'A singular, unflinching look at a life deemed redundant by the transactional machinery of capitalism'

Toussaint Douglass picks his comedy favourites

Toussaint Douglass – who’s performing his debut show Accessible Pigeon Material at the Edinburgh Fringe – picks a wildly diverse list of his favourite ever comedies:

Mr Bean: Exam episode

I’ve spent a large part of my life living in a flatshare with a lovely woman called Nellie who’s a good 50 years older than me and also my grandma. I’ve inherited her taste in comedy and also curtains (net, preferably thick enough to engage in commercial fishing in the North Atlantic).

Nellie introduced me to Mr Bean and I have been an admirer of his approach to life ever since. In a world of rolling 24/7 news, confessional celebrities and everyone oversharing on social media, Mr Bean still hasn’t publicly divulged his first name and says very little, creating an aura of mystique and intrigue that current Hollywood stars would cut off their assistant’s right arm for.

The show in which he stars in, named after him, was made in the early 1990s, and so is a sort of proto-reality show, think Made in Chelsea if instead of following the lives of a bunch of rich, entitled young people, it followed someone riding on the bottom of the number 47 bus to Bellingham. On the surface, the show has a seemingly unpromising premise of following Mr Bean as he engages in day-to-day activities like going to the shops, going to the dentist and going to the laundrette but in doing so reveals the universal struggle in everyday life, and crucially in how Mr Bean chooses to deal with this, the innate resilience of the human condition.

Put quite simply M. Bean is my north star for navigating life’s travails.

In this episode, Mr Bean faces something, we’ve all had to face at some point in our lives, an exam you are in no way prepared for. It’s your classic case of turning over the exam paper and realising absolutely nothing you’ve revised for is on the test. In this instance, it’s a maths exam and Mr Bean has focused on trigonometry, only to open the envelope and find the exam paper is on calculus.

Faced with this, most of us would take ourselves to the toilet, cry pathetically in the cubicle, splash cold water on our face, and go back to our seat to stare abjectly at the clock as the minute hand slowly mocks our misfortune. But not Mr Bean, he’s an imaginative soul, an artist trapped in a chartered accountant’s body.

He doesn’t accept his fate, instead he tries to copy off the person sitting next to him, an annoying bloke who has clearly revised everything that’s on the paper. He distracts the guy by coughing and pointing at something and the guy falls for it hook, line and sinker, allowing Mr Bean to have a look at his answers. But then the guy screws up his answers, they’re clearly all wrong, leaving Mr Bean back at square one.

Does Mr Bean give up? Absolutely not. The annoying guy places his answers face down so Mr Bean can’t copy them, but in a brilliant moment of human ingenuity, Mr Bean rests the side of his head on the table and blows the answer sheet up so that he can glimpse the answers.

Cheating is wrong. But herein lies the genius of Mr Bean and something which sets him apart from other public figures, he doesn’t shy away from his flaws and failings as a human being instead he embraces them and in doing so holds a mirror up to ourselves, we’re all Mr Bean.

At the end, the invigilator instructs the exam candidates to put the green calculus paper in the green box and the white trigonometry paper in the white box. Yep, that’s right, there was an exam paper on trigonometry in the envelope all along. The futility of life.

Mr Bean: Restaurant episode

It’s always hard going second, especially when you have to follow one of the most influential modern figures in existentialism, in Mr Bean, so there was only one choice really: Mr Bean.

In this episode Mr Bean goes to a restaurant on his own. It’s a classic Mr Bean thing to do. There’s still a slight stigma to eating out alone, it remains a bit of a taboo, an act of wilful transgression on the part of the solo diner.

Those witnessing it look confused, some visibly upset, why would they choose this for themselves, to eat a yaki soba in the front window of Wagamama’s, looked on by passers-by like rescues at Battersea Dogs’ Home waiting to be adopted. But ever the non-conformist, Mr Bean rails against the rigidity of societal expectations, and what unfolds is an ode to the pleasure that can be had in one’s own company.

It starts with the maître d' showing Mr Bean to his table and pulling out his chair. Mr Bean is having none of it, not one to passively go along with outdated social constructs, he offers a rebuke to the tyranny of traditionalism by pulling the chair back.

Mr Bean then takes out a birthday card, signs it, puts it in the envelope, licks it, and places it on the table. He then picks it up, opens it and reads it. It’s for him. It’s his birthday. As an introvert who is sceptical when the word ‘party’ is attached to any other word, be it dinner, pool or birthday, I approve of the number of people Mr Bean has invited to his celebration.

Mr Bean: Hotel episode

Being a non-conformist who doesn’t fit into social mores, often comes at a cost. Walking your own path means you spend a lot of time alone, and meaningful interactions can be few and far between. Again, it’s a credit to Mr Bean as a show that it doesn’t shy away from conveying the palpable alienation he feels as an outsider.

In this episode he stays at a hotel. There is a danger of overstating his loneliness here, as he is joined by someone whose companionship he values very much, his good friend, Teddy. But tragically when putting Teddy to bed in the bedside drawer in his hotel room, he decapitates him. Thus the rest of the episode sees Mr Bean grappling with the grief and turmoil of losing his companion.

