NY Scene Meets Milton Jones
picture by Karla Gowlett
24 February 2011
Dane Wright
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With his wild hair, wilder shirts and surreally silly one liners Milton Jones is fast making a name for himself as one of the UK’s top comics. NY Scene chatted to Milton ahead of his upcoming Yorkshire gigs to talk about pelting audiences with fruit, what makes a good one liner and if other comedians ask him for style advice…
How long have you been a comedian and what was your first gig like?
“I’ve been doing it for twenty years. My first gig, well it’s a bit of a blur because I think I blotted it out because it was so painful. But I think I went up and threw peaches at the audience and then ran off. It’s difficult to explain but I was trying to do a character thing but I changed it all at the last minute and forgot it. Then I didn’t do another one for two years after that. So it’s all a bit of a painful blur I’m afraid.”
What was it that made you want to be a stand up?
“I wasn’t good at anything else. I found at school that I was far better at messing about then doing any actual work and that you got a better reaction from doing that anyway. I wanted to be an actor originally but that wasn’t working out so gradually I turned to stand up.”
People will be most familiar with you from your performances on ‘Mock the Week’; how does your live performance on that show compare to your live show?
“Only in so much as there aren’t other people interrupting. On ‘Mock the Week’ the hardest single thing is to get a word in. If they like the stand-up bits I do and the themes I do in Mock the Week then it’ll be an hour and a half of that sort of thing. I do one liners but I break it up with music and flip charts and all sorts so it is more of the same but without the interruptions.”
Most of your jokes are one liners, how much harder does that make writing new material?
“It does make it harder to write, but the worst thing about it is that I can spend all day working on something and end up with ten seconds for my act at the end of it. So I’ve made a rod for my own back in terms of if I want to do an hour and a half show that’s a lot of writing.
Having said that people remember them better and when I do TV I can get straight to the jokes. I don’t have to mess around with a long story. When I do ‘Mock the Week’ I can get in and out in ten seconds, leave my grenade and be out of the building. So there are swings and roundabouts with doing one liners.”
What makes a good one line joke?
“The jokes that I like the best are the ones that put silly cartoons in people’s heads. Like if I say ‘about a month before he died my Grandmother covered my Grandad’s back in lard and after that he went downhill very quickly.’
It’s like a verbal practical joke. You’re taking people’s imaginations one way and then at the last minute pulling the carpet from under it and saying no I didn’t mean that I meant something completely different. So yeah I think it’s about putting good cartoons in people’s heads.”
Do you have a favourite joke you’ve heard a fellow comic do?
“The thing is when you work in the business you get involved in the nuts and bolts of it and it’s rare that you laugh out loud. You see comics laughing at other comics often only when it goes wrong. I don’t know who does this one so it’s a bit unfair because I hate being quoted, but I heard a line recently about some people doubt that werewolves exist so how do they explain men with hair on their hands. I’ve said that all wrong, scrap that.
Harry Hill does a very good put down to hecklers. He says, ‘You can heckle me now sir but when I get home I’ve got a lovely chicken in the oven’. And that’s it. They think it’s going to go one way where he slams them and he just goes I’ve got a lovely chicken in the oven now who’s sorry? That makes me laugh.
Sean Lock has got a nice one where he says ‘For Christmas my family bought me some psychiatry vouchers but I wanted a crossbow’. Stuff like that. That’s a one liner I like because it puts a cartoon in someone’s head. It leaves you more questions than it answers. I like that sort of thing.”
How do you deal with people expecting you to be funny everywhere that you go?
“I’ve got used to it and I’m just not. They do expect you to be full on all the time and you can see their eyes glaze over thinking you’re not that funny off stage. But I’ve got used to it. I mean if you hang around with comics it’s not an issue particularly. But in real life it’s one of those things that you’ve got to lump.
People often come up to you and go I’ve got a joke for you, I’ve got a joke for you mate. Then it’s some awful racist thing that you didn’t want to hear in the first place. There are lots of occupational hazards and people expecting you to always be funny is one of them.”
You have a number of credits for work on TV and radio; do you have a medium that you prefer?
“I think variety is the best. Radio is great because you can read it out. You can literally have a piece of paper and be reading it out without having learnt it. With TV you get more people seeing you and more money basically. There is a lot of work that goes making those lines that have been tried out on the circuit. So variety is the key. I wouldn’t like to get stuck in any one medium.”
New episodes of your radio show ‘Another Case of Milton Jones’ has been commissioned; how do you feel about that?
“It’s great; although I’m not quite sure when we’re going to do it because I’m so busy with other things. But I like it because it’s a different audience to the club audience and Mock the Week viewers. It’s children, it’s old people it’s people eating their dinner and it’s people driving home.
Because it’s radio you have to think about it quite hard. It’s not just a case of saying one liners you have to think of some kind of narrative. Half an hour is a long time to fill with a story, because you can’t say hey where are you all from, or what’s your job? You’ve got to have half an hour of words, over six episodes that’s three hours of material which is a lot of writing. It’s sort of the engine that generates the rest of my career.”
What made you call your current tour ‘The Lion Whisperer’?
“It’s mainly because they phoned me on a particular day and said we need a title now because we’re going to print this afternoon. That was the name of the joke that was on the piece of paper in front of me at the time. So that poster and that whole idea is from a random chance phone call.
You’ve previously admitted that many people know you as ‘they guy with the shirts’; where do the shirts come from?
“They’re usually sort of retro places. A lot of them are from sort of 70’s and 80’s second hand places. I try not to go for anything to obvious. It’s quite hard to find the right thing but people do look out for them now and sometimes turn up to gigs wearing them which is quite nice. It also helps sort of as an aid memoir that helps people to remember you in the first place if you’re wearing a funny shirt.”
Have any of your ‘Mock the Week’ co-stars ever asked you for style advice?
“No quite the opposite in fact. It just helps mark me out from the others a bit and where I’m coming from in terms of material. I like those types of shirts but I don’t tend to wear them when I’m not performing.”
What is your favourite part of life as a comedian?
“The things that are good about being a comic are also the things that are bad about being a comic. You get to travel a lot and you get to visit some interesting places and meet some interesting people. But then things that are bad about being a comic are that you get to go to some really dull places and meet some really dull people.
When it’s going well it doesn’t really feel like you’re working, it doesn’t feel like a proper job. I’ll see someone digging holes in the road and think oh no that’s a proper job, I’ll stop complaining about my traveling. Although there is hard work involved it is a great job to have.”
Finally what would you say to encourage people to come to your show at Harrogate Theatre?
“Don’t come if you want to learn anything. But if you like watching someone being stupid then you’ll be allowed to escape for an hour and a half.”
