Simon Amstell cut his teeth with a sarcastic interview style that bewildered his pop-star guests, but he’s at his best using the worst parts of his life in a painfully honest show
'IT'S NOT ME talking about Britney Spears for an hour," says Simon Amstell of his one-man show, Do Nothing– one of the best-selling comedy shows in the UK over the last few years. The still-16-year-old-looking Amstell, who is actually 31, first came to prominence with his beautifully judged sardonic approach to pop stars on the much-watched Popworldon Channel 4. Now, he is concentrating on his stand-up and a show that is an almost embarrassingly personal account of his not-so-private life.
"I think when Popworldended and I went back to stand-up, people thought my show would be full of anecdotes about pop stars but that was never going to happen," he says. "The show had to be what I wanted to do for me to stay interested and it was always going to be personal. And I am prepared to reveal everything on stage. It's a form of therapy for me.
“When you take the worst things about you and your life – the most embarrassing parts, the very worst parts – and turn them into a story and put a structure on them, it’s almost like you’re turning a negative into a positive. Because what has happened to you has become a story, in some way the pain doesn’t really exist any more. Or, at least, that’s the way I figure it.”
It's not that Amstell's autobiography could ever be called My Struggle– he comes from a middle-class background – but he extracts comedy gold from his experience of being a young, gay, Jewish man. A comparison to a young Woody Allen might seem trite, but Amstell's self-deprecatory observational skills are among the best going. "I was never going to do one-liners" he says. "I wanted personal, embarrassing and intimate things on display." The thinking man's Michael McIntyre if you like, Amstell is a ferociously intelligent comic who packs a real punch – this is all raw, scabrous material and he delivers it with no little panache.
Amstell first started performing as a comic when he was 14. “I was horrifically precocious,” he admits. “I went to this Saturday morning stage school and instead of dancing in tap shoes for my five-minute spot I would do jokes. It really was quite horrific. But then I became the youngest ever person to make it to the semi-final of a BBC comedy competition for the Edinburgh Festival.” He was picked up for a presenting job on the children’s TV channel Nickelodeon (he was still at school at the time) but was fired, surprise, surprise, for “being too sarcastic”.
He was excellent on Popworld. The skewed way he pretended to be interested in the vacuous world of pop music is now a model for much reportage of the genre. He later became the host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks but left last year, saying he wanted to concentrate on his live comedy show.
"It is a bit of a calling for me. I remember once watching an Eddie Izzard box set over and over again. I tried to figure out how the 'funny' was made. It was done in an odd way, not a stream of consciousness way. And I studied sitcoms. I watched Roseanneand loved it. It wasn't a sitcom for the sake of a sitcom – it had a point to it. Unlike, say, Friends, which was just pretty people saying funny words.
“The dialogue in that show was like a bunch of old Jewish people talking but which has been put into the mouths of thirtysomething gentiles. I was also attracted to TV interviewers who were a bit naughty – Ruby Wax, David Letterman – and of course, names such as Woody Allen, Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce.”
Amstell’s skill is in his neurotic over-analysis of everything. There’s a joke he does about having a bad back and going to see an osteopath: “I asked the osteopath if my back pain was a result of my parents getting divorced when I was 13. He said ‘No, it’s because you have tight tendons in your legs.’”
“There is much analysis in the set,” he says. “Stuff about how I screwed up, what I did do or didn’t do. Me struggling, things being my fault, my lack of acceptance. I don’t use it as a platform to slag people off – it’s more about being an outsider. Put it this way, I get offered a lot of hugs from people after the show.”
Because, he says, the best reaction he has ever got is from an Irish audience, he is recording his upcoming Dublin shows for his first live DVD.
“Irish audiences really get what I’m on about,” he says. “People really laughed and really got it. I suppose it’s because you have more of a storytelling background than the English do. With some audiences you have to fight them for everything, but with the Irish audiences I have had there’s that weird combination of excitement and laughter at the right points. They get all the subtle bits, they’re really on top of it and they never let me away with anything. It’s such a pleasure.”
Simon Amstell is at Vicar Street, Dublin, May 21 and 22, and at this year’s Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny, June 3-7
