Anthony Newley’s ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ by Paul Hamilton

THE BUSINESS OF PLEASURE

The hoariest of commonplace banalities must be the one about the sad comedian. The tears of a clown. The face of tragedy ever-present behind the mask of comedy. And, yes, there are many contenders for the coupled crown of King of Comedy and Heir of Sorrow; Robin Williams, Michael Barrymore, Chris Langham, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock, Richard Pryor… Of course, it’s more than the indisputable yin/yang contrast in emotional states (although they are connected by hysteria). Just as one would never ask why a gas fitter uses electricity, likewise no-one need query the emotional extremities of a comic. The professional comedian is so often an amateur human being, so often failing to find an equilibrium. The mania within him, when harnessed consummately, produces comic fireworks - brilliant, breath-taking, surprising - illuminating the everyday in a new light and at an off-centre angle. But when it overpowers him, the gunpowder is damp and the matches won’t strike, and the darkness clouds his vision. There’s no audience. There’s only his voice in the darkness. And it bores him. And boredom is unendurable.

Drugs and drink and sex are not a comedian’s substitutes for an audience’s love and laughter. They are used to blot out the need. They are there to stop the comedian from thinking. Comedy is the drug they are hopelessly addicted to. So often, they got the taste for it at school, and quickly learnt that it was preferable to have a bully laugh at you than thump you. Comedy became their shield, their protective layer, but there is a danger: A joke has been likened to a parachute - and there is always going to be the time it fails to open in time. And comedy’s always about timing. Will he land on his feet or his face? A comedian needs the love and acceptance of an audience - more than he needs his wife and family - but every time he steps on to that stage, he is in peril. If they don’t laugh at him, they don’t want him. And he’s lost. (Forever, in the case of Michael Richards.)

Of course, there are comedians such as Steve Martin, who has managed to tame his comic muse and produce comic nonsensical gems over the 35 years after he quit being The Wild & Crazy Guy. He is now the Sensible & Crazy-Only-When-I-Choose-To-Be Guy. He’s a lucky one. Most comedians, after finding security in their life, lose the danger in their art. Some never attain a level of maturity: Tommy Cooper was cursed by his gift, unable to converse about the myriad of mundanities life has to threaten without making everything into a joke. He was a man-child.

There are two tragedies concerning Anthony Newley. The first is, rather than being remembered as a one-man-band (actor, singer, composer, dancer, stage and film director) and a truly ground-breaking artist, he is known primarily as the influence on David Bowie’s silly song ‘The Laughing Gnome’. The second tragedy is that any article about Newley always mentions the aforesaid ‘fact’, thereby rubbing his face in Bowie’s crap a little bit more and wiping away his true cultural significance. Newley’s humour was peculiar - self-deprecating to the point of laceration in interviews, detached and self-mocking in his onstage between song banter. His ‘Strange World Of Gurney Slade’ TV series from the early 1960s was less a comedy series than a thorough demystification of the entertainment business (it was like a bizarre collision of Hancock, Freud and David Lynch); it was a notorious commercial flop, the viewing figures halving with each successive episode. ‘Fool Britannia’, his full-length comedy album from 1963 performed with Sellers and Joan Collins and co-written with Leslie Bricusse, is his non-Oxbridge contribution to the satire boom. Unfortunately, because it is exclusively about the Profumo affair, it has dated terribly; any giggles to be derived from it now are purely on the strength of the performances.

He was unafraid of over-extending himself, pushing the form (singing, acting, comedy) and format (stage, screen, TV) to snapping point, just to see what would happen. Sometimes his talent and audience would go with him; occasionally, they would be left behind, waving goodbye. One of his personal quirks was referring to himself in the third person (“Yes, I think Newley could do that”) and, though Dudley Moore said it was Newley who introduced him and Peter Cook to opium, Newley preferred sex to drink and drugs as a relaxant and escape.

Although he co-wrote many songs with Bricusse (look it up; you may be pleasantly surprised to find that you know quite a few), ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ is a rare Newley solo composition. Written for a 1978 American TV show honouring comedians, it is the quintessential Newley masterpiece, taking that Showbiz cliché about the Grock-like sad funnyman and making it real: The pressure from the stagestruck mother, shining her boy’s tap shoes and pushing him on to the stage; the pressure to grab and hold the audience’s attention; the pressure to slay the crowd, then slay ‘em again; the pressure to get to the top and stay there; the pressure to be funny offstage as well as on; pressure from all sides, even a rave review is more pressure to up his game. And this ‘funnyman’ he sings of; is he ‘funny’ because he is unlike the rest of us? He becomes freakish. Alien and alienated, he loses contact with reality, becomes meat for the laughter machine, as the audience he slays ends up slaying him.

There is a great 1993 live recording of ‘The Man Who Makes You Laugh’ on ‘The Last Song’ (STAGE 9031), a posthumous release of variable quality (wayward genius was never dependable mediocrity’s bedfellow), but there is, on YouTube, an epic performance of it on Michael Parkinson’s chat show: 

Touchingly dedicating it to “all those lovable fruitcakes”, he eases himself into the song which, as it unfolds, becomes a multi-dimensional psychodrama and you see the brilliance of Newley’s stagecraft. With deft, balletic gestures he paints the scenes - the comedian’s name in lights, the fat guy working in the delicatessen, the pushy mum, the nervous son, the fan at the foot of the stage holding up an autograph book which miraculously transmogrifies into the optic where the nervous wreck of a comic fills his whisky glass, the clown fixing his make-up in the mirror… It’s an unforgettable performance, and the spirits of the comics who gave their sanities and souls - from Tony Hancock (who would weep to Newley’s ballad ‘What Kind Of Fool Am I?’) down, down, down the years to Dan Leno - are summoned by charms and escorted safely home.