The 1980s aren’t everyone’s favourite decade but, for theatre producer Nica Burns OBE, there’s at least one thing to look back on with some pride–the comedy. “I was there when ‘Alternative Comedy’ started,” she explains. “The whole point of it was to change things. It had a mission; that jokes that were homophobic, racist or sexist were simply unacceptable. There was a desire to use comedy to change people’s attitudes, and it was incredibly successful.”
Burns has directed the Forster’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards (the Awards formerly known as “the Perriers”) since 1984 and has seen first-hand the success of many of the Awards’ nominees and winners–including gay men like Stephen Fry (a member, along with Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie, of inaugural winners the Cambridge Footlights), Paul O’Grady (as Lilly Savage) and Graham Norton.
So, when asked if now is a good time for gay comedy and gay comedians, she’s absolutely confident it is. “As a child, I remember watching people like Larry Grayson; he was very funny but he couldn’t admit he was gay,” she points out. “When you think of the gay performers on television then, they weren’t able to lead completely open lives. I think it’s incredible how quickly both heterosexual and gay comedians, working together, have changed things. Heterosexual comedians spoke up for the idea of equality. It made the workplace accessible to openly gay comics.”
“I’m not saying you won’t still find pockets in the clubs where people are hostile,” Burns admits. “You’re not going to change everything in 20-30 years. But incredible strides have been made, and I think that speaking publicly about it, making people laugh, is a great way of communicating ideas. It’s fantastic that people like Graham Norton, Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig are now major public figures who are really much loved, and on our television screens prime time. They are great role models for the fact that gay and lesbian people are just as able to be universally loved and appreciated and respected and laughed with—as opposed to “at”—as any straight comedian. That’s just brilliant; that’s how it should be.”
Should be, but is it really? Glasgow-born Charlie Ross first started stand-up 14 years ago. Although he performed regularly in gay nights at The Stand Comedy clubs in Glasgow and Edinburgh, it took him around 18 months of regular gigging before he began talking about his sexual orientation to “mainstream” audiences. “Even though it was 2000, the world was still slightly different then,” he admits. “It was just a little bit more difficult to feel confident about talking about that on stage. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen–were audiences going to bring out pitchforks and run me out of town? Then one night I was doing a standard gig and thought: ‘Sod this!’ I had a fantastic reaction. And I’ve just kept at it.”
Admittedly, Ross is the first to accept that part of the fun for him is playing with his audiences’ expectations. “I usually talk for about 10 minutes about being a PE teacher, and about football–being a lad brought up in Glasgow,” he says. “And then I ‘Come Out’. It’s funny; there is a physical reaction from most audiences. Colleagues have told me they’ve seen the audience move back in unison, because–since I’m not flouncing onto the stage, doing something extrovert–they’ve made a subconscious decision that I’m straight.”
“The problem being a gay standup is that people instantly align you with other gay stand ups,” suggests Solihull-born David Morgan. “You’re automatically compared to Alan Carr, Julian Clary or Graham Norton; it’s in the mind of everyone. A lot of people don’t get to meet gay people on a regular basis; the ‘gays’ they are exposed to are the ones on telly who tend to be the more ‘flamboyant’.”
Scott Agnew also enjoys confounding audience expectations by “dropping the G bomb”, not least because the burly 6’5” Glaswegian certainly isn’t Alan Carr. Not that he’s ever particularly hidden his sexual orientation. “I certainly remember talking about being gay when I started in stand up in 2000,” Agnew says. “Not in particularly sophisticated terms—less ‘angry young man’, more ‘Fuck you, deal with it!’–and I suppose there’s still an element of that in my act now. The best comedy is being honest; I’ve probably been to honest about everything I’ve done!”
Honesty is not without its problems, though. “I try not to make my set entirely about being gay,” says Morgan. “It’s difficult for people to agree with you when they have no idea of what you’re talking about. We’re still in a minority; we’re still a counter-culture to heterosexual people. Not everyone remembers the first time they discovered other gay men existed, or went into a nightclub. And the acquisition of sex for gay men is completely different too; you don’t have girls saying ‘No!’ to it!”
In recent years, Agnew has noted how some audiences and promoters have not been entirely comfortable when he’s stripped away the “fluffy, innocuous” gay routines of his earlier career. Indeed, during the height of last year’s public debate in Scotland on equal marriage, he even found himself the target of homophobic abuse while on stage–not just once, but several times within a few weeks.
“People are fine with gay men as long as they don’t have to see everything,” insists Andrew Doyle, “but I still think homophobia is the norm. Living in London, you can get a skewered idea of what the nation is like but, on the whole, many people are openly homophobic in the way they were still openly racist 30-40 years ago. I just don’t tend to see it, because I hang about in circles where that would never happen. When you’re doing comedy on the circuit, and you’re going to various towns round the country, you have to be prepared that people don’t want to hear about those things. It’s quite sobering to remember that’s the norm.
“Stand ups naturally talk about their own experiences, and if you didn’t communicate your sexuality within that, you’re probably self-censoring,” Doyle adds. “It’s just that when a gay comic starts taking about something to do with homosexuality, people notice it more than if a straight comic talks about their wife or girlfriend. A couple of critics made the point of my last Edinburgh show being “too gay”; I looked back at the script to check–because I’m a bit anal like that–and I think under 10% was referencing homosexuality. It’s interesting that they picked up on that, and thought it was predominantly about what the show was about.”
It’s perhaps a fear of audiences being “gayed out” that gay comedians seldom ever find themselves booked on the same bill, unless it’s a gay-specific event. There have, of course, been gay comedy nights for decades, and not just in well-known gay venues. Yet relatively few have stood the test of time; one of the longest running now is the annual gay comedy night during the Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival–which is two decades old. “About three years ago we looked into whether we should still do it, and people seemed to say: ‘We like it. It’s become a bit of a tradition,” says the festival’s director Geoff Rowe. “Some comedians don’t want to do that night, they just want to do a regular gig, and there’s a bit of me that thinks it’s not necessary any more. But last year it sold out and this year looks the same.”
Nica Burns, however, is not a fan of such gay-specific events. “It’s like asking where I stand on all-female gigs? My personal opinion is that if you put on an all-gay bill, the promoter is more likely to target a gay audience, because they want to sell tickets. Whereas, what I like is to have gay performers working on a mixed bill, who are simply hired because they’re very funny.”
A prime example of this for her is Paul O’Grady. She was familiar with Lilly Savage from her Vauxhall Tavern days, but the Edinburgh nomination in 1991–alongside Eddie Izzard, Jack Dee and eventual winner Frank Skinner–proved a career turning point. “He’s just a brilliant comedian, but he was playing then almost exclusively to a gay audience,” Burns points out. “Suddenly, after the nomination, his audience was full of heterosexual couples who thought he was wonderful. And he’d suddenly stepped out into the heterosexual audience world and increased his audience.
“There are, numerically, far more heterosexuals in the world than gays,” Burns points out. “I want to see gay comedians accessing the greatest audience possible, and I think it’s a much better statement about gay comedians–that they are equal–if they’re sharing on mixed bills. And who knows; the odd homophobe in the audience might start laughing and realise something.”
First published in #15 (Winter 2014) issue of Pride Life magazine.
