Roy Chubby Brown - Disconnecting Desolation (Seeking advice)

[daf]

I'm curious to know what The League ever saw in him, that they wanted to include him in their TV show. I presume they were fans? I don't see much Chubb influence.

In the DVD commentaries I'm pretty sure they deny that his act is racist - HUGELY sexist yes, but definitely not racist (like e.g. Bernard Manning). This was 20 years ago, so maybe he was only doing 'blue' material at that time.

The biggest (and only) Chubby fan in our class went on to be a headmaster (after doing a degree in 'sports') - he was totally obsessed with sex (hello "Teefal"!)

[ASFTSN]

I'm curious to know what The League ever saw in him, that they wanted to include him in their TV show. I presume they were fans? I don't see much Chubb influence.

I always assumed they just called the town Royston Vasey for maximum grotesquerie, and then decided to get him on the show to up the ante.  I was young enough that I had no idea who he was when I first saw LoG - I thought the cameo was quite funny at the time, though looking back it's just "ha ha he can't not swear".

[St_Eddie]

I always assumed they just called the town Royston Vasey for maximum grotesquerie, and then decided to get him on the show to up the ante.

This has always been my presumption too.  That and the fact that Royston Vasey is a funny name in of itself.

[yesitsme]

I'll compare jokes I recall by Chubby and Manning, respectively, off the top of my head.

Chubby:

"They reckon you can't call a corner shop a p**i shop, these days.  How 'bout that then? Not allowed to say p**i shop now......(long pause).........They'll Be sayin' next you can't call an Asian a fookin' p**i bastard!"

Manning:

"My grandfather was an unorthodox Jew-he was a Nazi."

(To a black man) "'ello there, sittin' in the shadows.  Didn't see you till you just smiled.  Thought someone'd brought a grand piano in."

That's a famous one of Manning's but I have heard he half-inched it from Woody Allen.

I've never checked back to see when Allen did it but does the same joke differ in the mouths of different acts?

There's certainly nothing racist in the joke (I think he says 'he was a fuckin' Nazi', sort of half under his breath like he can't believe it himself.  It's a good joke.

We too went to Manning's a few times and (as said on here several times) if you sat at the front he pointed at you and would call you anything from Arabic to a Zulu to tell a joke.  Only the people at your table knew you weren't X as the rest of the place was so packed.

Manning was good, don't say he wasn't.  He could tell a joke on any subject as good as anyone else ever and dislike him or loathe him you couldn't help but love him when he came on stage.  He had a genuine charisma.

I honestly think that the people who went to see him knew it was all a joke and I never saw anyone giving it a 'Yeah! that's right!' at the WFEC. 

Chubby on the other hand?  Course, vulgar and simply not funny. 

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Manning was good, don't say he wasn't.  He could tell a joke on any subject as good as anyone else ever and dislike him or loathe him you couldn't help but love him when he came on stage.  He had a genuine charisma.

He wasn't good.

I'm not having a go at you here, but people often say that, for all his massively racist faults, Manning was a good joke-teller with excellent timing. What is this claim based on? Every time I see a clip of Manning's act, I'm always struck by how poor his delivery is/was. He was almost incoherent at times. I've never detected a sliver of charisma either, he always came across as a charmless, self-regarding, slurring idiot. 

Chubby does have stage presence, there's no denying that, but Manning never did as far as I can see.

[checkoutgirl]

So did Ken Dodd.

Yeah but Ken Dodd was likeable whereas Carr is just a tossbean.

[checkoutgirl]

All he then needs to do is say his wife's fanny stinks and he's not gay and he's getting a standing ovation.

To be fair I did chuckle a fair bit at that sentence so maybe the chubby funster is on to something.

[Brundle-Fly]

Chippenham comedian, Wil Hodgson in his 2008 Ed Fringe show spends about twenty minutes describing the agony of being dragged along by his lairy work colleagues to see Roy 'Chubby' Brown perform. He relives the trauma of needing to go for a piss during his act. He considers a pink haired punk in eyeliner leaving his seat at this point might end badly. It does.

The routine isn't on YouTube but I think GoFasterStripe have a DVD of that show if anyone wants to investigate.

[Dusty Gozongas]

Chubby's a difficult one to explain unless you were familiar with Teesside in the 70's and 80's.  He was fucked by the time he'd gone to VHS but you can't blame a bloke for jumping on the chance of Blackpool and a wider audience (compared to an audience that was already dwindling in his old stomping ground).

Royston was a Club Comic who entertained many of us Thick Northern Cunts on a weekend up here in the arse end of nofuckingwhere because nobody knew how to spell cosmopolitan. He probably got paid off in full at a Cosmopolitan though. He was good at that. Take our local Catholic Club as an example: Chubby begins the evening by pointing at poor Jesus on his cross and sez "I see they caught the bastard who stole the telly!" OFF. Paid in full. And that's before a disgruntled club member can inform the bloke of more contemporary committee fiddles.

