Tears of laughter

At first glance, these books have an awful lot in common. Indeed, all three might have been produced by the same self-centred chatterbox, so similar is the slightly manic, self-consciously jokey, self-interrupting, lower-middle class vernacular in which they are all written. Fluent, full of ideas and, above all, conversational.

All three authors treat their imaginary readers like members of a live audience. ‘Sorry, I’m rambling,’ confesses Jo Brand at one point. ‘Tear this bit out and use the pages to make paper aeroplanes or something,’ advises Jack Dee at another trick moment. And in his opening remarks, Peter Kay goes right over the top by mysteriously including Jeremy Irons in a list of great comedians of the day, only to add the footnote: ‘Just checking you were paying attention.’

Inevitably, the experiences and tastes of these three ‘much loved’ public figures often overlap. All three of them may not have once driven vans delivering incontinence pads to old age pensioners in Putney (only Jack Dee did this) but they’ve all spent half their life sitting on the M1, they’ve all appeared at the Comedy Store and all three claim to find real life — everything from garlic bread to baggage carousels — much funnier than actual jokes. And, as if to prove their ordinariness, all three drag in the names of hundreds if not thousands of friends with names like Mike, Monica, Dick, Julia, Betty, Brian, Lizzie, Helen, Malcolm, Alice, Stuart, to mention just a few who have helped or hindered them on their way.

As with other outrageously open types, you wonder at times what they’re trying to hide. All three narratives sometimes irked me with their embedded insincerities. Is pudding-loving Jo Brand’s ego really as ‘fragile as an egg shell’? When Peter Kay watches punters arriving for his first TV show, do his nerves really drive him to ‘the edge of insanity’? And did sullen old Jack Dee really spend half the evening of his Comedy Store triumph sitting nervously on the toilet?

Surely not, but these books still have a lot to offer about what Dee calls ‘that strange vortex of arrogance and diffidence that governs the comedian’s psyche’, the thin line between the funny and the dreadfully un-funny, and the wonderful sense of safety an entertainer feels when his act is going well.