A hugely popular and uniquely versatile figure, comedian
Andre Vincent mines his own battle with the disease for
comedy routines, writes Si Hawkins
Andre Vincent had never really planned to get confessional on stage. The London-born comedian learned his trade on America’s punchline-focused live circuit, and even opened a show for the king of one-liners, Bob Hope. But Vincent was already toying with a more reflective style of story-telling when, in 2002, an unwanted source of new material presented itself: serious illness.
“I went into hospital April 27 and came out something like May 1 — it was a long weekend of cancer,” recalls the comic. “I had this massive scar, I’d filmed the operation, and at the end of that I thought ‘yeah, I want to do this, let’s do a show about it.’”
A decade on and still going strong, Vincent is very much looking forward to a working vacation in Doha this week, one of the well-travelled performer’s favourite destinations. Back home in Britain his talents remain largely unsung by the general public, in truth, but certainly not by the industry.
A hugely popular and uniquely versatile figure, his influence has touched many of today’s biggest comics, Eddie Izzard going on to the greatest global success.
Having lived through genuine traumas, Vincent remains suitably philosophical about the vagaries of fame; indeed, it transpires that shortly before we spoke he was dropped from a high-profile TV show featuring under-the-radar comics, for not being ‘alternative’ enough. But then just being funny has always been the major goal: entertaining is in his blood.
“My grandmother was an opera singer and her father was an acrobat, so there was always performance in the family,” he explains. “I thought ‘yeah, that’s it, I’ll be an actor.’ I could also sing and the family were sort of pushing me to be an opera singer, that’s what they dreamt about. But by then I’d heard laughter and I knew that’s where I was more interested.”
And so, like Homer Simpson in one of that sitcom’s finer episodes, he left home and headed for clown college. The budding comic actor learned some basic circus skills (“juggling, riding a unicycle”) while preparing for the Shakespeare farce A Comedy of Errors, then decamped to the famous Fratellini school in Paris to further hone his craft.
Street performance followed in some exotic locations, from Vietnamese refugee camps to Vancouver’s World Fair, before a brush with broadcasting presented itself at a Floridian theme park. “I was writing and directing a lot of the MGM Studio stuff,” he says. “And I hated it. It was so regimented.”
So Disney sent him on a trip that would change his comic destiny: a tour around the southern states with a team of grizzled stand-ups, who insisted he drop the props and costumes. The stand-up novice still possessed a secret weapon, though: his British accent, which rendered even the most innocuous comment comical to the locals.
That reputation spread and in 1992 he was invited to open for Bob Hope at a major festival, although a pre-show meeting with the great man removed much of the gloss. “It was the strangest thing,” he recalls, slightly sadly. “This old, old man. His memory was just not there at all.”
Firmly established in the States, Vincent would still make regular return trips to Europe, performing as both a stand-up and clown. The latter work came to a dramatic end at Amsterdam’s grand Theatre Paradiso, however, when he attempted to run up a wall and flip over backwards. “They changed the height of the stage without telling me, so when I went to do the move I ripped all the tendons under my patella, my patella shut up and shattered against the stage.”
The once acrobatic comic was bedbound for six months, and an insurance mix-up left his finances severely depleted too. Thankfully Vincent had already made firm friends on the UK stand-up scene and they rallied round, offering a room, food parcels, even staging benefit shows. He joined them on the circuit full-time when fully recovered, but worse health issues lay ahead.
Still performing regularly, the in-demand comic had resolved not to reveal his liver cancer publicly, a stance that shifted suddenly during an altercation with an audience member shortly after the diagnosis. “I went ‘don’t heckle me, I’ve just found out I’ve got cancer,’ and it got a big laugh,” he recalls. “There was something about it, that ‘Ooh!’ in the room. I got a buzz out of it.”
Vincent helped change British stand-up with his subsequent show, at the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe: Andre Vincent is Unwell. A courageous hour that poked fun at his ongoing illness and even wove in that surgery footage along the way, it pioneered a more confessional, multi-media strand of live comedy that remains popular today. The critically-acclaimed show also spawned a BBC TV special that went on to win an independent film award in the US.
Since then Vincent has continued to combine comedy and current affairs, working on several successful TV shows and a long-running festival event, The Early Edition. And yet the yearning for clowning clearly remains strong, and in 2009 his career came full circle as he turned to another venerable art-form: pantomime.
Anything but edgy, this child-friendly theatre is also far from easy: his recent stint playing a ‘loveable buffoon’ in Aladdin sometimes involved three shows a day. “It was perishing cold in Norwich,” laughs the comic, eager to swap England’s windswept east coast for a more agreeable Arabic adventure.
“In Qatar there’s two shows, we’re playing in the actual hotel and the food is just amazing. It’s perfect.”
Accept no alternative.