The funniest silences at the seaside

Comparing Ronnies Barker & Corbett, Jacques Tati, and Rowan Atkinson

Left: French comic Jacques Tati; right: British comic Ronnie Barker (who wrote By the Sea under the pseudonyms Dave Huggett and Larry Keith)

Rowan Atkinson doesn’t do interviews. He’s a very private person who spends some time on his own and the rest of his time with people he loves. That, at least, is what he told an interviewer on Danish television in 1993—whom, I presume, he didn’t love. He did do that interview, however, and he has, admittedly, done other interviews since, so it’s not quite true to say he doesn’t do them. In fact, in his time, he has interviewed other people, as part of his routine.

He once interviewed Elton John (who has also done remarkably unfunny comedy work with Matt Lucas of Little Britain and Morecambe and Wise, but I’ll draw a veil over those). In the Rowan Atkinson confrontation, he was constantly barraged with questions about his stage name. Elton, we learn, was the name of a saxophonist in a band that the singer was in before striking out on his own. And, no, he had never wanted to persuade Bernie Taupin to reverse the order of his names (Taupin is John’s lyricist). At several points, Elton John grows visibly irritated at the constant questioning of his stage name, retorting at one point that he imagined people might be more interested in his music than in his name, which does in some manner invite a question as to why he changed it from Reginald Dwight in the first place.

When composing the opening sentence to this article, I was in a quandary as to whether to refer to Mr Atkinson as a comedian or as an actor (Wikipedia refers to him as both), and this is a question that Atkinson himself has some difficulty with. In the end, in the 1993 Danish interview, he errs to calling himself more of an actor than a comedian. He admits to not finding very many things funny, and this is something I’d heard him say previously. I find that interesting, that a man whose acting is predominantly, if not exclusively, known for its comic qualities does not actually find anything or anyone else funny—whereas many comic actors are comedians precisely because they find other things funny (Robin Williams was a classic case in point). Atkinson will hear a joke or view a sketch and will remain po-faced until, perhaps, at some later point, he will analyse the structure of the sketch or joke and finally come to a humorist’s appreciation of what he has viewed and then, and only then, even if somewhat out of context, he’ll have a snigger at it. That is what he says, at any rate.

The son of a farmer, Mr Atkinson attended both Newcastle and Oxford Universities and might therefore be judged, knowing none else, as possessing a certain intellect, to which I bow. He has known great success and he is vastly popular around the world, first, for a character whom he has inserted into a wide array of historical situations in order to exploit them for comic value—his character Blackadder—and, second, for a character who speaks no words and whom he has compared to Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, being his Mr Bean. The Danish interviewer (Jarl Friis-Mikkelsen) quizzes Atkinson about Mr Bean, asks him how he chanced upon the character’s name, to which Atkinson replies that a number of funny-sounding names were considered, mostly those of birds (wren, chaffinch) and vegetables (cauliflower, zucchini) before his team came up with Bean, all of which makes me wonder how actor Sean feels about his name. And therein lies one reason why I’m not a great fan of Rowan Atkinson.

If you peruse the comments that follow the YouTube posting of that 1993 interview, you can see that Mr Atkinson is praised for his delicious English accent, his modesty, his humour, and his intellect, all of which is true and none of which I begrudge him. But Atkinson himself says something quite revealing about Mr Bean: that he is a very nasty man. I wonder sometimes whether a character who is portrayed as seemingly innocent and clueless should, in the flesh, be revealed to be nasty, but this revelation by the character’s creator comes as no surprise: Mr Bean is frequently observed to be nasty, and yet people still laugh at that. However, what Atkinson identifies as nasty behaviour is not quite all of what I identify as nasty about Mr Bean, for much of his nastiness extends not to the character himself, but to his creator.

