FUCK THAT NOISE - A Conversation About Comedy
Steven Storrie and Antonio Carrubbo
Songs chosen; Johnny Burnette ‘Train Kept Rolling’, Lindi Ortega ‘Til The Day You Die’, The Everly Brothers ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’
(Sitting down)
AC; I never drink coffee. Ever. Ever, ever. I had a good milkshake from there once.
SS; Why were you asking earlier if I drank whiskey or vodka? Think you can tell something from a person from whether they drink vodka or whiskey?
(Pulling out bottle of whiskey)
No cos I didn't know what to buy at the shop haha
Hahah! What happened to dressing like House, by the way?
Ah, my back. I've dressed as smart as I can.
It's ok; it's a good strong look. I once had a girl break up with me because she said I "dressed like I'd been run over by a beer truck"
Haha
Still quite proud of that. Most romantic thing anyone ever said to me. Are you working on stuff, then? Going back to study media?
Nah I think I’m just gonna read a couple of books
Haha and that'll do ya?
It’s kinda... I got this far without reading. The last book I read was The Fantastic Mr Fox
How'd that work out for ya?
Very visual... I didn't even read it, I'm fucking lying, I didn't even read that one, the teacher read it to us.
Ha this is only last year isn't it?
Ha yeah it was part of community service...
So what are you gonna do?
I'm looking at getting into comedy but I don't think I've got the... what's the word I'm looking for?
Jokes?
(Irishing up the coffee) Charisma.
What was the story you told me at work that time about when your Nana got into a fight on a bus with a kid who had Downs Syndrome?
I probably made that one up.
Well it was a good one!
I dunno, part of it sounds true... what was the job you went for this morning?
Selling haemorrhoid cream
I don't believe that straight away. That shit sells itself...
Haha that's the tagline; This Shit Sells Itself
Haha yeah what a good idea!
So what are you gonna do? Is it gonna be stand up or writing comedy?
It's kind of like… how serious do you take it? Like 'I'm a comedian', or 'aw no I tell jokes, I try and make people laugh.'
You have to work at your craft...
Yeh and to me comedy is as artistic as… as Michelangelo, and I always get laughed at when I say that
I think that's true
But then people say 'well is Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown an artist?' and it's like, well, no, but is the kid who draws a picture of a cow and sticks it on the fridge… is he an artist? It depends what you define as art and what you don't. I mean, for me, art is something evoking emotion, whether it be sad or happy or love or...
Something that strikes a chord
Yeh and essentially, what you're talking about, recording a conversation, I’m a big fan of Ricky Gervais, Karl Pilkington and Stephen Merchant and they were just essentially...
Shooting the shit
Yeh but you'd have to be naive to think they weren’t looking to... go down certain avenues. I know you like Curb Your Enthusiasm
Oh yeah, love it.
Which is 90% improv isn't it, but he wants to go down certain avenues...
Yeh I think he has a basic outline. ‘Ok, I’m gonna be in a coffee shop and I'm gonna get annoyed at some woman over the way she eats her sandwich', then he takes it from there...
It's perfect observational humour. I tell you when I knew I was gonna love it. The first episode of the first series with the bunched up trousers, where he's at the movies with his wife’s friend and his trousers bunch up and she thinks he's got a hard on?
Haha yeh like those trousers you had to wear at school, always rolled up on you.
Mine always rolled down...
Hahaha that what you said to the judge? (breaking off) Fucking hell how wet is the table? It’s like a...
That’s exactly what I said to the judge!
Hahahahahahaha
So what are you gonna do? Cos i think you'd be really good at writing comedies.
Well I can’t write...
HAHAHAHAA!
I’ve found the right way to do it is to... is to record. Then work it out. And get somebody to do the punctuation. I mean, I can do the punctuation, but if I sit down and write and I’m not saying it out loud it doesn't work.
Do you keep stuff, do you write it down?
I've got some stuff written down, not as much as I should. It’s all self-deprecating humour. I mean, it's self-deprecating, but people are laughing at what I’m saying, so it's an ego boost. I mean Woody Allen did it best, I mean, Gervais said it as well, nobody wants a 21 year old, chiselled, good looking star telling you how brilliant his life is.
Yeh they want fuck ups like us telling you how bad it is. Bill hicks... cos you can relate to that. That’s what I like about Larry David, he's such a misfit, he's in a minority of one but he thinks everyone else is wrong, and they usually are...
And it is just him isn't it.
...and he tells them.
Well someone asked Ricky Gervais ‘what do you suggest to get into comedy writing’ and his advice was ‘do what you love, do what you love , erm...and… take your time. And make sure you're happy and don't try and please anybody’. He was very Darwinian about it. He said ‘I did what I loved and if it worked then great and if not well, I'll die by it’.
Yeah I think it has to be that way. You have to approach it, if you really believe it, with the very real possibility that you might not make any money from it. A swimming pool in LA can't be the aim.
No. But I do still want a swimming pool in LA hehe. But it's like the demo for The Office. It’s just three minutes long. That’s all it takes, three minutes of quality.
That’s why I’ve had so many girlfriends; I’ve never been able to get 3 minutes of quality yet.
Hurghhurghhugh
90 seconds then I'm tapping out.
Hahahaha literally.
A lot of it is luck and timing though isn't it? We could have done the same observational humour if he hadn't had done it
Hahaha oh well 'I could have done that.'
Ha I could have been in The Beatles if I’d been born sooner
I don't think anyone else could have come up with David Brent...
Oh, no...
I mean, it's like Friends, and I’m a big advocate of Friends. But people would say, Friends has been done...
