He's a true Jack of all trades

10 April 2012

I have been compiling a list of the things that Jack Dee doesn't do jokes about. It consists, almost entirely, of the big stuff. Love. Sex. Death. Politics. Religion. Especially religion. This despite the fact that his hero is Dave Allen, who never joked about anything but God.

Dee's line is that all comedians are losers. 'Comedians are losers,' he says, 'and that's the stuff of their raw material, those sour experiences of life.' They fashion humour out of personal defeat. For most stand-ups, this is a question of not being able to hold down a relationship, of being overweight or underweight, or in some way inadequate or abnormal.

The thing about Dee and many stand-ups of his generation, who all became extremely rich and successful in the comedy-is-the-new-rock'n'roll revolution of the Nineties, is that none of them turned out to be losers. Nowadays, people like Alan Davies and Frank Skinner are winners who impersonate losers.

Nobody has to work harder at this impersonation than Dee. He's such a winner that he can talk quite openly about his relationship with God and you don't find yourself taking a wary step backwards. Yes indeed, Dee's a believer, always has been.

'I would describe myself as a non-literalistic, non-evangelical, non-exclusivistic, certainly non-fundamentalist Christian,' he says. 'Although my faith isn't based around organised worship, I do like to go to church, I like to take communion and I like to pray in churches. For me, faith is about pursuing a relationship with God. I find most Christians quite repellent. They are the last people I really want to hang around with. It might be the lack of sense of humour. It's much more to do with the smugness that can come with any religion. Faith is all about doubt. You can't have it without doubt. Without doubt it's not faith any more. Then it's lunacy.'

So there's no religion in his routine. Dee only does jokes about things that make him unhappy, and these are confined to the grating little impedimenta of life, the things that shouldn't put you in a bad mood but do, like pyramid-shaped teabags or computers that are too big for their boots. The new show, which comes to the Apollo Hammersmith next month, has a section about the cynicism of whoever it was who named the Hush Puppy.

Young James Dee was a loser once: he had a bad time at school in Winchester, and did only the four compulsory O levels. 'By the time I was 15, I already did not see the point of knowing how a frog could breathe,' he says. 'I didn't give a s***. You can put it down to anything as unflattering as arrogance or something as simple as a basic inability to be taught anything. I had to find out everything for myself.' He missed out on university and ended up waiting tables while hanging out with Cambridge grads in top jobs. He drank heavily and went to AA, although plainly a genuine alcoholic would not have subsequently taken the John Smith shilling.

When, encouraged by others, he first did a wee-small-hours set at the Comedy Store in 1987, it was 'about filling a gap that I always felt was there. It made me feel I have a point of being, which I didn't have before. I've described it as realising I'm a comedian, that's what's wrong with me. Now I have a name for it I can continue.' It was his own comic relief.

And how he has continued. The more sour and dyspeptic he makes himself sound, the more likable he becomes. The Celebrity Big Brother effect turned him from likable to lovable. When Dee went into the Big Brother house a year ago, he was popular. When he came out of it, he was something greater than that. He was lauded as the embodiment of grounded self-respect and sheer normality in a confused world mad for, and maddened by, celebrity.

In voting for Dee, the nation was voting for the better part of itself. Viewers looked at his housemates, most of them monsters created by our need to venerate and then obliterate celebrities, and gave thanks to Dee that he alone appeared not to crave public approbation. So that's why he is liked. He is one of us. Only funnier at being one of us than we are.

Unlike most other squillionaire comedians you can think of, enriched by the products they endorse in the commercial breaks between their own programmes, Dee has pulled off the whole conformity thing with convincing plausibility. He's got the happy marriage to Jane, whom he met when they were both waiters and who has travelled with him on what he calls 'a long learning curve for both of us'. Their joy at seeing each other after he emerged from the Big Brother house was thoroughly affecting.

They've got the four children, the dog, the house in Wandsworth, the bolt hole by the sea in West Sussex. The only apparent cloud on the Dee horizon is the difficulty of going to their favourite local restaurants. 'The fourth time you go there you wonder why you are not enjoying it as much as the last time and you realise it's because everyone is looking at you. People even let their children turn round and stare at you for the whole meal.' He mimes a child twisting round to lean against the back of a chair and gawp moronically.

