Let’s start with the hair. When Emo Philips burst onto the UK stand-up scene in the late 1980s, he sported a Prince Valiant mop that he fondled with a curious blend of awkwardness and self-love. Crowning his gawky frame, it was as much a part of his image as his whipcrack one-liners and his soaring, squeaking voice — one that seemed to leap octaves with a single bound, like a castrato who’d somehow hit adolescence.
He did so well in London that he stayed until his work permit ran out in the mid-1990s, then stumbled back to Hollywood, where he started working on movies, his physique and a whole new look, including a tack-sharp flat-top haircut. Somehow, none of it quite came off. Especially the hair. A brief visit to the Edinburgh Festival five years ago saw stunned crowds gawp at his neatly trimmed thatch. It was the main talking point of all the reviews. It, like his foray into film, went down badly. When the cabbie drops me off at his Beverly Hills home, then, it’s something of a relief to see the floppy mane is back. “I’m always debating what’s best for my face,” he grins. “You have to stay glamorous in this business.”
It seems a little strange, the idea of Emo in the glorious sunshine of LA. He grew up the son of a poor and eccentric Chicago postman with relatives in the police force — “It’s an interesting mentality, the Chicago cop mentality,” he explains. “It’s like being in the Chicago mob, except you can’t go to the police” — and he still gives off the air of an undernourished inner-city kid for whom the sun is slightly dazzling. “Don’t knock Beverly Hills,” he warns. “It’s not a great place if you’re a travelling stand-up, because there’s not much work to the west in Polynesia. But if it wasn’t for this house, I’d be in trouble. It does far better than I do. This is the breadwinner of the family. I feel I should wait for the house at the end of every day with a martini and go, ‘Thank you, how much have you earned for me today?’” Philips got burnt by Hollywood just when it looked as if he could join contemporaries like Steve Martin and become an LA player. He produced and starred in the original Meet the Parents, a small-budget indie flick that Universal snapped up to remake. “They made me associate producer, which was an honorary title, kind of like people name streets after Indians they’ve massacred,” he explains. “I did the deal myself, so I did very, very badly out of it. Basically, I didn’t make any money. Yet. We’ll see. There’s some accounting that has to be reconciled. I think if God went up to Universal and said ‘I’ll give you everything in the universe, including Meet the Parents, in exchange for Meet the Parents’, it would still not be in profit.”
This is why, at 50, he’s still playing 500 live shows a year around north America, and heading over to the Newbury comedy festival this summer. But he suspects he’d still be writing jokes even if he didn’t need the money. Writing jokes is what he does. He’s had three in the top 75 of all time, as voted by GQ, and one named the best joke of all time by the Episcopalian website Ship of Fools. Which is somewhat ironic, as he’s no intelligent-design freak. “I dropped out of science when I was a kid, so I only know two things about science. Water freezes at 23 Fahrenheit, and if you have two competing theories, you try not to choose the one that involves a magic spell.” In crafting his words, however, he’s a perfectionist. He has boxes and boxes of half-finished gags strewn around the house, and delights in telling how Woody Allen once worked on a single punch line for eight years.
“I just always wanted to be in show business,” he says simply. “I was embarrassingly naive and freaky, and I grew up with the whole Baptist thing. I didn’t have any social skills, and I was sickly — asthma and a lot of allergies. I never really played with the other children. I got beat up almost every single day. Comics like Richard Pryor, they grew up in tough areas, and they could get out of beatings by being funny. I had just enough of a sense of humour to make the bullies angry, but not enough to get out of the beatings.”
In his personal life, things are looking up. After a divorce a few years ago, he’s engaged. He beams: “I’ve been very lucky to luck into a woman who is just as easy-going as I am in terms of domesticity. My mother was very easy-going in terms of housekeeping. On the floor of the car, she had mushrooms growing. People would throw out turf, and she’d keep it. She’d take it out of the car, but never vacuum, so it would start raining and, well, you’d get mushrooms growing there. For years.”
All of which gives him time to indulge his other passion: the history of comedy. There’s a silent-movie theatre in Hollywood where he can while away hours watching Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He even knows all of Samuel Beckett’s attempts to get Keaton into his plays. In fact, during his live show at Newbury, he plans to show an eight-minute silent short he made himself, and play live clarinet to accompany it.
“The clarinet is a hobby of mine,” he explains as he drives me to the airport. “But I guess we’ll have to leave it at a hobby.” I look up quizzically. “What’s the difference between a jazz guitarist and a pepperoni pizza?” he shoots back. I shrug. “A pizza can feed a family of four. What’s the definition of optimism? A jazz clarinettist with a pager.” And as he drives off from the terminal, I swear I can still hear him telling gags — declaiming them to the freeway like an opera singer running through his scales.
Emo says: “Yesterday I ran three miles. Finally, I had to stop and say, ‘Lady, keep your damn purse.’”
“I love to go to the park and watch the children jump and dance. They don’t know I’m using blanks.”
“I discovered my wife in bed with another man, and I was crushed. So I said, ‘Get off me, you two.’”
Emo Philips, Newbury comedy festival, July 13-15; www.emophilips.com
