Stand up comedian, Frankie Boyle, star of comedy panel shows such as Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You, and 8 out of 10 Cats talks to Arts Hub’s resident budding comic Sam Stone at the side of a busy roundabout about grief sex, fatherhood and writing jokes.
“I Reckon I Could Kill a Labrador” is the unsentimental title of the email that Frankie Boyle sends out inviting me to attend his new material night at Islington’s Hen and Chickens theatre. I enjoy the show despite having to stare at the floor. Boyle had asked me not to sit near the front because he would find it “distracting” to get eye contact from someone he knew while delivering a punchline. As a new act comic I find this admission of nervousness from such an accomplished entertainer comforting and disturbing in equal measure. Unfortunately, when I arrive there is only one seat left… second row from the front, hence the staring at the floor.
Our conversation took place after the show on January 21st, a date which has become known as “Blue Monday” because some statisticians have calculated it to be the most depressing day of the year. It is not a day for killing Labradors… it’s a day for killing yourself.
“I tell you what is depressing,” says Frankie, surprisingly softly spoken and wearing a woolly hat that renders him almost unrecognisable, “nominal determinism… that’s depressing.”
Nominal determinism is the notion that your destiny is linked to your name, or the sound of your name. “Payne” for a doctor for example or “Tinkle” for a piano teacher. As Frankie is a “Boyle”, this could be interesting but we don’t get the chance to pursue it… as we sit outside Weatherspoons on Highbury roundabout, a very loud roadsweeper passes and the moment is lost as we wait for the noise to diminish, leaving me to ponder the possibility that the machine is operated by a Mr Annoying Bastard.
Pointing out that he has a great name I ask if he has any interesting anagrams for it. I had promised I would not ask the “same old, same old” questions that he must have heard and I reckon he cannot have been asked that before. His reply is typically dismissive, “I cannot think of anything more boring. All the porn in the world would have to dry up and then perhaps my legs fall off and I might get around to working that out.”
I laugh because he’s funny. He laughs too, an almost girlish trill of a laugh that rises at the end. Few comedians are as funny in conversation as they are on stage but Boyle is an exception and I am overwhelmed by self-consciousness at how uncomfortable it will be to listen to my own garrulous laughter when I transcribe the taped interview. I begin scribbling the letters of his name on a sheet of paper whilst declaring my intention to complete an anagram by the end of the conversation. Boyle might think I’m square but anything has to be better than being the goofy idiot who laughs at everything he says.
The gig itself was intimate and full of fans delighted to be involved in the process of helping Boyle develop new material in a safe environment. There’s a lot of polite laughter. I’m not suggesting that the jokes weren’t worthy of laughter, but I wonder if having such a supportive gathering of fans is going to provide a realistic verdict for the new jokes. Other than myself, there were no journalists to write critical reviews of material that didn‘t quite cut it. Like the rape joke.
Shock-jock comics all over the country commonly perform jokes about rape and similar controversial topics in the hope that breaking taboos will get them noticed. But as they invariably fail to provide sufficient comedic purpose for the inclusion of such material, the only response they get is the embarrassed laughter of audiences keen to prove their understanding that everything is fair game these days.
Boyle is in a class of his own, however, when it comes to that kind of joke though and often unleashes stuff that would have other comics booed off the stage. He readily admits that one of his rape jokes did not work tonight and that he’ll have to ditch it. Wanting to offer a more hopeful view, I put it to him that occasionally material doesn’t work because structurally there needs to be something that cushions the blow and that he should not necessarily write it off entirely.
“To be honest,” he says, “I have such a high turnaround of jokes that if I’m doing a new one-hour show every year, that’s 120 new jokes. I could go ‘I need a lighter way into the rape stuff here’ and I could purposefully do that, but most of my jokes are a by-product of topical material from TV shows. So there’s no time for structure. It’s a collection of gags. You try to sort them as best you can.”
Some comedians don’t like to talk about the ‘process of comedy’ but Boyle is generous enough to tell me how he writes his material. “If I’m touring, I’m often I’m in the car for five hours and I can’t work while I’m driving, so it can be frustrating but I’ll take stuff I’ve pre-prepared. I’ve got a notebook for different stages of ideas,”
He pulls a slightly dog-eared notebook from his bag and thumbs through it as he talks. “There’s a notebook that I’ll write ideas down in and they will eventually get upgraded to a ‘potentials’ notebook. I’ll take ‘potentials’ on the road with me and think about them and try to put three or four potential jokes a night into a tour show. Some of the tour shows have twelve hundred people in the audience so it’s hard to force yourself to do those new bits.” Very brave indeed I would say. No wonder a small gathering of friendly Islington folk holds so much appeal.
I first met Boyle backstage at one of my own gigs at The Stand in Edinburgh. Recalling what it was like walking down the street with him as strangers stopped to shake his hand and pat him on the back, I wonder if being a recognisable figure has influenced the nature of the material he writes? “Sort of… there needs to be ‘something else’ though. I think audiences want a mixture. If I was just doing material about Tony Blair or Gordon Brown for an hour the audience would go nuts.”