The other thing that has perhaps disturbed his equilibrium is the arrival, nearly four years ago, of twins. However thrilling this double bounty might be at some inner core of his being, it doesn't stop him looking superbly knackered as he presents himself in the usual immaculate suit at the Groucho. The twins - two boys - couldn't help muscling their way into the routine of his current national tour. He gets a good ten minutes of quality gags out of them, so I ask him if he rubbed his hands with glee when he first got the news from the scan.

'It doesn't yield very much, actually,' he insists. 'I'm wary of falling into the trap of trying to share everything that my children think and do and say with an audience in the belief that it's going to be hysterically funny or endearing. I do find people who go on about their kids...' he searches for a sufficiently disparaging mot juste '...quite selfish really. They tend to talk about their kids as if their kids are the only kids in the universe. I find that a little bit tiresome. A lot of parents have become intensely competitive and I think there is a real danger. They say, "I love my kids, do anything for my kids, they always come first." I think, why do you have to tell me this? I'm suspicious all of a sudden. I've never felt the need to tell anyone I love my kids.'

Dee's routine says the opposite, in fact. 'Listen, I'm a parent, I f*** up, and I'm sure my children will waste no time in pointing my mistakes out to me when they are old enough to put such thoughts together. I don't even know if I'm a good parent. I think it is OK to say they p*** you off. I think that's honest and that's what I'm in the business of. I will say things and people are perhaps quite taken aback by that. But I think it's better than smacking them.'

For the record, Dee has smacked the boys 'two or three times' but never his older daughters. 'I think it doesn't work. I don't think it's effective. And it sets an example to the child that you don't really want them to follow, so why do it? I know that when it's happened it's been out of rage and of absolute despair at not knowing what to do. And just by definition that's not a good enough reason to smack them. And I also think, why is it that it seems to be OK to smack kids when it's not OK to smack geriatrics, who are just as bad a nuisance really and should know better?'

Needless to say, Dee's children will never be seen in the pages of Hello! or wearing silly suits at premieres. After Big Brother, there were photoshoot offers involving 'a massive amount of money'.

'I don't want to do that kind of thing anyway. Especially then I was keen not to milk the situation. The fame thing is a by-product of what I do. It didn't occur to me for a second that it would ever become an issue in my life. I think some people are absolutely made for fame and telly and all those things. I can see that people like Graham Norton and Dale Winton, and I'll try and think of a heterosexual as well for you...'

Jonathan Ross? 'Jonathan. A great example of someone who pulls it off with great aplomb and seems to enjoy that kind of thing. I'm a bit quieter about things than that.' (There's also the practical reason. Dee spends his money on acoustic guitars and doing up the home 'but in fact you'd look round it and think, what a dump. You would.')

So, come on, Jack, if you're so squeamish about letting the public in, why did you do Celebrity Big Brother, an event which required you to be live on television for an entire week? 'The discomfort is not with the public,' he says, 'it's the relationship with celebrityhood and the expectation therein.' This doesn't quite answer the question. If he'd known what he knows now, would he still have done the show? 'It's impossible to answer. Nothing really bad has happened. I suppose my profile is raised.

'That happens in my business anyway. Claire [Sweeney] said, "We've both done well out of it." I said, "In the end it was another gig that went well." It could have gone very badly. It may have seemed a huge deal to everyone, but certainly to me it wasn't such a huge deal to go and do it. It turned out that it was a big deal.'

Anthea Turner, whom he likes and has spoken to since, told me in these pages that they all knew Jack was going to win. Did Jack know? 'I didn't, actually. I really thought Keith [Duffy] would be the winner because of the kids. I thought, the Boyzone fan club is going to completely jam the system from day one. But by the last day I thought it would be quite irritating not to win, having been stuck there all day and done my best to get voted out, it would be quite annoying not to win. That would be just typical.'

Jack Dee appears at the Hammersmith Apollo from 9 to 12 March. Box office: 0870 606 3400

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