A Comic’s Relief: Why Red Nose Day is still inspiring comedians after 25 years
You can compress one hundred thousand newsreaders in the finest, silkiest fishnet stockings, wedge them on the largest, shiniest, pedestal, and force them to mime three, four – ten! – Chicago songs, if you want, BBC1.
But as Comic Relief enters its 25th birthday, it is not the forced fun of the stapled grin of Fearne Cotton that shows why Red Nose Day is still so important. All of that is merely confetti that pours out of the bottom of the box to finish the package.
It’s Jennifer Saunders dressed as Gandalf. It’s Alan Partridge interviewing a depressive Milky-Bar kid. It’s the biennial opportunity for James Corden to be able to write a sketch where Gordon Brown fist-bumps JLS: and that actually being able to happen. Who knew, back in 1985, that founders Richard Curtis and Lenny Henry would produce such an attractive baby?
To step back and view the perspective of course; this is so much more than a six-hour rofling spree every two years. Comic Relief in total, has reached apocalyptic heights of fund-raising, from its beginnings of accumulating £15 million, to now, netting £108 million in 2011. And that is only the surface, as you may imagine.
So many fundraisers dotted around all over the UK, for decades have been accumulated for localised issues such as mental health, alcohol abuse, domestic violence etc, and international problems including climate change, HIV, and living environments. It’s common knowledge you all know, but always still omnipresent, always still haunting in the backdrop.
Laughter has always been about that though, penetrating darkness with a jet stream of light right down the middle. We’re not ignoring the bad times, we’re fighting them with mega-lols. The Comic Relief bloke himself Richard Curtis once wrote in his Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor:
“The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant.”
This year, that ever arid wallflower Russell Brand staged a gargantuan stand-up gig for drugs charities, and has famously used his relationship with them as his own material in his sets. “I didn’t know he was on drugs, I thought he was some cool girl with a pipe,” Simon Amstell said during his bit in the show. And with one throwaway annotation, a series of brutal years can be dissolved in a chortling crowd. In a way Comic Relief is the main perpetrator for that, comedy’s relationship with the darker side of things. Quite a lot of major veterans of Comic Relief (Think Stephen Fry, Robbie Williams etc.) are famous warriors against their own demons.
In essence, the bad times can be fought with quite simply joking around. 80s Thatcher Britain thrived off it, and Red Nose Day was born slap bang in the middle of that great euphoria in alternative comedy, The Young Ones, Blackadder, The Comic Strip Presents.
Comic Relief became the comedian’s equivalent of an office Christmas party to cement everything together, and construct a Megazord of all our greats in capacities we would never dream of seeing. The inane nonsensical attitudes of the program, the flamboyancy of a show in such great length, lent itself insanely well to the more insane-r comedians.
In 1995 for example, Vic and Bob attempted to sing Without You whilst drinking 75 pints of beer. In 2013, as part of Mark Watson’s 25 hour stand-up show to raise money, Rufus Hound attempted to break the world record of eggs smashed with one’s genitalia. Because Comic Relief is all about breaking boundaries. Sometimes those boundaries are eggs, and sometimes comedy is Rufus Hound’s penis, but at least that goes to show that the lengths one can go to for Comic Relief can be…extendable.
Comic Relief is still hugely important, this combination of comedy powerhouses all in one room. A Doctor Who sketch in 1999 was like fan-fiction for comedy fans, a world where Joanna Lumley, Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Grant were miraculously the Doctor for a brief moment.
For anyone who may dismiss the attempts of comedy as ‘comedy’ with sly air quotes could be excused. But if you don’t like Miranda Hart doing a funny dance, you can bitch about it on Twitter, and five minutes later find something that does tickle your funny carcass. After all, everyone finds different things amusing. It’s the putting of it altogether, the sketches, the spoofs, the performances, the odd combinations of human beings, that make it such immensely wonderful TV, tonally. The US get Saturday Night Live every week for this kind of stuff. We get it once every two years.
And as unfortunate as that is, the telethon is showing no signs of waning when it does come around. This year, Graham Norton is hosting the longest ever chat show, and Ricky Gervais is digging out David Brent’s ghost from one of his dusty award cabinets. As aforementioned too, Mark Watson hosting a legendary 25 hour stand-up show for old and new comics to combine forces, and inspire newbies into comedy.
That’s not the only thing; there is also a contest called Stand-Up If You Dare, inviting members of the public who have never done stand-up before to give it a try. The brilliance of Red Nose Day is that circumstances of bravery evoke bravery in others, whether it be bathing in a tub of beans, shaving your head, or telling a joke. As a comedy writer, it has always been the latter that made me feel Comic Relief was our biggest influence for new comics. Also, I happen to find beans overly-gooey.
So on 15 March, when the 2013 incarnation of Comic Relief comes to head, remember that for every awkward autocue, every shot of Harry Styles gasping for air, miming Debbie Harry, this is the UK’s biggest love letter to our comedy scene. It’s not just a relief for the thousands of people this charity helps, Red Nose Day is relief for comedians too.
