Known for his non-stop touring schedule and his role hosting Channel 4 panel show 8 out of 10 Cats, Emma McAlpine speaks to deadpan one-liner merchant Jimmy Carr about travelling solo, hecklers, and er, soup.
Asking a comedian how their tour is going is a perfectly normal pleasantry to start a phone interview with, but I feel a bit silly asking Jimmy Carr this question – after all, he’s been on tour for the last ten years. Frequently dubbed the UK’s hardest working comedian, when one show draws to a close, he often begins a new one only five weeks later. It all sounds rather exhausting to me. Surely being on the road all the time, performing to thousands of people most nights a week and filming a national TV show takes its toll. Would he not prefer to play arenas (which he could undoubtedly fill) and do less gigs?
“I could get my job done faster if I did arenas. But I have a theory on this which is that there are comics you go to listen to and comics you go to see and I’m one you go to listen to. People like Michael McIntyre and Bill Bailey can fill those spaces. I could physically get people to come but I don’t know whether I could fill the space as a performer. I just stand there telling jokes like the JokeBox 3000.”
It also becomes quite obvious to me during our interview, that Carr bloody loves the tour. He can’t get enough of it. When I ask him what his favourite thing to do when he’s not touring, he replies “booking more tours”, before blithely adding that he doesn’t have much time off anyway. “Maybe if I had a bit more time I would masturbate. Seriously though, it’s the coolest job in the world. I’m only strictly working about two hours a day really and when I do, it’s all about me.”
Travelling alone with no manager or warm-up act, Carr is more than happy with his own company and is something of a geek when it comes to his tour itinerary.
“Before I started in comedy, I’d been to Birmingham once and I’d never been to Manchester. Now I consider myself an expert on where to get good Chinese food in regional cities. I know which are the best service stations and motorways to take. I can tell you with a level of pride that I’ve stayed in every Mal Maison and Hotel du Vin in the country and all of them offer me soup when I arrive. I like soup in the evenings, so they get it in specially.”
On the road, he listens to audiobook CDs. He doesn’t listen to podcasts or his iPod because “my phone is my iPod and people are always ringing on it.” When he’s not slurping soup back at his Mal Maison hotel, he often kills time in the cinema. It might sound quite lonely if he didn’t interact with thousands of people most nights of the week and get approached in the street every day. “People come up to me and tell me jokes all the time. Sometimes they’ll tell me one of mine from years ago and they’ll say ‘you’ll like this one'.” He also has an enormous Twitter following (541,988 people at the time of writing) which he keeps updated with pictures and stories from his travels although he never tests jokes on them, because he hates the idea of someone hearing the same joke twice.
And what a lot of jokes there are. Carr now reckons he’s firing out around 300 per show, his memory aided by “tatty bits of paper around me all the time”. To break up the relentless barrage of darkly comic one-liners, Carr and his production team have introduced some neat visual tricks and interactive sections into recent shows, including illustrations on screens, a live comedy idol where punters get the chance to tell his jokes on stage and a ‘heckle amnesty’ which sees him take on a stream of absurd heckles. “I love heckling and that sort of combative nature. After about an hour I just go ‘Right, bring it on’. Often very aggressive heckles are misguided; people usually want to join in and make the show better.”
He tells me he never sits down to write jokes; he prefers to carry around a Dictaphone and update it with ideas, before editing them later – “that’s when the writing process happens.” Can he ever switch off from comedy mode?
“I find it easier to switch off from comedy now than when I wasn’t doing this for a living. I would tragically tell people jokes all the time beforehand, anyone that would listen, because I didn’t have an outlet. Now I have an outlet I can relax a little bit.”
Yet, while he frequently sells out thousand-seater venues, he still admits to having anxiety about the future. “I do sometimes think ‘It’s all good tonight but what about next year?' or ‘What if I stop being funny?’ There’s lots of people that I used to love who don’t tour anymore and you wonder what happened to them. Did they get bored?” Clearly however, Carr is far from being bored and it’s hard to imagine how he could stop being funny, if his passion for the job remains the same. Not that he would call it a job.
“You can’t really call this work. It’s just fun. I've been doing this for ten to eleven years now. This is my life. It still feels like there’s been some admin error sometimes. I often think that my life is so weirdly privileged that I must have been in a car crash about ten years ago and I’m in a coma somewhere imagining I’m living some sort of showbiz dream. It’s a good trip, as the kids would say.”
Jimmy Carr Making People Laugh is out on DVD now and available on Amazon.
Click here to see his London tour dates at the O2 Brixton
Click here to see his London tour dates at the Hammersmith Apollo
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