Sometimes I wonder if we classical music aficionados are masochists. We flock to the gloomiest song cycles by Schubert or Mahler expecting, indeed intending, to blub. We put ourselves through the atmospheric horrors of Soviet Russia by attending gigantic Shostakovich symphonies. And don’t get me started on Wagner.
So it was a relief the other night to shed tears of laughter for once — and muscle-wrenching, back-dislocating laughter, it was — all in the name of comedy in music.
Rainer Hersch’s one-man show at the bijou Jermyn Street Theatre pays tribute to Victor Borge, the man who proved classical music could be a subject for comedy. Hersch tells the story of the ‘clown prince of Denmark’ and does some of his best gags, along with a good few of his own.
Borge was born Børge Rosenbaum in Copenhagen in 1909. After early struggles, culminating in a dramatic escape from the Nazi invasion of Denmark — he and his wife were aboard the last boat to America out of Scandinavia — he made a dramatic radio debut and went on to tour the US as a comedian.
Eventually, despairing over New York, he hired a theatre on Broadway himself. It worked. By the end of 1953 he’d been called ‘the funniest man in America’ and his Comedy in Music became the longest-running one-man show in theatrical history.
Hersch was being called the heir to Victor Borge before he even had a clue who Victor Borge was. He’s a worthy successor: a stand-up comedian, but one with a terrific bent for music and a mean piano technique.
And he does a great job at evoking Borge himself — the Danish accent, the stooping stance, the self-deprecatory charisma. But perhaps the comparison between Borge and Hersch was inevitable simply because there aren’t that many musical comedians.
In a way, it is strange that classical music and comedy don’t mix more often. Both are about communication and depend on an unerring sense of timing. But even with talents like Hersch and the increasingly popular duo act of Igudesman and Joo, A Little Nightmare Music, it’s barely big enough to be called a niche.
It wasn’t always thus. The Comedian Harmonists, who took 1920s Germany by storm before being destroyed by Hitler’s racial laws, not only gave their audiences funny lyrics and performances but also were excellent musicians with fine voices and nigh-perfect song-writing abilities. Later there was the incomparable Gerard Hoffnung, whose drawings turned into a series of comedy concerts that have never been forgotten.
Dudley Moore’s musical skits were equally priceless: for instance, a Beethoven spoof that takes off many of Ludwig’s characteristic compositional tricks, and a skit on Benjamin Britten’s style — and Peter Pears’s singing — sharp enough to teeter just on the right side of cruelty.
Way back, BBC TV had a comic classical music quiz show, Face the Music. It was a great excuse for the likes of Joyce Grenfell, Richard Baker and Robin Ray to entertain with wit as well as wisdom. More recently, the inspired PDQ Bach made a comeback a few years ago after a lengthy hiatus.
Yet today comedy in classical music is so rare that performers compete for ownership of the best jokes. Igudesman and Joo use a trick in which they play the piano with a series of wooden sticks equipped with prongs arranged to sound successive chords. It seems, however, that Hersch was already doing something remarkably similar back in 1996.
Are these men of the moment the Ed Miliband and Sarah Millican of musical humour? It isn’t a new problem, of course: Borge himself was sued for filching a joke from a Norwegian scriptwriter. The scriptwriter won. But apparently died before he could collect.
So what makes us laugh at a musical joke? A show like Face the Music, or even Dudley Moore’s brilliant take-offs, probably couldn’t exist now, in a climate where admitting you know enough references to get the jokes is assumed to scare away all your friends.
Borge’s musical references usually centred on very popular classical works: the Beethoven ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No.2, etc. Hersch’s own material includes the wackiest possible mistransliteration of Italian words from La traviata, beginning ‘Libya mo’.
So could it be that sometimes musical humour takes off not music but our ignorance of it, our inability to play it and the devices that sometimes prevent us from trying?
Comedy with classic music may not send its audiences out eager to listen to Verdi or dip their toe in the waters of Wagner’s Rhinegold. But it does challenge the idea that classical music-lovers can’t let their hair down and enjoy a good old belly-laugh.
I intend to hot-foot it to Hersch’s April Fool’s Day concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It’ll do us old masochists the power of good.
Rainer Hersch’s Victor Borge is at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 31st March. Box office: 020 7287 2875. The April Fool’s Day Concert featuring Hersch, Spectator Arts Blog contributor James Rhodes and Omid Djalili is at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Box office 0844 875 0073.
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