Funny Cow

Dir: Adrian Shergold

2018

****

Funny Cow is a great name for this film. It is the name given to a young female stand up comedian as she makes her way up the working men’s club scene in the 1970s and 1980s but it is also a subtle take on the Funny Girl/Funny Lady films that featured Barbara Streisand in a similar role but in a very different style. The working men’s clubs in the north of England in the 70s and 80s are famous for their misogynistic, racist and generally offensive acts – many who made the big time. Of course it wasn’t all questionable comedy, some of the funniest people came from that environment because if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere (if Frank Sinatra was British the song would be Bolton, Bolton instead of New York, New York). Working men's clubs were a bastion of the local community and a piece of important cultural history now lost in time. In order to hold your own against the tough crowds in the 70s/80s though you had to be on top of your game and of a certain temperament. Tony Pitts’ story is a fictional tale of a women with just that temperament. We follow Funny Cow from childhood to middle-age through flashback scenes. She first appears as she is being interviewed, probably some time in the mid 1990s. We see her using humour as a coping strategy as her father beats her and her alcoholic mother. Not everyone appreciates her sense of humour however and at it’s core the film explores her humour’s development as well as her life’s. It’s a fictional tale but it feels very real, like it is based on a real life comic we all know, it’s just that they’ve changed her name for the dramatization. Funny Cow rebels and finds her own way to disarm the abuse but she also can’t quite help herself from sabotaging her own life and relationships. As so many abused children do, she ends up marrying an abuser. She learns her craft from a washed out comic whose only advice is to give up before she’s even started. Being a woman in a man’s world she is faced with instant abuse but she learns how to deflect it, like she has been doing her whole life. The story delivers tragedy and comedy in equal measure and has an impressive authenticity about it. There is something quite gritty about it and it certainly the mainstream family-friendly Julie Walters film that many people might have though it was. Without wanting to take anything away from writer Tony Pitts or director Adrian Shergold, far from it, but it is somewhere between a Mike Leigh film and an Alan Bennett play. It boasts an array of brilliant actors including Paddy Considine, Stephen Graham, Alun Armstrong and Tony Pitts himself as well as comics John Bishop, Vic Reeves and Diane Morgan, and musicians Kevin Rowland and Corinne Bailey Rae. It also features my old mate Richard Hawley who also composed the film’s score and wrote the original music. However, the film is a success thanks to Maxine Peake’s performance as the title character. I wouldn’t say she carries the film on her shoulders but I don’t think the film would be half as good without her. I can’t think of anyone else who could have pulled it off as well as she did. The three eras featured looked as authentic as the real thing and I had to remind myself that this was a fictional story. The script is real and the sort of unfortunate humour that did exist back in the 70s/80s was rightly featured. I loved how Stephen Graham played her father as well as her grown up brother. I think what I liked best about the character of Funny Cow was that she never quite fit in. She soon became popular and successful but her humour was still odd and her personality more so. Tony Pitts could have only written half of her, the rest came from Maxine Peake. I thought the direction was rather beautiful too, at the beginning I thought that the story and character deserved a television series rather than a film but in retrospect I think the richness of the visuals look better in a feature length movie. I’ve heard people say that the character and story are far too British and from yesteryear that many young folk and those who are not from the UK would find it hard to follow but I couldn’t disagree more. This is a great example of working class life in the north of England and a reminder to our forging cousins that not everyone speaks the Queen’s English or sound like Dick Van Dyke in Marry Poppins. It’s a superb work of fiction that is so utterly authentic and convincing that it could be considered real. Indeed, I’m sure there are many Funny Cows out there that the world never discovered.