Why are there no great double acts in modern comedy?
Double acts acquired a new lease of life in the Nineties – a marriage between university waggishness and the common touch had seemingly been cemented
This weekend, audiences nces around the country will have been taken into oa a bygone era by Stan & Ollie, a film guaranteed eed to ensure we fall in love all over again with Laurel and Hardy, courtesy of Steve Coogan and John C Reilly’s remarkable, eerily exact impersonations.
Laurel, lest we forget, was born n in Lancashire, made his stage debut but in Glasgow, aged 16, and honed his is clowning abilities amid the music-hall world that sprouted up p in the mid-Victorian period.
Originally, the “straight” man stood on stage as a means of repeating or feeding lines to the comic, but grew as a foil in his own wn right. Among the first Victorian double acts to find favour were a duo – Joe O’Gorman and Joe Tennyson n– – called The Two Irish Gentlemen or The Patter Propagators. But you can find double acts in Shakespeare, not least the master and put-upon servant team of Antipholus and Dromio in The Comedy of
Errors, which in turn harks back to ancient Greek comic staples.
There’s something so seemingly integral about the double act to making sense of existence – with all its pettiness and power play – that you’d think its continuance wouldn’t be in doubt. Yet where are the great double acts of today? After all, TV in the last third of the 20th century would have been a lot duller without Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies and French and Saunders.
Despite music hall not surviving the proliferation of cinema and advent of the small screen, the double act endured end through decades of political and social change. Even with the more combative com alternative comedy of the Eighties, Eigh the double act remained. Indeed, Ind with Seventies performers such as Little and Large and Cannon and Ball making the double act seem formulaic, for it acquired a new lease of life lif in the Nineties – whether that be the th punkish slapstick of Adrian Edmondson E and Rik Mayall in
Bottom or the cerebral buffoonery of Robert Newman and David Baddiel. A marriage between university waggishness and the common touch had seemingly been b cemented.
Cambridge also gave us Mitchell and Webb, Armstrong and Miller and Mel Me [Giedroyc] and Sue [Perkins]. With Wit the late-Nineties arrival of the surreal surr The Mighty Boosh and subsequent sub phenomenon of David Walliams’s Wal and Matt Lucas’s multicharacter cha jamboree, Little Britain, things thin looked up, then suddenly fell away. awa “There aren’t any true double acts these days,” the latter’s erstwhile mentor, men Vic Reeves (who is still going strong stro with his own comedy partner, Bob Mortimer), lamented in 2011.
Discounting the symbiotic comic relationships that crop up in sitcoms, the terrain got much harder for double-act vehicles. The odds on a good double act coming into being, flourishing and lasting have always been slim: there’s the need to meet, get on, and combine a shared comic taste with complementary differences of style, and then commit to keep going, through setbacks and the lure of other projects. On top of that, the challenge of finding a wide audience through the still-essential platform of television is tougher than ever. Double acts will often express their role-play dynamic within sketches, which make them expensive. Stand-ups are found in abundance and can be easily and cheaply corralled into Live at the Apollo style packages or panel shows. The net result? The individual comic ego holds sway, the complex yin and yang of the double act takes a back-seat.
All the same, it’s not game over. Double acts are still plugging away. Listen out for Julia Davis and Vicki Pepperdine’s mock agony aunt podcast
Dear Joan and Jericha, which is like Ab Fab meets Derek and Clive meets Alan Partridge. And talking of Partridge, Coogan himself has helped forge a new direction for the TV double act with Rob Brydon in The Trip. The premise of two celebrity pals vying for comic supremacy in a car proved as brilliantly simple as the best Laurel and Hardy skit. Old-style double acts may well be vanishing in the rear-view mirror but this pair’s casual genius for mimicry and needling mateyness suggests that something wonderful could lurk around the next bend. Stan & Ollie is on general release now