Viva Brighton Issue 34 December 2015

comedy
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Paul Foot
Professionally amateurish
“It’s a sort of competent incompetence, a professional
amateurishness, an organised shambolicness,”
says the cult comedian Paul Foot. On stage he’s an
excitable, bizarrely-dressed eccentric, talking about
“ludicrous things” in an “utterly childish” way.
In real life, he has a slow, measured voice and an
Oxford maths degree and lots of sensible and wellorganised
thoughts about comedy.
He says the style “still comes directly from me; it’s
not contrived in any way,” though it is a style, an
act. Sometimes punters, meeting him after a gig, are
surprised at how he’s “actually quite sensible. But I
think I have to be quite sensible, because a lot of the
comedy I do is so strange and weird, I have to have
a sensible side to anchor myself, or else I’d probably
float on, disappear into my own crazy thoughts.”
An index of Foot’s routines, on his website, includes:
‘Rushed spaceship docking’; ‘Pineapple-themed
shop’; ‘Barry Goose, apprentice undertaker’; ‘Melancholy
Beekeeper’; and ‘Shoes – shiny or scuffed’.
It’s not that he thinks serious issues can’t be funny.
Just that generally, he likes “to have those issues
just subtly make themselves apparent… I tend to
come up with surreal thoughts that are very silly and
childish, and then later realise that there was a serious
issue behind them. So I think the serious bit of
my brain just sort of works in the background.
“There’s a piece in the current series of retrospectives,
about taking revenge against a bed-andbreakfast
landlady. It’s very silly, and it’s funny all the
way through, but I suppose if one were to analyse
it, it’s about how human beings cause pain to other
humans, and how no one really understands other
humans’ pain, and how we trivialise the pain of others,
and only think about ourselves.”
His style, he says, involves making people “sort of
think you don’t know what you’re doing, in a good
way, where they deep down know that you do, and
have faith in you. And that took about 13 years to
get right.”
Foot’s act went largely unappreciated for those 13
years, and “the only reason I carried on, really, was
that I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Also, I
always felt it was one show too early to give up. I
always thought: ‘Well, I’ll do one more’.”
So he carried on doing this weird act, in clubs which
were “sometimes quite stymying, because they did
want to hear conventional comedy. I somehow
managed to remain quite unaffected really, carried
on doing what I was doing, on my own terms. Until
eventually people just came round to it.
“There were tough, hard times. I don’t really think
about them now; I can’t really remember them
much, or even relate to them. It feels like someone
else did that, a long time ago. I’m just happy doing
what I’m doing now, performing to people who’ve
come to see me and know what they’re coming to
see; it’s an absolute joy.” Steve Ramsey
Paul Foot: A Retrospective, Fri 4 – Sun 6 Dec, Brighton
Dome Studio Theatre
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