"You don’t really test yourself creatively without doing Edinburgh". Emma McAlpine chats to top stand-up and Radio 4 regular Simon Evans about returning to the Fringe after a seven year hiatus, joke-writing for TV comics and how he became such a stage snob...
If you go to a lot of comedy gigs, you might have been lucky enough to encounter Simon Evans headlining. You may even recognise his voice from one of the Radio 4 panel games he often pops up on and there’s even a chance you have laughed out loud at one of his jokes without realising it was his. Evans is one of those stand-ups that when you come across them for the first time, you wonder "How on earth did I not know about this person before?" He’s renowned and celebrated on the comedy circuit but inexplicably not known to the general public.
Having performed stand-up comedy for the best part of 15 years, he has a distinctly dry sense of humour and unashamedly caustic views. He plays the part of the ex-public schoolboy with finesse. Not the idiotic chin who’s always braying loudly in the pub. The razor-sharp devil you sat next to at that wedding, who said all the things you’d never dare say and made you laugh like hell.
Taking a new show to Edinburgh this year entitled Fringe Magnet, you’d assume Evans is something of a Festival regular when in fact, he’s just a sucker for a good pun. Chatting to him before he packed his bags, I found out why his last show was seven years ago: “During Edinburgh 2002, my wife discovered she was pregnant and by the time the next one came round, we had a brand new baby girl and it wasn’t feasible to leave her on her own for a month.” Having had another child three years later, Evans is finally comfortable leaving his family for a month and is excited to be back: “You don’t really test yourself creatively without doing Edinburgh. You can sink into your comfort zone very easily if you’re not careful.”
Sharing a flat with fellow father and comic Dan Antopolski for the Festival, you’ll be more likely to see Evans running up a hill than propping up the bar after his show: “I intend to use Edinburgh as an opportunity to get up early every morning and run up Arthur’s Seat. I feel a lot happier in life if I live healthily, I’m 45 years old now and I don’t metabolise alcohol nearly as well as I used to!”
Originally an improv performer, it wasn’t until he was 30 that he got into stand-up: “I did a workshop and wrote a bit of stuff and then I thought I’d try a gig. I had no intention of making it a career but the adrenalin buzz was amazing. It was like taking a parachute jump – you have to overcome your disinclination to do it at all and then when it goes alright you become quite addicted to it.” Evans’ career quickly accelerated. He started getting paid for gigs and began to develop an outspoken, snobbish stage persona.
“It wasn’t intended but I decided quite early on to listen to what people liked in my act and build on that. I did law at university so I spent a lot of time with people from wealthy backgrounds and had plenty to draw on from being around them. There’s something quite beguiling about the degree of callousness and indifference these people can have towards others, as if they’re horses. There’s something quite noble about it – it’s totally unsentimental and very amusing.”
By becoming an exaggerated version of himself, Evans (whose sets in the past have started with the line: “If you are struggling to place the accent… it’s educated”) found a way to say the unsayable and play with the boundaries of comedy:
“There has to be a bit of distance between you and what you are on stage, otherwise you’d be putting up the same walls and inhibitions that people do in conversation. You can’t have that; you need the freedom to say unacceptable things. A lot of times you do cross the fault line and can’t always justify it but the big laughs always come between what is acceptable and what isn’t.”
When he’s not performing live, Evans writes for TV and radio comedy shows like Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive (Radio 4) 8 Out of 10 Cats (Channel 4), and Lee Mack’s Not Going Out (BBC1), which he is currently in the process of co-writing a third series of. He is also the joke-writer of choice for several TV comics from Jimmy Carr to Sean Lock and Dara O’Briain, although he tells me he’s “reining that in a bit now” as his material was getting weakened as a result:
“Sean Lock did a joke of mine at a theatre gig recently and it got a massive response. I sat there thinking ‘how am I ever going to be that guy, getting that applause and selling out big theatres if I’m giving my best stuff to Sean Lock?’”
So it’s bad news for TV comics and good news for Edinburgh audiences. Simon Evans is back and he’s brought his best jokes with him.
Simon Evans Fringe Magnet will be in the Pleasance Courtyard from 16th-30th August at 9:50pm
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