Not that it matters.

Chubby was proper working class dirty. Husbands were happy to have their wives hear the sort of industrial language they heard every day in the workplace even though they were 'civilised' at home. Wives and girlfriends loved it equally because they wouldn't ever let a man into their dirty world. No woman or man was ever dragged screaming to a Chubby Brown gig. His appearances were rare, always sold out, what a dirty fucker with his dirty fucker shtick.

I'll add to the "check the c-90s out" sentiment if you can get hold of them. I don't recall ANY racism even though I suspect there was some (which was easy I suppose in a time when the only nignogs a northerner saw was on TV or when they watched Othello at the Billingham Forum).

Heh.It occurs to me that I'll defend Brown but have a lifelong hatred of Manning. Maybe those posh Manchester twats do working class a bit too high tempo for me...

Deffo fucked by the time he was knocking the VHS out though. All context was lost*. He was a regional comedian from a fucking rough old place.

_{*you will NEVER get this unless you got it}

[Dusty Gozongas]

I'm going to give a caveat to the above post.

I don't find Chubby brown particularly funny these days but I've stolen his aura for use in private conversation hahah.

I worked in industry for years after leaving school and the banter there was no worse than Royston's. He captured industrial humour. He put a weeks worth of common workplace parlance into a set. Some people won't have any experience of how the fuck he might have been funny but he was a perfect example of Zeitgeist. Be careful how you judge. Burn those C-90s? Careful now.

[Dusty Substance]

British stand up Simon Caine posted on his Facebook yesterday that he's secured an interview with Chubby Brown as part of his Ask The Industry Podcast (like The Comedian's Comedian, but broader and has had writers and promoters as guests). Simon's reached out to his fans asking for any questions to pose to Mr. Vasey. You'll need to join the FB group but this seems like a rare opportunity to ask Chubby Brown some questions.

I'm tempted to go with "Where do you get your crazy ideas from?"

https://www.facebook.com/groups/AskTheIndustryPodcast/permalink/2101757050066751/

[Annie Labuntur]

That's a famous one of Manning's but I have heard he half-inched it from Woody Allen.

I've never checked back to see when Allen did it but does the same joke differ in the mouths of different acts?

There's certainly nothing racist in the joke (I think he says 'he was a fuckin' Nazi', sort of half under his breath like he can't believe it himself.  It's a good joke.

Allen's joke was recorded in March 1964 in Chicago, and although Manning was probably performing comedy before Allen, I highly doubt Manning came up with that joke first.

It's on the first of Allen's three LPs, and collected on the 1979 re-issue collection "Standup Comic". The original's about 30 seconds in here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6tjx_XsBJ8

[Morrison Lard]

A "brown person's" review of a Chubby gig

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/jmb4k4/roy-chubby-brown-gig-133

[Dusty Gozongas]

I'm tempted to go with "Where do you get your crazy ideas from?"

I'd ask him whether he's worked out what an anachronism is yet. Or if he can spell cosmopolitan.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Allen's joke was recorded in March 1964 in Chicago, and although Manning was probably performing comedy before Allen, I highly doubt Manning came up with that joke first.

It's on the first of Allen's three LPs, and collected on the 1979 re-issue collection "Standup Comic". The original's about 30 seconds in here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6tjx_XsBJ8

Allen's line, "A very reformed rabbi - a Nazi", is funnier than "An unorthodox Jew - he was a Nazi", so the alleged child molester triumphs over the confirmed racist in this particular instance.

[Shit Good Nose]

A "brown person's" review of a Chubby gig

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/jmb4k4/roy-chubby-brown-gig-133

That's a really good article and puts me very much in mind of when I went to see Ice-T at the Bristol Academy.

[BeardFaceMan]

I fail to see the difference between the muslim/blow job gag and something Sadowitz would come out with. I'd genuinely love to see Chubby do 5 minutes of Sadowitz's material in his act and Sadowitz do the same. I honestly wonder if you could tell whos material was whos.

Manning was just shit though, he wasnt a comedian, he was a joke teller, he barely wrote at all, just pulled from a huge list of public domain jokes or just nicked them from other comics who did the same.

[Dusty Gozongas]

I'd genuinely love to see Chubby do 5 minutes of Sadowitz's material in his act and Sadowitz do the same. I honestly wonder if you could tell whos material was whos.

Tried that one ages ago. Good luck with that.

[a duncandisorderly]

Chubby's a difficult one to explain unless you were familiar with Teesside in the 70's and 80's..... All context was lost*. He was a regional comedian from a fucking rough old place.

