Mitchell & Webb

26/07/2010

Peep Show’s comedy double act on their identity crisis, sticking it to The Man and why The Simpsons is great art

By Jane Graham

For a business based on laughs, comedy can make for a lonely, dispiriting career. It’s not just those long, solitary trips around the country, punctuated by garage sandwiches, ’phone calls with loved ones and a couple of hours of joke-sharing with a faceless congregation each night. The notion of sitting on your own to conjure up images and ideas you hope – but can’t be sure – will make strangers laugh can be deeply intimidating, even if you believe you were born to do it.

It may be that it takes an odd kind of person to commit to comedy, and indeed those journalists who have interviewed many comedians may well conclude, as I have, that most of them are oxymoronic conundrums, part masochist, past egotist, often troubled and bitter about the world, yet desperate to be embraced by it.

Joan Rivers often said her audiences were her group therapy, sharing in routines which were born of “total unhappiness”. Woody Allen put it rather more succinctly: “Being funny is not anyone’s first choice.”

It’s not surprising, then, that the job has spawned so many double acts. The double act has a built-in loneliness-shield, and comes with a
free-sounding board, guaranteed ego-booster and permanent compatriot in paranoia. Men in particular – the fragile sex? – have taken shelter in comedy double acts over the years: from Morecambe and Wise, Cook and Moore and The Two Ronnies through to the years of Smith and Jones, Fry and Laurie and Reeves and Mortimer, and on to today’s crop of Lucas and Walliams, Armstrong and Miller and today’s interviewees, Mitchell and Webb. 

In some ways David Mitchell and Robert Webb are unusual in the world of comedy double acts in that their partnership, though formed when they were students at Cambridge Footlights, first came to attention when they starred together in a sitcom they didn’t write. Channel  4’s Peep Show, which follows the lives and thwarted loves of two ill-matched flat-sharers, made cult comedy icons of Mitchell and Webb, and also popularised particular versions of the pair’s personas, which must have felt a bit strange since they were based on identities dreamed up in the minds of other people.

So did writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain get the essentials right?

“They’re not a proper reflection on our real characters,” admits Robert Webb, speaking from the London home he shares with his wife and new daughter Esme. “But I suppose we do still take a leaf from them when we’re presenting ourselves as ‘real people’ in our sketch show.
“When we do the behind-the-scenes sketches, David is the worried, anxious one and I’m laidback, stupid and complacent. 

“It’s not really us but I quite enjoy playing sneery and stupid and there’s something of a worrier in David as well. But of course I think I made it a bit awkward for people with all the strange dancing up and down one minute [Webb famously won last year’s Comic Relief version of Let’s Dance with a parody of the Flashdance routine], and the documentary on TS Eliot the next.”

Unlike Webb’s modernist poetry documentary, the fourth series of the pair’s sketch series, That Mitchell and Webb Look, won’t hugely challenge the common perceptions of their make-up.

It sees a return to their established mix of the surreal and silly – one sketch sees an affronted Monsieur Garnier chastising his “laboratoire” scientists for finding a cure for Alzheimer’s when they’re supposed to be concentrating on the new Garnier Fructis range – and the dark and unsettling, examples of which include the post-apocalyptic gameshow The Quiz Broadcast (‘Stay Indoors!’) and a vision of a dementia-suffering Sherlock Holmes being propped up by a loyal Watson.

“You could probably write a film around that idea,” says David Mitchell of the Holmes sketch, squeezing in a phone call with me between courses in the London hotel he’s based in for the day. “But we’ve just pissed it away in three minutes.”

The sketch series have always been more hit and miss than the reliably excellent Peep Show, but nevertheless, That Mitchell and Webb Look secured the partnership a much coveted BAFTA in 2007 (with Peep Show winning the award the following year) and thrust them into the mainstream of British TV entertainment. It’s a disconcerting place for a comedian to be. As well as often being less than entirely restful human beings, comedians, particularly British ones, can see themselves as naturally anti-establishment, using comedy as a weapon to undermine pomposity and entitlement and expose the flaws of individuals and institutions.

As Webb puts it: “As comedy performers you have far more licence to be standing in the corner without joining in.” So does their ascent into the popular mainstream sit uncomfortably then?

“I still don’t think I’m doing much joining in,” says Webb, sounding faintly offended. “I don’t turn up to premieres or big parties, I’m not going out with models or turning up in the tabloids.

“It’s true we won a Bafta, which is quite establishment of us, but I don’t feel myself being swallowed up by The Man yet.”

He may have grounds for that claim, but does his running mate? While Webb has had his moments in the spotlight – the Let’s Dance final being the most obvious one – David Mitchell is possibly becoming better known as a sparkling panel show wit than he has ever been as part of a double act.

But while he admits that “having a nice chat with other comedians you admire” on the likes of QI and Mock the Week is “so easy and so much fun I feel like a bit of a charlatan being paid for it”, Mitchell is adamant that crafted, scripted television such as That Mitchell and Webb Look is what he reserves “care and love” for. Which must come as something of a relief for Robert Webb.

They are firmly united in their belief that comedy is a serious business, and certainly an artform as valid as any other. “There’s nothing you can’t express through a joke, no subject that can’t be addressed through comedy,” says Webb.

“Great comic films can deal with big universal themes in a brilliant and universal way, but if you’re laughing there’s a temptation to dismiss it as something anyone can do.”

Or, as Mitchell puts it: “If the best of The Simpsons isn’t great art, then fuck art really.”

The more the two chat about their work, their priorities and their world views, the more similar they seem. Although the images of the dictionary-devouring aesthete Mitchell, and thoughtless reveller Webb neatly fit the ‘intellectual and the dunce’ model that the likes of Cook and Moore and Fry and Laurie embraced, the truth is that such close-knit duos are far more likely to be made up of two rather similar characters.

Thus, neither Webb nor Mitchell come across as breezy types. While Mitchell doesn’t surprise when he describes himself as a former “swotty, spoiled public schoolboy filled with self-loathing” who is still “useless at parties”, Webb reveals that although he is probably less uptight than his partner, he too was a “very angsty, massively shy” teenager. “Without a drink inside me I’m as terrified in a roomful of strangers as David probably is,” he says.

The hunt for the happy, well-balanced social butterfly of British comedy continues. And let us selfishly hope it goes on for a long time yet.

That Mitchell and Webb Look is on Tuesdays at 9pm on BBC Two