Even celebrity has its limits

Zoë Heller was on Radio 4's Start The Week yesterday, talking about the American comedian Don Rickles as someone who could be better known in Britain.

She's right.

I, for one, had no idea who he is.

So I looked him up on his website to educate myself. But I think it's too late. He's nearly 80 already. So I am not going to bother. All the articles I waded through about Don Rickles, and how he likes insulting his audience, quoted the same joke he made when Frank Sinatra came to see his show. "Hi, Frank. Make yourself at home. Hit someone." Not bad. Unfortunately, he made this joke in 1957, and they are still quoting it now. This suggests that he hasn't improved on that joke yet. That's a bad sign. So I am not going to bother.

But that is one of the great things about American culture. We really don't have to bother. British comedians are always consumed by guilt and shame at not succeeding in America, and they keep throwing themselves at the defences of that golden promised land, only to be thrown back helplessly by armed guards, but we forget all the American comedians who have never made it here. I don't suppose it matters to Don Rickles for a moment that people in Britain haven't got the faintest idea who he is, any more than it matters to David Letterman and Jay Leno and all the chat show people that, for all we are being told the whole time how big they are in America, we don't know who they are, and wouldn't recognise them if they knocked at our door, but I think it is very comforting that it is equally open to Americans to fail to make an impact outside their own shores.

And it's not just comedians. It's everyone. Take Martha Stewart, for instance. It seemed very important to Americans that Martha Stewart should be found guilty of something or other financial, but there was nobody in Britain who could give a toss. There was a good reason for this. Nobody had the faintest idea who she was. Every time she was mentioned in the papers, someone had to add a brief description, such as "Martha Stewart is America's Delia Smith and Nigella Lawson rolled into one, but much more important," which made it all the more delicious that we hadn't heard of her before and didn't want to hear about her again.

The only American comedians we know about in this country are the ones who go into films (Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Woody Allen) and thus cease being comedians or even funny, or the ones who have the energy to go abroad and court a foreign public. Jackie Mason we know about because he comes here and entertains us and insults us. Bill Hicks we knew about because his brand of scorching humour struck a chord with us; the one time I was lucky enough to see Bill Hicks in action was one of the most jaw-dropping moments of my life. But now he is dead, and nobody will see him again, and I fancy that most of my readers will never have heard of him even now.

What is encouraging about all this is that it means that celebrity does have its limits. We are told repeatedly that the cult of celebrity has taken over everything and everyone. So it is good to be reminded that as you pass out of US airspace, the people who are celebrities in America - the kind of people that Tina Brown writes about wonderfully incomprehensibly - become unknown in a magic sort of way, just as our little island celebrities become nonentities outside our shores. Nobody in France or Canada or Russia has the faintest idea who Germaine Greer or Jordan or Paul Merton or Gary Lineker is, just as we haven't the faintest idea of the name of any American footballer or baseball player or TV chef or racehorse.

In an increasingly uniform and international age, it's not much to be thankful for, but it's something.