_{*you will NEVER get this unless you got it}

I too hail from smogville, by the seaside. too young to see RCB live at that time, but I'll go you one better- he came for piano lessons off me mam, & me sister swears he even child-minded for us once or twice. I don't remember this last bit. first one of his gags I heard was something about a bomb or a natural disaster in boosbeck, doing £5-worth of damage. I remember thinking that picking on boosbeck was as much to do with the sound of the place-name as anything, & that he could just as easily have said eston or south bank, except that they're nearer where he's actually from. I thought that was poor.

working class teesside can be astonishingly conservative. it's one of the reasons I had to get away. I watched the doc a few years ago & it just made me sad- I wonder how many people see a depiction of the place where they grew up & know, absolutely 100% for sure, that they'll never want to go back there.

[Jumblegraws]

I always assumed they just called the town Royston Vasey for maximum grotesquerie, and then decided to get him on the show to up the ante.  I was young enough that I had no idea who he was when I first saw LoG - I thought the cameo was quite funny at the time, though looking back it's just "ha ha he can't not swear".

Chubby claims in his autobiography that they told him they were all great fans of his work, but even if they really did say that it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that they were just buttering him up in order to get permission to use his birthname in the show.

One of the League, I forget who, asked Chubby what he thought of the show after the first ep aired. Chubby said that he thought some was hilarious and some he just didn't get, to which the Gentleman replied that that's what they were going for.

[thenoise]

That brown persons review makes it sound awful, last time I checked chubbs act was 90 minutes of sexist gags with one or two p**i jokes thrown in (that admittedly got the biggest crowd response). Now it looks like it's the other way round. I have to wonder whether he has had any problems releasing his annual DVD with the BBFC, I can't imagine thy take that kindly to him going 'n**ger bigger n**ger' and calling it comedy.

[Jockice]

If you want to find out how much (or more likely - how little) Chubby's humour has evolved, try tracking down some of his old c90 tapes. Back in the late 80's there were loads of them getting passed around pubs and classrooms. I'm assuming they were all bootlegs from assorted club dates, but the audio quality was fine. I'm sure some will still exist, perhaps in CD form.

Yeah, a mate of mine who is a bit blokey but otherwise quite right-on (his favourite comedian ever is Bill Hicks) was a big Chubby fan around that time (something that he never mentions nowadays) and lent me one of those tapes. I can't remember any of the jokes from it but I think I laughed twice. Another friend at the time was into him, and thinking that if he liked offensive humour he'd like Jerry Sadowitz, did him a tape of Gobshite. He didn't even play it all the way through as he found it too offensive.  So Jerry wins!

[thenoise]

Royston Vasey isn't that funny a name. It isn't just the racism/sexism, it doesn't seem like the same kind of comedy at all. It's weird if they grew up liking chubby then went on to produce the League.

[BeardFaceMan]

Royston Vasey isn't that funny a name. It isn't just the racism/sexism, it doesn't seem like the same kind of comedy at all. It's weird if they grew up liking chubby then went on to produce the League.

Not that weird really, most people of that age, especially in the north, would have grown up with that type of humour. Stephen Frost said something similar on that Young Ones reunion show, all the comedy he liked growing up was the sexist/racist stuff because thats all that was about, then he saw alternative comedy and realised you dont have to be racist/sexist to be funny. Its not like you can draw a line from Chubby Browns comedy to the Leagues comedy, the similarites would be a very small crossover of a venn diagram, but its not a huge stretch to say they were fans of his as kids.

[Churston Deckle]

I have to agree with Mr Gozongas. My experience of Chubby Brown is very similar to his - I worked for twenty years in an almost all male industry from the mid 70s, and many a copied c90 floated around. I never found the VHS tapes to be as funny at all, and I haven't bothered since then. The shock value in those days was tremendous, and cannot be replicated today, no matter how much it is tried.

What I don't understand is how the OP would even consider writing even a review of the one tape he has seen, let alone attempt a documentary on a subject with so little knowledge, and from a 2018 perspective?

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Without wishing to piss on the OP's chips, what's the point of making a documentary about Chubby when the programme mentioned earlier in this thread already exists? It encapsulates everything you'd ever want to say about the man.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

it doesn't seem like the same kind of comedy at all. It's weird if they grew up liking chubby then went on to produce the League.

If they liked him as adolescents, then that's not surprising, given most teenagers are attracted to stuff that's close to the knuckle by the day's standards.

[MattD]

I've heard rumors that Al Murray may not be the lefty luvvy he seems. To be fair to Murray he came up at a time  when the entire UK standup circuit was controlled by Ben Elton. If Ben didn't like your politics, you didn't work.

In fact it's only fairly recently that comedians like Simon Evans, Geoff Norcott and Ben Elton have felt able to come out of the closet and be openly right wing.

He's a definitely not hard left but  liberal lefty, though the loony fringe of Corbyn supporters would want him put up for show trials even for this.

[Dusty Gozongas]

It's weird if they grew up liking chubby then went on to produce the League.

Considering for example that Henry & Ally are a reference to their younger selves, I don't see a youthful liking for Chubby Brown as unlikely.

[daf]

'Ow many Swearinz'?