He seeks connection with another hotel guest and attempts to build a rapport by meticulously mirroring all their gestures to foster communality between them but his efforts are rebuffed. In the end, in a cry for help, Mr Bean desperately tries to fill the emptiness with oysters. But the oysters are bad. And Mr Bean wanders the corridors of the hotel, naked, surrounded by people but completely alone.

Mr Bean: Funfair episode

It would be remiss of me at this point to not touch upon something which even to this day, gets swept under the carpet, in the public discourse around Mr Bean, his dark side.

Hidden beneath the superficial bumbling charm lies, at times, a problematic and troubling figure. No more so apparent than in this episode, where Mr Bean finds a baby. Mr Bean does not hand the baby in to the authorities. Instead, in a chilling display of recklessness and impulsivity, he kidnaps the baby for his own amusement and takes them to a fun fair. The lack of empathy on show is unfathomable.

Yet despite this criminal behaviour, Mr Bean’s career was largely unaffected. It was the 1990s, and thankfully we’ve come a long way since then.

Can you separate the art from the artist? It’s the age-old question, and this episode is a constant reminder of the moral complexities in attempting to do so.

Mr Bean: The Animated Series, date episode

I could fill this whole playlist with episodes from Mr Bean. But I’m not going to do that.

Instead, I’m going to change tact with this next one and choose an episode from an animated series, called Mr Bean: The Animated Series.

At the time, its release in the early 2000s, caused a great deal of controversy. Mr Bean was a singular, unflinching look at the life of a person who is deemed a spare part by the transactional machinery of the capitalist modes of production, how could a cartoon hold a light to this?

In fact, in adopting a different form of visual storytelling, the show masterfully explores elements of Mr Bean, its notoriously private protagonist, had previously kept hidden. In this episode, Mr Bean and Irma are having relationship problems. They have differing priorities and there is a distinct lack of communication between them, creating tension and emotional distance. They go to a restaurant where their dysfunctional relationship is the main course.

Irma reaches across the table to hold Mr Bean’s hands but her act of emotional vulnerability is cruelly rejected by Mr Bean, as he is so out of tune with her, he mistakes it for a game of slapsies.

The disintegration of the relationship is hard to watch. The bleak denouement sees Mr Bean forget his wallet, and figuratively and literally, abandon Irma, to go back home to get it. Irma, mourning the loss of the love that was once there, goes off with a handsome European waiter and it should be noted, accomplished violinist, who saw her in a way Mr Bean was unwilling or unable to.

It’s a staggering ten minutes of unrelenting tragedy but love finds a way, and a serendipitous traffic incident with a Robin Reliant, brings the pair together at the end, for possibly a last chance at finding what they lost.

Mr Bean: Christmas episode

There were so many other things I wanted to include on this playlist but re-watching episodes of Mr Bean is a rabbit hole from which I rarely find my way out.

By this point the algorithm knows I’m eager to mainline more Bean into my veins, and as if I am it and it is me, it throws up the perfect recommendation to end on, Nellie’s favourite.

It’s great isn’t it the algorithm, such a wonderful, benign, force for good.

It’s the Christmas special and it starts off with Mr Bean unplugging the Harrods lights display so he can test his own Christmas lights, and then proceeds to give what I will go to my grave arguing is the greatest retelling of the nativity, complete with sheep, Darleks, a van reversing, a dinosaur fighting a tank, and the angel Gabriel dramatically descending from a search and rescue helicopter.

The episode shows the best of Mr Bean, his undimmed Childlike enthusiasm for the magic of life. He raises a huge amount of money for charity, conducts a Salvation Army band in a joyous rendition of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen and for his Christmas present, gives his best friend Teddy, the gift of sight, with two brand new buttons.

But he’s not done there, he prepares a turkey, a big one, and proceeds to stuff it, only for his watch to come off inside the turkey. What ensues in the next three minutes is why Mr Bean is and will always be a heroic figure in my life.

Mr Bean’s head gets stuck inside the massive turkey. I repeat, Mr Bean’s head gets stuck inside the massive turkey. He stands up and his whole head is inside the massive turkey. He can’t get the massive turkey off his head. He’s clattering into the door, banging into the wall. It’s chaos. Irma comes around, and he does what I know I would one hundred per cent do in that situation. He throws a towel over his massive turkey head and tries to pretend that what is happening, his head being stuck inside a massive turkey, is not happening.

Irma, still unaware, says: ‘Have you got the turkey on?’ And I lose it in a way nothing else makes me lose it, I laugh so hard, enough pee comes out that I technically am pissing myself laughing. I should have gone to the toilet earlier but I’m in the deep recesses of the Mr Bean rabbit hole and so have neglected to.

At this point, my new flatmate comes crawling in, they’re a good 30-odd years younger than me, a proper baby, and also my son. He looks at the screen and giggles because I repeat, Mr Bean has his head stuck inside a massive turkey. And just like that Nellie’s sense of humour, joy for life and taste for the absurd has been passed down once more.