Chris Addison Articles/Reviews

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http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...823292570.html

The ponce has returned

Posh British comedian Chris Addison is now standing up for middle-class swots, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

When he first started doing stand-up, Chris Addison recalls, he tried to play up the bits of Mancunian brogue in his cultivated voice. It sounded a bit more "man of the people", as he puts it; not so "up himself", as we would say.

"And it didn't work," he says, "because I hid who I was. You have to be as honest as you can be if you're going to be good at comedy and the fact is that I'm a middle-class ponce."

It's true: even the most perfunctory Addison emails read like something from Esquire magazine in its 1950s heyday - breezy and clubable. But why knock it?

"I have slightly too grand an idea of myself and a snotty way of looking at the world," he says.

He has made it his handle, "almost like a question of identity", that extended to wearing a linen suit in his show, Port Out, Starboard Home, which was all about the English abroad. This year, he is in school swot mode in The Ape That Got Lucky.

The show, part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, is, briefly, about the whole of human evolution. It follows the typical Addison approach, by which he sets himself a subject to address with jokes.

He finds it rewarding having to dig into a subject: he loves writing a column called Funny Money for the jobs section of the Guardian, because what does a comedian know about money? (Or, for that matter, jobs?)

One thing the English liberal intelligentsia does understand, however, is guilt. In the new show, his very middle-class embarrassment at the grotesqueries of empire and expatriate life now includes all of humanity. The fact that we've evolved to run the planet has to be some ghastly mistake; after all, we share 98 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees, who have been decidedly sidelined.

"We've had one or two moments of luck," says Addison crisply, "that we've taken advantage of," moments, he informs me with mock frost, that I will have to pay to discover. But then, the same principle rules daily life.

"You only have to look at the pages of Who Weekly to see people with no natural advantages who have got incredibly lucky."

The instant celebrities on reality television, for example, he says, warming to the theme - like all good stand-ups, Addison is a master of unlikely conversational leaps, although his tend to be more high-flown than most.

I know, even if he is not going to tell me for free, that his reflections on the success of the biped with the articulated thumb encompasses language ("Hebrew in its written form has no vowels, which makes it ideal for texting"); social relations ("There are computers that can work out every possible chess move in the universe, but they couldn't design a wedding seating plan that made everyone happy"); and cultural diversity ("I met a man who was Iraqi-Chinese, which is a difficult racial mix because you really want to grow a big moustache and can't").

Those quotes are from reviews, but I can just hear him saying this stuff in his ironic way. He's in full riff now. Obviously, he says, there is nothing real about reality TV.

"They could perhaps have made that claim when it started, on the principle that people were ingenuous about it, but now they fall into a pattern of behaving appropriate to reality television, as if they behave in the way they should.

"But then, we live in times that are very media savvy. Even in interviews with sports people, you hear them trotting out other people's words, piecemeal phrases handed to you at media training exercises. They play the media in the way the media plays them."

So how savvy are comedy audiences? Do they also know what to expect?

"Yes, and I think that's great," Addison comes back enthusiastically. "Some comedy is brilliant, but all art has a mud-on-the-wall element. People are still getting up and suggesting that men and women are different and that you get the munchies when you're stoned, but people are less able to get away with that kind of thing now. And if audiences are more savvy, you can try more stuff."

He describes one comedian on the circuit in the early days of alt.comedy, pounding away at a room full of straight faces until finally one of the punters shouted "Tell us one we know!".

"That's how it used to be, but it's rare now."

Melbourne audiences, he believes, are more alert than most. Two years ago, they had no trouble relating to a show entirely consumed with what it means to be English, Addison-style: class-ridden, repressed, self-loathing yet pompous.

"But then, Australia knows England far better than the English know Australia," he says.

"Anyway, there are plenty of English snobs who, if there were a Piccadilly-style club they could join, they would. We English define ourselves by the things we hate rather than the things we include and that's less true in Australia, but every country identifies a lower class to mock. The very word "bogan" proves there is a concept of class in Australia."

Which football team you support, he discovered, speaks volumes although, he adds in another spin-off rave, he loves the amiable tribal rivalry at Australian rules matches, where the stands are still safe for kids and grannies.

"Nobody dies for football in Australia," he says. That has to be a mark of comparative sophistication.

How long can you keep railing at your own kind, at the culture of which you are so visibly and, in Addison's case, audibly a part?

