‘Tell us about the Eskimos’
Ross Noble has just been voted one of the Greatest Comedy Stand-ups of all time. Jo Shelley catches up with him on his Nobleism tour for a bit of Geordie banter.
“It’s just like… like, I can’t even describe how… it’s that thing of, like…” And with one, simple question, Ross Noble – who’s just spent two and a half hours on stage taking the piss out of a theatre full of delighted Yorkshire locals – is tongue-tied.
I’ve asked the comic what it is that he loves about touring. It can’t be the money; these days TV work is far more lucrative. Yet he’s spent more of the last ten years on the road than off it, and pops up on our tellies only once a year, for an obligatory appearance on Have I Got News For You. The answer, it turns out, is rather sweet.
“You know how, if you’re in the street, and somebody smiles at you – how that lifts your day? Well imagine that, concentrated. For a couple of hours you just see hundreds of smiling faces, and it’s just…” He falters again, his mouth opening and closing so that, with his naturally wide-eyed expression, he looks a bit like a goldfish as he tries to find the words to complete his sentence. Finally, the Geordie concludes with typically northern directness: “What a great way to live your life.”
To tour or not to tour is not a decision that most successful comedians have the luxury of making. Shackled to a TV audience that finds them funny enough to watch from the sofa but possibly not to spend twenty-odd quid on seeing them live, they stick with panel games and a sketch show or a series, if they’re lucky. Noble, however, is in the enviable position of being able to make the occasional TV programme here and there, and still attract sell-out audiences to his live shows.
Like his hero, Billy Connolly, he has a reputation for being much funnier in front of a theatre audience. Anyone familiar with his stand-up routines will know that finding the right words is rarely a problem Noble comes across because, in the years that have passed since he first took the microphone at his local comedy club aged 15, he’s developed a baffling ability to improvise. In fact, ‘routine’ seems the wrong word to use for a comedian who can walk onstage, see – as he did at his York show two weeks ago – the hand of an elderly woman in the front row brush against her husband’s crotch, and then riff for twenty minutes on the sexual problems faced by the over-50s and, if we’re going to go into specifics, how to cure erectile dysfunction. (His answer? “Helium injections.”)
I meet Noble after his gig in York, which is one of 36 stops he’s making up and down the country on his much-awaited Nobleism tour. Backstage, things are unexpectedly quiet considering that he’s the biggest celebrity to come to the city in recent months. Only the man himself and a few of his “crew” – who are removing a large, inflatable replica of his head from the auditorium - remain. He seems exhausted, but is incredibly polite, offering up first his chair and then the pick of a bright bouquet of Haribo sweets as he packs away the last of his things. A DVD with three semi-naked women on the front is hastily tucked into his backpack. I raise an eyebrow; he laughs and jokes: “That’s a Dixie Chicks documentary by the way, in case you thought, ‘Oooh, he’s got a stash of porn.’”
“When I was in a terrifying brothel in Amsterdam, I didn’t think, ‘oh yeah, I’ll talk about that onstage in the future”
Off-the-cuff banter like this – quick, perceptive but not, he assures me, mocking – is, I think, trademark Noble. Watching him, you often have the unsettling sense that any pre-prepared wit is being impulsively thrown to the wind in favour of what seems to be his favourite pastime: spotting the gag-potential in faces that stare up at him onstage. Intrigued by this, I ask how much of the night’s show was ‘something he’d written earlier’. He looks almost insulted. “It’s not like I’ve sat down and I’ve gone, ‘right, I’ll write it down, these are my jokes,” he says. “I like going off on a bit of a tangent and then… well, just sort of seeing where it’ll go. Like, the danger is that you go, ‘right, this is the show,’ and then there’s no room for it to expand, and flow, and just kind of evolve, you know?”
Tonight, I’m told, just three or four jokes were thought of beforehand. It’s unsurprising information, given that, aside from helium-filled penises, most of the first half revolved around his latest visit to York: the infamous sword shop (“brilliant”), the Jorvik Viking Centre (“shit”) and the cab drivers (“fucking nuts”). As Noble’s own saying goes, ‘If it’s in the head, it comes out the mouth.’ “A few years ago,” he reflects, “when I was in a terrifying underground brothel in Amsterdam, I didn’t think, ‘oh, yeah, I’ll talk about that at some point in the future.’” Yet tonight the incident popped into his head and soon an innocent, but messy encounter with a stout, middle-aged Dutch prostitute was shared with an auditorium full of strangers. Soon, no doubt, it’ll make it onto YouTube.
