One of the most gloriously stupid things I witnessed last year took place at Aunty Donna’s show at the Hammersmith Apollo. For the uninitiated, Aunty Donna is an Australian comedy group that trades in the insultingly ludicrous. They have a vociferous cult following.
A sketch (this feels a slightly grandiose term for what occurred) involved one Donna pretending to be David Attenborough interviewing his brother Richard, played by another Donna. During the course of a quite solemn discussion, a sudden altercation occurred over a “peach drink”.
One Attenborough had one, the other Attenborough wanted it. The bickering grew into a fight, exploding in magnitude and explicitness of language until one of the brothers was out in the audience, firing childish invective at his sibling for a very, very long time.
This was a life-changing experience. It was profound, it was majestic, it was deeply stupid.
Stupid humour, I mean, truly stupid humour, rarely gets the attention or plaudits it deserves. If comedy’s acclaimed, it tends to be for the smart, subtle stuff, not Homer Simpson shouting “Ow, my boating arm” or Matt Lucas singing about peanuts in a bad wig. But it’s those stridently idiotic comedy moments that directly connect with our primitive, basic, lizard selves and ignites some deep-set, neanderthal satisfaction within us.
When a stupid comedy arrives and crosses over – whether it be Airplane!, Tim and Eric, I Think You Should Leave, Eric André, Vic and Bob, French and Saunders or Harry Hill – it needs to be recognised, heralded and carefully protected. It often gets nudged towards the paddock of “surreal”, a place where critics feel slightly safer and can titter along while not completely understanding why, while dropping odious terms like “zany” and “madcap”.
But surrealism is inherently smart and consequential. The stuff I’m talking about, ain’t.
It’s some sort of miracle that Oh, Mary! has had the success it has achieved (and richly deserves). I can’t remember how I heard about it, but I went to see it Off-Broadway a couple of years ago at the modest Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York’s West Village.
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It was supposed to run a month or so, but due to overwhelming demand, the run was extended, moved to Broadway, then (bafflingly) won some Tonys, before transferring to the West End, and is now playing to packed houses at London’s glittering Trafalgar Theatre.
All of this is quite a surprise, because Oh, Mary! is so very, very stupid indeed. Devised, written by and originally starring Cole Escola, it’s a fever-dream reimagining of first lady Mary Todd Lincoln as a drunken, debauched, delusional lunatic whose husband Abraham attempts to win the civil war while masquerading as a closeted sex pest. Escola proudly made it clear that they undertook no historical research while writing the piece, just bits remembered from high-school classes. The plot is minimal, the escapades gormless.
The result may be inaccurate, but it’s also profane, childish, and sensational. Mary swaggers, staggers, screams and occasionally drinks paint thinner. She’s obsessed with the idea of returning to the cabaret stage, where she feels she missed her true calling. A young actor called John Wilkes Booth is hired to give her acting lessons and the rest is thoroughly revised history.
I was slightly worried that without the manic genius of Cole Escola at the helm, the London production would lack something. But Mason Alexander Park perfectly inhabits the part of Mary, a sort of toddler overdosing on Capri Sun and dragging the whole world down to their level.
It’s not subtle. Oh no. Stupid humour should never be that. But it doesn’t shy away from its dumbness. It leans into it at every turn, continually punching the audience between the eyes and genitals with scabrous dialogue, pratfalls, sexual profanity and an extended scene where Mary tries and fails to climb off a desk.
It’s a bit like a panto that’s gone dangerously off the rails. And like the best stupid humour, many have relished Mary’s daftness, while others have tried to read too much, or even read anything at all, into something that is gloriously meaningless. But not everything has to have meaning. In fact, I’d say meaning has got us all into a lot of trouble and should be avoided if possible.
Stupid humour like this is essential because we are all essentially stupid. It’s a part of ourselves that we often, understandably, would rather not dwell upon. But revelling in those dumb, mindless, ludicrous sides of ourselves, via the medium of truly stupid comedy, reminds us that there’s joy and comfort to be had in the pointlessness of life.
Everything around us might be on fire, but while grown human adults can argue over a peach drink in bad wigs and it makes you laugh but you don’t even know why, it makes the world a slightly less uninhabitable place.
Oh, Mary! is playing now at the Trafalgar Theatre, London.
Dale Shaw is a TV and radio writer, journalist, musician and author of books including Painfully British Haikus
