Ross Noble has been running by the seat of his pants for 25 years now, curly hair streaming in the slipstream, maniacal grin bearing down on the next happily hapless front row. He has developed a reputation for improvisation that is unique even among other comics, and so it makes sense to pry secrets of the trade from him so that we might bottle his humour and sell it on the fringe black market to unscrupulous comedians in dark trench coats and novelty pants.
“It all comes back to the idea of playing,” Noble says in his unmistakable Northumberland accent. “To improvise properly, and I think this is a rule of life in general, you have to learn to turn off the part of your brain involved with censorship. The trick is to just go with it. People talk about creative writing, how if you sit there with a blank page and think you have to write the best thing that anyone has ever written, you’ll never write anything. Whereas if you sit there and just write anything at all, whatever pops into your head, it’s better than having nothing. And that’s sort of true of improvising onstage. There might be something that you think is a crap idea, but as you work it there might be something fantastical there. Alternatively, it might be a fantastic idea but you don’t get that much out of it.”
He chuckles between mouthfuls of breakfast. “You see it a lot with newer comics. They don’t necessarily know what their point of view is yet, how they view the world, what their own take is. They’re just thinking, ‘God, I just need to come up with something, anything that might be funny.’ Whereas if you know what you want, it’s easy to process things. You’ll stop thinking, ‘What will these people laugh at?’ and you’ll start to see, ‘This is what I find funny.’”
From a man who is consistently ranked among the greatest stand-up comics in the world, it’s advice most aspiring performers should take to heart. Noble honed his talents by following the same path as so many before; busking before strangers and slowly learning that the trick to keeping your material engaging was to do whatever came naturally.
“Originally I was trying very hard to be slick. Jack Dee was one of the first comics I saw. He wore a suit and his material was really sharp, and I thought, ‘Yes! That’s the sort of comic I’d like to be.’ But it just didn’t work for me, because I wasn’t like that as a person. I’d come from this place of being a street entertainer. I was quite comfortable working the street, which sounds a little suspicious. I wasn’t there learning in the comedy club, where everyone was a lot more focused. I used to compare quite a lot, but then I found myself doing TV warm-ups, and it was one of those things where you can’t really stand there and just tell jokes. You have to talk to the crowd, and I really enjoyed it! I found I could do it really well, and so I wandered off down that path. But that whole time I was just being myself.”
Watching Noble perform live is a beautifully bizarre affair, like finding yourself invited to some communal dream. His stream-of-consciousness verbosity and audience engagement leads to moments of unpredictable, ridiculous delight, yet you don’t work for a quarter-century in any industry without picking up certain secrets of the trade. 25 years, and the veil is finally lifted; plumbers rarely carry plumbs, falconers are actually using cunning little rabbits strapped to hang gliders, and a quiet audience is not always an unhappy one.
“I think over that time you just naturally become more attuned to things like rhythm, recognising the different energy levels of an audience,” Noble says. “Sensing that they’re going to get tired any minute now, or knowing that if they’re laughing sort of low-key, it’s not because they’re not enjoying it. You need to just bring them in that little bit more. That makes it sound a little like I’m practising the dark arts there, but ultimately what it still comes down to is playing. Playing onstage and making others who are watching feel like they’re playing, too.”
With a Ross Noble gig almost guaranteed to sell out, his audiences are, well, rather large. Gone are the days of performing on street corners and warming up television audiences, though he doesn’t find the facelessness of these massive crowds off-putting in the slightest – if anything, you sense that he is buoyed by this ocean of laughter. Nor is he particularly interested in turning the tide and reconnecting with an intimate audience.
“No. In answer to your question, no,” he laughs. “Every now and again I’ll pop into something. I have mates who have comedy clubs and sometimes I’ll just turn up unannounced and get up. But I also have this TV show in the UK called Freewheeling, where I travel around on my motorbike using Twitter to see where I end up. And with that, sometimes I’ll turn up in people’s houses, or I’ll find myself giving a speech at someone’s wedding. Sometimes there might only be two or three people in a room, and while you know that you’re also performing for the camera, it can still be quite a laugh just one on one. So that kind of fulfils that urge when it’s there.”
While his greatest success remains his ever-evolving stand-up career, Noble has also branched out into film and television; in addition to the hilarious Freewheeling, there is also his celebrated appearances on the perplexingly profound quizzish show, QI. Hosted by polymath Stephen Fry, part of its appeal is watching a panel of comedians trying to develop the funniest joke until one of them explodes.
“You know, you might think that comedy is always that spur-of-the-moment thing,” Noble reflects, “that you get a bunch of comics together and it’s almost combative. But actually, it’s not. It’s still about playing. It’s the same as stepping out in front of an audience and treating it as you versus them. When QI works at its best – well, for me anyway, a lot of people might like just sitting there hearing a load of facts – is when you’re improvising together. You’ll hear something, someone else will follow the idea to some ridiculous conclusion, and then someone else again will pick the ball up and run with it in another direction. It builds and builds. One of my favourite episodes is when I was on with Professor Brian Cox. I was asking these stupid questions about space, and instead of going, ‘You’re an idiot, stop asking me about Ewoks,’ he said, ‘Well, that could happen on this planet and with these conditions.’
“If you’re only interested in the big punchline, well, sometimes you can get a massive laugh and a round of applause, but that’s it. You’ve killed it! That’s why I like that show. It allows you to make believe with others.”
Ross Noble’sTangentleman is on at Enmore TheatreFriday April 24 – Wednesday April 29.
