Ross Noble

When did you realise that you were funny?

That’s a really tricky question. I think you find you’re funny as a comic when you just give it a try. As a kid I spent my whole childhood being told I was a bit odd. Or that I was a bit of a dick. Then, after a period of being called a twat, people suddenly started laughing at me. I was like, ‘Oh, I see.’ I amused myself for a few years then thought, ‘I’ll see if other people are into this.’

And were they?

Yeah. I did my first gig when I was 15, and it went really well. I had a suitcase full of crap that I’d bought from charity shops and Poundland. I had a whole thing about glue-sniffing budgies and I remember talking to a carrot at one point. I had a joke about the Highway Code. I had a copy of it and, in the back, it used to say, ‘If driving while disqualified, you get six months in prison…’ and in brackets it said, ‘… or 12 months in Scotland.’ So my act used to consist of going on, pulling shit out of this case, doing this joke, then leaving.

Did it work?

Yep. I did a five-minute opening slot and, on the strength of that, I got another five-minute slot at this bigger club where it went down really well. Also, they didn’t have anyone to compere, so by the fourth gig I ended up compering! But I only had five minutes of material that I’d used up the week before!

Is that where you started improvising?

It was more a case of going on stage and being funny rather than getting hung up on an act. I thought it was much scarier to write a joke then do it again the following week, because people would just say to me, ‘Well, you did that last week, didn’t you?’

How do you decide what to talk about?

It’s usually a mixture. One idea leads to another which sparks off another idea. It’s stream of consciousness. I’m a sort of comedy liquidiser. It comes out as a hilarious mind smoothie! I just talk about whatever comes into my head.

Like monkeys?

Yeah! I went to see the latest Pirates Of The Caribbean the other day, and that’s got some of the finest monkey work ever. There were three moments in particular: the shivering monkey was genius, and they had a monkey in a tiny Chinese hat. I thought they’d missed a massive trick with that. The movie had a budget of millions. For me, the whole thing could’ve been two hours of a monkey running around in a little Chinese hat. The film could have literally been called Two Hours Of A Monkey In A Chinese Hat, and I would’ve paid good money to see it. The monkey doesn’t have to do much particularly, just be in tiny monkey clothes.

Brilliant. But what was the third thing?

Oh yeah, in the film they fire a monkey out of a cannon, and the little fella was slightly on fire as well! I’ve got an obsession with things being fired out of cannons, things bursting into flames and monkeys. I was watching that and I thought, ‘This is one of the greatest moments in movie history!’

Why the huge monkey obsession?

The main reason is that they’re tiny hairy people that have no qualms about chucking their shit around. They’re like kids but better. A monkey the same size as a tiny child can ride a miniature bike! People always go on about dolphins being great, really intelligent and that, but until an animal can ride a miniature bike, it doesn’t qualify, in my opinion. If you go to YouTube, type in ‘monkey’, then click – there’s a day gone.

Have there been any real nightmare gigs?

I did a gig in a football-crazy, beer-drinking shit-hole of a pub in Essex. They’d all come to watch the football, and the stage was halfway up the wall behind the screen. I’m stood behind this screen and the final whistle had blown, and this guy said, ‘Listen up, it’s now time for comedy!’ and the screen started to go up. It rose really slowly but he hadn’t turned the football off, and all these blokes could see was the statistics projected onto my body. The blokes were sort of taking it in but really they were trying to read the statistics off my legs.

Do stand-ups crowd-surf at their gigs?

Oh, yes. I did a charity gig recently, and Johnny Vegas was rat-arsed and decided he was going to stage-dive. Everyone thought he was joking but I knew he wasn’t. I ended up running down into the audience and saying, ‘For fuck’s sake! Can you all just stand together because he is going to do this!’ And we eventually got enough people together to lessen the impact – though he came down fairly hard on the back of a chair.

Tell us how you handle hecklers.

I sort of go with them. If they want to disrupt the show, I’ll rip the piss out of them. But if they add to the show, I’ll run with it. Once, I came out in a black shirt with red stripes and a bloke shouted, ‘Have you come as the A-Team van?’ That was a great heckle.

OK, we’re giving you the task of creating a new reality TV show… go!

There’s a programme I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a while. It’s called Vanessa Feltz Fights A Pig. It’s a half-hour show that starts off with Vanessa standing in a farmyard in a one-piece swimming costume. They release a full-size adult pig. It comes charging in and Vanessa has to pummel it until it’s unconscious. When the pig and her are both lying there with no strength left, it just fades to black. And then Friends comes on.

That’s genius! You could make it a series!

Describe the idea to a couple of mates in the pub, and it turns people into TV producers – ‘She could do a different animal each week!’, ‘She could have a weapon!’, ‘You could get a selection of celebrities!’ I can see it replacing talk about the weather. In the future, people will turn to each other in lifts or at funerals or during uncomfortable silences and go, ‘So, er, what do you reckon to Vanessa and the pig then?’ It’ll bring communities together.

Ross is back in the UK with his new show, Nobleism, from 2 September. For tour dates and info see www.rossnoble.co.uk