Just Williams

‘Hoping for the best (my default attitude), I set about eating my way through Mum’s humongous pie’

Simon on how to make ’em laugh

PEOPLE MAKE A DISTINCTION between being laughed at and being laughed with – I can’t really tell the difference, it’s just a great sound. My first memory of it came early, at primary school. I was cast as Little Jack Horner, a cameo role – all I had to do was sit in a corner eating a Christmas pie, then, as per the nursery rhyme, put in my thumb and pull out the famous plum. My mother had made a monster pie of solid pastry with an ‘x’ to mark where she had hidden the crucial fruit. What could go wrong?

As doting parents began arriving in their Morris Travellers, we crouched behind the curtain drinking our milk through a straw. Miss Grant put my hat on for me, ‘And let’s take your glasses off, shall we?’ They were the pink National Health ones with wires that went behind the ears. Alas, without them, come the moment, I couldn’t see the ‘x’, just a blurred landscape of golden pastry. Hoping for the best (my default attitude in life), I set about eating my way through Mum’s humongous pie. It was slow, uphill work. The audience became restless. My mother crawled towards the stage in her polkadot dress and crouched there, pointing. She too was a blur; I gave her a wave and went on chewing. The audience began to laugh. Miss Grant tried to wrestle the pie from me and when I protested, great flakes of pastry flew out of my mouth. More laughter. On it went, pie without end. At last I pulled out the plum, declaring my only line with a flourish – ‘What a good boy am I!’ – and got my first round of applause. Oh yes!

At Harrow, in a house review, I learnt a hard lesson about the cruelty of comedy. I wrote and performed a monologue as Elsie, one of the school’s kitchen staff – a big, cheery Irish girl with a grating falsetto voice. With a headscarf and massive padding under my apron, I had her down to a T. All the boys were rolling with laughter, but in the back of the room, half hidden, I caught sight of Elsie solemnly watching me – not laughing. ‘That was supposed to be me was it?’ she asked later, ‘with everyone laughing?’ I can still feel the tingle of shame.

Later in the year, the school’s great classicist was going to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I was shortlisted to play Hermia (they were ahead of the game on gender-blindness). Sadly for me, when the time came I had grown two inches and my voice had broken, so I had to be ‘let go’.

Welcome to show business – or, as the director could have quipped, ‘Sic friatur crustulum.’ (That’s the way the cookie crumbles.)

Simon is appearing in Posting Letters to The Moon at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London SW1, on Sunday 21 October; postingletterstothemoon.com