An Introduction To: Reeves and Mortimer

By Aila Slisco

The best kind of laugh is the kind which seemingly comes from nowhere. It’s the product of an inexplicable kind of humor, which no amount of analyzing can explain adequately, and something, which from a comedy performer’s point of view, is just as likely to confuse an audience as it is to make them break down with laughter. Preferably it will do both. This is exactly the kind of comedy the UK comedy duo Reeves and Mortimer have made their specialty.

British comedy is undisputedly well-loved throughout the world, but there remain several acts which, while household names in the UK, are virtually unknown elsewhere. This could be due to any number of factors, but the UK’s appreciation of the eccentric, as well as the large variety of comedy originating in Britain, leaves plenty of room for acts which cater to a myriad of different tastes, some of which don’t translate to aesthetics of other cultures in a mainstream sense.

Vic Reeves Big Night Out

It would certainly be difficult to argue that any other country in the world has produced a comedy landscape as rich and varied as the United Kingdom. On the other side of the Atlantic, many people are aware of the most popular elements—the groundbreaking silliness of Monty Python, the comedy acting genius of Peter Sellers, and the crude, borderline-misogynistic slapstick of Benny Hill, to name a few of the most obvious “old guard” representatives. Reeves and Mortimer represent something entirely distinct from these acts, while drawing influence from a fairly broad cross-section of comedy’s past.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, Jim Moir (the man later to be known as Vic Reeves) began unleashing his bizarre form of comedy onto the unsuspecting public of London. His Big Night Out live show was certainly unlike anything else in that city’s live comedy scene at the time. A type of mock “variety show,” Moir would appear in character as one of several different personas and proceed to deliver up to three hours of madness centering on bizarre monologues, musical interludes of questionable quality and meaning, sight-gags, and absurd observations.

Much of the show was ad-libbed, augmented by audience participation, and seemingly without direction. This was presented to an audience who largely would have been expecting politically-based stand-up comedy, as the UK’s “alternative comedy” scene was still thriving at this time. Moir’s show, while sometimes cited as an example of it, represented something of a backlash to this form of humor (which itself was a response to much of the stale, mainstream comedy popular in 1970s Britain).

Vic Reeves, a somewhat oblivious, ego-inflated character billed as “Britain’s Top Light Entertainer,” was the persona that ended up most successful, eventually becoming the regular “host” of the show and Jim Moir’s stage name for the rest of his career. The live show built momentum over several years, and by the late ’80s it had attracted a large cult following which included some fairly influential media figures.

One night in the middle of all this, Bob Mortimer, a young lawyer with no background in comedy, ended up accompanying a friend to the show. Mortimer, who coincidentally came from an area of northern England very close to Moir’s home town, took an immediate liking to the style of comedy and kept coming back, regularly joining in as an audience member. Before too long, he and Moir struck up a friendship, and Mortimer became a regular contributor to the show.

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