Friday, April 25, 2008

Heroes Of Comedy No2 - Chic Murray

A clip of Chic Murray, rarer than hens teeth these are............This is from a Variety performance in Aberdeen, sometime in the eighties. A great wee biog of the man can be found here and his best one liners are here

They didn't come more 'off the wall' than Chic. Little language tricks, feints of logic and, in character at least, the demeanour of a man soberly facing down the absurdity of his situations like they were just minor inconveniences.

There are bits of this performance that don't seem to quite come off. As he nears the end of his allotted time, he sacrifices a couple of gags, almost relegating them to the narrative, simply so he can get to the punchline before he 'runs over'. As stated in the short piece about him linked above, Chic was at his best when he had no constraints. Had he lived just a bit longer, I think he would have benefited from a few 'specials', shows in which he could stretch his legs and move through his material at will.

Comedian Doug Healy does a pretty good run through of Chic Murray material in this clip. If you can suspend disbelief for a minute or two, it's actually not too far off target.

6 comments:

Rob said...

Thanks, I hadn't heard of Chic Murray before. It's a shame there aren't more clips of him about.

Anonymous said...

Lovely biscuits! IIRC he used to own a hotel on the Bruntsfield Links in Edinburgh at one point.

I gave a presentation at a conference once and a chap came up to me and said "You remind me of Chic Murray." "Thank God", I said, "I thought for a moment you were going to accuse me of being a bloody Renaissance Man."

Anonymous said...

Thanks for putting that up. It reminded me of just how unique he really was.

douglas

Gadjo Dilo said...

I hadn't heard of him before either, but he's terrific, thanks for that!

Gadjo Dilo said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
iLL Man said...

Hello! Sorry I haven't replied. been a bit busy, what with falling asleep a lot and trying to maintain my speedway blog. You won't see me for whole weeks now that the season has started.

Rob - I think his lack of exposure has built his mythological status. A little bit of even the best goes a long way, but with Chick, it seems like us 'young uns' have been sold a little short.

dearieme - Maybe he was referring to the dickie bow and the flat cap.......... ;)

Douglas - No problems, the pleasure was all mine.

Gadjo Dilo - He was also responsible for a whole load of one liners that have travelled the world. The sort of gags that you heard ages ago, but had no idea they were attributable to Mr Murray.