When Ronnie Barker took his famously premature retirement, it was not the first time he had retreated into silence. In 1982 he co-wrote and starred in By The Sea, a jolly seaside romp in which he dispensed with the very thing that until then had served him so well: words. Before and since, silent comedy has been a creative side alley into which British performers have occasionally detoured. Eric Sykes wrote and acted in The Plank in 1967 (and remade it in 1979). Rowan Atkinson turned Mr Bean into a $237 million-grossing hit film.
Now it’s the turn of David Schneider, who has written and stars in Uncle Max, a 13-part series of dialogue-free shorts for children’s television about a man who gets into a traditional array of amusing scrapes on the golf course, in a pizza parlour, a shoe shop and more.
Like Atkinson, Schneider’s rubbery features are a gift for visual comedy. His stand-up routine was predominantly physical, and he was always the most antic of the exceptionally clever performers assembled by Armando Iannucci in The Day Today. “I’ve always been very good at physical humour,” he says. “I was out to prove that I could do more than just that. But then I thought before I’m too old I’ve got to do my human cartoon.”
Children’s television seems an odd place to end up for a man who has a degree in modern languages from Oxford, and who stayed on to write a doctoral thesis on Yiddish drama. Ten years ago the intellectual side of Schneider’s split personality yielded The Eleventh Commandment, a play for Hampstead Theatre about a Jew marrying a Gentile. His second, in the pipeline, is “about the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, whose members were killed in the pogrom by Stalin” . During the seven-week shoot last summer for Uncle Max he felt suitably conflicted. “There were moments when I thought this is fantastic and moments where I’d think, bloody hell, I did eight years at Oxford and now I’m diving into a mud pool or wearing a cow costume.”
And yet Schneider turned to silent comedy like a man coming out of the closet. In I’m Alan Partridge he played the BBC controller who told Partridge he would not be getting another series. Schneider’s own series never seemed to materialise. He was at Iannucci’s elbow in the various incarnations of Armistice. He did gurning cameos in The Saint, Mission: Impossible, and A Knight’s Tale.
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“I’ve always been the wingman,” he says. “I’ve always been part of a team or helping the main guy. My new year’s resolution this time last year was to do what I want to do.”
On set Schneider knew exactly what he wanted. “You have got to be absolutely uncompromising. You can still be nice but you’ve got to say, ‘I know what’s funny here and I think it should be done like this.’ ” There are occasional references to silent classics such as Laurel and Hardy, but Schneider is “not an obsessive. I’m not ‘Do you prefer Keaton or Chaplin?’ I was never into Jacques Tati.” In his own head he is paying tribute to the animations he grew up watching: Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo and The Wacky Races. “In the marathon episode I get very slow and knackered and I’m passed by a granny and a toddler and then by a tortoise. I feel that’s very cartoony. Or saving a child from a bull by dressing as a matador. I feel I’m being Bugs Bunny at that moment.”
Schneider hopes Uncle Max will follow all of the above into the international bloodstream. “Not just for my pension. In comedy you get quite geeky and you want to know whether there is such a thing as humour that will work anywhere. Is it just Benny Hill? Isn’t the line that we’re meant to take that he was actually a genius? I never liked him. It’s too coarse for me. It wasn’t clever enough. I like to think that some of my gags are clever.”
Uncle Max may be slapstick, but, uniquely, it is slapstick with a PhD.