How did you get into comedy?
Slightly by accident. I had tried standup in my last year at university, then did three open mic gigs at the Edinburgh festival which offered strong evidence that I should give up. So I did. Eighteen months later, after a vague plan to try to get into sports journalism ended with me subediting articles about stock markets for a business publishing company (even less exciting than you might think), I booked one gig, at the Comedy Cafe’s Wednesday open mic night, hosted by Daniel Kitson. If that had gone badly, I don’t think I would have tried standup again. It went well enough to carry on, and within a year I was starting to get a few paid gigs, and standup gradually became my “job”.
Can you recall a gig so bad, it’s now funny?
In about 2002, I did a show in Killarney in Ireland. A very popular local act had to pull out, and they asked me to headline the gig instead. It was in a hotel nightclub where it was cheaper to go to the comedy and stay for the music rather than just go to the music. So the audience was a mixture of people who wanted to see someone else, and people who wanted to dance. The response to my set was a fascinating cocktail of silence, hostility, confusion, apathy, resentment and pity. The noise of the disco then kept me awake until 4am.