Impelled by the interview, I revisited the classic Jacques Tati film Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, which dates from 1953, but was repeatedly tinkered with by its director until a final cut was produced in the 1970s, which was then later remastered. The spruced-up version on YouTube is nothing less than a delight. It tracks Monsieur Hulot’s journey in his cranky little car to the seaside, where he checks into the Hôtel de la Plage (which can still be visited in the Atlantic-coast resort of St Marc-sur-Mer), along with a whole host of other somewhat zany characters (the least zany of which are the young boys who jaunt about the beach and what-not, and the young, elegant lady whom Hulot challenges to a game of tennis—a game at which he was a dab-hand in real life).

At one point we observe a boy of no older than three or four years purchase two ice-cream cones from the beach vendor. The ice cream seems to sit precariously atop the cones, but the little boy in his ungainly beach costume waddles up the stairs with them, even negotiating the turn handle of the hotel door (the ice cream thus defying gravity as it remains fully installed on the upside-down cone) and the boy enters the hotel to find another boy sitting waiting on him. He hands over one of the cones and the two lads sit quite contented, enjoying their ices. The one scene in which the filmmaker could have rollicked around with the maladroitness of youth, he uses to show that youth has so much to teach adulthood, whose misfortunes are only of their own making.

I had last seen this movie in the early 1980s, so it is well worth revisiting, since the parallels to Mr Bean are clear: the entire film is as good as unspoken (and in some regards, is paralleled in a short 1982 film by the BBC’s Two Ronnies, which deals with a similar subject matter: By the Sea). Monsieur Hulot differs somewhat from Mr Bean in that the misfortunes of which he is the author are at no point intended by him: they are pure accident (and expertly executed), and indeed Monsieur Hulot himself falls victim to the pure accidents of other characters in the film. By the Sea likewise follows the philosophy of Ronnies Barker and Corbett, who preferred to fall victim to the traps laid by others (in particular the character played as The Brat by little-known actor John Brewer) than to lay traps themselves.

What gets Mr Bean into most of his scrapes is not the innocent accident-proneness of others but his own determination to devise a solution to a perceived problem that causes more mayhem than anything else. I don’t know: I have difficulty liking Mr Bean, knowing that he is the brainchild of a somewhat comically conceited actor, who hesitates to call himself a comedian, even if he is known exclusively for his comic roles (including Johnny English, perhaps his most dramatic outing, of all his characters), who with some modesty tells Denmark that he doesn’t drive too fast, but fast enough, and in subsequent years went on to seriously damage at least two of his own collection’s sports cars, valued at several hundreds of thousands of pounds (his penchant for Aston Martins led him to spend over a million pounds on one particular model, and get the manufacturer to up the spec to racetrack, as opposed to road use, only to sell it again for just short of 200,000—that’s enthusiasm over monetary sanity). If Mr Atkinson has earned such huge sums from making other people laugh, then we might gain some amusement still from his adventures with sports cars, if only because he doesn’t seem to find much amusement himself with anything in particular.

I’m not sure what mental deficiency Mr Atkinson supposes his character Bean is suffering from (in the interview, he speculates that Bean is in fact an extra-terrestrial; ahem). Perhaps he suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, perhaps ADHD: whatever it is, he paints Mr Bean as a sad, friendless little man, excluded from society by his own idiosyncrasies, turned inward on a world of his own, in which he finds the resolution to his problems in a manner that merely gets laughed at by the rest of us, who are, oh, so smart, and educated, and intellectually superior to him. There are quandaries that I fret about that have invoked remarks from others, that perhaps I suffer myself from a hint of Asperger’s syndrome. I don’t know if I do, but if it makes me fret at the misfortunes of others, I see no particular need to remedy it.

Meanwhile, I very much doubt whether Rowan Atkinson suffers from any mental affliction and I am confident that, if he did, he would be the last to concede it. Mr Atkinson is rich, a playboy in the world of sports cars, and finds other people very unfunny. Jacques Tatischeff (he was of Russian lineage) and Ronnie Barker possessed a tad more humanity for my own money.

Take a look at Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot and By the Sea. And then compare them to Mr Bean At the Beach, and judge for yourselves.