Two Missionaries
In his latest volume of memoirs, How I Got to Be Whoever It is I Am, the actor Charles Grodin reveals that when he met Robert Altman, the late director said to him, ‘I know I should like you, but I don’t.’ How could it be, I thought, that Altman, the master of improvisation, was not a fan of Grodin, whose impro work in Midnight Run and Albert Brooks’s Real Life, to name just two, was second-to-none? For me, it’s always a shock to discover that two people I admire don’t get along. (Just as it is every time I’m reminded that the entire world doesn’t necessarily agree with all of my opinions about everything. Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if it did? Certainly, there’d be fewer wars, and more old British sitcoms on DVD.) Just recently, I found myself in the middle of a kind of feud between two of my heroes…without either of them ever realising it.
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I first saw the great US comedian Franklyn Ajaye perform in 1989, at Melbourne's ‘Comedy Club at the Hilton’ (now, as was inevitable, a Tabaret). He had everyone in hysterics with his routines about Middle Eastern justice (a man with no hands describing himself as ‘a master criminal’), Australian lawn bowls commentators (‘You can’t fake enthusiasm for lawn bowls’), and his theory that the nation of Chad is in fact just one man, called Chad. The material was top shelf, but Ajaye was also master of a technique I had never seen before: he would talk about a subject for what seemed too long, getting the room to the stage where you could feel everyone urging him to move on. But he wouldn’t. And somehow, at the moment where it looked like the tank was empty, he would keep pushing (or rather, gently prodding) the audience, until the idea became funny all over again. By this point, even a single word or repetition of a key phrase would produce a tidal wave of laughter. It was like a kind of magic trick.
The following year, inspired by Ajaye’s performance, and at the continual urging of two local comedians, Simon Rogers and Andrew Goodone, I decided to have a crack at stand-up myself. While I was able to achieve a basic level of competence, I never had the guts, or level of ease, to emulate Franklyn’s ability to stick with a single idea long enough to bring an audience to orgasm. An ability I again heard demonstrated on an obscure record I found in a second-hand shop. Titled Plaid Pants and Psychopaths, it was notable for three reasons. Firstly, Franklyn’s name was spelt wrongly on the cover (as Franklin with an ‘i’); secondly, it had been recorded in Sydney, at Kinselas, in 1985; and thirdly, it was balltearingly funny from start to finish. His Star Trek routine, ending with an extended riff on how Vulcan men can only make love every seven years (‘I tell you, Spock was a different dude that day. “Fuck you, Jim. I ain’t estimatin’ shit!”’), was Ajaye at his best and became one of the most-requested bits on the late Dave Taranto’s still-lamented 3RRR comedy show, The Cheese Shop. Franklyn seemed to take to Melbourne too, recording his first HBO special at our own San Remo Ballroom. He eventually moved here, and was regularly seen performing at the Comedy Festival, appearing on The Panel, and loping down the streets of Clifton Hill, charming everyone with his cool, his dreads, and his infectious giggle. I bumped into him one morning after what had clearly been a big night. ‘I gotta go record the talking book of the new Robert Ludlum,’ he said from behind his shades. ‘Hope it’s the fuckin’ abridged version.’
I learnt never to be surprised by whatever job he was doing. He’d not only written material for Robert Townsend and In Living Color, but entire episodes of NYPD Blue. He’d acted in everything from Car Wash and Stir Crazy, to Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy and the remake of The Jazz Singer (‘I’m the only man in the history of film to go to jail for beating up Neil Diamond and be bailed out by Sir Laurence Olivier’). And he’d appeared on the Tonight Show multiple times and released a string of hit comedy albums in the seventies (one was called Don’t Smoke Dope, Fry Your Hair). And yet, there he was, standing on Queens Parade, addressing shopkeepers by name. Then, just as he was approaching potential King of Moomba status, he announced he’d been cast as a regular in HBO’s Deadwood. Given that the show was a full-blown masterpiece and certain to run for years, we all assumed that was the last we’d see of him.
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Back in 1991, I visited the Edinburgh Festival and saw another stand-up comedian who would become one of my all-time favourites, the UK’s Stewart Lee. Aside from being piss funny, Lee shared two characteristics with Ajaye; Firstly, his name was spelt wrongly (I have the 1991 Fringe program in front of me. The ad reads ‘Stuart Lee “Brilliant” – The Times’). More significantly, Lee was another man who spoke quietly and could tease a subject out to what seemed to be a foolhardy length (the story of Robert the Bruce and the spider was repeated three times with tiny but crucial variations), but which eventually paid off in laughs bigger than most others I heard on the Fringe that year. And all to an audience of about forty punters who had no idea who he was. Not all of Lee’s routines were extended; at one point he related a conversation with his mechanic: ‘How long’s it going to take to fix my car?’ he’d said. ‘How long is a piece of string?’ responded the mechanic, glibly. ‘Well, this one’s thirteen inches,’ said Lee, producing a length of string from his pocket. ‘Now, about my car.’