"Everyone's relationship with their home culture ought to be fraught," he says. "It's a vast and complex beast made up of deep-seated attitudes and assumptions covering everything - the way you live your life, religion, politics, what cultural information is based on.

"There are so many problems in the world, so many dreadful things that, historically, are of our making.

"If you don't question the things you're taught, how can you live a productive life? If you don't question the place of our own cultural views in causing those problems, nothing will change."

Chris Addison, The Ape That Got Lucky, is at Melbourne Town Hall from Thursday until April 18.

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http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...412275753.html

Melbourne International Comedy Festival
By Bernard Zuel
March 29, 2004

Chris Addison: The Ape That Got Lucky/Simon Munnery: Trilogy, Melbourne Town Hall, March 25, 26

Chris Addison and Simon Munnery are as unlike physically as possible, with stage manners at polar opposites. But there beats inside them a very similar heart and mind and a slow-burning anger that transforms their shows.

Addison looks like the sleek, good-looking chap who sailed through his lectures and won over the fresher girls in the uni bar. He performs his short history of evolution (or how we may be just better dressed primitives) in motion, moving easily from easel to table, pausing only to sip water, talking quickly through a well crafted script. Your first thought is "glib charmer", your second that a pleasant but inconsequential night lies ahead.

Munnery looks like the college geek: bad teeth, unexceptional glasses and drab clothes, the type who was probably just a little too odd for the campus Tolkien Society. Out of character (his earlier festival shows have featured the likes of insane, but worryingly close to the truth, political/social activist Alan Parker Urban Warrior) he sits, stumbles over his words - there is no script; there is probably no plan, really - and suggests the next hour will be more a ramble through the gorse than a significant journey. Surprisingly, though, their paths cross in several ways. Each subtly makes the point that both the politeness of the English and the supposed egalitarianism of Australians hide a sullenness that can and does turn rancorous. Each peels back the truth that comfortable middle classes everywhere harbour resentments that spread bile above and below while affecting propriety and fairness. Each eases from wry amusement to pointed pricks at the righteous Right dominating public discourse at home and here.

Addison's jocular explanations of how modern man has developed stupidity to compensate for no longer having a natural predator (all those injuries from men zipping up their pants may be a form of natural selection, you know) are clever, erudite and amusing. But he really blossoms when he takes up asylum seekers, racism and muddleheaded insularity. It's not that this material is funnier but that Addison brings passion to the pithiness.

Similarly, Munnery's convoluted, frequently distracted stories are charming and quite capable of inducing long fits of giggles. But when he almost casually traverses the territory of the thick-of-skull-but-thin-of-skin (while telling us about his testicular cancer or a blackly comic arrest in Edinburgh) he finds a way to bring focus to the disconnected discourse.

They may have started with what looked like throwaway shows but Addison and Munnery stuck fast because they brought both brains and heart

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i could have sworn we already had a thread for chris.

article comes from here: contains a video of his acting debut.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/chrisaddison/

Interview 11th July 2005

You were a bit of a revelation in The Thick of It. Did you surprise yourself or did you know you could act?

Oh, you, with your words... Well, thank-you. That was the first time I've acted, really, so I had no idea whether I could do it or not. I'm still not that sure. It's difficult to think you're any use at acting when you're standing next to people like Capaldi and Langham who are so ridiculously good at what they do. I'm not really acting that much, since my character Ollie rather helpfully tends to be a little bemused and in over his head, which is more or less how I felt.

Did Armando come after you for the part? How did you get involved?

He asked me to go in and do a screen test, which involved improvising a scene with Adam Tandy, the producer, in this weird, slightly tiki-lounge room in a casting studio. We were pretending to be at lunch on Whitehall, discussing the fate of a Minister and we were surrounded by these life-size, fake palm trees and this fibreglass stone-cladding effect wall. I half expected Bing Crosby to come in and start singing 'The Little Drummer Boy'. He didn't, though. Slightly disappointing.

It's only partially written isn't it? You are improvising, like Curb Your Enthusiasm. How does that work, practically?

We always say that it's about 80% written and 20% improvised. The writers (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche) working alongside Armando, produce these excellent scripts, which we then improvise around and ruin in rehearsals. There are rewrites and re-rewrites and then we go and film it. When we're filming, we often do several takes - some sticking to the script, some messing around with it, trying different things out under Armando's direction - and then we all have a nice sit down. We shoot the shows in chronological order, as far as possible, so that if something comes up in an improvisation in one scene, it can be referred back to.

