I’m a long-time lurker, but this seems like a good time for my first post, as Phil Kay is my favourite comedian. I first saw him on TV, with a slot on Barry Cryer’s “The Stand Up Show”, in the mid 90s. He bounded onto stage like a puppy, demanding an enthusiastic “Give us a ‘D’! Give us an ‘E’! Give us an ‘H’!”, eliciting the predictable Pavlovian response from the audience, but went on to deliberately fizzle out the chant with increasingly mumbled letters until the audience’s unison degenerated into incoherent vowels and consonants. I was instantly hooked by his playful subversion (another variation of his is “Give us a ‘D’! Give us an ‘E’!” left hanging with a downbeat “Thanks. Magic.”). Along similar lines, as Happy Tree mentioned, he often manages to wring 10 minutes of giggly hysterics by requesting complete silence from his audience, on the basis that his standup comedian Grandmother once advised him to get all of the laughs out of the way in the first half of the performance. The laughter comes partly from the audience being told that their laughter is forbidden, partly from his increasing feigned frustration at not being able to shut them up and get off the stage, but also (for me at least) from just how long he has the balls to push this tenuous joke for.
On his day, he can pluck dozens of beautifully crafted ideas and one-liners that Daniel Kitson might spend months carefully honing, from thin air, seemingly at will (and I say this as a huge fan of Kitson). His anecdotes often appear to start underwhelmingly, from a germ of truth (“I was at Glastonbury one year, stumbling around drunk, and I ended up getting into the wrong tent – it was so embarrassing”), only to slowly spiral off into the absurd (“and I ended up going home to live with her in the wrong house for 6 months – it was so embarrassing!”). And end with an almost contemptuous abruptness (“and then I vanished…with a trace. As opposed to without a trace. I left a slight bit of slime behind”). On the other hand, I’ve been to gigs where he’s told stories that are so painfully true and confessional that it can be hard to listen. Once in particular a story about burying the baby of one of his close relatives, which – not surprisingly – didn’t contain a single comedy moment, reduced many of the audience to tears.
He’s about as far from a feedline/punchline comedian as it’s possible to get, but he has a pretty good stock of pithy one liners (at a gig during the Iraq war,“the American tanks have stickers on the back: ‘01-100-155 – How’s my invading?’”). And a joke so perfect that even though it was hidden in the midst of an anecdote at a gig about 10 years ago, I still remember it:
“I injured my finger, and it occurred to me that I didn’t realise how much I relied on it until it was out of action. My Uncle died a while ago and he was saying that until then, he hadn’t realised how much he relied on his whole body”.
His physical comedy is also as good as I’ve ever seen on stage. Obviously, this is rather difficult to convey in print, but on his “That Phil Kay video”, there is a section of improvised slapstick involving a piano, a bucket and a ladder that is utterly sublime (although I realise it might not sound that funny to read). If anyone knows an easy way of recording a VHS onto a Mac or PC, I’d be more than happy to capture it and upload.
Having said all of that, as Ballad of Ballard Berkley rightly says, his shows can miss as well as hit (and increasingly so, unfortunately). If you get an unlucky break, you’ll have paid a tenner to watch him consult his watch a dozen times and apologise to a disgruntled audience that he just doesn’t feel funny that evening. In fact, one show that a friend of mine came to after much hype from me consisted of Phil Kay spending most of the hour checking with the audience on the seriousness of tonsillitis, which his daughter had just been admitted to hospital with. On occasions, I’ve seen him break off to lecture himself to relax and let it flow, in an attempt to get the show on track.
All this is the downside of his genuine authenticity, I think, but absolutely worth it for the chance of catching him on a high.
Anyway, apologies if I've rambled on. Even if this is my first and last, I hope I’ve contributed something useful!
Topic: Whatever happened to Phil Kay? (Read 14823 times)