That Joe just isn’t funny anymore

Legendary alternative comic Alexei Sayle is set to arrive in Belfast shortly for the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, where he will be reading from his memoir Stalin Ate My Homework. Over the past 15 years or so, Sayle has in fact moved more towards the world of literature, and has enjoyed considerable success as an author of fiction.

Nonetheless, his humorous streak remains and many of the stories in Stalin... have a hint of comedy about them, such as the occasion his leftist parents decided to take him to a Sergei Eisenstein film rather than a Walt Disney cartoon, explaining that the studio mogul was a supporter of McCarthyism.
I wonder how Alexei now feels about his upbringing?
“I suppose it gives you a critical attitude towards the world,” he considers, in his Liverpudlian drawl. “I don’t really resent being raised in that way. If you want to be an artist, I think you have to be an outsider by and large, because normal people can’t be arsed with trying to interpret the world. It’s like, so many actors and actresses were in the forces and stuff, and again, in that scenario, you’re detached from normal society.”
Was there a particular aspect of his life Alexei wanted to explore in the book?
“It’s sort of about ideology,” he replies. “In a comical sort of way, it’s about being raised in a cult. A lot of it is about that and my strange reaction to it. There’s a subtext there about the nature of belief, and the dangerous nature of belief, the cultism and psychology of it.”
Where does the dangerous element come in?
“Well, it wasn’t a negative influence on me,” responds Alexei. “My parents were good people – well, at least my dad was – and they genuinely wanted justice and an end to oppression, but they ended up turning a blind eye to government nations who murdered a hundred million people. Stalin and Mao between them are much greater mass murderers than Hitler, for example.”
Martin Amis explored similar territory – and sparked a bit of a spat with his late friend Christopher Hitchens – in the book Koba The Dread.
“I think he was coming at it from a different direction,” says Alexei. “He was kind of justifying his own reactionary nature. But yeah, it is a kind of an injustice that Stalin is just a mildly comical figure, while Hitler is excoriated... (laughs) Obviously Hitler’s a bad guy! I have to emphasise that point. But Stalin is in some ways a greater villain, and he’s just seen as a mildly comical figure. Amis was going on about that, rightly.”
Sayle says he got into comedy, as opposed to politics, as humour was “a natural response to the insanity around me.” At what point did he actually start performing comedy?
“I went to art school,” he explains. “And then I was unemployed for six years. Then a friend of mine started a Brechtian cabaret group. That broke up and I started writing comedy for us. The first comedy club in Britain opened in 1979, and I went along and auditioned, and they offered me the job of MC. And now, Dara O Briain is my bastard grandson – modern comedy started with me.”
Sayle of course went on to be a part of the ’80s generation of alternative comedians, alongside the likes of Fry & Laurie, French & Saunders, Smith & Jones, Rik Mayall and Rowan Atkinson. Was it an invigorating scene to be part of?
“It was,” he nods. “I wish I’d taken more time to enjoy it really. We were inventing an art-form; there were no rules for what we were doing, and we were doing a lot of stuff for the first time. In the midst of that, you’re preoccupied with the business of it, and you don’t have time to realise what you’re doing. Occasionally, you look around and think, ‘Shit, this is extraordinary’, but a lot of the time you’re caught up in the day-to-day of it.”
Oddly enough, some of the writers and performers from that radical generation of comics have gradually drifted towards the middle ground, and as a result have produced increasingly bland material. One thinks in particular of Ben Elton and Richard Curtis, writers of the brilliant Blackadder, who are now associated with middle-of-the-road entertainment and generic rom-coms. Is Alexei surprised by this turn of events?
“Not really,” he shrugs. “You always knew with Ben that his ideological belief was only in himself, which is the case with a great many performers. But he was taking a stance because that would help him get on, rather than because he really believed it. He was just tremendously ambitious, so the fact that he’s followed that parabola of going from seeming radical to reactionary... it’s just, I’m surprised he’s lost his way a bit.
“People idolise Richard, and a lot of people seem to hate Ben really. He’s kind of fucked it up along the way – his ambition was so great that these days, he can’t even do the cynical thing. I think Richard’s going like that as well, but more slowly. Obviously, I haven’t seen The Boat That Rocked, but it doesn’t sound great.”
One of the last major comedy projects Alexei undertook before setting out on his literary career was Paris, the debut sitcom by Father Ted writers and ex-Hot Press staffers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews. How did he find the experience?
“Working with Graham and Arthur on my own series, The All New Alexei Sayle Show, was wonderful,” enthuses Alexei. “The three of us wrote two series of that together, and that was absolutely amazing, they are both wonderful writers. It was a privilege to work with them so young, and give them a kind of leg up, not that they needed it – they would have succeeded anyway. Paris was a bit more complicated because it didn’t properly work. I think they got a lot of mistakes out of their system which they didn’t make on Father Ted. And Father Ted is the greatest sitcom of the ’90s – it’s an extraordinarily strong piece of work that really hasn’t dated at all. In terms of writing and casting, everything about it’s perfect.
“Paris was too ambitious. The director, who’s sadly dead now, didn’t know what she was doing and neither did I. There’s a lot of good things in it, but it was a difficult experience for me. But Graham and Arthur certainly got over it! I thought they were immensely talented, and you can’t do better than Father Ted.”