Is it true you first performed standup as a drunken dare?
Yes! I went to visit a friend who’d been diagnosed with stage four cancer. A couple of weeks later, I was talking with another friend about how life is all right and you don’t know how lucky you are. I’d just turned 30 at the time and I thought we’d grown up in a really turbulent time. If only I’d known. They said: “We should do something to scare ourselves.” I thought: “Well, I can’t jump out of a plane.” He suggested a comedy course with a gig at the end of it. The rest is history.
Can you recall a gig so bad, it’s now funny?
There was this Christmas gig in a pub on the outskirts of Glasgow. It was Black Friday and all the 18 to 22-year-olds who worked at the local call centre had decided they were finishing at five and going out to this comedy night. But the comedy was an inconvenience to their evening. The gig started at 9pm, they’d been there for four hours. It was so bad that the comics just did the gig to each other. It was the only thing we could do, but we had to do the gig to get paid. If you’re booked, you always do your time.
