Comedy

Read Time Out's December 2008 interview with The Mighty Boosh

Write with somebody else
Noel Fielding It’s more of a laugh being in a social situation. If there’s two of you and you say something and it makes the other person laugh then you know it’s funny.

Julian Barratt If you’re Woody Allen you can write on your own, but we’re a double act so it makes sense to write together.

NF What often happens is you get a thought in your brain and take it as far as you can go, then you give it to someone else and they can take it further. The power of two is so much more powerful than the power of one. Feature continues

Know what you like (and don’t)
JB We’re quite strict about what we allow into the Boosh. It’s not written down, but we feel it. When people try to chip in with wacky stuff often we’re like ‘you haven’t really got it have you?’ Your mates, people you’re working with, they may even be really good comedy writers – often it’s when people try to be surreal or do some crazy imagery, it stinks of forced wackiness.

NF We don’t really think like that. The fishing episode in series two is an example. We started talking about fishing, and ended up with a Merman with a mangina who falls in love with Howard – that’s funny, for us.

Get out of the house
JB We actually wrote that fishing episode in the Barbican. We try different places to work, sometimes you get really cheesed off with an area. We wrote a lot of the second series in One Small Fish which is a cafe in Shoreditch which plays good music. They must have thought we were insane.

Tread the boards
JB The majority of our audience are people who’ve seen us on TV, who didn’t know about any of the live stuff we’d done. But that’s how it all started for us – the audience interaction, the double-act chemistry. We had to amputate that whole side of things for TV, on stage the story becomes less important than the banter around it and the night out.

NF We spent five years improvising and fucking around on stage, so people who come and see us live for the first time are quite surprised we can do all that. You live and die by every line on stage, you almost have to go from joke to joke to joke.

Don’t be ‘the only gay in the village’
NF We’re never that interested in catchphrases, we do a couple live like Naboo turning his back on someone, and Bollo saying ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’. If it’s relevant we’ll put it in, but we’ve tried not to come out and say ‘Hey I’ve got big hair’ etc.

JB We have catchphrases we say in life all the time. Naboo turning his back was from ‘Goodfellas’. We get obsessed with things and then try to make an in-joke public. Noel says everything’s ‘geeenius’ all the time.

NF A lot of people criticise ‘Little Britain’ for doing the same joke over and over again, but I admire them. I don’t think I could write seven situations around Naboo turning his back on someone.

Create unpredictable characters
NF Some of our characters could easily have half an hour dedicated to them. The weirder they are the more people seem to love them. Audiences go wild when Old Gregg comes on, which surprises me because he’s quite frightening, especially for kids.

JB But I loved monsters when I was little. I used to love Scorpio (the killer out of ‘Dirty Harry’) when I was a kid, and he’s basically a rapist and a paedophile! We like the idea of having characters like from ‘Beauty And The Beast’ who are never completely evil or nice. You think they’re evil and then it turns out there’s something a bit sad or wrong about them.

Make Mistakes
NF You have to remember that if you actually fall over on stage it’s going to be the funniest thing for the audience. Last night I did this thing as Pete Doherty and I slipped in my Chelsea boots. They pissed themselves. One night Julian was frantically trying to get a yeti suit off as he came onstage and knocked the set over. It took the roof off (the laughter, not Julian).

JB It wasn’t until 10 gigs in that we got our heads round the show. At the start we’d have to stop and say ‘That’s as far as we’ve got I’m afraid’. Which was funny anyway. We still try not to make it too slick. The show now has reached a point where we could do more with it, but we’d have to go away to work on it. It’s like we’re flying and we could change that wing but we can’t do it in midair.

The ‘superjoke’ is comedy’s Holy Grail
JB The best jokes are the ones that come out of story and character, they’re the superjokes.

NF We try to get a superjoke at the end of every TV show really but they’re hard to come by.

JB We’re going to sound really big-headed if we keep going on about superjokes.

NF Yes, but it’s just for us – when we know we’ve written a joke that ties in story, character and plot. In series one, when we went to look for the zookeeper who’d turned into a cheeseman and we grated him down and fed him to Bainbridge so his spirit consumed Bainbridge. That’s a superjoke.

JB It’s not funny, though.

Play away from home
JB It reminds us how different the Boosh is to everything else you do. I really enjoyed working with Chris Morris but it’s not to do with the stuff I love. When I do Rudy I’m not taking the piss out of Rick James and Santana and funk, it’s more of a celebration.

NF And when I dress up and do my hair I’m not taking the piss out of people in Shoreditch, that is how I dress. That’s what I’m interested in. I worked with Graham Linehan recently on ‘The IT Crowd’, he’s a great writer. Seeing him and Chris Morris duelling was pretty intense.

JB Did they actually duel each other?

NF Yep, like rutting stags. They’d have these huge intellectual debates about one joke.

It’s just a job
JB We’ve been doing it for five years now, so we know how hard it can be. When we have a tight deadline we don’t drink, we don’t go out, we don’t talk to anyone, because it’s all you’ve got in your head. But there are worse jobs I’m sure.

NF As soon as you think it’s a jolly you never get beyond a certain point. I remember Seinfeld said he used to take the afternoon off, then he saw some construction workers in a cafe getting up and going back to work. He thought if they can go back to work after lunch, so can I! And he never looked back. We enjoy each other’s company – like any colleague, you have to be able to be in a room with someone and not kill them. We do get on each other’s nerves but other people get on our nerves more. On tour you think: 'There’s no way I could spend eight years in a room with you. I’d chop your head off and kick it out the window like a football.'

Read Time Out's December 2008 interview with The Mighty Boosh