A weird outsider with a bowl haircut, Emo Phillips has been peddling his unique brand of geek humour for over 20 years. He tells Brian Boyd about keeping the show on the road
LIKE Pee Wee Herman on Mogadon and looking like a medieval village idiot, Emo Phillips is an arresting figure. With his bizarre see-saw voice, his atypical mannerisms and his often disturbing observations and opinions, he cuts a curious figure on the comedy circuit. Hardly a polished performer, he stumbles his way around the stage and he always speaks as though trying to master an alien language. His image aside, though, he is formidably funny and it's not just Jay Leno who believes he is "the funniest joke writer in America".
The star attraction at this year's first Letterkenny Comedy Festival [ see panel], Phillips caused a few shocks when he pitched up at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago after a lengthy absence. The material and presentation were still the same, but he looked like he had just emerged from a TV fashion makeover. In place of his trademark pudding bowl haircut, he sported a short and spiky contemporary cut. More just-stepped-off-a-surfboard than his usual "escaped from an institution" look. His audiences were perplexed. The hair had to go and it did.
"I originally changed it because I was sick of people making fun of my hair and so I cut it off and I got much more attention than ever before," he says. "It was like when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 - three times more people came to see where it used to be. But I've changed it back now."
The big deal with Phillips is always is he or isn't he a comic character?
The man himself only does interviews as Emo the stage character (although a more relaxed version) and over the years the boundaries have blurred a little between his off-stage and on-stage personae.
Not that it matters to his many fans. When they compile lists of the best gags ever, there's always a few Phillips one-liners up there at the very top. There's a whole encyclopedia of his jokes on the internet. Not that he's interested, though - the net for him is just "a lot of neon signs with an arrow".
A big noise in his native America, his forays this side of the Atlantic have become rarer due to his non-stop touring commitments. "It's a shame because I love coming over here," he says. "I love doing the Edinburgh Festival and getting laryngitis after the first week and having people ask me 'how did you get laryngitis?' I find that really, really funny. I prefer the comics over here. There are certain things that British and Irish comics get away with it which just wouldn't work in the US. There's almost a more avant-garde approach. And I really think I know what the reason is for this: over here you can get served alcohol when you're 18; in the US it is 21. There's a big difference between an 18 year-old comedy audience and a 21 year-old comedy audience and I think those few years are vital in shaping how people view what can, or can't be, regarded as humour."
While he may be best known for his material on his own weirdness, his more thoughtful material is about different religious systems and the nature of belief. "That's another thing about playing over here," he says. "In the US there are certain places where you can have jokes about Jesus and certain places where you can't. I have a lot of Bible and Scriptures material and I have to be careful about where and when I use it. That doesn't apply over here."
If it seems like every show he does is like a mini-masterclass in the art of stand-up comedy, it's because he has been performing regularly for over 20 years and he has honed his material down to the essentials. He talks about how he structures his comedy in "poetic forms and iambic pentameters".
He chooses a curious example to illustrate his paring-down philosophy. "A joke is like a machine in that it shouldn't have any unnecessary parts. Otherwise it's like that Victorian time machine which has doilies on the armrest," he says.
"I find a lot of humour just by metaphorically turning things upside down - or sometimes even literally turning things upside down. But there is no planning, no forethought, no grand scheme with me. It's all a collaboration with the audience. If they laugh, it stays in. If they don't, I take it out."
It's because his jokes are so precise and so specific to his character that you never hear other acts trying to imitate or borrow from him. "There is still a gentleman's agreement in the stand-up world not to use anybody else's material," he says. "That doesn't happen so much with sitcom writers. Sitcom never appealed to me as a format. There were people like Jerry Seinfeld and Roseanne Barr who changed the format to suit them, but these days it seems that US TV is just remaking British sitcoms - particularly since the success of The Office. The thinking seems to be that these are shows that people have already liked".
Not many people know that Phillips was executive producer of, and acted in Meet The Parents. "It was the original version of the film back in the 1990s, not the recent version," he says. "A friend of mine, Greg Glienna, wrote and directed it. It was very low budget and made on 16mm film. I'm in it as a guy who works in a video shop. It did well when it first came out - it was screened at all the major comedy festivals and then we sold the rights to Universal and they took the story and recast it."
He has no immediate plans to re-enter the film world. "People think I'm an actor already," he says. "They think I'm a character when I'm on stage. But there's no acting ability involved at all. There's no guesswork or conjecture. If I wanted all that nonsense I would have joined the seminary."
Emo Phillips play An Grianán, Letterkenny on Saturday, July 29th at 7pm