As it happens, Noble is one performing artist who’s embracing the virtual world with open arms. He not only has an official internet site (www.rossnoble.co.uk), but is signed up to both MySpace and YouTube, where he sporadically posts clips from his gigs. Perhaps because of the uniqueness of each of his performances, the internet revolution doesn’t seem to have cheated the comedian out of ticket sales. In fact, more noticeable is the growing gaggle of fans who appear at not one but a number of his shows up and down the country. Here in York, when one group cried out in unison, “Ross, tell us about the Eskimos!” the rest of the audience looked perplexed. “That was pretty much the whole show in Birmingham,” he explains.
It seems to be a mark of pride with Noble that on his tour, muffin humour aside (he’s known to like finding faces in them), the same joke never gets told twice: “What some comics do is they’ll have their thing and then they’ll just milk it, but I refuse to go back.” It’s not surprising, therefore, that he admits to forgetting many of the stories he’s told as the shows behind him begin to blur into one. The constant flow of creative energy required onstage – dreaming something up on the spur of the moment, acting it out and half-teasing the audience for finding it funny – seems to have led to him suffering from some kind of performance amnesia. When the Brummies piped up, he too was puzzled. “Here, it’s like, I can’t even remember it,” he says.
Once, Noble recalls catching himself on TV in New Zealand doing a gag about cherubs (“my basic theory on cherubs is that you never trust anyone who plays trumpet in the nude”). “Even though it was me, I could remember about five per cent of it – it was this sort of hazy kind of memory,” he says. “I was pissing myself laughing… It was like watching someone else.”
To be fair to Noble – who, judging by his rapturous reception in York, will be egged on to return to the helium, the prostitute and the budgerigars (‘why’, I’m now asking myself, ‘do they need ladders?’) at some point in the future – he’s never going to be able to remember everything. In fact, I realise, given the pace with which he’s still pounding around the international comedy circuit after ten-odd years, he’d be lucky to retain a fraction of it.
It’s easy to forget myself, sitting opposite him, just how celebrated a stand-up comic Noble is. In all honesty, now that his trademark dark, messy tresses have disappeared underneath a brown baker boy hat, the man originally from Cramlington, Northumberland isn’t someone you’d necessarily recognise if he passed you on the street. But, log onto the Channel 4 website and you’ll see his name there, voted in at number ten in the broadcaster’s list of the 100 Greatest Comedy Stand-ups – behind the likes of Connolly, Bailey and Kay, but in front of Dee, Gervais and Carr. You see, while they rule the telly waves and The Office funnyman has pipped him to ‘cracking America’, it is Noble’s career that is reaching more adventurous, if less glamorous, highs. His comic travelogues for Radio 4 (yes, 4) are a case in point. Despite linguistic, cultural and social differences, whenever Ross Noble Goes Global he has audiences laughing from Egypt down to Cape Town; from Eastern Europe all the way across to China.
As his experiences in Amsterdam suggest, all this time spent on more distant roads also has the potential to offer up more new material for Noble to use in his performances. On his recent tour of Australia then, I ask, were there any episodes which could rival the brothel gem?
“I did the whole thing on my motorbike,” he begins. “I did this 26,000-kilometre road trip right around Australia, just doing a gig every night. And while we were doing that, yeah, there was some fairly mad stuff that happened. One night I met a guy who had a Harley Davidson hearse.” I look confused. “Like a motorbike and sidecar, you know? With a bit for a coffin? So in this outback town, right in the middle of nowhere, basically I jumped into the bit where the body’s supposed to go and we just went driving round this graveyard.” He grins, remembering the scene. “That was pretty cool.”
