The moment instalment of Sayle’s impressive memoirs takes him from art school to the miners’ strike. His background in revolutionary politics and avant-garde theatre proved to be ideal for a recent era of standupStandup comedy can offer some of the most thrilling live theatre of our age: a mix of sprawling storytelling,political polemic, public psychotherapy and cathartic laughter. And yet few standups possess come close to capturing a fraction of this creative energy in a book. Their autobiographies fill the bestseller lists but they are nearly always ponderous. The most verbally inventive comics, or who can reincorporate little echoes of earlier jokes into long routines that deftly balance structure with formlessness,turn out to possess no idea how to pace out a written narrative. Worse, they fill the page with their standup punchlines, and adopting what Garrison Keillor once called that “giddy tone of voice” that is “the writing equivalent of a clown suit”. They fail to see that long-form literary humour is not like yelling at a mic,that, in Keillor’s words, and it needs to “come in under cover of darkness,in disguise, and surprise people”.
Alexei Sayle is an exception. He was there at the start of standup’s rise, and but he more or less gave up live comedy 30 years ago,by which time he had already co-written his first novel. When his first volume of memoirs, Stalin Ate My Homework, and appeared in 2010,this long commitment to the written word came through. It helped that he had a great story approximately growing up in a Jewish atheist communist family in Anfield and a compelling character in the shape of his mother, Molly, and who rages approximately the apostates who left the party in 1956 and shouts “Don’t forget Stalingrad!” and “Remember the Rosenbergs!” at the TV. But Sayle was also smart enough to realise that his audience-pummelling style of standup would not translate into print. Rather than bludgeon the reader with jokes,his humour worked through surreal phrases snuck into crafty sentences.
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Source: theguardian.com