Even as surreal comic upbringings go, Noel Fielding's was better than most: born in 1973, he spent most of his early years being chased by butterflies and moths who viewed him as a king. Things didn't get much better when, after school, he found himself in art college. There, he would regularly dress up as Jesus and would entertain the masses by climbing up on his crucifix to do the Can-Can. And now as a professional comic, he "skims the stage like a shaved bush baby, spurting inexplicable tales of back-to-front rams' legs, underwater gun-fights and Spanish fullstops on mopeds". Hold tight, it's going to be a rough ride.
You're going to be hearing a lot more about London comic Fielding (and yes, he does have Irish grandparents) who is arguably the most interesting comic Britain has produced since Eddie Izzard. A delightfully exuberant and imaginative act, this 26-year-old has more in common with Beckett and Ionesco than he has with Ben Elton and Jack Dee.
As part of the marvellous Mighty Boosh show at last year's Edinburgh Festival (alongside Julian Barratt) he carried off the Perrier Newcomer Award, and Dubliners will get a chance to see what all the fuss is about when he comes over to do some solo stand-up this week as part of the inaugural Guinness Sit Down/Stand Up comedy festival at Vicar Street. Very much a man of his times, Fielding was too young (bless 'im) to be influenced by the first wave of "alternative" comedy: thus he's no Young Ones/Ben Elton/Saturday Night Live-type clone. He is, though, one of the first of the new generation to emerge from "alternative comedy part two" - the surreal bunch of Harry Hill, Izzard, Sean Lock and Vic 'n' Bob. With no "jokes" to his name and having only a casual relationship with the notions of build-up and delivery, Fielding ploughs a furrow that divides fans and critics alike: some people think he's "weird" while others think he's "really weird". "I first started messing about with comedy during art college," he says, "it was sort of performance art stuff, Jesus and Mick Jagger impersonations (at the same time) and all of that. I liked what I was doing so I decided to sign on the dole for a year and try to get some openspots on the circuit." Not overly impressed by the acts he saw on the circuit, he as good as stalked another new comic, called Julian Barrett, who was doing similar "weird stuff with no jokes" and who proved to be a surrealist soul-mate.
Having impressed everyone with his first few gigs, Fielding found himself pushed into entering a Daily Telegraph comedy competition and, after coming through the heats, ended up at the Edinburgh Festival in 1996 contesting the final. He didn't win, but he did well enough to be signed up to the Avalon comedy agency - a mini-empire in its own right. "I think back then, I was really raw and had none of the technique needed to get my act across, but I had arrived at a time when the sort of material I was doing was gradually getting accepted because people like Eddie Izzard and Harry Hill had been there before me. Which sort of fits in with my influences because they would be Peter Cook, Spike Miligan, Izzard, Jacques Tati, and not Ben Elton," he says. "There really was a change in comedy at the time with people willing to embrace acts who didn't do traditional stand-up. And I remember very clearly a guy called Roger Mann, who was doing similar type `weird' stuff about five years previously, coming up to me and saying that the climate had changed, and that the sort of stuff I was doing was now acceptable."
IT'S difficult to describe what Noel Fielding does. He himself describes his two-hander Mighty Boosh show as "not stand-up, not drama, not cabaret but an adventure . . . It's always really difficult when you just talk flatly about what you do, but the only way I can describe the show is that it's a series of strange, surreal scrapes. It's just about two of us being stuck in a zoo, getting swallowed up by a giant, evil eye with lots of strange props and lots of visuals and music in the background".
A lot of the critics were pan-handling for Beckett references in the show and coughing up "theatre of the absurd" comparisons, which are quite rare in comedy. How did you deal, I ask him, with the intellectualisation (if you'll pardon my French) of your work? "You just don't know, it's a really strange thing. We originally set out to be the `new Goodies' and then we're getting all these flashy reviews. The only real rule we had when we were doing the show was that if there was a joke in there, we'd take it out - or rather, we would take out anything that was a `proper' joke. And that also goes for my own solo work. "I suppose I'm getting away with an awful lot because if a traditional standup gets up and just puts out punch lines and people don't like him/her there's nothing else they can do. But with my stuff, because there are no jokes, just demented stories, people just think `he's really weird' as opposed to `he's really good/bad'. So in that sense the avant garde can save you," he says.
His solo work was helped along immeasurably by a number of appearances on Channel 4's new comedy series, Gas. "That really helped because I only did short slots on the show and when I did my own gigs I had people coming along saying they had seen me on Gas and were just curious about what other stuff I had," he says. What about all of the "son of Izzard" comparisons? "I don't think it's a lazy comparison and in some senses I understand it. I think we're very different though - his stuff is a lot more accessible than mine, I mean he does material about tampons, being a transvestite and Star Trek . . ."
The fact that Fielding finds the above three areas to be "more accessible and mainstream" may come as to a shock to people who are still stuck on Little and Large, but it speaks volumes for what he repeatedly terms the "weirdness" of his act. "Channel 4 asked Julian and me for some scripts" he says by way of illustration, "and we sent them some of the Mighty Boosh scripts but they came back saying they were `too weird' and couldn't see it working on television. "So when we did the stage show at Edinburgh they came along and began to really understand what we were on about in the scripts and how it all fitted together when it was performed live. But even then they still thought it would take about £80 million to make, so they just weren't that sure," he says.
All of which begs the question: where do you go if even Channel 4 think your material is "too weird"? Maybe TnaG should have a look.
Noel Fielding plays Vicar Street, Dublin on Thursday night.
