STAND-UP LOU SANDERS Hug and Pint, Glasgow, Fri 15 & Sat 16 Mar
Blowing any audience cobwebs away with a show that revelled in its tales of misadventure, Lou Sanders’ Shame Pig was a highlight of last August’s Edinburgh Fringe, with its star laying some of her least proud moments out in the open for all to hear. A vital distinction was drawn between momentary embarrassment and the kind of shame that can impact on mental health. A relentlessly silly hour, Shame Pig was, at the same time, the sort of poignant comedy we need right now: acknowledging that being imperfect is surely the one thing we all have in common.
Our conversation quickly turns to Jon Ronson’s
revelatory book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. ‘I love Jon Ronson,’ Sanders tells me from Sydney where she’s gigging and ‘squeezing in a lot of beach time. I opened for him in London when he was doing a tour of his new book which I was delighted about as he’s the best non- fiction author in the world. That book was life changing and everyone needs to read it and have a think about their actions. Compassion has been replaced with finger pointing and blame and everyone’s gone quite bonko.’ Both Shame Pig and a work in progress of new show The Face That Launched 1000 Dicks will get an airing at the Glasgow Comedy Festival. She’s still writing it, but has it mapped out conceptually. ‘At this stage I want to talk about context. We’re so divided and everything’s reduced to headlines so it’s harder for people to say their truth with depth and nuance because they’re worried about being called out or cancelled. It would be better if people could speak from the heart and be allowed space for what they believe at that time and to think differently and make mistakes. But that might be too hard to make funny.’ If anyone can accept that challenge, it’s Lou Sanders. (Craig Angus)
P H O T O : P A U L W O L F G A N G W E B S T E R
COMEDY | PREVIEWS
P H O T O : I
I D L S U K A N
MY COMEDY HERO JUSTIN MOORHOUSE THE STAND, GLASGOW, SAT 16 MAR; THE STAND, EDINBURGH, SUN 17 MAR
My comedy hero is Les Dawson. He is, in my opinion, the father of modern comedy, especially the comedy that lazily gets lumped as ‘northern’. To the idiotic some, he was your archetypal 70s comedian, a frilly-shirted rotund bloke doing gags about his mother-in-law just like the rest of them. But he invented that character, he created that persona, and that mother-in-law wasn’t real. She was a Hogarthian monster he designed perhaps to expose his own inadequacies. Born and formed in Collyhurst, a rain-sodden north Manchester slum, Les always looked outward. He left school at 14, dreaming of becoming a writer. Instead, he worked in the parcels’ department of the Co-op. For a short time, Les worked on The Bury Times, he sold vacuum cleaners, did National Service and at one time got vacuum cleaners, did National Service and at one time got by playing piano in a Parisian bordello. Typical northern working-class comedian! His jokes were tightly formed and perfectly constructed. Though that doesn’t mean he was obsessed with keeping the word-count low; far from it. The florid passages were so perfectly written that they’re a delight just to read, never mind hear.
He was a giant of comedy, a titan of panto, a brilliant writer, a droll deadpan. When he left us early in 1993, Nick Smurthwaite’s obituary in The Independent summed him up brilliantly as ‘the most original and unexpected of stand-up comics, combining the coolness and command of Jack Benny with the studied misanthropy of WC Fields, his hero.’ He was the best. (As told to Brian Donaldson)
60 THE LIST 1 Feb–31 Mar 2019