Stand-up John Robins pays tribute

I’m pissed. It’s 2am and I’m back from a gig. Nothing particularly unusual about that. But this is the first night I’ve done a gig when Rik Mayall hasn’t been alive. It’s also the first night stand-up comedy gigs have happened in the UK without Rik Mayall being active in comedy.

That fact struck me pretty hard, because Rik Mayall is the first titan of my comedy world to die. Every so often an obituary appears for music hall trailblazers like Ted Plinkington, Ernie Groves, ‘Dainty‘ Maggie Rimmer, or whoever. Or bigger beasts like Malcolm Hardee, Norman Wisdom, the guy who wrote for that guy. But I don’t know them. I know of them but they are not part of my comedy upbringing.

How sad it was, then, to hear that Rik Mayall had died. Not only was he the first comedian I was fully aware of, but he was the reason I first made people laugh. Impersonating Bottom at school was my first experience of eliciting laughter, the reward of staying up slightly too late and seeing programmes with slightly too many fart gags.

The Young Ones was a touch too early for me; it’s amazing, it’s groundbreaking, but it’s not my sitcom: Bottom is my sitcom. I don’t think there has been, or is, a better sitcom than Bottom. Any writing course will tell you that humour comes from characters feeling trapped. Bottom is the blueprint: it’s Waiting For Godot with incontinence. Ade and Rik performed Waiting For Godot before writing Bottom, and the influence is plain to see: two men with nothing to do. That’s it. That’s the pitch. And writing has to shine in a format so simple …my God how it shone.

The reason I latched on to Richie (Rik), is because it’s Richie who’s trapped. Eddie is happy stealing booze, watching TV and living rent-free. Ritchie, however, dreams of more: sex, acclaim, popularity. And to a teenager that’s pretty much the whole shebang.

For me, Richard Richard is the archetype of the arrogant loser, the pathetic dreamer, and that is such incredibly fertile ground for comedy. Comedically, arrogance is nothing without failure; it’s too distasteful. And failure on its own can be whiny, self-pitying, icky. I think the greatest comedians are a perfect mix of massive ego and crushingly low self-esteem, and nowhere is that contradiction better displayed than in Bottom, and for that I will always be extremely grateful.

I’m not a particularly ‘alternative’ comedian, but in a sense we all are, or at least have the freedom to be ‘alternative’ because of Rik Mayall. In my time I’ve read poems on stage, attempted characters, played games. The reason I can do that without being booed off is partly down to Rik and those people, who, in the early 1980s, were the pilgrim fathers of the land we now inhabit as comedians.

These days The Comedy Store may be a shrine to 1986, it may not book enough women, it may not be worth the yearly ten-minute spots to get a paid gig (I gave up in 2007), but there was a time when it was the place where the parameters of our art form were forged. And it is a fucking art form …at times …to some, and all because of people like Rik Mayall.

So farewell Rik, your back catalogue is unique in its vibrancy, consistency and quality. I met you once on the steps outside Liverpool Street Station and you made me laugh. Your Twitter profile is an example to many, you would have stolen the show in the Harry Potter films (had they not edited you out), you are the reason I, and so many others, spend their lives trying to make people laugh.

Published: 10 Jun 2014