The Comedy Couch - Chris Morris Review

"The midnight streets of Britain: Now so full of drugs, not even the dealers know them all." Following this alarming announcement, a man approaches an actual cocaine dealer on a dodgy, south London street corner in the middle of the night. He then proceeds to attempt to purchase a slew of non-existent drugs.

"You got any Clarky Cat?" he enquires. "How about Yellow Bentines? Make sure it's good. I don't want my forearms feeling like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon. D'you know what I mean?" He swears he's cool, insisting, "Don't worry. I'm not a bloody piano-dentist." Finally, the coke dealer, knowing that the man has 40 pounds cash to spend, begs him to leave. "The only thing I sell out here is coke. My friend, please leave me alone." The entire transaction was real. And so begins the drug episode of Brass Eye, the cleverest, shrewdest and most offensive comedy series ever put to film. Brass Eye is so challenging and so honest that we'll probably never see it on television here in North America.

Meet Chris Morris, affectionately referred to by the British public and the press and the "media terrorist." The moniker is entirely fitting. Where terrorists seek to strike at national symbols of "freedom and democracy" to show a complacent society what it's been ignoring, Chris Morris has built a career around devastating attacks on complacency by presenting images so disturbing that the viewer never really knows whether or not to laugh until they've asked themselves some serious questions about their attitudes.

For example:

An angry mob ties a known pedophile to an enormous wicker penis and sets it on fire.

A school tricks a young girl into believing that her parents have died of a massive drug overdose for her own good.

A musical based on real-life serial rapist and murderer Peter Sutcliffe opens to great fanfare in London's West End.

Like at all great satirists, Chris Morris not only delves into the realm of discomfort, but also pushes a nation's decency buttons to force them to realize their own hypocrisy.

Chris Morris' first foray into broadcasting came when he was hired out of college in 1989 to host a program called Loose Ends on Radio 4. He was with the series until Christmas Eve, when he announced the fictional death of the Queen Mother. (She actually died in 2002.) Despite the numerous calls to the contrary, Morris remained adamant that the Matriarch had passed away in her sleep. He was fired. Then hired. BBC Radio 1 recognized the power of Morris' stunt and offered him his own comedy series.

What he produced was the short-lived news satire On the Hour. Its popularity gave way to the television version The Day Today, which gave first appearances to Doon Mackichan (Smack the Pony), Rebecca Front (Smack the Pony, Nighty Night) Patrick Marber (writer of Closer) and Steve Coogan (Alan Partridge, 24 Hour Party People, Tristan Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story). The Day Today successfully reinvented the genre of news satire, replacing the tradition of gag-heavy shows like Not Necessarily the News with an attention to detail not before seen. Despite the subject matter, The Day Today could have actually been the news. In fact, the first time I ever watched it, I was fully convinced that it was a real news program until I saw their piece on the death-row inmate who was entitled to choose the manner of his execution. Being an Elvis Presley fan, he chooses the electric toilet. The Day Today formalized the abstract chaos of alternative comedy shows like The Young Ones while adding absurdity to the dry, stale conventions of comedy news. The Day Today ran for only one season, but in that time it set a new standard for a generation of British satirists.

Following The Day Today, Morris set his sights higher to impersonate prime-time network journalism programs such as 20/20 and Nightline. The result was what is widely considered his greatest achievement: Brass Eye.

To watch Brass Eye, one truly does wonder how it came into being. It is so adamantly anti-media that the viewer is forced to wonder how any executives gave it

the green light. It offers little in the way of traditional entertainment value and horrifies the viewer at any given opportunity. Not the stuff of popular comedy. A famous Chris Morris story has to do with Channel 4 TV Executive, Michael Grade, pulling a story of his at the last minute. Morris finally gave in, only to replace the piece with a brief flash of the words "Grade is a cunt" in its place. (Furthermore, he wrote to Nelson Mandela telling him that Grade had begun a movement to keep him in prison). He was fired. Then rehired. It seems that Chris Morris is un-fireable.

What separates Brass Eye from other news comedy programs is its guerrilla-style use of genuine interviews with actual celebrities. Long-tired of egocentric celebs too willing to lend their faces to trendy causes, Morris set about creating fictional causes to see how socially aware these people actually were. In Brass Eye's seven episodes, Morris successfully tricked popular British into appealing on behalf of a Russian elephant with its trunk lodged in its own rectum ("Come on people, let's pull together and get that trunk out."), duped Phil Collins into warning children against pedophiles who might seek to "show them a scale model of your home village, but all the buildings are made of penises." Most famously was Morris' crusade against the non-existent Czechoslovakian drug "cake", a ludicrously large yellow puck that proposed to stimulate the part of the brain known as "Shatner's Bassoon". Through the guise of trendy anti-drug rhetoric, he managed to sucker British MP David Amiss into drafting legislation for the British House of Commons seeking to criminalize cake, all the while expounding the values of Morris' anti-drug organization FUKD & BOMBD. (Free the United Kingdom from Drugs & British Opposition to Metabolically Bi-sterile Drugs)

While a hero to like-minded viewers sick of bullshit media disinformation, Morris' attack on the media was not universally accepted. Following his controversial pedophilia episode of Brass Eye, he had to move with his family to France under threat of persecution because he couldn't prove that certain scenes weren't fake. Morris only decided to produce the contentious pedophilia episode after British media's hysteria following the murder of a young girl saw two pediatricians mobbed and intimidated. Morris lashed out at a system that claimed to rebuke pedophiles, while celebrating teen sex icons like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

After the furor over Brass Eye died down, Morris created the trippy, disturbing radio series Blue Jam (1997-1999), and its subsequent television version Jam (2000). One particular sketch involving a plumber attempting to cure crib death made Channel 4's "Most Horrifying Moments" special, beating out Psycho, Alien and the Shining based on viewer votes.

His most recent creation is Nathan Barley (2005), which mercilessly skewers internet hipster culture. The character of Nathan Barley is a great postmodern

satirical creation: an incredibly popular host of pointlessly tacky internet site Trashbat.co.ck constantly making references to major political events, but missing the point entirely. Surrounding Barley is a slew of equally stupid media whores as they work to produce the mindless pop culture magazine Sugar Ape, which for shock publicity reasons abbreviates its name to "Rape". Chris Morris has recognized that the media he made a name mocking has evolved, and with it has his satirical expression. Nathan Barley accurately depicts internet babies as giggling idiots with miniscule attention spans, delighting to internet sites depicting Russian homeless people forced to race for sport and having their teeth extracted for entertainment.

Sadly, Jam, Brass Eye and Nathan Barley remain unavailable in North America. However, with more and more DVD players being produced with multi-region features a whole new culture can learn from all of Chris Morris' work by purchasing it online.

I know that a Canadian Region version of The Day Today is available on VHS from Limelight Video at Alma & Broadway, but aside from that you'll have to download this genius' work online.

In a country that considers Talking to Americans to be courageous social commentary, the work of Chris Morris will hopefully egg us on to destroy some sacred cows of our own.

Dylan Rhymer is a Vancouver-based stand-up comic and actor. www.dylanrhymer.com