The actor on comedian on free speech, Twitter, and gaming addiction
I’m meeting Tiffany Stevenson – actress, compère, comedian, and one of the biggest players behind, and in front, of the comedy curtain.
From an early appearance in
The Office came a lasting relationship with Messrs Gervais and Merchant – who have both appeared at her comedy showcase
The Old Rope – and a solid grounding amongst the comedic hierarchy. Names like Izzard and Noble, Khorsandi, Tennant and Wendt are inconspicuously sprinkled into the 40 minutes I’m allotted before the smell of next door’s Wagamamas calls a halt.
She arrives slightly late citing London traffic, staff issues and a successful last night at the Old Rope where Tim Minchin and Lenny Henry graced the stage she runs with business partner Phil Nichol – an if.commedie award winner.
The agenda reveals itself to be Twitter, female comedians, gaming addiction and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Before the dictaphone is in optimum position, Tiffany reveals she’s incandescent that Joss Whedon won’t be involved in the forthcoming
Buffy the Vampire Slayer film – there’s some immediate common ground.
“It’s just not going to work now. They’ve just jumped on the bandwagon …I feel sorry for teenagers now with
Twilight-type films which are terrible. We had the good stuff – it was funny and knowing.”
It turns out Tiff’s mum is a fan of occult teenage dramas too, but she’s more
Angel than
Buffy.
“My mum liked it as it was that bit darker and older –
Buffy was a bit teenage for her, she didn’t get the knowingness of it.
Angel had brooding men in it – not that
Buffy didn’t have brooding men.”
Does Tiffany see many brooding men at her
Old Rope comedy nights?
“Not really – I get broody women..! No we don’t. It’s quite a geeky comedy night actually, lots of self proclaimed comedy nerds.
“Because of the fact we get people like Paul Foot, we attract quite a nerdy crowd.”
I ask about Paul Foot citing his appearance on
Nevermind the Buzzcocks a few weeks back. It’s not often that the show is owned by the guest sitting furthest camera right. But Foot – a long time friend and colleague of Tiffany’s – was on sparkling form that night.
“They gave him free reign I think which was delicious to watch. If you have Paul Foot on you have to let him be himself.”
Paul Foot is accelerating well on the scene, finding a niche with his beautifully erratic act which is aiding his emergence into the mainstream without sacrificing that which makes him so entertaining. A very visual comedian, if Reginald D. Hunter could read the phone book and get a laugh, Foot could act it and get a bigger one.
“He talks about being gay in his act – he makes a joke of it ‘I don’t know if anyone can tell I’m a homosexual’. He’ll do bits about it and he has some brilliant stuff but it’s not totally who he is or his act. Not in that same way like people like Alan Carr or Graham Norton. He’s actually one of my dad’s favourite comics. You can just throw a topic at Paul and he’ll just go – and he’s gone. It’s funny the minute he steps on the stage.”
Foot is part of a simmering undercurrent of zany, leftfield and left-leaning comedy undulating under the mainstream and people like Tiffany are facilitating its welcome arrival. Her namedropping is not a grand self- importance but rather a nod towards what she sees as her position – someone who is trying to ensure this cabal makes its mark. She has an inherent gratitude for the levels of free speech we have and an intense respect for letting comedy breathe without barriers.
“I think it’s really dangerous to start putting boundaries round things. There’s a brilliant Joan Rivers bit about someone who’d lost a limb and someone in the audience got offended saying, ‘my son’s got one leg’.
“She harks back, ‘Grow up … fucking grow up my husband has lost a leg and went blind so fucking grow up – if we can’t joke about these things what the fuck can we joke about?’
“Nothing in life is black and white, there’s such a massive area of grey and the grey is where we all live and the grey is what’s interesting to explore.
“People are getting up in arms about what Frankie Boyle says – is Frankie the enemy..? I don’t think Frankie is the enemy … I think the enemy is the Tory government pushing up tuition fees. The enemy is real criminals out there.”
Frankie Boyle, predictably has shocked and angered focus groups, the rightist press and beyond with his visceral material and pieces on Madeleine McCann, terminal disease and the like – it’s not like we couldn’t have predicted that – but for fellow comic Tiff, his material is so present:
“There’s no such thing as giving offence, only taking offence.” she says.
“I did an article about it when I came back from China – it was really bizarre being in a country where people are so, so oppressed. We were doing a theatre show out there and weren’t allowed signs outside in case they were anti-government propaganda. They’re not allowed Twitter because in Chinese characters you can say a lot in 140 characters – you can slam the government.
