James Acaster asserts to Mock The Week’s studio audience that he knows “shit loads about bread” and that, to him “the origin of prawn toast still remains a mystery”. Lucky really, that Dara Ó Briain landed Acaster with the topic of ‘food’, he’s something of a culinary comedian – the first thing that appears when you type him into YouTube is “James Acaster cheesegrater”. Fortunate too, that his most recent Mock The Week appearance aired the night before I was due to interview him. Perfect ice-breaking material, that.
Not that much ice needed breaking – the man likes Exeter. The Kettering-born comic visits the city for the fourth time next month and brings with him a full range of jury duty anecdotes, Christingle quips and riotous rants. After winning the Chortle Breakthrough award with Recognise last year, Acaster’s new show Represent entertained thousands, including the heroic Emma Thompson, at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “Yeah, that was weird”, Acaster admits of Thompson’s approval, “very surreal”.
Serial Edinburgh award nominee and television panel regular, Acaster is living the dream whilst maintaining an impressive grip on reality. With a distinctively deadpan style, his work is observational comedy at its most accurate and hilarious. Agreeing with Wikipedia’s description of his humour as ‘low-key whimsy’, he talks of how it took him a while to master his style. “My first six months of stand-up was really hit and miss”, he says, “I probably didn’t really get my voice until my first Edinburgh show. That was 2011, so I’d been doing it for about two and a half years at that point.”
Initially Acaster drummed as his day-job, only doing comedy to “fill the time”. It wasn’t until he’d told jokes for nearly two years that he decided to pursue it professionally.
“I look back at [my music career] very nostalgically but at the time I was just thinking about the future all the time and didn’t really enjoy doing what we were doing. Even now I don’t really know where I want my life to go.”
Acaster might not have foreseen his comic success but he is certainly not guilty of under-thinking his sets. He talks of the importance of “telling the joke best”, whether it’s a personal anecdote, some audience participation or a dance break, it must have method behind its madness. With a conscious mind-set to not over-use expletives or drum onstage just for the hell of it, I wonder where he found his comic clarity. “You learn to have a filter”, he explains, “you don’t try and make everything in your life funny because if do that you ruin your whole life.”
Supporting Milton Jones and Josie Long on back-to-back tours, the 30-year-old thanks them for the performer he’s become today. “Josie’s audience pushed me to try and experiment more and do inventive stuff. Milton’s audience pushed me to tighten it all up and write jokes over the top of that. I think that’s definitely who I am now, a mixture of those two things.”
It’s true; a tight originality is definitely at play in his latest show. His telling of the lesser-known fable of ‘The Goose and the Sloth’ is a moment of brilliant comic ingenuity. The standout moment from the set is when he runs with this morality tale for a good ten minutes when analysing Lucas – an especially vomit-inducing “adult bully” who happens to accompany Acaster on jury duty. It is this “mean-spirited figure” that annoys him the most, he admits, “I hate professional arguers, people who’ve learnt how to argue but not how to actually be right. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone will start an argument with someone, get them really annoyed so that they retaliate, and then will look at them and go ‘well you’ve shown your true colours’. I hate it so much.”
He holds an equally high level of contempt for shows like The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent: “It’s people going ‘let’s all be bullies but pretend that we care about people if they’re good at something’.” Comedians are partly employed to rant about life’s little annoyances, but Acaster’s misanthropy is nuanced enough to not become irritating in itself.
The morality of the man continues to impress me as we turn to the topic of Dara Ó Briain’s head. In his numerous appearances on Mock the Week, has he ever touched it, I ask? Acaster replies with a moving display of protectiveness: “No Sarah, I think it’s very offensive to go around touching bald people’s heads. I don’t think they would thank you for such things.”
“you don’t try and make everything in your life funny because if do that you ruin your whole life.”
Acaster may well be missing out on a bucket list moment there, but he’s not falling short of ticking a few others off. As well as touring Represent around theatres nationwide – “the most fun part of the job” – he is due to appear on QI and Live At The Apollo this year. He’s also nabbed a cameo in Josh Widdecombe’s new sitcom and will then head to New Zealand’s International Comedy Festival to try out material ahead of Edinburgh next year. That unplanned career of his seems to be going all right? “Yeah”, he grunts modestly, “it’s fun”.
Catch James Acaster’s Represent tour at Exeter Phoenix on 1st November.
