Sean Hughes, who has died aged 51, was one of the most important figures in the evolution of modern long-form standup comedy. Until his 1990 Edinburgh festival fringe show, A One Night Stand With Sean Hughes, won the Perrier award for best show, most alternative comedy shows at the fringe were little more than extended comedy club sets, gags shamelessly stitched together. Hughes did something different, weaving a narrative into his performance, which was set in an imaginary bedsit.
Today we think nothing of comedy shows having an emotional arc regarding some personal grief or loss. There is even a joke about it. Comics talk about doing a “dead dad” show. We might not have had these shows without Hughes. His former promoter Richard Bucknall has rightly called him “a pioneering, groundbreaking comedian who changed comedy with that live show”.
While the comic with the impish face and indie kid fringe was usually thought of as Irish, he was born John Hughes in London. His Catholic family moved to Dublin when he was six and Hughes used to talk about how sounding like a cockney in an Irish school was not easy. He later quipped that he spent “most of my childhood in a headlock”. Not surprisingly his Mary Poppins accent soon developed a lilting local burr.
Making schoolfriends laugh was a classic defence mechanism and he even set up comedy gigs at his school. What started out as a hobby quickly became a career. After cutting his teeth on the small Irish circuit he came to London in the late 1980s where the alternative comedy scene was really taking off with standups such as Jo Brand, Jack Dee and Julian Clary making a name for themselves.
Hughes immediately stood out. There was a literary bent to his playful style and his routines were peppered with references to pop music. He was a huge Smiths fan and imagined Morrissey phoning him up for a chat. He made comedy cool long before it was described as the new rock’n’roll. When he won the Perrier award at 24 he was the youngest winner of the prize.
Further critical and popular success came with Sean’s Show on Channel 4 in 1992. This was a sitcom that broke down boundaries, as Hughes addressed the audience and commented on the action. It was not the first comedy to do this – Garry Shandling did a similar thing in the US with It’s Garry Shandling’s Show – but Hughes added a surreal sensibility to the format: musicians turned out to be living under his bed and his bath was filled with jelly by Windsor Davies from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.
Success did not always sit comfortably with his temperament. Although he went through a decidedly hedonistic period in his youth he could also be something of a solitary figure. He lived alone in a large house in Crouch End, north London, and while he had a number of girlfriends he did not seem to be interested in or able to form long-term relationships. “I like to be on my own. I can deal with that,” he told the Guardian in 2012.
He will probably be known to most people for making playful digs about pop stars as one of the team captains on the BBC2 music quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Hughes appeared on the show from 1996 to 2002 and enjoyed messing about with the likes of Boy George and Mel B, who chided him for not being sassy enough.
There was a serious side, too. His numerous books included stark poetry and gloomy novels. His publishers, of course, wanted funny books, because they thought they were the ones that would sell. There was always a tension in Hughes. He could make people laugh easily, but wanted to achieve much more. Vivienne Clore, who was his agent for a while, describes him as a “poetic, lonely soul”.
In recent years he had developed a new string to his bow as an actor. He appeared in high-profile television programmes including The Last Detective (2003-07) and Coronation Street (2007) and joined a long list of standups who have done Shakespeare, appearing as Touchstone in As You Like It at Wyndhams theatre in 2005. He also played Mr Perks in The Railway Children at King’s Cross theatre in 2015. More in keeping with his absurdist streak, he was the lead in a film adaptation of Spike Milligan’s Puckoon in 2002.
In middle age he caught the standup bug again and performed a series of shows in which his sense of humour was as playful as ever – he was just older and portlier. The jokes were often about his body falling apart – Hughes recalled a recent prostate test: “You’ve never lived until a man has put his finger up your arse.” Reports suggest that he had been ill over this summer with liver problems.
In his acclaimed 2012 show Life Becomes Noises, he finally did his own “dead dad” show and shed some light on his upbringing. His father, a driving instructor, had a fondness for betting on horses, so Hughes junior wore a jokey jockey outfit in the show. Both father and son liked to drink (though Sean gave up around this time), but were never close. “We used to high-five each other in the middle ground of self-hatred,” Hughes told the Guardian.
A new generation of comedians seemed to be discovering Hughes, who was happy to return to basics and play the London circuit again to roadtest new material. The rising star Carl Donnelly was a big fan and says that Hughes helped him to develop as a comedian. And anyone who has ever staged an acclaimed Edinburgh show with a narrative element should probably dedicate any award they pick up to Hughes.
He is survived by his brothers, Alan and Martin.
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