Interview: Daniel Sloss

Interview: Daniel Sloss

21 September, 2010
by: Emma

"I have lucky bastard syndrome." Emma McAlpine speaks to young Scottish stand-up Daniel Sloss.

Turning 20 means slightly more to Daniel Sloss than most teenagers, after all the unique selling point that frequently adorned his posters and press releases is now redundant; instead of being a comedy wunderkind he is now a regular twenty-something stand-up, battling against the rest of the graduates and Russell Howard wannabes to earn his place on the circuit. 

At the age of 16, Sloss was the youngest working stand-up in the UK, although he’s well aware that he’s not the first teenage comedy success story. “Ross Noble started out when he was 15 and I think Bill Hicks was 14 when he was doing the clubs, so if that's anything to go by, I’m an old man.” He tells me he first got the performance bug in school productions (“I was an attention-seeking little git”), adding jokes where he wasn’t supposed to and soon discovering there were limitations to acting. “With acting you don’t know if you're doing a good job or not until the end. With comedy there is an instant reaction. I really liked that side to it – of being on stage and making people laugh – so I thought I’d give it a try.”

He found support in an unexpected place. After sending an e-mail to fellow Scotsman Frankie Boyle asking him for advice on becoming a stand-up, the cynical Mock the Week star offered to help him out.

“He said ‘Come to the Edinburgh Festival, we’ll go for lunch a few times, I’ll take you to some shows and teach you what to do.’ I always get asked if he’s a dick but remember, this is a man who is incredibly famous and gets an e-mail from a cocky 16 year-old saying he wants to be a stand-up comedian. I haven’t done the research, but I'd assume most people would say ‘fuck off’.”

Boyle was clearly impressed with his protégé. Some of the jokes Sloss wrote for him to critique ended up on Mock the Week. He was also instrumental in getting him his ‘first proper gig’ at the legendary Stand club in Edinburgh. 

“I applied and there was a waiting list of about six months. Frankie told them to get me on the following week and I got my first five minutes. I had material that I'd been writing for the past year, and I stood in front of the mirror and went through it line by line, dissecting it and re-writing it. Looking back, there's not much you can dissect from five minutes of wanking material. But I fucking loved it. I was then booked in for other gigs after that and a couple of months later I stopped rehearsing, I knew my set.”

While Sloss got his parents to come along to gigs for moral support, his school friends were another matter. “I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing at first. But then the local paper found out that 'Man in Fife is Actually Doing Something with His Life' and some of my friends pinned the article on the school noticeboard. It was interesting to see how different people reacted. I had some friends who just randomly came to gigs to support me and then I had others who said: ‘Why is he doing this?’"

After reaching the final of the inaugural So You Think You’re Funny? new act competition in 2008, Sloss debuted his first solo show Teenage Kicks at the Edinburgh Fringe the following year. While full of the kind of material you’d expect from an 18-year-old, his confidence, and skill at playing with the audience’s perception of his youth, won him a lot of new fans. His Fringe shows sold out and the illustrious Soho Theatre booked him for a West End run that October. This year, Sloss has had a pilot sitcom commissioned by the BBC, sold out his second Edinburgh show My Generation and performed on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow to a viewing audience of 4.5 million people. It’s fair to say, his comedy star is on the rise.

“I have lucky bastard syndrome. I know the success I’ve had is down to me being lucky and having the unique selling point of being a young comedian but I do work very hard as well. I’ve probably earned about 30% of it and the rest is down to luck and other people giving me chances.” 

Now that he’s no longer a teenager, Sloss is going to have to work doubly hard to qualify this success, a challenge he seems more than ready to face. “I’m so flattered that people want to spend their hard earned cash to come and watch me talk shite. It gives me extra drive. All I can hope for is that people find me funny."

Daniel Sloss: My Generation will be at the Soho Theatre until Saturday 25th September

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Emma