At the side of the busy roundabout there is a lot of noise, it’s late and he probably wants to go home. Boyle is still and upright in his woolly hat and I am continuously shuffling about to find a good place to rest the dictaphone or scribble anagrams. He has granted me this interview because beneath that seemingly cynical Glaswegian exterior – that hails from an almost clichéd background of poverty and alcoholism, he is a warm and deceptively optimistic person. If you don’t get that about him, then you’ll be offended by his rape joke. And his wife beating joke. Oh… and his paedophile joke.
It would be too easy to forget how well informed and politically sensitive he is if you just focussed on the fact that much of what he does challenges through its apparent tastelessness. But he is a man of superior intelligence who wipes the floor with other comics with classy topical writing and delivery to match. During the Iraq war which he was strongly opposed to, he tells me that he believes he once had the plug intentionally pulled from his microphone during the ‘Live Floor Show’ from where he was summarily sacked. I asked him why.
“Because they were fucking idiots.”
Before Boyle turned to comedy, he worked in a mental asylum. The work and, consequently, his life, comprised two days on and three days off. He used the lengthy spells away from work to get plastered: “it was fucking amazing… I got to see how an Asylum runs. It was a very good experience. I had no qualifications so I couldn’t have got promoted. I would probably still be there if I wasn’t doing comedy.”
He gave up drinking ten years ago. He became a different person to the one his wife had met and that took its toll on their marriage. They hardly had any money and once he had taken drink out of the equation, “things just stopped being fun. Nobody can drink that much without getting fucked up… I never got to the wetting-the-bed stage but I was definitely an alcoholic. There’s a lot of undiagnosed alcoholics in Britain who drink at that level. There seems to be this almost Viking idiom of drinking, war, sex… it’s weird.”
He shifts easily between the sharp one-liners and matter-of-fact coarseness to the more quietly philosophical observations. When he remarks on his interaction with one of tonight’s audience who had revealed their very low self esteem, he is surprisingly tender, “I must remember to be more positive with people like that.” I suggest this wouldn’t suit him. He agrees, “Yeah it’d be fucking terrible.”
Boyle recently became a father for the second time and I ask him how it feels to bring new life into a dying world. He is unperturbed by my flippancy. “At least with each species that dies out, there will be less to teach your children”. He mimes a child pointing, “What’s that Daddy?” He shrugs, “Probably a dog, son”. “The world is dying”, he says, “People are in denial.” I tell him that I find it curious that people are willing to admit this but remain happy to continue having children.
“Why wouldn’t you?” he insists, “ My kids will be ok. Their kids won’t be, but mine’ll be ok. I think my kids’ll live a kind of Mad Max lifestyle. We’re definitely supposed to have kids – we’re equipped to have them. Why wouldn’t you have kids?”
He is asking me this question directly. I simply hold his gaze and remind him that I’m the one asking the questions. I recall a joke from the end of his show about “grief sex” and mention that he’s coined a brilliant phrase. He corrects me… the phrase already exists. “I always make sure I throw in a bit of material that I really love right at the end of a show.” He repeats the line, not even a joke yet: ” ‘There must be some people who are in it just for the grief sex’. ‘ There’s something funny about that, but I don’t think there’s anywhere to go with it.’ I disagree, I think there is. He pauses for thought, then adds “The grief sex is probably what the police go into the job for.”
Boyle continues, “women do become very aroused around death. They’ve got this thing about creating life to balance it out.”
Sex and death, I suggest.
“It’s not about sex and death. It’s about sex and life. We’re fucking to create life but we forget that because a lot of the time we’re not! That can be the title of this piece if you like – Frankie Boyle: Fucking to create life.”
I suggest it should be the title for his new Edinburgh show. Boyle smiles broadly. “I was thinking about a title for that and was considering, ‘I Would Quite Happily Punch Every One Of You In The Face.’”
But he swiftly returns to his more serious point, “we are fucking to create life. That’s what we are doing. We are procreating. We’re educated out of it because of the whole fucking love thing. It’s very hard to have kids and not love ’em. The forces that rule the planet want us to atomise and like to keep us working. It’s very difficult to come to work when you’ve got a baby. There are some days when all I want to do is stay at home and talk to the baby. Why wouldn’t you have kids?”
Again, the question sounds rhetorical but he is asking me directly, so I give him my reply: I cannot think of anything more boring. All the porn in the world would have to dry up and possibly my legs fall off and then I might consider it.
I ask him if he thinks he really could kill a Labrador, “I reckon I could, yeah. It would clearly be an effort but I reckon I could. A pit bull, that’d be harder.”
I realise that while I am asking whether he could kill a Labrador from a compassionate stance, he is commenting merely on whether he could kill one from a practical one. Unaware of my misgivings, he continues unabashed and takes at face value my observation that he could easily kill a Labrador as they are “soppy as fuck”.
“You wait ’til I start gouging it’s eyes out,” he counters, “it could turn!”
I finish scribbling, “I’ve got an anagram for you Frankie Boyle.” He leans over and I show it to him – “Real Knife Yob”.
His face registers something between unease and disappointment. I realise it’s not the nicest of anagrams, – “I can do another one for you if you like.”
“No. Please don’t.”
