Why stick with the standard spelling for days of the week? Why describe yourself as surreal when you’re just doing what comes naturally? Why not become a person in a boilersuit? Emma Clegg meets standup Paul Foot, who has a talent for not being conventional.
Comedian Paul Foot was once described as “Like a cult classic, a relic from the past, a rare exotic bird” [Daily Mail]. Having done my research, and then spoken to him, I can only agree.
Take his website. Instead of using sound digital marketing principles, he has created his own zany, eccentric world. After encountering a ‘Welcome to my websyte baybayyyyy’, we discover he has a glamorous yet dangerously ‘lob-sided’ secretary Jemima Shazaaaar who is half woman and half lobster; a list of secret shows only available to The Guild of Paul Foot Connoisseurs; and that the days of the week in this alternative world are Moonday, Tunesday, Wrensday, Thirsty, Flyday, Saturnday and Sundae.
Paul explains, “I tried to make the days and months as appropriate as possible, but also not too confusing. Flyday is the sort of day when you might fly somewhere or travel. Sundae is a day when you might relax and have a sundae, a more decadent day. Tunesday is a day when you might listen to music to get you through the week. You do start to get thirsty on Thirsty and maybe start to think about the weekend when you can have a wine. And similarly with the months – Decadence is a decadent month before Christmas and March I call Marsh because it’s one of those months that goes on and on and you feel like you are never going to get through it.”
Paul, who studied mathematics at Merton College, Oxford, first started performing during his time there and then took on open mic slots after graduating. Now he frequently performs live and since 2003 he has done 16 tours, often starting at the Edinburgh Fringe, then touring Britain and moving to Australia after Christmas for the Australian festival circuit. He has won a collection of awards over the years, at the beginning of his career the BBC New Stand-up Award in 1997 and most recently his latest show Dissolve – which is heading to The Rondo in Bath this month – won jointly for best show in the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards.
“When I started, I was doing what was regarded as very weird comedy. There were just a handful of other people doing that, and no one wanted it – it was a totally different industry then, based around the comedy clubs who wanted much more conventional comedy”, Paul explains.
“Sometimes I’d do a slot at a comedy club and it would go great and people would say ‘oh this is the future of comedy’, and sometimes it would be terrible and they’d all say they didn’t like it and people would shout at me, and they would send someone else on to rescue the evening. So those were hard times. But then I went from being the sort of act that no one wanted, where I was having to ring up comedy clubs begging them to put me on, to suddenly everyone wanting me. I just carried on doing the same thing and the industry changed around me.
“There is much less of that club scene now and there are interesting cabaret nights and more theatre touring. When I started in 1996 I always dreamed of being a great success on the club circuit. I became a great success on the club circuit eventually, after 13 years, but by then I was moving on to other things so I became a big success for three months before retiring.”
Paul is known for his ‘flights of fancy’ on stage where he rants around subjects such as how often you see carthorses nowadays, Viagara and rhino horn, early morning fascists, and the meaningless language on dating sites. His comedic style has been described as surrealist. “I am at heart a surrealist, but really I just come up with stupid ideas. When I started as a comedian I never planned it to be surreal or groundbreaking – I just did the sort of comedy that seemed the most obvious to me and then other people called it surreal. That was just my style. Sometimes I read reviews that people have written about me saying Paul Foot is this sort of comedian, and I think ‘Am I?’ I don’t really notice. I’m just doing it. I just sort of became it really.”
His Dissolve show signals a new direction. “I’ve never done a show like this before”, says Paul. “It’s autobiographical to some extent and it’s personal. It’s really about my journey from being very unwell because of my mental health towards complete wellness. I talk about the depression I felt. Obviously I’m a comedian so I make it funny. I also talk about silly things like Tutankhamun and what Jesus might have achieved if he’d been a plumber. So people laugh but they also sometimes get quite emotional. It’s also a show that I have to really concentrate on, because there are bits when I’m being all funny to then quite poignant bits and then I go suddenly into funny bits again all unexpectedly. The audience never know when the twist is going to happen and there’s a change to the mood. It took a while to get that right.”
Paul’s edgy haircut and sartorial look fits with his persona, and this was something that evolved. “At one stage my manager said they were going to get me a stylist and my brief was eccentric English lord. So I had lots of cravats and ties and checked trousers. It was interesting because I wore all that stuff on stage and I enjoyed wearing it and then I’d have a meeting with a TV company and I’d think, ‘well I should wear my work clothes for that’. And then I’d get used to wearing the work clothes and then I’d wear work clothes all the time. And in a strange way I had became the person who wears those clothes. Since then there have been a few changes of style, the spaced, casual look or the futuristic retro look with leather jackets. And more recently for Dissolve I’ve been wearing these boilersuits. Then I started wearing them in my normal life – and now I have become the person in the boilersuit.”
I ask Paul the classic question about who are his comedy heroes. He mentions Frankie Howerd and Tommy Cooper, but admits that his real heroes are classical composers. “They are the people who inspire me. I get up in the morning and I think of people like Berlioz. I would like to be even just a tiny bit as brilliant as him. And I love the madness of some of those composers, their crazy lives. Sibelius was brilliant but absolutely mad, and I love the fact that he took no notice of what anyone else said about his work – he just did his own thing. I was asked once who influenced your latest show and I just said ‘Brahms’.”
Paul is no stranger to Bath. “I do know Bath quite well and I have been there many times over the years because I’m a stand-up and we all travel everywhere. I also know it quite well because it appears in lots of films and on TV. It’s the equivalent of Baden Baden in Germany. Of course they really go for it there, with the name Baden Baden. This is really what Bath should be called, Bath Bath.”
Paul Foot is at The Rondo in Bath Bath on Flyday 22 and Saturnday 23 Novella; rondotheatre.co.uk; paulfoot.tv