Well I guess my idea that we're beaten to the punch doesn't quite hold true because Friends is basically Seinfeld, and they ran alongside each other...
Yeah I think there's plenty of space for stuff. My idea is I go from insanely funny, to mildly funny to just...sick. I mean... I... Like… would it be AT ALL funny if I rang my mother at like 2 o’clock in the morning and said 'Nana went out for a drink with a friend and she was raped on her way home' and record her reaction to that...with a kind of humour in it but then, no, no, you can't do that...
Well I’m laughing, so...
I mean when I was in school I wrote this book, I say book I mean a page, like, I mean my uncle was a lot older than me, a philosophy student and I had this conversation with him about the taboo. and I’m 15 so I’m right there with all the literary great people that...I can't even name one that's how good I was, and I was thinking what happens if... it's like Louis CK said...
I love Louis.
I think he's the best.
That second or third series had so much more humanism and warmth, like he was a lovable loser doing his best, taking his shot. It really changed and it worked...
Have you ever heard that joke,’ what's worse than taking a bite out of an apple and finding a worm in it?’ It’s meant to be like a classic joke…
Don't think so...
Jimmy Carr. Well he says ‘what's worse than taking a bite out of an apple and finding a worm in it?’ and everyone goes ‘finding half a worm’, cos, you know, obviously you've ate part of the worm and he just goes 'no, rape', like that...
Ah yeah...
And I mean it's a shit joke but... Louis CK is a genius, he's just a genius. I mean for me he's up there with a philosopher or a scholar and there's this one joke about, someone says to him just before they die 'when I die will you scatter my ashes on... on an island’ or wherever and he's like 'no, no I won't. I’m not gonna run errands for ya after you're dead. You’re dead, you don't matter anymore. You gotta watch his stand-up...
I’ll watch the stand-up if you watch the show.
I’ll watch the show...
The thing with me, and I’m quite passionate about it, is it all has to be permissible or none of it. Like, you can't make jokes about AIDS but then...cancer....’woah, I know somebody who died of cancer, that shit's not funny.' You can't do that, you can't pick and choose. It’s either all of it or none of it. I don't care how extreme it is or how 'offensive' but you can't pick and choose...
Well the thing is about getting offended it’s such a...a... matter of opinion. Just because you're offended doesn’t mean you're right.
Of course not
Cos to me well I don't get offended at all
Which is just as well isn’t it
Ha yeh well I don't know what to get offended by. Cos you could say 'you're mother’s ugly' and I might say 'yeah well she's not looking her best' or ‘she's carrying a few extra pounds’ or you might say I’m fat, I’m ugly, I’ve got a lisp, but...
And that's all just opinion, most of the time from people who don't even know you. It’s all conjecture...
I think the line that you cross is when you actually attack someone,
Yeah, definitely
Or even live up to stereotypes. I think intelligent people know the line. It’s kinda hard, it's kinda hard to say what the line is cos it's like 'if you're smart enough you'll know.'
That’s why they say comedy is like walking a tightrope, there is no safety net.
Well you've got to make comedy for like-minded people... and you've got to be able to take it.
One of the things I love is comedy roasts. And there's James Franco and Charlie Sheen... just shows you how great Charlie Sheen is. One of the best ones they were talking about...there was some joke about how dim his girlfriend was until he threw a fucking lampshade off her, talking about beating his wife up and talking about how he doesn't get to see his kids and they're really fucking ripping him, and he's taking it. One thing he said... just don't say anything about my mother. I thought that was kind of sweet.
Yeh.
It’s like science and how a scientist would look at the world and how it would explain relativity.
Relativity now? You’ve gone from Fantastic Mr Fox to relativity...
Ha fucking Darwin over here. No but the same way a scientist would look and observe, science is basically observing and recording and telling people how it works. The same with humour. It’s just essentially that you look at a situation and make observations and to do that very well, you have to be smart.
True
Cos I remember you always writing and I was like 'yeah, good luck to you.'
Thanks!
No, I didn't mean that! Hehehe that was really angry, why was I angry?!
Bitter!
No cos it's weird now cos we're kind of looking to do the same thing.
Yeh (trying to pour more coke for the whiskey and spilling it)
Here (taking glass)
Ah I once got fired from a pool hall in Kansas cos I couldn’t pour drinks with a steady hand. Got fired from a restaurant in Toronto for having 'unkempt eyebrows', too...
(Picking up conversation and passing over the glass)
Not cos I thought you weren’t capable of being a writer, just because I thought that about everything; actors, writers, directors, footballers, it was a pipedream and that's not the way... it's a SHIT way of looking at things, you know? And that's the way I looked at it back then. I looked at it like 'what chance has anyone got to make it?'
So what's next?
My big plan, and a big part of what I want to do, is to start fucking reading a book
Ha
Education. cos I see the link between humour and education and I realise I have to get a lot smarter. I don't think there's a comedian i like that isn't smart. You have to be smart. There’s no dumb comedians. There’s dumb comedians, but they're bad at what they do. I don't want to work at anything else.
Let’s finish on a joke.
Ok. Sarah Silverman once told a joke about the holocaust. Her niece comes home with homework about the holocaust and Silverman is Jewish and her family are all there so she says 'can I read it to you?' So Silverman says 'sure ok' so her niece starts with 'there were 60 million Jews killed in the holocaust’ and Sarah says 'I have to stop you there, sweety. There were 6 million not 60.' So her niece says ‘6 million, 60 million, what's the difference? What does it matter?’ And Sarah says ‘well, the difference is... the reason why this matters is 60 million would have been unforgivable..."