveted Bafta Writers’ Award, for our body of television work. This consisted almost exclusively of half-hour and one-hour comedy – Birds of a Feather, The New Statesman, Goodnight Sweetheart. But as we stood with our golden mask in hand, a Bafta executive whispered to us that we would not have been given one of the academy’s most prized awards had we not plunged, feet first, into the shallow waters of drama – that we had only won because we had written Love Hurts, a BBC series that was deemed to be a serious study of falling in and out of love.
Maurice and I knew better than most how much easier drama was than comedy to execute. Who cares if drama doesn’t evoke tears, as long as it contains a captivating story? If comedy doesn’t elicit laughter, pretty damned quickly, then the nation’s critics are poised with their poisonous pens. Those Hollywood stars lined up in front of Ricky Gervais win awards for making people feel bad. It takes a far rarer talent to make the same people feel good again.