BBC Four seem very proud of it. We hear more shows are coming. When can we expect those, and do you see it running and running, like Yes Minister?

There are three more on their way. We've just started filming them. As far as I understand it, they should be on BBC Four in the Autumn, and then the full series of six will be repeated on BBC Two. Which is too late for my parents, who've already bought a digibox. I expect they've kept the receipt, though. They're very good like that.

I do hope it runs and runs, yes. And I speak as a license payer. It's such a rich seam of subject matter and there's so much more to get out of the characters and their various relationships that I can't see it running out of steam anytime soon. Whether or not it goes on is up to other people, though, which I see as a flaw in the BBC charter, quite frankly. Apart from anything else, it's so much fun to do that I'd rather it didn't stop just yet.

And you're taking a one man show up to Edinburgh this year?

I am, yes. It's called 'Atomicity' and it's going to be a trawl through The Very Fabric of The Universe Itself™. At least that's the plan. I may decide to take everyone out for cake, instead. I doubt it, but it's good to leave your options open, isn't it? Anyway, it's on from the 5th to the 28th of August at The Assembly Rooms at 7.45p.m.

You're at the very cerebral end of stand-up, is that reasonable to say? And as such is it a lonely road you travel?

I'm never sure about this 'cerebral' thing. I always worry that makes it sound as though the shows I do are dry and inaccessible, which I work really hard not to make them. The thing is that for the last few shows I've used these really big subjects as starting points - 2004's show was about what elements go to make up a civilization, and the one before was about human evolution - so there's a tendency to describe them as cerebral, but the most important thing I'm aiming towards when I'm writing them is creating a really funny show.

They're full of daft jokes about high-fallutin' subjects, stories, stupid tangents, lots of lies... It's not like they require any previously-acquired knowledge about the subjects, any more than you need to understand intimately the home life of comedians who talk about their families before you go and see their shows. I just think that there's comedy in these ideas and I still have that gleeful, little boy fascination with finding stuff out, and it's so much easier to be funny about things you're enthusiastic about.

I hope that the shows are intelligent, though - I never assume that my audience are stupid. I can't stand watching comics pretending to be dumber than they are, or that they don't like 'clever' stuff, just to curry favour with an audience. It's such a lie, and so patronising to the people who've paid to watch them - as though they were just this raucous, bestial mass with no brains or opinions which they've devised for themselves.

Still, I don't think it is a lonely road, really. There are plenty of people creating intelligent, interesting comedy: Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel, Dan Antopolski, Sarah Kendall, Paul Foot, John Oliver, Andy Zaltzman, Daniel Kitson, Demetri Martin, David O'Doherty, Mark Thomas, Stewart Lee, Alex Horne, Robin Ince, Simon Munnery, Robert Newman... and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

The Department is back on Radio 4 (second series). Tell us a bit out that and who else is in it.

Yes it is. Well, it's a show which I've made with the over-talented John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman. It's set in the secret, non-governmental organisation that you always suspected existed, which really runs the country. We play a three-man think-tank who have to solve one of the nation's pressing problems each week. We're very proud of it, I have to say, so I hope people like it. It's another good example of taking really big ideas and then being stupid with them. I tell you, you'll never see anything like John Oliver alone in a room with a microphone, thinking himself into the part of a giant, mechanical moth, arms flapping, eyes closed, cawing.

Do you love radio, or is it a stepping stone to a TV show?

I do love radio. I was brought up with it, really. My first proper memories of comedy are all of radio. In the early Eighties, Radio 4 used to repeat classic shows at half twelve on a Sunday - I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, Round The Horne, The Goon Show - and I used to listen religiously. I loved it. I can even remember listening to Week Ending when I was supposed to be asleep. So it's a real joy doing radio. The Department's odd, because we make it over the course of a day in a sound studio in Shepherd's Bush, but earlier this year I recorded my own series called The Ape That Got Lucky, based on an old Edinburgh show, at the Almeida theatre with an audience and a cast and everyone standing at mics with scripts and everything. I got a bit giddy.

What else might we see / hear you in over the coming months?

