Did Johnny Vegas over-step the comedy mark?

It will come as little surprise to anyone in comedy that, according to the Guardian today, during a recent show at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, the comedian Johnny Vegas over-stepped the mark. That's what Vegas does. He blunders alcoholically across every mark, every boundary, every line in the sand you can draw. In a sense, that's what he's for.

On this occasion even those who condemn his actions admit that half his audience were convulsed with laughter. What they were seeing was exactly what they had paid to see - Vegas overstepping the mark again.

So what did they see? Witnesses say a nervously giggling girl, sitting in the front row of the audience, was manoeuvred onto the stage, and made to lie flat. It is alleged that Vegas then variously stroked her breasts, raised her skirt, ran his hand up her leg, fingered her through her clothes, and finally straddled her and kissed her extensively. It was behaviour which would constitute sexual assault if he did it in public - which, when you think about it, he did.

Writing in the Guardian, Mary O'Hara, who attended the show, said Vegas "clearly had no idea where he was going with his act". Of course he didn't. He never does. His technique, even in television interviews, is to ramble, until he touches a nerve or draws a reaction. Then he can rapidly become very funny.

The technique of involving the audience in the act is not new in comedy. Bob Monkhouse would stroll along the front row of tables at his cabaret gigs, ask each woman her name, and then haul an appropriate joke or song out of his prodigious memory. He claimed it never went wrong.

More offensively, when the team from the C4 satirical show Who Dares Wins, to which I was a regular contributor, took to the stage in the 1980s, the performers pretended to promote safe sex, and invited pretty girls on stage to demonstrate how to put a condom on a banana.

The usual result was some embarrassed girls and much mocking laughter from audience and performers. Then one night a particularly attractive girl caressed the banana so lasciviously, and to such hearty applause, that it was the performers who didn't know where to put themselves.

Today it's the stand-up clubs where the truly offensive moments in comedy take place. They're tough, dangerous places, where performers often have to fight for their comedic lives. I once saw a stand-up begin his act with the words "Hello, I'm a schizophrenic", only to receive the immediate reply from the back: "Then you can both fuck off". I never saw him again.

To protect themselves, the performers often retaliate first. Last week I watched a girl comic take the stage, immediately pull her trousers to half mast, bend over, and invite an imaginary partner to choose. No one could be embarrassed after that.

The late Malcolm Hardee, allegedly the owner of the largest testicles in London, would use them, plus luminous paint and a pair of spectacles, to produce an alarmingly obscene impression of Charles de Gaulle.

Set against these performers, one could claim, Johnny Vegas is relatively bland. There are those who will excuse him entirely. They will say that in over-stepping the mark on stage, Vegas and those like him serve a purpose. After all, you only know where the mark is when you over-step it. And in a world of rapidly changing tastes, the mark keeps moving.

Mealy-mouthed clap-trap? Possibly. And nothing can truly excuse his activities at the Bloomsbury, which were, if we believe the Guardian report, those of a seedy, drunken and sexually voracious bully.

Will he get away with it? Probably. Meanwhile, my advice to the offended is simple. If you are disgusted by Vegas and his ilk, don’t go. And if you do go, never ever ever sit in the front row. ·