You've seen British comedian Bill Bailey, haven't you? He played deranged bookshop dogsbody, Manny Bianco, in splendid TV sitcom Black Books.
Funny looking geezer. Extremely bad facial hair. A limp goatee hangs from his pasty chin and a monk's fringe of straggly locks hangs from the back of his otherwise bald head like a hair curtain.
He's not tall, either, and thus quite accurately refers to himself as "part troll".
If you can picture the man I'm talking about, you can perhaps imagine my distress when Bailey picks up the phone and informs me he's in the bath. You know, naked. In all his hairy glory. I am not paid enough to have to cope with mental images like this.
"Nah, mate" he says. "I didn't say 'in the bath'. I said I was "angin' about'. You know, doing nothing, waiting for your call. But I share your distaste for phone calls where the other person is in a compromised position.
"I hate it when I phone someone, talk to them for a while, and then there's a flushing sound. That's just wrong. Worse still, I phone them and in the background I can hear the sound of a small domestic animal slowly being slaughtered."
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the alarming and wondrous world of Bill Bailey, the man British TV network Channel Four recently proclaimed "the seventh-greatest stand-up comedian of all time".
Born 44 years ago in the fair city of Bath in England's West Country, Bailey lives in London with his wife and four-year-old son, Dax. After putting a succession of mind-numbing day jobs behind him, he has been a professional mirth merchant for 20-odd years.
BORN FOR COMEDY
If ever a man was born for this job, it is Bailey. It might be the sight of him that gets the first laugh, but then he opens his mouth and out flows some of the most original and peculiar stand-up comedy you will ever hear.
He's bringing his new Tinselworm show here in a few months, and those lucky enough to snag a ticket can expect an inspired mix of surrealism, mimicry, philosophical monologue and musical theatre.
He is a relentlessly post-modern funny-man one of Bailey's trademarks is deconstructing traditional gags, getting his laughs by messing with the structural conventions of the joke rather than by supplying the usual kind of punchline.
He has endless variations on the "lightbulb" joke ("How many amoebas does it take to change a lightbulb? One, no two! No, four! No, eight ... ") and barely lets a show go by without coughing up several new versions of the old "three blokes walk into a pub" chestnut.
But the thing that seems to tickle his fan-base the most is when Bailey uses the the format of a geriatric joke as a springboard for a truly ridiculous rant, as in this little snippet from his Bewilderness live DVD: "Three blokes go into a pub. Well, I say three; could be four or five. Could be nine or 10, doesn't matter.
"Could have been 15, 20, 50. Round it up 100. Let's go mad, eh 240. Tell you what, double it up 500. Thousand! Two thousand! Small town in Hertfordshire goes into a pub! Fifteen thousand blokes! All right, let's go population of Rotterdam. The Hague. Whole of Northern Holland and Mainland UK.
"Let's go all the way to the top Europe, all right? Whole of Europe goes I say Europe, but why not go bigger still. All right, continents North America! Plus South America! Plus Antarctica, though that's just eight blokes in a weather station. Not a good example. All right, make it a lot simpler, all the blokes on the planet go into the pub, right? And the first bloke goes up to the bar and he says "I'll get these".
Pause. "What an idiot."
So, what is it that excites Bailey about overhauling traditional jokes?
"I mostly do it to tip my hat to the history of comedy culture that's gone before, but to put my own spin on it," he says. "We have an oral culture, and just like songs or poetry or even advertising catch-phrases, the best jokes get handed down from one generation to the next.
"They have their own life and often exceed the life of their creator. I like to use some of those old jokes as a starting point for elaborate tangential flights of fancy, but it always bugs me when people say, `Oh, he's so trippy and weird and nonsensical and druggy' because really, I'm not. What I do is all about the application of the imagination to everyday things, putting them through my own filter while trying not to underestimate my audience."
OUTSIDE COMEDY
Besides his comedy career, Bailey hosts a lot of TV series, from game shows to wildlife docos, and is also a talented actor, appearing on stage alongside Vanessa Redgrave and in movies such as Hot Fuzz.
He also plays every musical instrument under the sun. He tells me he has done time as a lounge pianist and crematorium organist, and played in everything from classical ensembles and jazz trios to punk and "krautrock" bands.
Somewhere along the way, Bailey discovered a gift for fusing music with jokes and theatre, and spent the latter half of the 80s touring as one half of comedy musical duo, the Rubber Bishops.
Years of slogging around the circuit doing stand-up shows followed, until he was approached by his good friend and fellow stand-up Dylan Moran in 1999 to co-star in Black Books.
The show made him a household name in the UK and Bailey's stand-up career has taken off, to the extent that Tinselworm sold out three consecutive nights at MEN Arena in Manchester, the largest indoor stadium in Europe.
"The thing I love most about stand-up is its hidden depths," he says. "Providing some sort of commentary on contemporary life is the aim of any stand-up who aspires to deliver anything more than jokes. If you're making people laugh, they're also more receptive to a few more profound ideas or elegant deconstructions of modern society."
MAKING PEOPLE LAUGH
In Bailey's view, the best comedy is ultimately a sneaky way of telling the truth. As an example, he points to one of his famous monologues that kicks off with the line "I'm English and, as such, I crave disappointment".
"Now, people laugh themselves silly over that, but it's absolutely true. Growing up in England in the 70s as I did, there was never really a culture of enjoyment. To eat decent grub, or enjoy a nice glass of wine, or go somewhere warm and interesting abroad, these things were all seen as ludicrously indulgent. We English were conditioned for a life just short of pleasure, but at least we were allowed to have a sense of humour."
Bailey is intrigued to hear that one of the guiding principles of my own life is to never trust a person who doesn't like music or has no sense of humour.
"But a sense of humour is a very complex thing, isn't it? It's not just about making people laugh. A big part of having a sense of humour is being acutely aware of yourself, or of the inherent absurdity of social situations. To be honest, I know several comics who have no perceptible sense of humour.
"They can write jokes, and they can get up on stage and deliver those jokes and get laughs, but if you take the piss out of them they just look blankly at you and say, `What do you mean?'. Humour isn't part of how they engage with the world; it's just their job. They tell jokes, someone hands them a cheque, they pay their mortgage that's it."
On the flipside, says Bailey, you go some places and everyone's funny, because their culture encourages that.
"When I play in Dublin, I get the feeling that everyone would have a great old time, entertaining each other, whether I'd turned up or not. New Zealand is much the same. When I was there a few years ago, I was struck how unusually perceptive and intelligent the audience was.
"I was also struck by the food, the fresh air and the greenery. The place felt sheltered from the worst excesses of the wider world, though I daresay New Zealand society has similar sorts of problems to every other modern civilisation."
Indeed, it does. Wherever you live, the world seems to be becoming a far more serious sort of place. If you didn't laugh, sometimes, you would most certainly cry. I wonder how it feels to be a comic when there's so much pain and sadness in the world. Is it hard to be funny in difficult and desperate times?
"Perhaps it is, but it's more necessary as well. People badly need a laugh when things are going tits up. Everyone's walking around in a state of permanent pre-apocalyptic tension, worrying about nuclear war, floods, pestilence, disease, environmental destruction and so on.
"There aren't the same certainties many of us grew up with, so everyone's stressed to the gills. At times like that, a few laughs can be very useful indeed."
*Bill Bailey plays Auckland's ASB Theatre on August 31, Christchurch's Town Hall on September 3 and Wellington's St James Theatre on September 4.
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