Well, that about covers it, really: Edinburgh, The Thick of It, The Department and The Ape That Got Lucky, which is being broadcast on Radio 4 through August. I'm also touring Atomicity after Edinburgh, from September to December. That'll do me for the year, to be quite honest. You might also catch me wandering about in Ikea. I like the meatballs.

Finally, a random question. Are you pro-Europe or would you have voted Non?

I am fiercely pro-European. I would very much have liked to see this country join the Euro a few years back. Not least because it would greatly annoy the kind of people that I don't generally like. I think if we just point out to these idiots that having the same currency as everyone else is simply one more excuse for not having to bother to learn anyone else's language, they would see things in a very different light. 'Euroscpetic', indeed. I hate that phrase, because within the language of philosophy, the term 'sceptic' implies that you've actually thought about it. I could go on. I generally do.

The Thick of It is being repeated regularly by BBC FOUR.

Starting from July 12th, Series 2 of The Department can be heard on Tuesdays at 11pm on BBC Radio 4.

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http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c2d05dc6-0d...00e2511c8.html

Chris Addison: Atomicity, Edinburgh Festival
By Ian Shuttleworth
Published: August 15 2005 03:00 | Last updated: August 15 2005 03:00
Although a world away from the character of the Pub Landlord, comedian Chris Addison is in danger of following in Al Murray's footsteps as a repeated Perrier award nominee who is incomprehensibly always overlooked for the prize itself.
Addison is probably the country's prime exponent of the too-clever-by-half school of comedy. Where, say, Stewart Lee uses his impressive intellect to batter ideas into submission by interrogating them on their own terms, Addison gives them a quarter-twist anti-clockwise and bumps them against each other to see if they strike sparks. In his hands, they always do.
Atomicity is nominally a show about the periodic table of the elements, but where too many Fringe shows chain themselves to their high concept, Addison simply sticks a few assorted objects (an illuminated globe, a periodic table mug, a big DNA double helix) on a table, shows a few captions in placards on an easel and largely continues riffing in his usual way.

And what a way it is. There's a standard comic technique of topping your own punchline, adding a further gag a couple of seconds along to prolong and intensify the laugh. Addison regularly tops his gags four, five, six times over. It could be immensely annoying, except that it's entirely natural to his ebulliently inquiring mind and each successive gag is always genuinely funny. He twits us about the time it takes us to get the joke about "the Bronze Age: the third best Age we've ever had", and at one point simply shouts out in delighted wonder: "This is my job!" He seems to get a lot of job satisfaction; he certainly gives it.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.../btchris18.xml


Edinburgh reports: 'there's no excuse to be an idiot, unless you're a clown'
(Filed: 18/08/2005)
Dominic Cavendish talks to comedian Chris Addison about his Edinburgh show, 'Atomicity'

Last year, Chris Addison received a long-deserved Perrier Award nomination. But being finally within reach of the most coveted prize in comedy wasn't his biggest festival thrill.

'People are brighter than they're given credit for': Chris Addison
Instead, he was far more excited to spot Johnny Ball at one of his gigs. "I went to pieces for about five minutes, I was so star-struck," he says. "I really wish I'd told him: 'You're the reason I'm doing this. It's all your fault!' "

That Addison owes quite such a debt of gratitude to the presenter of the children's TV classic Think of a Number will make perfect sense to anyone who's caught his last few solo shows. Since he began to theme his hour-long Edinburgh spiels five years ago, he's rattled through immense-sounding subjects with boyish enthusiasm. Englishness, empire, evolution, civilisation and, this year, the nature of man's relationship with the universe, have all been traversed in his waggish disquisitions.

At 33, he cuts a more debonair figure than his idol ever did, and can issue expletives to match the saltiest of his stand-up peers, but the lineage is unmistakable. To watch Addison prowling the stage this month in front of an unfurled poster of the periodic table, explaining that every living thing has to contain carbon, just as "every Fringe has to have a student production of Abigail's Party" is to be taken back to the pithy wit of Ball at his best.

Just don't call what he does "infotainment". Addison has only contempt for a culture so dumbed-down it needs a label for something that might make you think as well as laugh. There's a fearlessness about him in his loathing for stupidity - "There's no excuse to be an idiot, unless you are actually a clown" - and in his refusal to apologise for being middle-class.

When he first tried stand-up 10 years ago, in his native Manchester, after a degree in English, he felt inclined "to play up the northern aspects of my vowels and background. But then I decided I wouldn't disguise who I am and what interests me. I don't like watching comics who are deliberately acting dumb to make themselves one of you, which is so unbelievably patronising. People are brighter than they're given credit for."

