Don't Talk to Me About... The Bob Blackman Appreciation Society

Mother Mac's of Back Piccadilly is an inauspicious location for live comedy. Situated opposite a derelict site and backing on to a brothel, it sits 100ft from art hive/ping-pong outlet Twenty Twenty Two physically, and a million miles away from it culturally. Rewind to a February evening in 2012; I'm sat in the tiny upstairs room watching the Bob Blackman Appreciation Society perform a 50 minute set bathed in the uncomfortable fluorescent glow of a strip light, and I'm falling in love-

Two years later, and we're meeting five minutes down the road in Thomas Street's Bar21, ahead of their appearance at Dead Cat Comedy Club. The bar, a cosy temple to Cold War-era science fiction, sits oddly out of place against the Northern Quarter's knife-edge-of-cool drinkeries, but then the two men I've come to interview are similarly stuck in a time warp.

The Bob Blackman Appreciation Society is the creation of comics Johnny Sorrow and Sir Richard Swan. Their act is hard to categorise: It's not a carbon copy of club variety acts, but a faithful homage underlaid with a queasy desperation and an indefinable weirdness – equal measures end of the pier and end of the world. Their act consists of a series of vignettes, some old-school compering, some wordplay, some visual gags, some weird stuff – like when a balaclava'd Richard Swan pretends to stuff paper into his mouth in tribute to real-life vaudevillian paper eater and silent movie star Chaz Chase. All their performances end with a salute to the titular Bob Blackman, a man who used to hammer himself over the head with a tea tray while singing postwar cowboy song 'Mule Train'. Sorrow tells me, “We're more variety than standup. At the end of the day, you're telling jokes to the audience.”

“We're talking to the audience. We're not doing sketches. We're not detached,” adds Swan. 

Meeting them, it's clear that variety is their first love. “It's not really a send-up or a spoof of comedy from then," Swan says. "It's an attempt to drag it back!” The time period they capture is vast, starting in the music halls of Victorian England and ending in the social clubs of the waning Industrial North, but the picture they paint is consistent. “It's acts like Bob that we absolutely love. More kind of bizarre acts. You don't get so many of them these days,” laments Sorrow – and you can see that written out in their performance. From Sorrow's frantic repetition of his “Don't talk to me about...” catchphrase strained through a rictus grin to Swan's funereal deadpan parade of non-sequitur gags, it's the madness that shines through with sequinned brutality. The illusion is so complete that past audience members have approached them with false memories of seeing them perform in the 1970s.

Such an act should not be popular, and, judging by the modest turnout at Bar21, it isn't. But the Bob Blackman Appreciation Society still carry with them a peculiar critical allure. Less than a year after forming, they took their first show up to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011, where they scooped the prestigious/cult-y Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality – an award named after a comedian and promoter principally famous for getting his dick out at Glastonbury. Past winners, like Rubberbandits, have gone on to find mainstream acceptance, or a solid foothold on the national comedy circuit, like Edward Aczel; the Bob Blackman Appreciation Society have found neither.

It's not difficult to see why. For one, they don't look like modern comedians. Middle-aged, unfashionably dressed and burdened with thick regional accents, they sit awkwardly in an industry dominated by young, middle-class men with tight jeans and tighter jokes. But they're happy to be distanced from mainstream comedy, which Sorrow dubs – with no hint of the malice that the printed word might imply – “karaoke comedy.” Neither of them have ever been interested in pursuing the mainstream, saying that “the market's become so saturated with standup, so every channel has some kind of standup programme. If you saturate a market, people start moving away.”

Prior to reforming as a duo, both had a hand in the Northwest standup circuit – mutually bonding over consistently being the weirdest acts on the bill. The Vauxhall Conference comedy circuit couldn't contain their wider ambitions, though. Arguably, nothing can. Variety, as they see it, died with the working men's clubs. These clubs, frequently demonised by alternative comedy acolytes as nicotine-yellowed dens of warm-lager racism, were the last great bastion of variety and sideshow lunacy; a place where the Sorrows and Swans of yesterday could cut their teeth. There's a sense that when they closed, the variety baby was thrown out with the far-right bathwater, an unfortunate casualty of the progressive change of modern comedy stylings.

This inability of the wider comedy culture to accommodate the Bob Blackman Appreciation Society sits strangely at odds with the way they are received at nights. They are that rarest of beasts – a niche act with broad appeal. The audience at Bar21 and the crowd from Mother Mac's all those years ago couldn't be any more different, but the reaction was the same. Sorrow and Swan admit there are few traits shared between their fans, as theirs is an act that cuts across the usual boundaries. Of the makeup of their admirers, Swan says, "very varied age range. Equally, a very varied age range don't like it."

One place they've consistently won fans is from the stable of Northern comics, always attracted to the weird stuff. Their continuing presence on comedy bills in supportive, smaller clubs like Dead Cat or A Laugh in Stockport is a testament to this. After failing to win over the backroom gigs of the North and Midlands, they've finally found a home in the hearts of independent enthusiast promoters – but it's hard to gauge their impact over the past few years on the local scene. There's been a recent boom of sketch groups – most notably, dark-crowd pleasers Gein's Family Giftshop – as well as a groundswell of acts turning away from traditional standup to explore new territories. Over the past year, Mancunian comic David Stanier has started running his 'Silly Party' shows – mixing standup with ridiculous parlour games – which have more than a hint of the music hall about them. Sorrow and Swan are reluctant to take any credit for these changes, though, citing instead the same forces of saturation that push them to hit themselves over the head with trays night after night.

Ultimately, what's crucial to their act is an unwillingness to compromise. They make shows for themselves, not for the big crowds, not even for their fans. As Sorrow remarks, “We do our show because that's the show we want, and that's just it. We don't pander." Like Bob 'The Tray' Blackman before them, they've found virtue in pursuing their own warped vision, wherever it takes them.