Subscribe The image is appropriate Rome gave the world the notion of civic order and it is in the
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The image is appropriate; Rome gave the world the notion of civic order, and it is in the civic virtues that Elton claims to find some of his greatest delight, and, in their bitter betrayal, seems to burn with rage. It was at the root of his attacks on the Thatcher government, and of his bewilderment at the deracination of contemporary America, as reflected in the films of Tarantino, Stone and his own imaginary Delamitri."My politics have always been about a sense of community I find well- run municipal facilities inspiring. Who am I to think I can tell a story? I always used to think that I had to sugar every pill."It might seem curious that Elton regards the points behind his jokes as pills to be sugared. But it was once memorably said that the difference between a satirist and the Emperor Nero was that the satirist burned while Rome fiddled. Yet the demands of stand-up comedy - not keeping the audience interested so much as keeping it laughing - translate badly into prose. As Elton says, "Until this book, even in the other novels, I suffered from the paranoid desire to amuse ...
I'd think, I'm looking a bit of a wanker here, I haven't been funny for a while, I must crack a joke; that's what I do. It seems more likely that he's just naturally shrewd, able to see how the world works and prepared to go along with it .. up to a point. (Unlike most of his contemporaries, he won't, for example, do commercials, despite the massive fees he could command for lending his perceived credibility.)He seems better suited to disputing the finer points of artistic morality or the wreckage of the American dream of self-determination than out on stage, doing his one-man show; and yet he seems to regard the monologue as the supreme test, much as pianists regard the Chopin Etudes: you can't claim you can cut the mustard until you can get out there and do it. Or maybe even five."It all seems a terrible bother, and later this year Elton is going on the road to do it all again. I wonder why Elton goes through with it, if, as he insists, it's not for the buzz of applause. It's only afterwards that it occurs to me that he wouldn't be nearly so comfortably off, and the novs, as he calls them (a very English desire to diminish achievements), probably wouldn't have sold nearly so well, if he had just traded under the reputation of a diligent, productive and frequently inspired comedy scriptwriter This isn't to impute some kind of cynical, mercenary motive.
Rik of course was an absolute natural; he'd just go on stage and everyone would laugh He never had to figure it out; he just did it. Ben had to work out from scratch how someone like him should do stand-up, and the result was that he used to roar along with the knob turned up to 11 when occasionally he might have tried eight or seven. The book is less frenetic, more carefully considered than his previous novels. "That's much more what Ben is really like," says his friend the author Douglas Adams. "The trouble with the stand-up stuff - although it was brilliant, and don't forget that it was all new, every week, a whole 30-minute stand- up routine; and there aren't many people who could even write that much, let alone perform it - is that it was only presenting a very small aspect of a very complex, rather thoughtful and warm-hearted man People just got the wrong idea. Ben is essentially an extremely nice person who gets himself into a lather about the fact that some other people aren't nice."In the early days he was basically Rik Mayall's writer.
And in the last few years, a great penny dropped about stand-up."I suddenly realised that I was talking too fast, I was too scared, I didn't trust my material, I didn't trust my audience, I was scared, and so I would rant."The impression I used to give was that I was a know-all. For years I used to say 'I'm not bloody preaching! I'm not bloody moral!' and after about 10 years of saying that in interviews, I thought, well, if they all think it, I must be doing something wrong. Sure, I'm doing something right because I can fill six Hammersmith Odeons, but I'm also doing something wrong because .. I irritated some people There's no question about that But I assumed it was nothing to do with me. It was someone else's problem, based on political prejudice or something. And then this huge clunking great penny dropped: I'm scared on stage, which is why I keep driving home my point I'm scared they won't get it, so I'd better say it again ... and if I shut up for one second, they'll shout 'Fuck off!' Because the shadow of the gong from the early days at the Comedy Store ... it's a very long shadow indeed."In Popcorn, it seems that Elton may at last have escaped from under that shadow There's not going to be a gong to signal failure.
So what is the problem, then?Elton's own theory is straightforward. "I'm moderately unique in that I don't get any adrenaline buzz from performing at all," he says "It's an intellectual kick It's the material that matters I've never thought of myself as a performer I'm not a funny person I have some funny things to say. The man clearly does understand comedy - satire in particular - and generates it almost by reflex. It's an accusation frequently trotted out by Elton's detractors, but which, once you meet him, is impossible to take seriously.