Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 124

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Popular Culture Review
ing around on a speeding motorbike. “A lot of it’s me being
dragged along behind a truck,” he says, adding: “We did it at the
end in case I hurt myself. There’s a stunt man doing some bits,
but he’s not as daring as me.”
Slapstick comedy double acts have been thin on the ground
since Laurel and Hardy - of whom Edmondson’s a fan, much
more than comic clowns like Charlie Chaplin (who he finds “too
sentimental”). “I think Buster Keaton was very funny, but he
never had anyone else to make it believable,” he observes. “If
you’ve got two people being like that, it’s somehow easier to
suspend your disbelief.” Which is presumably why, despite their
solo careers, Rik and Ade keep coming back for more stupidity
together.. .It’s a double act which has, according to Edmondson,
“taken hitting each other to an art. At the forefront of hitting
each other amusingly, we hope.” (Adrian Edmondson Web Site)

This is familiar terrain for both Mayall and Edmondson, as well as their ad
mirers. As Edmondson admitted to a bookseller in New Zealand during a theatri
cal tour, “the thing with the characters me and Rik play is, and you might have
noticed this, they’re all the f**king same - just a different setting” (Adrian
Edmondson Web Site). Mayall agreed, telling British television personality Jonathan
Ross in June of 1999 that “We’ve always been with those two characters, and
they’re always called Richie and Eddie...So it’s G u est H ouse Paradiso, not the
B ottom movie, no, but I’m Richie Twat in this, as I’ve been Richard Ritchie be
fore, and Eddie has been Eddie Hitler before [Eddie’s original last name in the
B ottom television series]” (Rik Mayall Web Site).
While Edmondson is clearly the more dominant member of the team
(Edmondson dreams up most of the gags, much like Stan Laurel’s creative leader
ship in the L a u rel a nd H ardy series), Mayall serves as the perfect foil for all this
carefully staged mayhem with a fine sense of direct, no-nonsense craftsmanship.
In G u est H ouse Paradiso, for example, Mayall notes that “I love the fight in the
kitchen. When I hit Ade [Edmondson] with the Jug, he took the punch so well. The
editor cut it perfectly. There’s something about this pace and timing...! do think
the nearer you are to frightening your audience - the rush of energy you get from
witnessing violence, especially if it is more filmic than theatrical - the more unset
tling it is. The release comes out in laughter” {London Telegraph interview, No
vember 21,1999, as cited in the Rik Mayall Web Site). And of Edmondson’s con
trol of the set at Ealing Studios, where the film was shot, Mayall commented “his
[Edmondson’s] organizational skills were very impressive, he’s a very canny man.
We had to work fast and he held it all together. He could have been a Nazi general.