Here's looking at you, kiddo

Dreichie's bijou city-centre nosheries. Why? ''Before I came up to

appear at this year's Fringe, a London magazine gave my show a preview

listing, saying that it was 'based on the inevitable book'. As though it

was something I'd just trotted out to be like other stand-up comedians!

This book wasn't inevitable at all!''

Or was it? Arnold's book is called Are You Looking At Me, Jimmy?

And it's you getting autobiographical in your highly-rated surreal and

oblique fashion, isn't it, Arnold?

Arnold's book, you see, begins as a faithful mapping of Arnold's

relationship with Glasgow -- and then mysteriously becomes a journey

without an atlas across strangely-familiar terrain. It's partly a

private-eye puzzle in which Arnold dogs the fictional steps of his

recently-deceased Uncle Harry. And partly it's the saga of the Brown

dynasty after their enforced flight from Czarist Russia to Glasgow; the

tracing of a family's evolution from a mishpocheh into a clan.

Arnold has long revelled in picturing himself as the value-for-money

outsider, the all-round underdog: ''Scottish and Jewish . . . two racial

stereotypes for the price of one.'' He was brought up in a Crosshill

tenement. By the fifties, half of the tenement still didn't have hot

water. You can guess in which half Arnold lived.

''We used to have to go to the public baths in Calder Street. At home

there was a gallows humour. My parents were cynical, but it was cynicism

with a laugh. I feel more Jewish than Scottish now, but I've an empathy

with Scottishness. There's a Scottish enjoyment of communication. Of

seeing something daft, and saying 'Look at that!', and sharing it with

others.

''Chatting, basically. Billy Connolly, Bruce Morton, Fred MacAulay,

Parrot. What they all do is chat. Me, too. And I love lots of Scottish

words and rhythms. I use them as a magic shorthand.''

Arnold's book led him to undertake a longhand trawl through

contemporary Scottish chronicles. ''I went through the library of the

Jewish Echo, which has folded now, but in a 1928 edition I found an

advertisement for my uncle's shop: Abraham Lizerbram, he was a tailor in

Crown Street.''

Ah, the streets of Glasgow. Where geezers pace, issuing forceful

one-way exchanges right in your face. ''Glasgow's streets are an

encounter forum; a form of comic serendipity. I enjoy the absurdity of

chance conversations.''

Arnold has an ear for the Confucian words of the city's pavement

philosophers. Stoatirs like: ''Can you spare me the price of a deposit

on a wee flat in the Merchant City, Jimmy?''

Sadly, Glasgow's streets see too little of Arnold Brown, ochone. He

winged awa' frae us long ago as a fledgeling accountant, nesting

permanently in London. Arnold's 58 in December, you know. These days

he's drawn back north of the Border by family bereavement -- an instance

of which provided the book's genesis -- or he's brought back by work.

Ten nights on the Edinburgh Fringe. A couple of gigs earlier this month

at the Tron. One night in 1990 at Ibrox, functioning as Frank Sinatra's

warm-up man. ''But not in a shy way,'' Arnold points out.

Yet there was, naturally, a Scottish aspect to the day-to-day task of

writing Arnold's book. ''I wrote it in Hampstead tea-rooms close to my

home, and in the cafe on Euston station. Going there acted as a Scottish

umbilical cord by providing me with access to new copies of The

Herald.''

Does the emergence of the book signal a change in your career? A move

from stand-up to a more literary, book-based form of performance? Will

you be doing less live work?

''I'm in an odd position in being too big for smaller clubs, and while

I've a nice reputation as a comedian's comedian, it's on a cult level.

Rather than on a sell-out-2000-seat-theatre level. In a sense I'm on the

periphery. Although I am on the cover of the October edition of Esquire

magazine . . . or at least I appear, along with a selection of

comedians, on a cassette which is stuck to the front of the cover of

Esquire magazine. But being on the periphery is slightly irksome. As a

socialist, I want more money.''

Literary influences?

''Herzog. Saul Bellow. Mordechai Richler. Arthur Miller. Something

with heart in it, not comedy for comedy's sake. But I read less than I

should do. As a performer, I'm motivated by creating my own material. I

haven't read intensely. Which is a terrible admission for a

pseudo-intellectual.

''I see the big issues and everything that's happening out there, and

because hey, I'm a zeitgeist-kinda-guy, I sum them all up in a line.

Which is very lazy of me. But I believe that by looking at the minutiae,

you can illuminate the big stuff.

''For instance, in the book my Uncle Harry sums up all the problems of

the world in one word: space. People don't get on because they haven't

got enough of it. In the same way, my comedy is based on pricking

pomposity; treating problems which have no solution by trying to

puncture them with little barbs of wit.''

But given your Jewish background, and the fact that your forebears

only arrived in Glasgow because they had been driven from their central

European home by the pogrom, and mindful of what seems to be a

modern-day resurrection of fascism . . .

''Ah yes. Fascism. It has its attractions for some people. We're

attracted to power. Not weakness. I don't attack powerless people in my

comedy.''

But your book does come close to attacking fascism . . . you do have a

serious role to play as a Jewish comedian, no?

''But I'm a comedy illusionist; a trickster; a quack. I pretend to

deal with the big issues, but then it collapses into bathos. I have no

answer to the big problems.'' Arnold mimes eloquent snoot-cocking

gestures with his nose and thumb. ''That's merely all I do.''

Arnold professes himself unhappy with cloying sentimentality and

Scottish couthiness; the insistence that everything will turn out OK in

the end.

''I'm confusion with panache. Elegant disarray. Not solutions. I like

being the devil's advocate and going for easy targets. The Pope, say . .

. there's an easy target. And being a cowardly man, I'll go for the easy

target. Well, someone has to.

''Trivialising things, that's me. Because I don't have the intellect

to do anything else. A small man against the forces of evil. With Uncle

Harry as my alter ego. It's all to do with the impulse within me to be a

child.

''As I've said for some time in my stage-act: 'The reason why

stand-ups go into comedy is to get the attention we never got as

adults.' The venues we appear in are our creches, wherein we are fed the

rusks of applause -- and you're really straining the metaphor here,

Arnold.''

Oh aye, as we say in Glasgow when what we mean is aw naw. Here's

looking at you, Arnold.

* Are You Looking At Me, Jimmy? with drawings by Ken Cox is published

by Methuen at #6.99.