Comedians have long been a prominent part of British cultural life, but it's only recently that they've acquired real glamour. Until the mid-1980s they tended either to be working-class heroes, wheezing into the microphone between sips of a pint, or Oxbridge graduates performing smart-alec revue sketches with their pals. Now, like rock stars, they wear outrageous clothes, hint at excitingly louche lifestyles (Eddie Izzard, Russell Brand) and play sell-out gigs at Wembley and the O2. Where once MTV was everything, now there is Dave ("the home of witty banter").
Publishers have been slow to cash in on this phenomenon, but they're making up for lost time. In the past year, memoirs have appeared from a gala of popular comics including Frankie Boyle, Jo Brand, Dawn French, Michael McIntyre and Johnny Vegas and now there are books from Rob Brydon (Small Man in a Book, Michael Joseph), James Corden (May I Have Your Attention Please?, Century) and Lee Evans (The Life of Lee, Michael Joseph), too. The path was cleared for this stampede into print by Peter Kay's The Sound of Laughter and Russell Brand's My Booky Wook. Whether or not you go for Brand's bestseller will depend on your tolerance for his flamboyant and oversexed urchin persona, but it is intelligently structured, and written with vivacity and nerve, which is more than can be said for many of its successors.
Readers are likely to approach this latest batch of memoirs with high expectations their authors are all gifted and experienced entertainers. Evans has an extraordinary on-stage energy and a unique way with physical comedy; Corden's great strength is his affability, his apparent lack of pretension, his knack of always being first to laugh at himself; Brydon (perhaps the most talented of them all) has in abundance the traditional gifts of timing and mimicry, as well as his own brand of slightly peevish deadpan delivery. But pressed into service as memoirists, all three of them jettison their particular strengths.
A genre has solidified, and with it comes an inevitable loss of originality. These books might have been written with help from a How To guide. Each author begins either with a description of his birth, or with a suspiciously vivid and instructive "earliest memory", then this opening spiel is rounded off with an upwards glance at the towering success he has become. Then an unswervingly chronological account is provided of the journey from A to B.
Childhoods were difficult (Brydon was forced to move schools; Corden was a disruptive student; Evans was poor) even though parents were terrific (Brydon: "Mum and Dad made those early Christmases truly magical"; Corden: "I never realised the sacrifices Mum and Dad made for us growing up"; Evans: "Mum cared deeply about us"). During or shortly before the teenage years, there is the first intoxicating taste of showbusiness, and although each career has a bumpy start, riches and fame are eventually achieved none of which would have been possible without an amazing wife (or in Corden's case, fiancée).
Along the way, the comedians own up to some forgivable faults Brydon talks of his "desire for attention", Corden of his "lust for people to pay me attention", Evans of how "a lifetime of feeling like an outsider had made me pathetically grateful for attention" and indulge in a bit of cod self-analysis. What makes Evans want to tell jokes all the time? "Insecurity on a giant scale." What has been Brydon's most significant obstacle? "Fear of rejection." Looking back over it all, they're astonished that they've come so far because "the truth is", they're still uncertain of themselves. Corden: "I'm thankful for all of it really The truth is, often I'm not sure what I've done to deserve all this". Evans: "I have hurdled quite a few barriers and undergone an amazing journey But the truth is, all I have ever been looking for is peace and acceptance."
So far, so Katie Price. But the comedian's memoir differs from the traditional celebrity autobiography in two significant respects. First, it is not usually ghostwritten comedians work with words, after all, and seem admirably (if sometimes unwisely) loath to relinquish control of them. Second, these books have the additional job of making us laugh: the stuff about overcoming hardship and finding love must be spruced up with plenty of (self-deprecating) humour.
On stage, most comedians proceed by exaggerating a couple of character traits until they can support a caricature, through whose eyes the world is interpreted thus James Corden is a Lazy Fat Bloke, Rob Brydon is an Anally Retentive Welshman and Lee Evans is a Freak. Over the course of a book other notes must be played. So here we get jokes freed from any comic perspective or effective delivery, jokes that don't warrant being spoken out loud, let alone set down in prose jokes about babies peeing on doctors, about old men spilling tea on their laps, about schoolboys misbehaving in class. The really galling thing about these squibs is not how comprehensively they fail to amuse, but how half-heartedly the authors appear to be trying. If any single element of these books exposes their cynicism, it is the complacency with which they treat the job of making us laugh.
It is a great relief to turn from these pages to the memoir of a fictional celebrity, whose shallowness and egotism are all part of the joke. I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan (HarperCollins) is the autobiography of the former BBC, former Radio Norwich, current North Norfolk Digital presenter Alan Partridge "TV Quick 'Man of the Moment' 1994" written "with help from" his creators: Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci, Rob Gibbons and Neil Gibbons. It delightedly skewers the conventions of the form. Here are the difficult beginnings, the steady rise towards showbiz success and the whistle-stop tour of career highlights, complete with sentimentality ("we stood at the window, me and my son I looked up at the starry night"), score-settling ("Phil Wiley In all honesty? I don't give the guy a second thought"), clumsy attempts to appear plugged-in ("I'm a firm friend of Dale Winton one of the gayest men in Europe") and cut-price wisdom ("Wikipedia has made university education all but pointless").
Partridge is a magnificent comic creation: a monster of egotism and tastelessness, a mischievous idea of a Daily Mail reader's pin-up (the latter paper "really is a rock-solid daily"). Part of his appeal is that he allows liberal audiences to laugh at politically incorrect humour (as when he comments that on The Day Today his beat was "sport, plus the Paralympics") every loathsome comment is sold to us not as a gag, but as a gaffe.
There are moments here when that voice wobbles a bit, when the comedy of awkwardness is clumsily transplanted on to the page. But his creators have been wise to deflect any doubts about their motives on to their appallingly wonderful character, rather than draw attention to themselves. They must be laughing they may well be the only people laughing at the latest books by their comedy peers.