The boy, it seems, is into his toys; and particularly the fast, two-wheeled kind, suggesting that in life, as on stage, he prefers getting kicks to getting comfy. The hearse anecdote is soon followed by one about a confrontation with “one of the most poisonous snakes in the world” whilst filming Down Under in Darwin. Nothing came of it, of course, but the idea still makes a female member of his crew, wheeling the wardrobe rail out from his dressing room, shudder. Her reaction soon gets Noble thinking.
“You know, snakes and spiders, and just all of that stuff – it doesn’t bother me. Because I just hate the way how, nowadays, in modern life in general, you can’t have a puddle of water on the floor without somebody putting a ridiculous, yellow thing over it with, ‘Don’t Slip On This’ written on it. You know, people suing coffee shops for burning their mouth…” He trails off, evidently disgusted. “But not only that, but like, some people try to sue McDonald’s for making them fat. It’s like, if you’re doing something because a clown told you to do it, then you’re a fuckwit, you’re a fuckwit who deserves to get fat! It’s retarded. It’s absolutely retarded.
“Now I’m ranting, but that’s the way I feel. Because I’m into my motorbikes and stuff, and you know when people go,” – he puts on his best whiny voice – “‘Ooh, they’re very dangerous.’ And you go, ‘Yes, they are. Good.’ It’s like…” There’s a sigh of exasperation. “If you spend your whole life trying to protect yourself…”
Suddenly, mid-monologue, what started out as a rant about snakes, coffee and motorbikes, touches on reality TV contests and bizarrely acquires a more severe tone. Noble’s carefree philosophy on living life, it appears, is wound up with a serious philosophy on the pursuit of one’s dreams and life ambitions.
“The natural state of the human mind is not to live in a perpetual state of bliss… All these people on the bloody X-Factor and all that, they’re there just going, ‘This was my dream and I can’t believe it’s over.’ No it’s not! If you really wanted to do it, you would crawl across broken glass, you know? Like, I’ve got the respect for those guys who are singing in pubs, where people are chucking shit at them. Even if they’re not very good, they’re still doing it. They’re still going out there and, fair enough, they might not be selling out arenas or whatever, or performing in nice venues and stuff, but they’re still going out there and doing it because they love it. I think people who sort of, who avoid things because of, you know, ‘What if this happens, what if that happens’… That’s just life, isn’t it? It’s just like yeah, okay…”
He doesn’t finish his sentence, but what Noble essentially seems to be saying is: “get over it”. Things might be rosy for the boy from Northumberland now, but he remembers well the trials of performing on the pub-club circuit. Audiences weren’t always as receptive to his daft, chit-chat style, or as willing – or even conscious enough – to be the subjects of a little ribbing.
“I can never wait to get to work. Imagine turning up to the office, walking in, and a thousand people just cheer”
“I used to do quite a lot of fairly rough kind of nightclub gigs,” he says. “Everyone was dancing and pissed, and then they’d just turn off the music and go, ‘Right, here’s your comic.’ I think the worst gig I ever did was in a sports centre in Manchester; it’s the only one where I’ve ever turned up and just gone, ‘absolutely no, no way.’ It was a giant rave, basically, and there was probably about a thousand, two thousand people there. I was in the chillout room and there were people unconscious, just lying there, just fucked. And I just went, ‘er, no thanks.”
Things are very different now. In an analogy typical of a man who likes to burn rubber, Noble describes doing stand-up comedy as being “a bit like driving a car.” If this holds true, he’s upped several gears since his days on the rave circuit and is currently cruising. These days, people come to shows ready and willing for him to make them laugh, which makes striding onstage, he says, an entirely unnerve-racking experience. “Imagine getting up every morning and just going, ‘I can’t wait, I can’t wait to get to work’. That’s what it’s like. It’s never, never work, it’s never a chore. Imagine turning up to your office, and you walk in, and everyone, a thousand people, just cheer. Imagine that, just turning up at the office.” He’s animated now, and he sits up, raises both arms and roars like a football fan. “‘Yeeeeeeeeeeeaaahh!’ And then everyone just sits there, you know? And you get to make people laugh.”
Someone pops their head around the door of his dressing room; there are a crowd of fans waiting for him outside. Maybe they’re looking for an autograph, but chances are they’re hoping for just a few more laughs and a bit more banter before the night’s over. Either way, he’s up and off. The bets are on that they’ll be going home smiling.