This year, Addison became a familiar face on the small screen thanks to Armando Ianucci's Westminster satire, The Thick of It, in which he plays a clever but clueless advisor to Chris Langham's bumblingly inept minister. By coincidence, The Thick of It is not a million focus groups away from Addison's delightfully erudite Radio 4 series, The Department, which involves surreal brainstorming sessions between a trio of policy wonks.

Both series take pride in eschewing obvious topical gags derived from newspaper headlines. "We've spent 40 years since Beyond the Fringe unpicking political language. My generation was brought up with people saying politicians are idiots. To continue to repeat that is of no benefit. It's much more interesting to ask: do we have politicians and media we deserve? Do they deserve each other? And explore the complex relation between these three groups."

What with those two shows, plus the remaining episodes of The Ape That Got Lucky, a Radio 4 programme adapted from his 2002 cod-lecture on evolution, and an imminent UK tour of his Edinburgh show, Atomicity, this bright spark is fast becoming as ubiquitous as oxygen - and just as essential.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.../btedadd12.xml

Dominic Cavendish reviews Chris Addison at the Assembly and Natalie Haynes and Alex Horne at Pleasance

My, what a lot of brain-boxes there are engaged in the difficult business of making people laugh these days.


Smart-alec: Chris Addison
At the Assembly Rooms, Chris Addison, comedy's favourite smart-alec, is broaching with breathless excitement the subject of mankind's relationship with the universe. Over at the Pleasance, the ferociously intelligent Natalie Haynes demolishes creationism and discusses the etymological root of the c-word, among other things. Not to be outdone, Alex Horne is waging a concertedly silly campaign to re-establish the love and learning of Latin.

Whatever happened to the sort of comedians who fell into the job having spent their school years larking around at the back of the classroom? Shouldn't Addison, Haynes and Horne be shaping government policy on climate change, or reforming the education system?

No, on reflection, they've got their métier right; while stand-up's new overeducated middle-class tendency needs to be monitored, you have to admire those crusading on behalf of unabashed intelligence.

Addison, a Perrier Award nominee last year, and a rising star thanks to his prominent role in the excellent BBC satire The Thick of It, is the best of the bunch, having got his cod-lectures down to a fine science. If there's a criticism, it's that he digresses too often.

Haynes, whose ostensible subject is turning 30, can lose you in her gabbling delivery, and irritate you with her smiley-smugness. Just when you think it's all getting a bit too swotty, though, she'll come out with something bracingly vile: a great hater of children, she argues: "Until you can walk, talk, and eat of your own volition, you're not a human being, you're an unusually developed tumour."

Horne's show utilises the deadpan assistance of Tim Keys and much audience participation. We're guided through a computer-crafted maze of questions which is nominally located in Sheffield "on account of it having seven hills - unlike Rome, though, Sheffield was built in a day". I want him to be able to win this year's Perrier just so he can say: "Veni, vidi, vici."

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http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/t...icle307966.ece


Chris Addison: Atomicity, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

By Julian Hall

Published: 24 August 2005




"I am in love with him," my friend says to me as we leave Chris Addison's show. I understand that glow of admiration after witnessing another impressive performance from comedy's Mr Smartypants. Last year's show, Civilization, was a triumph and it wooed me too

I am slightly less enamoured this year. I'm not fickle - well, not very - but I see the latent smugness of Addison's stage persona more clearly, and while this comedian has almost every base covered, the proceedings are a little rushed in parts.

The periodic table gives structure to the show but is the loosest possible theme to house Addison's jibes against stupidity. Of 7 July he coos, "Ooh, we had one too", contrasting it with 11 September. Later he pokes fun at Fox News for an alleged link about the London bombs: "There's been a blast in a major European city... we'll tell you which one after the break."


Particularly enjoyable are his more extended routines like one about failed suicide bombers coming back to base, to explain how their mission went.

The proceedings are rounded off by Addison's trademark eulogy. In this case he is taking us one step forward by listing human achievements but countering that with some of our poorer ideas. In many ways, if you've seen Addison before you've seen this show before, but it is hard to refuse more of the same when it's high-quality humour albeit of a hasty, huffy hue.

To 29 August (0131-226 2428)