Ode to Joy

On the face of it, the worlds of standup comedy and poetry have little in common. Stereotypically, standup clubs are boozy, lairy places where performers gurn and jape to elicit laughs from their pissed-up audience; poetry is a rarefied world of sensitive souls, earnestly pouring their hearts out to beard-stroking intellectuals. But as anyone who’s witnessed poetry slam evenings or delved into the more thoughtful side of standup will know, they’re not as different as all that. There exists a hazy borderland between the scenes that a few adventurous souls are exploring, to ever-greater rewards.

One such performer is John Cooper Clarke, a legendary 'punk poet' of two decades' standing, who graces Edinburgh with his presence for a full week in August. Clarke first found his audience at punk concerts in the late 1970s, and tells me: "I’ve always been able to play rock’n’roll venues, comedy venues and literary venues." Indeed, his poems are so funny, caustic, foul-mouthed and beguiling that his warm-up sets for bands like The Sex Pistols and Joy Division became almost as keenly anticipated by the punk crowd as the bands themselves.

Clarke has now found respect among the literary establishment and even had some of his poems added to the GCSE syllabus earlier this decade. But he’s hardly let such highbrow endorsements go to his head; instead, the rambling comic banter that glues his poems together has lengthened, and he’s now as likely to be found gigging at comedy clubs as anywhere else.

Clarke rarely gives interviews and is reluctant to analyse his technique (he fears that "you’ll get what you want, but lose what you had"). But he recognises that the balance of his act has shifted, and concedes that "maybe there’s a bit more of the in-betweeny stuff about now." With the influence of alternative comedy having opened up the standup circuit to a more diverse range of acts, people like Clarke can now take the comedy clubs by storm.

This same adventurousness in the comedy circuit has also been a boon to Tim Key, the poet best known for his short, stumbling readings on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, who brought comic poetry blinking into the light last year when he took away the Edinburgh Comedy Award. Key tried his hand at straight standup early in his career, but says succinctly, "I was shit."

"I felt that frustration where you feel you possibly could contribute something," he tells me, "but when you're doing it you just feel constrained and lost, and aware that you're contributing absolutely nothing."

It was then that Key started writing whimsical, gently humorous poems, which he initially performed in front of a few friends. Key found he liked the freedom the poems gave him to mix different types of humour into his performance. "Some of my poems are constructed in such a way that they're clearly written by a comedian who has some handle on how to make people laugh," he ponders, "but some feel more like they're blowing in the wind, like a little piece of nonsense. And I like both those things."

Perhaps due to a poetic style that The Guardian has labelled "wilfully artless", Key has sometimes been misunderstood by the wider poetry scene. "The slight risk you run is that you look like you're satirising the whole genre," he says, "that you're coming in to say 'poetry's absolute bullshit.'" Key insists that this isn't the case, and points out that "if I was interested in satirising poetry, that would assume that I'd watched quite a lot of it and thought 'this is ripe for parody', and then gone away and constructed an act around it. In actual fact it was much more naive than that."

No such defence is possible for comedian Phil Nichol, who premiered his 'Bobby Spade' character at the Fringe last year. Spade is clearly a parody of a very bad 'beat' poet, complete with pretentious pronouncements, self-indulgent, autobiographical ramblings and an unhealthy dose of misogyny. But like most satirists, Nichol says that the impetus to take the piss comes from a sincere love of the form itself.

"Any time you satirise something, you have to secretly love it," he says. "I grew up writing poetry—like most teenagers, I took myself very seriously—and I was a fan of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac." Bobby Spade's 'magnum opus' Welcome to Crazytown is a tribute of sorts, and Nichol has done a surprising amount of work creating a backstory for the character, studying the lives of other beat poets so that the details would ring true to anyone with a detailed knowledge of '60s counterculture.

Nichol has already built a reputation on the circuit for what he calls "broad, clownish, daft comedy," and like Key he appreciates the chance poetry gives him to be more "lyrical" and less exclusively laugh-focused. "I wanted to write something where I didn't end up with my trousers round my ankles," he says. At the same time, he admits that "the good thing about doing a character is that it gives me licence to be a bit shit."

Performance poet Tim Clare has a theory about people who do these kind of parody acts. "I'm a little bit suspicious that Phil secretly wants to be a real poet," he says. "And I don't know whether the fact that it's a character gives him a bit of a safety net, because maybe that's the worst thing in the world to be accused of," he laughs. "But yeah, I think there is definitely a band of people who are clawing at the door of the closet but unsure if they really want to come out."

Clare's background is as a performance poet and musician, but his first ever Fringe outing is predominantly a standup show that happens to contain a few poems and a song. This isn't as big a leap as some people might assume, he says. Clare clearly has a great knowledge and appreciation of standup, and maintains that "all good standups are poets to a certain extent. If you look at somebody like Mitch Hedburg or Emo Phillips, the art of crafting those one-liners and garden path sentences are all sort of poetic techniques."

Clare is refreshingly open about the pretentiousness of some of the performance poetry scene. "Some poets can be a bit floaty, and have a tendency to think that it's just about self-expression," he says. "At its worst, that's the ultimate masturbation." One of the things that attracts him to comic poetry is the instant feedback from the audience, which lets the poet know exactly how well they're going down. "On the artist-entertainer continuum," he says, "I'm definitely more of an entertainer... I think that if people haven't laughed, then I've probably done a really shit job."

As well as this unbridled desire to entertain, it's a consummate love of wordsmithery that ultimately links all four of these seemingly disparate acts together. Tim Clare perhaps sums it up best: "I think in both poetry and comedy you're trying to say the most interesting possible thing in the fewest possible words. And in the end, perhaps that's where really good standups and really good poets can see eye-to-eye."