Comedy

Back in 2005, while he was running a club in Kentish Town called the Gilded Baboon, comedian Liam Mullone instituted a smoking-compulsory night. Russell Brand headlined the show clutching a shisha. ‘We wanted to annoy ASH,’ Mullone explains. ‘They have no sense of humour and baiting them is so rewarding.’ It’s something he couldn’t do now. But Mullone won’t lie down quietly: ‘On the first day of the smoking ban I’ll be driving round London in a hearse, offering smokers a place to puff in comfort – it has a smoking lounge in the back.’

Born in Leicester, but brought up from the age of nine in Hong Kong, he went to university in Stirling. He got thrown out, he says, for nutting a bar manager. The manager was later sacked and Mullone was reinstated. During his wilderness months, Mullone found a job as a gardener. It was in the Garden of Remembrance at Putney Vale Cemetery. ‘I ended up digging graves because the proper gravediggers were complete stoners and always off sick. The main hassle was the constant fear of being buried alive. Also the head gardener had only two topics of conversation: his pornography collection, and the mourners he claimed to have shagged in the potting shed.’
Feature continues

After university, he worked as a journalist. ‘The first thing I ever wrote was for a women’s porn mag. The story was rejected for being dangerous and irresponsible.’ He moved to Hong Kong to become a restaurant critic: ‘I had one bad suit covered in stains. I couldn’t remember what polenta was, or work out exactly what it’s for. I refused to eat shark’s fin or sea turtle. This made me fairly pointless on a magazine aimed at Chinese millionaires. Back in London he got a job on the news desk at the Independent. Now he’s in the obituaries department at the Times: ‘It’s like working in a library. Eveyone is very polite and very clever, at least most of the time.’ He also writes the Questions Answered column: ‘It solves quandaries such as: can birds fly upside down? My comedy is full of this stuff. I don’t think there is such a thing as useless information.’

Mullone started out in comedy six years ago. He’s taking his first full-length show, ‘Health & Safety’, to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. His stand-up, he says, ‘has always been fairly surreal, inoffensive, non-sweary and boyish’. Then one day last year, he had 34 issues of the GLA’s monthly freesheet the Londoner through his door: ‘I realised that I really did want to put Ken Livingstone’s head on a fucking spike. So the show’s a sort of silly backlash against the forces of Efrafa.’

Efrafa? Think ‘Watership Down’. The rabbit heroes of Mullone’s imagination meet the Efrafans, rabbits so terrified of death and obsessed with security that they’ve expunged from their lives everything that makes life worth living. In Mullone’s mind the British Health and Safety Executive, the health lobby and the Home Office are all Efrafan institutions. ‘We must resist them,’ he declares. ‘Tooth and claw.’

So, in view of his celebration of smoking, gravedigging and obituarising, would Mullone say he was obsessed with death? ‘No. I’m obsessed with life and its terrifying brevity. Accepting death is essential to enjoying life.’ Does he suffer from any negative feelings? ‘What annoys me at the moment is middle-class women with five children who bang on about climate change as if their philoprogenitive compulsion has nothing to do with the crisis we all supposedly face. To confront population growth, I’ll be encouraging everyone to fall back on the three tried and tested means of reducing fertility and longevity: tobacco, alcohol and pornography.’

Liam Mullone’s ‘Health & Safety’ is at the Etcetera Theatre on Saturday.