About The Footlights
Footlights! A Hundred Years Of Cambridge Comedy By Robert Hewison
Foreword by Eric Idle
Comedy is a very odd activity. To stand on a stage in front of hundreds of other people and make them laugh is a very strange thing to do. For some bizarre anthropological reason, since earliest time a few people have found it necessary to be amusing. Why should this be so? Clearly when someone goes to such lengths to attract the admiration of strangers we can observe that they must feel desperately unloved, but this does not explain why we, the audience, should tolerate and actively encourage them in their weird behavior. Nor why comedy should prove to be so popular or so universal.
It seems no coincidence that England, a land rich in absurdities, should be so rich in comedians. Writing about comedy is difficult, but it is not half so difficult as writing comedy. For example, I am writing in this room to which I have come every morning for the past few weeks, but today is different. Today I have only to write about comedy, I don’t actually have to write the bloody stuff itself. If I’m wrong when I’m writing about comedy then some minor critic in Penge will abuse me over his saltimbocca, but if I’m wrong when I’m writing comedy then – horror of horrors – nobody laughs: there is nothing but the sound of one hand clapping. It is this potential result that gives comedy its edge. It is a bit like tightrope walking. You really have to do it to know it, and indeed that is also the only way to learn how to do it.
If it were nothing more than gilded youths dressing up as women then you could hardly be blamed for thinking of the Cambridge Footlights as an effete collection of privileged wankers. It has from time to time been just that, but collectively it is far more than that, for it has proved to be a durable training ground for people who have gone on to become excellent in their own right. This is Footlights’ triumph and its justification. It is also preeminently a self-inventing form. No University Official stepped forward and said ‘Let there be Footlights.’ In fact they have flourished so healthily without direct encouragement that this might be seen as yet another triumph for Cambridge subversion.
Comedy is a shared experience. Without an audience it is nothing. Far more so than tragedy, comedy is intimately connected with the audience’s response. We weep alone, but we all laugh together. It is this shared communality that makes it so powerful and so popular. It is constantly reminding us of our own absurdity in this vast universe. It is frequently to do with scale, cutting us down to size, laughing at our human weaknesses. For a few moments it removes us from the prison of our own personalities, the trap of our own self-created selves, and unites us in a warm shared response by making us laugh at the trivia in which we continually enmesh ourselves. It is an uplifting experience. We are taken out of ourselves, and made to laugh at ourselves. This is both slightly painful (laughing does hurt) and healthy (because it is done communally). It is instant group therapy.
It achieves this effect by demonstration rather than persuasion. We do not decide to laugh, we find ourselves laughing. In the dark amidst hundreds of strangers we suddenly find ourselves united in a tribal explosion of noise, which begins in a shout of recognition and ends in the sound of a gurgling drain or a goose being strangled. For a few seconds we are all barking mad together.
To be on the other side of a laugh, causing it, triggering it and feeling the great wave of human noise come back at you, is one of the most powerful and addictive sensations that there is. It is a great welcoming sound that wraps round the performer, enmeshing him in approval. He can learn to play with it, to toy with the audience’s expectations, to tickle the laugh, to surf along it, hold it back and then finally release it, but he can learn this only by doing it. To be sure, such ability is partly instinctive – some people are just funny – but it can also be learned, or at least honed and improved by experience. This is why a structure like the Footlights is so useful. It is both a training ground, and a safety net, which prevents hundreds of people who are drawn to it but are otherwise unsuitable, from pursuing it too far.
This is the history of a comedy club. A loose association of extraordinary people with almost nothing in common except that they all belonged to it. Nothing dates faster than comedy. Today’s topical witticism is tomorrow’s puzzled yawn. From the many extracts in this book it is easy to chuckle at the sketches near our own time, but at the distant end of the century the humour is elusive and we can only stare blankly at the lines and wonder ‘Did they really laugh at this?’ I think the reason for this is quite simple. Comedy consists of two elements: the content and the manner. The content is the contemporary trivia of day-to-day shared experience from which the comedian draws his material. The manner is the secret that belongs to the performer. An odd mixture of ‘timing’ and a strange persuasive power which reassures the audience and lulls them into a state of confidence in which they can accept that that virtually anything he says is funny. Looking at old scripts we are left only with what they said, not how they said it, and that is to miss perhaps sixty percent of the comedy. A good comedian can make you laugh at almost anything.
The value of Footlights for me was that, while learning about content, how to write, rewrite and cut sketch material, I still had to go out and learn performing in front of quite difficult audiences. In my short time there I experienced almost every kind of audience. We performed cabaret professionally at least twice a week. We played in theatres, we played at Edinburgh Festivals, before factory audiences, before dinner-jacketed hoorays and ball-gowned debs, in Butlin’s holiday camps, before drunks, before dinner, before Round Table businessmen, and ultimately in radio and television studios. Had one sat down to plan a crash course in show business one could hardly have bettered this as a learning experience. A University which permits such activity is clearly doing its job, by doing absolutely nothing.
Despite repeated complaints about the Footlights – that it is somehow too professional (but then who wants amateur comedy?); that it is elitist (though nobody laughs because they are impressed by the social rank of those on stage); that it is privileged (nobody laughs out of kindness either); and that it is undergraduate (they are after all, undergraduates) – it has nevertheless self-created its own tradition. A tradition which seeks after excellence, and then seeks to hide that excellence. (Ars est celare artem.) The measure of the Footlights is that it is continually reinventing itself. It is impressive that with no encouragement from the University, no financial support, no grants nor University premises, and with hardly any real continuity except for a few dedicated officers (take a bow Harry Porter), it should survive for a hundred years.
We should be grateful to Robert Hewison, a man who has suffered the advantages of an Oxford education, for so excellently researching and writing the history of Cambridge humour.
Eric Idle
Sydney 1982
