Brown The Glasgow Smile

A Celebration of Clydebuilt Comedy
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-85790-235-1
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Few cities can rival Glasgow for their contribution to the history of British humour. From the gladiatorial atmosphere of the old Empire Theatre,dubbed the 'graveyard of English comics', to the front-page controversies of Frankie Boyle today, the city and its citizens have trademarked their own two-fisted brand of confrontational, but always hilarious, comedy. In this, the first dedicated overview, Allan Brown gives a historical,kaleidoscopic and encyclopedic account of the people, places, performers and procedures that have made Glasgow a by-word for a certain kind of rough, tough quick-wittedness. Every facet of Glaswegian life is considered, viewed through the prism of the city's sense of humour; from the showbiz renown of Billy Connolly and Chic Murray, Kevin Bridges and Boyle, to the occasions the lighter side was seen in Glasgow's history of television, film, literature, football,law, science, academe, crime and art. Through profiles, criticism, tales and anecdotes, The Glasgow Smile - fittingly also the term for infamous Glasgow gang punishment - is a treasury of the city's past and present, and of its own very particular approach to the absurd.

Allan Brown was a writer and critic with the Scottish edition of The Sunday Times and author of Inside the Wicker Man, an acclaimed study of the cult British horror classic The Wicker Man. He lives in Glasgow.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brown, Allan

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

In a 1980s diary column, the , as was, ran a most instructive item. It told of a German tourist to Glasgow encountering a harassed mother smacking her errant child. The tourist interrupted: ‘In Germany,’ he announced ‘we do not hit our children.’ ‘Is that right?’ replied the mother. ‘In Partick we don’t gas our Jews.’

Reflect upon this remark. Consider its aggression, its swift, rhetorical kick to the tender regions. It is defensive, yet offensive, to extents that border on the sociopathic. It takes no prisoners, gives no quarter, bars no holds. It is a boxing kangaroo of a comeback, up on its hind legs instantly, lashing out. It invokes, almost casually, what is perhaps the darkest hour in human history, the Holocaust, merely to disoblige an impertinent stranger – an impertinent German stranger at that, who, being so, was probably a mite sheepish about the matter anyway. Such is the humour of Glasgow – if not at its best then certainly at its most refractory and oppositional, which is to say at its most typical. The retort contained all one needs know about the temperament of this vital, restless, charismatic and, above all, unyielding city. Truly, the humour of Glasgow is a formidable thing. No place in the kingdom has anything to compete or compare with it.

In fact, when it comes to wit, the entirety of Scotland is but Glasgow’s colonial outpost. There is no Scottish comedy that is not Glaswegian. Subtract Glasgow from the comedic equation and Scotland becomes the square root of nothing much; a wasteland, an eternity spent in Ronnie Corbett’s anecdotal armchair. To identify a Scottish comic figure of consequence who is not Glaswegian is like naming an American map-maker or a great Welsh painter. It can’t be done.

You’re welcome to try, of course. You might point out that Alastair Sim, star of the St Trinian’s films, hailed from Edinburgh, as did Muriel Spark, whose early novels were exquisitely comic. Aberdonians would cite , the dusty stage revue decipherable only by Aberdonians. Sir Harry Lauder came from Portobello. Neil Munro, writer of the Para Handy stories, was an Inverary man. Will Fyffe, author of the music-hall standard ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, came, wouldn’t you know it, not from Glasgow but Dundee.

But the exercise is pointless. North of Carlisle, only Glasgow can do humour. For a nation of 6 million souls over the span of more than a century Scotland has proven pitifully deficient in the provision of wit, a calamitously unfunny place. When people speak of the Scottish sense of humour, what they mean is the Glasgow sense of humour. It needs admitting that, really, there is no Scottish sense of humour, no funny bone running from Gretna Green to John O’Groats. There is simply Glasgow, and the wit it lends out like a library book. Glasgow’s humour is what linguists term a synecdoche, a part that stands for a whole. In this respect, as in so many others, Scotia is merely the chaff around the grain that is Glasgow. The comic productivity of the entire nation was outsourced to the city by the Clyde.

It can even be argued that Glasgow’s standing in this regard is global, that this is the funniest city on the planet. You’d assume such a designation would belong somewhere grander: New York, for example, with its history of club comedy and cabaret, the city of Woody Allen and Joan Rivers; or to Los Angeles, centre of film and television production; or to London, which has given us Chaucer, Noel Coward and Monty Python. Yet each of these cities is essentially just a hub, a magnet, pulling in talent from hundreds of miles around. As a rule they have not given birth to the stuff.

