To describe British comedian Bill Bailey as an animal lover is an understatement akin to dismissing David Bowie as merely a pop singer. Bailey is not just an admirer of our four-legged or feathered friends; he is an advocate for animal rights, a chronicler of animal lives and his house has become something of a haven for all manner of exotic orphans who need a place to call home, a “veritable ark of forlorn guinea pigs, oddball cats, stray dogs and homeless parrots”.
Add in Madagascan hissing cockroaches, iguanas hiding in the bathroom and a large speckled hen who frequently perched on his head, and you realise that Bailey’s love affair with wild creatures verges on the obsessive.
Animals, Bailey contends, “teach us lessons about loyalty and responsibility, and even loss. They reflect the arc of our own human experience”. Throughout these tales of the feathered, furred and scaled creatures with whom Bailey has shared his life, we get brief insights into the comedian’s inner workings. Thus, we learn how comedy allowed him to combine his love of acting and music into a “haphazard, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, punk-style do-it-yourself ethic”, alongside being treated to some bizarre anecdotes, from covering for a singing parrot in a Brighton cinema to saving an owl from the menu of a restaurant in rural China.
Bailey’s language exudes the excitable bonhomie of his stage presence, so a boisterous red setter pup “galumphed” along a beach, while a massive white Flemish Giant rabbit could be found “fallumphing around the garden”. His boyish joy shines through encounters with all manner of exotic creatures, from wild Brazilian jaguars to whale sharks.
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The writing is also imbued with Bailey’s irrepressible humour, something to which fellow passengers on Dublin Bus can testify as this reviewer embarrassedly sniggered his way through some of the comedian’s more vivid descriptions, including a Lakeland terrier taking an over-amorous shine to the family tortoise, how trying to swim in towelling shorts is like “dancing the paso doble in Crocs”, or why the humble vole is “the all-purpose snack of the animal world”.
It may be a slim and slight volume, but My Animals and Other Animals brims over with Bailey’s natural warmth and compassion for all living things; a welcome antidote to the grim news cycle of 21st-century life.
John Walshe is a critic
