From Flight of the Conchords to French and Saunders, single-sex double acts are everywhere ? but Frisky and Mannish show that more should cross the gender divide
What's distinctive about Frisky and Mannish, who start touring this week? No, I don't mean the kohl-eyes and fishnets. Nor do I mean their discovery of Noel Coward overtones in the oeuvre of Lily Allen, much as I like the music they make to prove the point. What's unusual about F&M ? or Laura Corcoran and Matthew Jones to their nearest and dearest ? is that they're a male-female live comedy double act. Given the current ubiquity of comedy, and the infinite varieties in which it's being conceived and performed, it's amazing how rare it still is to find a man-plus-woman double act.
The double act is, after all, one of the most durable comic formats. But a quick range across its greatest exponents reveals ? unsurprisingly ? few receding to zero male-female duos. Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, Flight of the Conchords ? the all-male acts obviously predominate. French and Saunders, most notably ? alongside current pairs including Adams and Rea, Watson and Oliver, Anna Crilly and Katy Wix ? show that woman-plus-woman is a formula that's gaining traction.
But you'll run out pretty soon if you look for great ? or indeed any ? male-female duos. Ginger and Black ? aka Eri Jackson and Daniel Taylor ? gained a toehold on success a few years ago, with their dry-as-dust musical comedy, but they've gone quiet recently. You can spot a few male-female duos on the Edinburgh fringe each year, although John-Luke Roberts, whose partnership with Nadia Kamil is among the best of them, has recently gone solo. Even male-female sketch troupes seem hard to sustain, to judge by the experience of Fat Tongue. Comedy award-nominated in 2006, this trio duly lost their sole female member, Sophie Black, and devolved into a male-male double act, Cardinal Burns.
You might surmise that the male-female dynamic militates against comedy ? but for the many examples throughout the history of sitcom and rom-com that disprove the idea. So is it something to do with the specific exigencies of the live double-act? As Morecambe and Wise made explicit by sharing a bed in their TV show, the double-act is an extremely intimate, co-dependent relationship, analogous to a sexual or romantic one. The double act spends lots of time together; they need to know one another inside out; they may be latently (or openly) competitive. Maybe that scares off potential male-female partnerships. (It shouldn't: sexual tension and romantic possibility are fine comic fodder, as Flight of the Conchords star Kristen Schaal showed in her flirty ? and temporary ? double-act with Kurt Braunohler, Edinburgh Comedy award-nominated in 2009.)
Or maybe it's just that ? depressing generalisation alert ? men and women really do have divergent senses of humour, and that the intensity of a double-act collaboration necessarily exposes that. Frisky and Mannish are barely an exception to the rule, given that they're more cabaret than comedy; and that "Frisky" and "Mannish" are characters rather than versions of Corcoran and Jones themselves. But I hope their success encourages more woman-plus-man duos to try their luck in comedy. In every other artform, boy meets girl is box-office gold; it's plain bizarre that it so seldom happens in live comedy.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/apr/05/comedy-male-female-double-act
Nuclear power Public sector cuts Terrorism policy The US embassy cables Financial sector Cultural trips
No comments:
Post a Comment