Glasgow has. Pound for pound, per head of population, no city on earth has produced such a ceaseless torrent of comedy, created by and for its own folk, though enjoyed across the globe. As the Irish sociologist Sean Damer wrote: ‘Glaswegians are among the best talkers in the world, the most articulate debaters, the wittiest storytellers, the best one-liners, the best purveyors of what they themselves call the “lightning repartee”.’ A close analogue in this is Jewish humour. The wit of Glasgow, also, is less a type of entertainment than a philosophy, a prism, a telescope, a way of seeing the world – or, to be more exact, a means by which Glaswegians can ‘see’ Glasgow better.

This comedic prowess, however, is not immemorial; the mastery is modern and post-industrial. We have little way of knowing if the Glaswegians of yore were amusing or otherwise. Mass literacy was yet to come, and anyway the market in conspicuous cleverness was being cornered in Edinburgh, by Hume and Boswell, by and the . In Glasgow there was no paper trail of tradition, nothing much written down. The Presbyterian hierarchy had set its face against theatre, believing it redolent of the pageants of Catholic times. In 1754, for instance, a playhouse at the top of the High Street was demolished on the orders of George Whitefield, a Methodist preacher, who’d labelled the structure ‘a limb of Satan’. Edinburgh, then, had the Enlightenment; Glasgow had the Endarkenment.

But then came industrialisation and with it an explosion in Glasgow’s population, few of whom were to be mollified with Bible stories. Instead came the era of the ‘penny geggies’, wild, illicit jamborees which turned streets into open-air theatres. There were four such in the Saltmarket alone, with the street’s length divided up by concentrations of collapsible canvas booths. Inside them were presented historical dramas, songs, storytelling, though the gatherings were also hotspots of pickpocketing, drunkenness and brawls, which often had to be calmed by performers.

Their popularity saw some Glasgow publicans convert their premises into makeshift mini-theatres, where performances were given by gymnasts, jugglers and comics. From the 1850s, such adaptations gave rise to concert halls, their attendances swollen by the depressing fact that domestic dwellings of the period were too grim to be lingered in. Soon it was estimated that Glasgow’s city centre contained 26 theatres, purveying cleaned-up versions of the bacchanals offered in the penny geggies. These mutated into the Victorian music-hall, followed eventually by the advent of cinema. By the early 1900s a Glaswegian in search of distraction was spoilt for choice; between the penny geggies, saloon shows, cinema, variety theatre, concert halls and any number of museums of curiosity, or freak shows, such as the one in the Britannia Music Hall on Argyle Street, enhanced by a rooftop carnival and a waxworks. And this inventory omits the pantomimes, operas, miscellaneous concerts and Shakespearean productions staged in ‘legitimate’ theatres such as the King’s and the Theatre Royal.

This was happening as the city itself changed. In the decade after 1841 the Irish community in Scotland increased from 4.8 per cent of total population to 7.2 per cent, compared against 1 per cent in England and Wales. As workers were drawn by naval engineering Glasgow absorbed a third of the population of the west Highlands. Jews arrived too, fleeing Russian pogroms and, later, the rise of National Socialism: by the end of the First World War 9,000 Jews were living in the city, almost the entirety of their population in Scotland, employed mainly in tailoring. Glasgow became home also to the UK’s third-largest community of émigré Italians. And few of the incomers could afford to settle anywhere but the Gorbals, the notorious slum district just south of the river.

‘The streets were slippery with refuse and often with drunken vomit,’ recalled Ralph Glasser in his memoir ; or as Jeff Torrington wrote of Crown Street in : ‘We came now to a thorough-fare that blitzed the senses with its sudden blitz and uproar. Here, there were many shops doing business: bakers, fruitshops, fishmongers, banks, dairies, butchers. Above these thronged premises there were dental surgeries which shared their common stairs with tenanted flats from between the curtains of which faces could now and then be glimpsed. On the pavements, shoppers’ feet churned the slush to fine black mud.’ The squalor and violence were delineated most famously in the novel , by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long, with a vivid grimness that ensured the book’s infamy has never faded. The Gorbals grew to be among the most overcrowded areas in Europe, a sump of dereliction and despair, where the ethnic poor competed for survival in a Colosseum of disadvantage. In shipyards and railway yards, or in pubs, jails and pawnshops, or in the shadow of the hellish Dixon’s Blazes ironworks, where five vast blast furnaces belched smoke and ash unceasingly, the character, the tenor and timbre, the very identity of modern Glasgow was being forged, in literal and metaphoric fire.

For comfort and distraction the city wrapped itself in the patchwork of its people, began to see itself through the kaleidoscope of its citizenry. Glasgow absorbed the fatalism of its Jews, the vigour of its Highlanders, the verbal ingenuity of its...