Can the Gentlemen of Leisure inject some humour into the British Museum? Emma McAlpine takes a tour with the pillars of the Parthenon of culture.
The Gentlemen of Leisure have made a name for themselves in creating shows that parody the highbrow, but in their ‘cultural gallery tour’, taking visitors on a comedy tour of the British Museum, they have taken on their most ambitious project yet. There are plenty of potential pitfalls to the experiment: will people feel they can laugh in a gargantuan space for contemplation and learning? Just how funny can material on the Rosetta Stone be? What if people get lost? What if people join in who have no idea what’s going on? Happily for the comedy duo, Londoners love trying out new concepts, and with the 20 or so places on the tour selling out after 20 minutes of going on sale, attendance, at least, isn’t going to be an issue.
Meeting in the British Museum’s lobby, we are all given tour labels to wear (so far so normal) and introduced to our guides Nish Kumar and Tom Neenan: “two men who always go back for seconds at the cultural buffet.” The pair give something akin to a compere’s warm-up, by getting us involved in some funny multiple choice questions and instructing us to wave our hands and shout “museum!” if we get lost. The tour is only half an hour and restricted to a few rooms, so the likelihood of someone actually getting lost is small but the shouting and hand-waving certainly adds to the fun and earns our group some bemused looks from other visitors.
A mixture of fact and ridiculous fiction, the tour encompasses some of the important artefacts ‘acquired’ by the British Empire in the last two and a half centuries including the Rosetta Stone, the winged bulls of the Palace of Sargon and a Roman statue of Aphrodite. Along the way, The GOL read out some spurious ‘translations’ they’ve found; introduce us to an ancient game carved on a plinth (“the angry birds of its day”); and (my favourite) present a silly re-enactment of British traveller Charles Fellowes discovering the Nereid Monument, complete with dubious accents and grandiose acting.
The duo’s presentation style is amusingly hammy, with the kind of groan-worthy jokes and character play you might experience on a ‘quirky’ Dickens tour of London. At times, our guides abandon their learned guises altogether, melodramatically pointing out “a massive horse” or a water dehumidifier before moving swiftly on.
The tour works well for the very reason that it’s in a museum. Humour often comes in places it’s not supposed to, whether during a funeral or a business meeting. There’s something about being in a serious environment that makes you want to laugh, it’s a tension release. And let’s be honest, who hasn’t wanted to giggle at a naked statue or a painting of an ugly woman instead of gravely reading the boring blurb beneath it?
By the end of the session, we’ve picked up quite a few stragglers, intrigued and delighted by the shambolic pair. One guy beckons his friend over whispering: “Come and check this out, these guys are mental!” In fact, my only complaint is that it feels a little short, but as promoter Neil Wates explains to me afterwards, the tours are more of an experiment at this stage. With enough support, who knows what the British Museum might let them do. A treasure hunt in the Chinese Ceramic wing perhaps? Or cultural comedy tours for kids? Now those are the kind of school trips I would remember.
www.the-gentlemen-of-leisure.com
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