“There’s the great firewall but you can get round it – I found a loophole – so I managed to get on my Facebook and Twitter. I fought the system, I showed China who’s boss. And I bought some tacky merchandise.”
For someone so versed in the rights of mankind, freedom of action, speech and traversing around state law in the Peoples’ Republic, the irony isn’t lost as she discloses what she’d like to do to the thief who stole her brand new iPhone 4 a few weeks back.
“I’d probably have laid him out (laughs) I’ll be honest. I’d have enough of my peeps around. I’m trying to be philosophical about it – whoever took it needed it more than me blah blah blah.”
“I just love the games on it, I don’t have games consoles – I’m not allowed them cause I’d be on them all day.”
Growing up, Tiffany was a SEGA not a Nintendo type of girl, preferring Sonic and PGA Golf to Mario and Super Tennis. But by her own admission she doesn’t have a console for fear that she’d be on it all day and it would start to engulf her waking hours.
“My boyfriend is constantly on at me to get a Playstation and I keep saying no because nothing ever gets done. I could lose five hours in the day just playing a game.”
This doubtlessly heart-breaking decision is offset by the effort and honing which went into her performance of self-penned show
Dictators at the Edinburgh festival.
“Good crowds came to see it, they seemed to enjoy the theme of the show and I’m speaking to people about the possibility of doing a radio show based on it.”
The show is about the level of dictation and the main agents who enforce it in our lives. Strangely that the same
Angel-loving mother appears on a spurious list of Tiff’s own dictators along with Hitler, Mugabe, Kaddafi and OK magazine.
Working on building a solid fanbase, Tiffany has more Edinburgh shows coming in 2011 and 2012 but is performing local comedy on the London scene.
“There’s an ongoing thing I’m doing called
Celebrity Autobiography. With the right performer it can really work. He (an on-stage partner, played in Edinburgh by Norm from Cheers, George Wendt) would read bits of David Hasslehoff and I would read Destiny’s Child or Jordan. At the end they mash up autobiography of Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Fisher the story is told from different sides. It’s like a little mini play – a really good format.
“We did one with David Tennant, he did Richard Burton and David Cassidy – he was brilliant.”
I inform her I’m not speaking to David Tennant because he refused my request for an interview even though our parents had dinner 25 years ago – she tells me that’s a tenuous link and I should let go. Maybe one day.
Tiffany is just one of a number of comedians who try out their new wares on
Twitter – an arena which continues to impress her from a comedy and community point of view.
“I thought it (Twitter) was going to be constant self promotion for people but actually it’s a community and a really intelligent community where people actually support each other which is nice. It’s one of the true places where you can actually test jokes and it’s a great forum for seeing … that’s got 25 RTs or whatever. Everything is judged on its merit.”
Before Twitter, comedians would test drive jokes on stage, risking death and ritual humiliation – but that’s what Old Rope is, a testing ground before comics take their polished material to the bigger stages in venues, arenas and festivals. But before these enlightened technocentric days, comedians – and especially women comedians – had no such safety nets.
“As a woman you’ve got less time when you go onstage – it’s one of those things these keep perpetuating: that women aren’t funny. I think before they’d always just go “Ah she’s bollocks” but that kind of goes away.
“At Old Rope last night there were four women on the bill out of nine and the week before five out of eight. Women like Sappi Korsandhi and Diane Morgan and me and men like Milton Jones Lenny Henry, Tim Minchin – it’s not as if the women were in poor company and they shone because they were really funny.
“A woman gets less time on stage to prove she’s funny so a guy can probably get minutes and they trust him, women get a smaller window and the heckling will start if its not funny in the first two minutes.”
Tiffany, for all notions of equality-is-best is acutely aware that comedy has – for awhile – always been a man’s game. But she’s staunch in her belief women are as capable comedy performers and views her Old Rope night and its profile as a knowing and progressive launching pad.
I ask if there’s an inherent sexism or mysogeny in what has always been a very male dominated artform. Back to Python, Ronnies, and the Oxbridge set of the 1970s and 80s – it’s a sad fact that men in comedy have always vastly outperformed women on the bigger stages.
“In comedy clubs now 50, 60 percent are women – so that’s changed. And women want to hear what other women have to say. I get people coming up to me afterwards and saying ‘that was brilliant I normally hate female comedians and you were amazing’ – which is sort of a backhanded compliment. But you take the compliment and say ‘actually have you seen any other women..?’ It is just tedious but it is changing and needs to change.
“Someone came up to me after a gig and said: ‘are women getting funnier or is it me’ and I said ‘it’s you, they’ve always been funny it’s just there’ more of us on the bill.’”
