Do we need standup comics? Robert Greig, encountering the genre, gives a qualified maybe
IN the polite, liberal context of South African theatre, anyone called gross, self- indulgent or obscene is at least original. Ian Fraser is all of those things, which should prove the point.
It does — and it doesn’t. He certainly pushes the limits of polite discourse and he has a unique vision. But he’s held back by conventional, nice-guy comic routines.
Before his appearance at a double-bill with Gilda Blacher and Deon Stewardson at the Balalaika Hotel last week, I’d never seen him perform. My theatre-going friends, all two of them, were amazed. “Never seen Ian Fraser?” they chorused in tones implying I was the chicken who didn’t dare to cross the road.
True. Fraser’s public persona repelled me. It just wasn’t funny or nice. It was OK to be angry, obscene and self-indulgent but at least the guy could act funny in public. Instead, he came across as intense and self- absorbed.
In practice, theatre probably does not challenge anyone’s values. The affronted simply stomp out in tears, looking for a teacher or cop to whine to. They seldom have to look hard. Though Fraser’s satire may not challenge values, it does, uniquely, highlight the Rotarian niceness of liberal discourse in theatre.
Part of that niceness flows from the commentative role of South African satirists. They rely on events which your average lawn- mower-pushing suburbanite would find worthy of notice. Few have the cast of personality or bent of vision to transform material.
The obvious exceptions are Robert Kirby and Pieter-Dirk Uys. But Kirby lives in the Cape which for all its virtues, blunts the critical edge. Look at the way people there refer to 80 different mountains as “The Mountain”. It’s a sure sign of mental rot and impaired vision. Now Kirby is a specialist on trout-fishing and also writes testy articles informing us that TV is a crock and admen are whores.
Pieter-Dirk Uys has more staying power: his latest work is more lancing and discomforting than anything he has done. But his satire has also tended to be too nice and affectionate — too humane. He did, after all, come from the Cape.
Because most South African stand-up comedians look at themselves as commentators, even pundits, they lack their own material. They fall back on what they know, which is usually showbiz gossip. They believe that showbiz matters as much to audiences as it does to them — which is an insult to any non-actor’s intelligence, as well as self-promoting: “Here am I, this show personality giving you plebs the lowdown on the stars.” Who turn out to be Richard Loring and Des and Dawn Lindberg, or some TV or radio robot. (Fraser does this, to my amazement.)
If it’s not showbusiness, they exhume 30-year- old kugel turns or southern suburb grobs who sound like Athol Fugard. Gilda Blacher and Deon Stewardson spend a boring hour doing that. It hasn’t dawned on them that today the kugel and joller are black: has no one actually seen Mooi Street Moves?
Fraser doesn’t fit that mould, though I suspect he’s drawn to it. On stage, he comes across as surly, complex and intense. He has not the performer’s ability to separate the human being from the performer nor to invent a comfy stage personality. He is discomfortingly naked and therefore freaky on stage.
The nakedness is partly physical. He dresses like a nice private school boy wishing to blend into his surroundings and instead standing out. Fraser, with his red hair, waxy complexion and clean, facial lines looks weird.
At first, his stage personality is guarded and cold: the introverted coldness never quite leaves him. It takes about five minutes of awkwardness before an adrenalin turbo-charges him. Even then, he doesn’t woo his audience: he performs at them, which contrasts with the commentative style of ingratiation.
The nakedness is probably another disguise. It has been sedulously cultivated, as in his autobiographical My Own Private Orchestra (Penguin). Erving Goffman once wrote that the stigmatised either brandish their stigmata or apologise for them. Fraser does the first.
Much of Fraser’s material is gross and scatological. It invites the defensive reaction that the grossness is comparable to a child’s dirty jokes. In its purposes, this is probably true. The purposes are to test approval, to establish separate identity and all those good rebellious things. But reductionist explanations don’t entirely account for the ferocious energy, bleakness and coherence of Fraser’s satirical vision. It’s as hallucinatory as, say, Celine’s. He, too, did not push lawnmowers on Sundays.
Technically Fraser is naive and gauche and this blurs his vision. He often uses the shopworn stage techniques of your Las Vegas raconteur. He adopts American accents as an evasion of present reality. He reminds you that he is performing and asks for approval. It’s as if the mannerisms and transitional gimmicks are apologies for the grossout: “Well, folks, after all that sex and violence, I’m actually a nice guy. Hell, I even write poems.”
Having said that, what matters is his ferocity, his refusal to buy into the nice-guy consensuses, his determination and ability to shock. In a time when the old radicals are sitting in government and beginning to praise family values, we need that.