What do you get if you take the Beano and the Dandy and parody their style, swapping family-friendly hilarity for bad language, toilet humour and surreal absurdity?
“I think Viz is just about the same level of funniness that it’s always been,” Simon reckons. “It’s just that it’s not new to people any more.”
Chris Donald resigned as editor of Viz in 1999 and Simon left in 2003. “I think my brother had just had enough of it,” Simon says. “He works in a bookshop these days and seems to be happy.
“I was ready to move on to other things as well. I still derived a certain amount of pleasure from the writing, but the rest of it sitting doing the lettering and so on had become quite old. It had turned into an office job, which was the very thing I’d wanted to avoid.”
Since then, Simon has forged a new career as a stand-up comedian.
“I’ve always loved doing impersonations and characters,” he says. “I’ve been doing them since I was 12, when I used to tape them onto a cassette recorder. I grew up listening to the Goons and watching Monty Python.”
Currently touring the UK, Simon lives in London and has a Scottish girlfriend. His first stand up performance was in 2005. “Surprisingly, I wasn’t that nervous when it came to performing in front of an audience,” he says. “I love doing stand up. You don’t need to write anything down, and you find out if your jokes are funny straight away rather than having to wait a month for the readers’ letters to come in.”
He took some time away from stand-up to dabble in the music industry, managing a band called Hungover Stuntmen, and then looked after his eldest brother Steve, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the summer of 2008 and passed away the following November.Winker Watson parodyIn 1995, Viz ran a cartoon parodying one of The Dandy’s longest-running comic characters, Winker Watson, changing the first name by one letter to create their own extremely rude version.
When D. C. Thomson & Co threatened litigation, Viz removed the strip and replaced it with a new character called D. C. Thompson, the Humourless Scottish Git, featuring an irascible old man in a kilt complaining about breach of copyright when a mother admonishes her son Dennis for being a menace.
In a rare case of Viz being out-Vizzed, however, The Dandy struck back, resurrecting its “The Jocks and the Geordies” strip, in which the Geordies (clearly representing Viz writers) and the Jocks competed to create the best cartoon characters.
The Geordies’ miserable efforts bore close resemblance to actual Viz characters, such as ‘The Boy with Big Pants’ a reference to Felix and his Amazing Underpants. The Geordies ended up suffering the full range of Dandy indignities – jabbed up the behind with pencils, falling down manholes and being biffed on the chin by the triumphant Scots.
The comic quarrel was resolved amicably, however. “I think there was a lot of mutual respect and admiration on both sides,” says Simon. “It was all sorted out on the pages of our comics rather than in court.”
You get Viz, a comic for adults inspired by the famous, family-oriented comics produced by The Courier’s parent company D. C. Thomson & Co.
Most people under the age of 40 will remember Viz characters like Roger Mellie, the Man on Telly, Johnny Fartpants, Sid the Sexist and Sweary Mary.
Their Top Tips section has featured such gems of useless advice as: Why waste money on expensive binoculars? Simply stand closer to the object you wish to observe; Town Councils reduce litter problems by issuing blind folk with pointy sticks. Employers avoid hiring unlucky people by immediately tossing half the CVs into the bin; Drinkers worried your teeth will be stained after a heavy night drinking red wine? Drink a bottle of white wine before going to bed to remove the stains; and save a fortune on laundry bills give your dirty shirts to Oxfam. They will wash and iron them, then you can buy them back for 50p.
This latter example was allegedly plagiarised virtually word-for-word by McDonalds for an advertising campaign. Some readers believed the comic had given permission to the fast food chain, leading to the following submission:
“Geordie magazine editors. Continue paying your mortgage and buying expensive train sets by simply licensing the Top Tips concept to a multinational burger corporation.”
Controversially, Harold Shipman and Fred West got their own strip as rival neighbours trying (and failing) to kill the woman next door. In a reference to glossy magazines like OK and Hello, who pay ridiculous sums for the rights to celebrity weddings, comedian Johnny Vegas sold the rights to his wedding photographs to Viz for £1.Simon Donald is at Highlight Glasgow Comedy Club on Renfrew Street tonight at 8pm and at The Hive on Niddry Street at 8pm on Tuesday. For more information and tickets visit www.simondonald.comThe comic was created by Newcastle brothers Chris and Simon Donald in 1979.
“From a very early age my brother was very preoccupied with making magazines,” Simon (47) explains. “His first attempt was a trainspotting fanzine for the children in our street who were into trainspotting, which was about six kids.
“He’d met a kid at school called Jim Brownlow who was a talented cartoonist. They started to produce little photocopied sheets of cartoons to entertain people in the pub. Then they decided to put together a comic and asked me to be involved. I’d always wanted to be a comic artist. They were four years older than me and I was slightly in awe of them so I was incredibly flattered to be asked.”Viz was born”The first pub Viz was sold in was the Gosforth Hotel, where Sting also played his first gigs,” Simon continues. “It had a Viz plaque on the wall until a couple of years ago, when the outgoing landlord nicked it.”
The best the brothers can remember about the origin of the comic’s name is it was chosen for being easy to write and remember, consisting of only three letters that can all be made with straight lines.
The popularity of Viz soared during its first decade and by the late 1980s sales had smashed the one million mark. “There was a time when the three top-selling magazines in Britain were the Radio Times, the TV Times and Viz,” says Simon. “We were outselling Hello and Cosmo.”
Despite being so successful, Viz was not exactly produced from state-of-the-art premises.
“We put Viz together in a bedroom at our parents’ house,” Simon says. “We didn’t move out and get our own office until May 1988′.”
What did their parents think of the brothers’ creation? “They didn’t know about it for a long time. It is quite rude and we weren’t sure they’d approve so we didn’t make a big deal out of it. But when the BBC arrived at their house in 1981 to make a documentary about us, the cat was out the bag.
“Our parents didn’t read the magazine too often but they were proud of our success, especially because we’d managed to do it on our own.”
Viz often prints letters accusing it of not being as funny as it used to be, or complaining about cover price rises. These are published and often framed in a section called “Why I Love My Viz,” in mockery of The Sun’s similarly-titled feature.
Continues…