Through the nineties, Lee, in partnership with Richard Herring, produced two classic TV series, Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy (broadcast live on Sunday afternoons!), neither of which made it to Australia (nor, bizarrely, have they ever been released on DVD, making them virtually unseeable to this day). The only bit of Lee’s stand-up I was able to see during those years was a single routine on the Lee & Herring Live video, in which Stewart deconstructs a postcard depicting a dog and two cats playing a piano. The way he stretches his observations, delaying the killer moment when he finally reads the postcard’s caption (I won’t spoil it. It’s on YouTube), is akin to Ajaye’s own ‘time bomb’ technique. I found myself wondering whether either was familiar with the other’s work. Probably not, I concluded. Franklyn would never have heard of Fist of Fun, and Stewart didn’t look like someone who’d pop out to rent Car Wash.
In 1999, I made a second visit to the Edinburgh Festival, this time (rather shakily) supporting Judith Lucy in her triumphant season at the Gilded Balloon. I passed Lee in a stairwell at the Pleasance and was struck by the difference eight years had wrought. Gone was the studenty look; he was wearing sunnies indoors and was dressed like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. And why not? He was only the director of that year’s hottest show, Arctic Boosh. In the next few years, both Lee and Ajaye would take a break from stand-up. Lee to continue his directing work, write a novel and create the most controversial stage show of the century, Jerry Springer: The Opera, and Ajaye to lend his sly delivery to the near-Shakespearean dialogue of Deadwood (‘I have been known to cut the occasional fart’ he says, to Calamity Jane, and trust me, on screen it’s a great moment).
And then, after these triumphs, both men have returned to the clubs, better and funnier than ever. Lee’s 90’s Comedian set, available on DVD through the brave folk at GoFasterStripe.com, contains his most extended bit yet; a joke about Christ too obscene even to be alluded to in print that will be difficult for even its author to top. And Ajaye’s latest (though barely distributed) album, Vagabond Jazz & The Abstract Truth, caused a friend of mine to nearly lose control of her vehicle. Over a long reenactment of the original failed attempt to blow up the Trade Towers in New York, Franklyn, like a conjurer using powers of misdirection, somehow keeps the audience from asking the most obvious question: Having blown up the van, how exactly were the terrorists going to claim their deposit from the rental car company? When he finally poses this simple query, it’s like a bomb going off. Just like when Stewart Lee hits the ending of his bit about the ET doll at the Princess Diana memorial.
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So, given all this, and assuming you’ve made it this far, imagine my mixed feelings across the week commencing 13 April this year. I’d just been enjoying Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on YouTube. The six-part series, a welcome return to TV for Lee, went out on BBC Two, Monday nights. By midday Tuesday, it hit the internet (don’t expect to see it on Australian TV any time soon. It’s that good.), and it was on Tuesday the 14th I saw the episode in which Lee spends several minutes holding up, and analysing, the cover of an old comedy album he’d found at a jumble sale: 1974’s I’m a Comedian, Seriously…by Franklyn Ajaye.
Lee gets plenty of mileage out of the fact that he has never actually listened to the album, choosing to concentrate instead on the sleeve notes, which expound, in a style that was common at the time, upon the comedian’s art and the creation of the material contained within. Lee contrasts the high-falutin’ style of the notes with the lowbrow nature of the track listings, which include such titles as ‘Dick Caught in Zipper’. It’s pretty funny gear, and I found myself laughing along even as my heart sank. ‘But, Stewart,’ I thought, admittedly entirely missing the point of the joke. ‘Why not give the album a play? You might actually like it’, although I confess I’ve never been able to track down a copy of I’m a Comedian, Seriously and so cannot say whether it stacks up to Franklyn’s later work.
The very next morning, I fronted up to the fancy grounds of Melbourne High School to shoot location inserts for Thank God You’re Here, and who should I find waiting for me but Franklyn frickin’ Ajaye! Slightly greyer round the dreads (he turned sixty this year), but still with the same mischievous glint and laser delivery. I immediately froze; had anyone told him about the Stewart Lee show? I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. Instead, I sat back and listened in awe as Franklyn gave me the whole Deadwood story, how ‘everyone bought a house and then HBO couldn’t afford to make the fourth series’, stopping only to be dragged onto set, grinning with evil intent and asking me, ‘So we just make shit up, that’s how this works?’
It wasn’t until the live taping, that Friday, that I got to see the ‘shit’ Franklyn had made up that day. It was funny stuff, with Franklyn as the coach urging the kids on the sports team at the fictitious grammar school to ‘think about that cold beer at the end’. And when we filed out onto the stage to film that bit at the halfway mark where we all banter with Bourney, I decided to do as Stewart Lee had done earlier that week on the other side of the world. I produced an old Franklyn Ajaye album and used the cover to score a few laughs. The album was Plaid Pants and the laughs were derived from the fact that it is, to my knowledge, the only album ever released where the artist’s name is spelt wrongly on the front (‘We made it for fifty bucks,’ said Franklyn, his expression suggesting that even he didn’t own a copy.). But I did make sure I pointed out that it’s a dead-set classic and worth keeping an eye out for in the increasingly fished-out waters at Dixons.
And now that Deadwood is closed for business (while the Two and a Half Men roll on seemingly forever) the man who dared to play a character called ‘The Nigger General’ is looking to get back on the old stand-up horse. This is good news for comedy fans. And I’d like to think that one day, on the circuit, he’ll bump into Stewart Lee, and the two of them will fall into conversation. A long conversation. With a killer ending.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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