Dry humour

“I’m a man of several names,” says Arthur Smith, a man whose taste for pseudonyms seems fitting for such a multifaceted performer. Born Brian in 1954, he has attempted to go by Captain Wanker for the sake of annoying a performers’ union and, according to a long-running and intentionally tired joke, is known as Daphne Fairfax to the people at the Streatham tax office. Nonetheless, his trademark Cockney growl, wit and presence have remained part of the furniture at Edinburgh’s festival scene since his first performance here in 1977.

Although a stand-up comedian at heart, he has established himself as a sort of factotum of the entertainment world, having dipped his toe into everything from broadcasting to modern art pastiche to writing for the stage. This year saw the self-confessed dilettante turn his hand to prose in My Name Is Daphne Fairfax, a memoir that darts and staggers its way across the first fifty years of a life fuelled by wild, booze-sodden capriciousness and the ever-present challenge of finding new ways to baffle and charm his audience.

Recounting his youth in Bermondsey, his first ventures into entertainment and countless strange nights at the Fringe, Smith takes to writing with the same energy, sincerity and prowess as he has done where any of his projects are concerned. “Words are my medium,” he says, and as a former student of literature and admirer of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and Benjamin Zephaniah, he is more than comfortable in the role of storyteller. Had you asked Arthur Smith ten years ago, the prospect of him writing this book would have been out of the question. He remembers once saying, "If you ever catch me writing an autobiography, please shoot me," but today, after an aborted attempt at writing a novel and a pivotal, near-fatal case of alcohol-induced pancreatitis in 2001, we find him in a more introspective mood.

“I’d been ill and it felt like I’d arrived at the end of act two of my life”, he explains. “I think that once you get to 50 it’s not inappropriate to do a bit of looking back.” Speaking from the deserted smoking area of an outdoor swimming pool in his native South London, Smith has just performed at Glastonbury and is drifting round the literary festival circuit in the run-up to bringing My Name Is Daphne Fairfax to what he fondly calls "the grandmother of them all," Edinburgh. With his past five decades now chronicled in print, act three, presumably, is in full swing.

“It’s a slightly odd feeling – you feel like ‘oh well, that’s that bit of my life finished, then.’ Done, dusted, I might have to just die now.” It’s a pessimistic, if offhand comment that might have been typical of Smith during the early 90s, when an unsuccessful foray into television dragged the famously dynamic comic into a slump of self-doubt and lethargy. He writes about this period with remarkable candour, reminding the reader that no matter how many times one hears the story of the outwardly vibrant performer privately struggling with depression, the impact abides. These days, however, a revitalised and resolutely teetotal Smith regards this milestone with excitement: “Now I have a challenge to create something else, another bit of life that I can write another book about, maybe.”

What didn’t kill Smith has in many ways made him stronger. While the majority of the debauched, bizarre and occasionally naked adventures described in the book were indeed inspired by drink—and though his days of excess have left him leading a quieter life, coping with diabetes—he has lost none of his appetite for the absurd and unexpected, and in fact now finds drunks "boring, by and large."

“I’ve always been a show-off,” he admits. “If an idea appeals to me hugely I will always do it whether anyone’s watching or not… well, I might have to have one person watching.” Suffering from an uncharacteristically empty diary, this year he’s considering supplementing his single date at the Edinburgh Book Festival with an impromptu comedy set "halfway up Arthur’s Seat or something" (he urges any interested readers to contact him at me@arthursmith.co.uk). It’s all part of a compulsion towards the unorthodox, a desire not just to entertain but also to surprise his audience.

“Well, it’s hard work being alive, isn’t it? So if you can find one little spark that staves off the endless, encroaching death and the mundanity of everyday life then I’m all for it – spontaneity and a madness that struggles against the straitjacket of mortality.”

When Smith talks about comedy today, this fixation on the inevitable end is a recurring theme. For him, comedy holds a value beyond simple entertainment: “Laughter, for the brief period that it’s happening, is the antidote to death. And to me comedy—which brings people together, all making this weird noise—doesn’t seem to have any other equivalent. It is the attempt to laugh at mortality.”

Sheepishly apologising for "getting a bit metaphysical," Smith turns his attention back to the more familiar ground of the Fringe. A true veteran, he has watched with regret as it evolved from a "shambolic, nonprofit, anti-institution" event to the more polished, lucrative, "official comedy festival" led by giants like Michael McIntyre and the former object of Smith’s contempt, Jimmy Carr.

“I’ve changed my mind now. I love Jimmy Carr. He’s a marvellous human being and he’s full of poetry,” sneers Smith. “No, he is a nice chap. I just wish he wouldn’t do the kind of stuff that gets him signed up with the BNP and what not.”

Grumbling aside, he remains confident in the survival of the more idealised, alternative side of the Fringe of which he has been a part for decades. It was this conviction that in 2007 earned him Spirit of the Fringe award for his send-up of pretentious, conceptual art, the massively popular Arturart. He still describes himself as "a bit of a Jack-the-lad," an "ageing roué" whose stage persona has now been remodelled to that of the reformed drunk who, he says, can "almost be drunk on stage without having a drink."

And yet, as chaotic as Smith’s life has proved, and whatever peculiar alleys he may take in this post-Fairfax chapter, he insists that stand-up is still the backbone of his career. “You can always go back to it. You might become unfashionable in the media, you might become clapped-out in other areas but I think I could always do 20 minutes in the pub.”