The last time I saw Ross Noble, he very nearly killed us all.
Well, alright, so maybe not directly. Sydney had been lashed by weather so severe that the roof of the Enmore Theatre buckled under the strain, and the performance we were promised had to be postponed. “An act of God!” I hear you cry. “That’s not Ross’s fault at all!” But now, ahead of his 2016 Australian tour, I can reveal the grim truth: the Northumberland comic was quite content with the idea of luring us to our seats and certain death, like some smiling, murderous piper. Lucky he’s such a charming bugger.
“Ohhh, I’d forgotten about that!” Noble cries in his inimitable brogue. “That was pretty full on though, that roof collapse. All of the water that had gathered up there burst through to the electrics, and the electrical board exploded. So the theatre people said, ‘Well, you might want to not let people in?’ like it was a question. But I thought, ‘Well, as long as it’s not on fire now, it should be alright?’”
He laughs at the memory. The show did eventually go on two days later and was downright hilarious at that, yet the theatre does still bear the scars of that sodden weekend when the streets of Enmore were blanketed in ice. Noble’s live shows are renowned for being unpredictable beasts, which is really the very nature of improvised comedy. Yet his audiences themselves can be just as mysterious, and over the years he has worked out subtle ways of gauging just what kind of a crowd he might expect.
“You can tell! When the lights go down, there’s a noise that comes off the crowd. But it’s also a feeling in the room – an anticipation. If you were there three nights running you might think the audience sounds exactly the same, but they’re totally different. Sometimes I’ll think of something and the audience will laugh right away, while sometimes there’s a beat before they get it.
“Then sometimes – and this is one of my favourite things – you get to a joke where rather than saying the punchline, you give them the ingredients. Say you’ve been talking about a tiger hiding in a box. Or maybe a car bomb that’s about to go off, right? Two minutes later, you’re miming that you’re in a car and pretend to turn the key – you look down and go, ‘Ohhh no’. You’re not explaining the joke, you’re just doing it. All those elements that you’ve been leading up to come together.” Noble pauses. “Now people are going to be turning up to the show going, ‘Do the car bomb bit! And what ever happened to that tiger?’”
With so many upcoming gigs scheduled for Brain Dump, it’s safe to say that Australia has quite a sweet spot for Noble. He’s been touring here for years, and even lived just outside of Melbourne for a while until a bushfire destroyed his family home and the Noble clan relocated to the UK. While his family were thankfully unhurt, it certainly put the comic’s life and fortunes in perspective. Nowadays his surrealist skills are unsurpassed, largely due to an acceptance of simply being himself.
“The mistake that people make starting out is that they’ll try and find a style. The trick is, let the style find you. The best comics are sort of themselves onstage. It’s just an extension. That’s just me in front of people showing off, but it’s me. I might talk about topical stuff, but nobody would ever describe me as a political comedian. The political comedian is probably somebody who in real life [is] constantly banging on about party politics – about changing the system. I have elements of that, but ultimately I’m just there talking bollocks. Yesterday some friends and I were talking about the EU referendum, but it wasn’t about grinding out the topic. Really it was taking the piss.”
At his core, Noble celebrates the idiosyncratic. Don’t mimic the easy laughs we’ve heard a thousand times before. Don’t replicate your idols. To thine own self be true, though perhaps with a nearby rubber chicken and ‘Yo Mamma’ gag just to be safe.
“You see these comics who desperately want to be Bill Hicks, and you just think, ‘That’s not who you are.’ If you’re true to yourself and go out there, you’ll find out what kind of comedian you are. You get people who say, ‘I don’t want to be one of those comics who talks about their kids.’ But Louis CK gets up there and does stuff about his personal life that’s so incredibly original that you don’t think, ‘Oh God, here’s somebody banging on about his kids.’ It’s just part of who he is.
“You don’t want to become a hack who’s just doing the same thing that’s been done before. I think it’s important that the audience gets a sense of who you are, but equally, sometimes I hear comedians talking about themselves and it just does my head in. I think, ‘I just don’t care about this, I do not give a shit. I don’t care about you, or your annoying mother.’” He laughs. “If I’m going to be annoyed by my relatives, I have my own thank you very much.”
Ross Noble: Brain Dump,as part of Sydney Comedy Festival 2016, is on Saturday April 23 and Sunday April 24 at Sydney Town Hall. He is also appearing at Riverside Theatres on Thursday April 7.
