Who is B.S. Johnson?

I remember reading a very short article in Sight & Sound magazine a year or so ago about the films of someone named B.S. Johnson. The writer’s description of this quizzical yet entertaining figure tickled my curiosity, so I dropped a link to one of his films – Fat Man on a Beach – into my watchlist.

There it languished, until recently, when I finally got around to watching it. What a fantastic little jester he was!

The first thing that you notice is just how consistently hilarious he is, dropping witty one-liners, extended funny stories and beautifully naughty nursery rhymes.

But B.S. Johnson was clearly no one-trick pony. As witty as he is, there’s a reason he’s not just a stand-up comic. He was much more than that; a proficient filmmaker, a clever writer, a solemn orator – even a philosopher of sorts, incorporating profound allegorical insights into his work.

There’s an exquisite absurdist tone to much of what he presents to the camera in Fat Man on a Beach. Said with a deadpan delivery and coming so thick and fast, it’s almost hard to keep track of when he’s making a joke and when he’s being deadly serious. Maybe there is no difference. Perhaps that’s the point.

There’s also a beautifully balanced delivery to B.S. Johnson’s monologues in the film. It seems to be the wonderful balance between witty humour and extreme profundity that furnishes the film with such wisdom. It’s the carefully curated life experiences of Johnson that provide the basic structure to what he’s telling the audience, but the wonderfully funny way in which he speaks creates a disarming tone that allows the wisdom to practically slide right into the psyche of the viewer with hardly any friction at all.

But there’s also an awful sadness hanging over the final scene of the film, indeed over the entire life of B.S. Johnson. The last thing he says to the camera is “….you can go, off you go, up, up, up” as he motions to the camera (the eye of the audience) to move upwards with his arms. After this, he simply proceeds to walk into the Irish Sea, alone, fully clothed.

While that famous dictum about the thin margins between genius and insanity has always felt a bit twee to me, I can’t help but think that the closest the dictum gets to the truth is in characters like B.S. Johnson whose psyche seemed as though it had no conscious choice but to push at the boundaries of polite, sensible reality into the realms of hilarious absurdity in relentless pursuit of wisdom and truth. Unfortunately, no matter how hard you push, it’s sometimes not enough to escape the demons that are chasing you.

A few weeks after filming that scene, he ended his own life.