To interview comedians, you don’t usually travel to Belgium to attend festivals of Flemish culture. When speaking to them, you’re not usually distracted by a dead fox, prostrate on a table, intermittently swishing its animatronic tail. But this is Kim Noble we’re talking about. Obsessive videographer of his own life, professional cleaner and darling of Euro arthouses. “I don’t class myself as a comedian at all,” he says. “But I still have this inbuilt thing that I need to make people laugh.”
He’s certainly done so tonight – albeit to more of a performance art crowd than he may find in London. We’re backstage at the Campo venue in Ghent, where he’s been developing (for seven years!) Lullaby for Scavengers, the third in the trilogy that began in 2009 with Kim Noble Will Die and included 2015’s remarkable You’re Not Alone. Both shows honed Noble’s signature video-and-performance style, blurring life and art, depression and fragile hope, the tender and the (notoriously) repellent.
