Interview: Funny Jones
Milton Jones joins the Brighton Comedy Festival this October with his new show The Temple Of Daft.
Milton Jones, the king of the one-liner and Mock the Week regular, is back. His tour, The Temple of Daft, will take him to uncharted territory. That’s because joke machine Milton, the man who can cram in up to 250 gags a night, is now a joke machine with a purpose. His new tour strings the quips together in to a broader story, one that sees Jones take on the mantle of Indiana Jones, don the hat and set off on a madcap journey in to surrealist comedy.
Your tour is called The Temple of Daft. Why?
Basically, previous tours have been lots of jokes in different forms, but basically lots of jokes. This is more of a story, more like one of my radio shows. It loosely, and I say loosely, follows a kind of adventure-archaeology type story. It started off with me noticing that I had the same surname as Indiana Jones, and it has all transpired from there.
Do you wear a hat? Do you have a whip?
I do wear a hat at one point, not for the whole thing, ‘cause then people would never see my hair.
You talk about using a narrative style, and you say this is a bit of a departure. What brought that on?
Two things. When people see you on telly, they want to come and see the same sort of thing when they see a live show, but obviously not the same jokes. Moving to a narrative was a way of keeping the same style. It begins to mine other areas of jokes as well, in terms of, if you can do a scene where you’re talking between two people – even though I’m the only person there – that’s a different sort of writing than just one-liner after one-liner.
How do you prepare for a tour?
Anything that I have written during this tour will go in to the next tour. I’m amassing jokes from the moment my last tour beings, and then once it finishes, I begin to go to little out of the way places to test them. Generally speaking, the further you travel, the more pleased they are to see you. I will go with bits of paper and ideas, and it will be throwing mud against a wall and seeing what sticks. Eventually I’ll accrue enough material to do try-outs nearer home. So, it’s a trial and error process from the beginning of that. Years ago I started as an actor, and I’d quite like to incorporate more of it. For instance, previously the footprint of the tour has been I’ve gone on and done 15 minutes as a character, and then there’s a support act, and then I do the whole second half. There’s a different character this tour. Previously, I’ve done my granddad, but this will be a different relative.
Who?
This is my uncle, my great-uncle, Sir Randolph Digby Jones. He’s an explorer, I quite like warming the audience up with an obscure character to begin with, then making it more of a show.
A lot of your comedy is quite word based – can you just come up with it?
No. It’s all about writing as much as you can, and then taking the top 10 per cent. There’s lots of stuff I’ve discarded. The new show will have between 200 and 250 jokes, probably, but that doesn’t mean that’s all I’ve written; I’ve written another 100 that I’ve put in the bin, at least another 100, probably, maybe three times as much, and that’s the hard work. Even after all this time, I’m thinking I have just written the best joke ever, and I go and do it and it just doesn’t work – however, the thing I improvise off the back of it does work. But, I wouldn’t have got to that place had I not tried the first one.
Do you have books and books of jokes that you might return to? Do ‘the Jones files’ exist in a filing cabinet somewhere?
Never throw anything away, is my motto, in that if you thought there was a seed of something that was funny, keep it on file. Especially one-liners because one syllable, one word, changing the picture in people’s heads, can suddenly make something work that didn’t before.
Has being known as the king of the one-liner ever been an encumbrance at all?
Yeah I mean, in a way, I’ve got to be grateful… people want to put you in a box, so that originally it’s people who are booking gigs; they want to know what type of comedian you are to fit on a bill. And I think that’s true of television as well, to some extent. On Mock The Week, I sit in the one-liner chair, and if it’s not me, it’s Stewart Francis or Gary Delaney – you know, it’s the ‘odd’ bloke, so that has gone in my favour. I’m sort of grateful for where it’s got me, but if I go for an audition for another show, albeit a sitcom or something, it’s quite often as the crazy neighbour. You think well, I’m glad I’ve got this audition, but it’d be nice not to have to do that role forever. So, I suppose this show is me trying to move things on.
“It’s always seven people trying to get through a door for two”
Tell me a little about Mock The Week. Do you have to mug up, read all the papers beforehand?
It’s a bit like doing an exam in that we actually get some stuff beforehand, but the list is so long that basically it’s every story that happened in the news that didn’t involve someone dying over the last week. So, there is no way I can cover all of it. You just hope, like an exam, that the bit you’ve revised comes up, because it records for nearly three hours for a half hour show. You hope that the 10 minutes you zoned out for isn’t the 10 minutes that appears on television. When I know I’ve got Mock The Week in the diary, I think, oh, it’ll be nice to see those people again, but it is hard work, there’s no escaping that, especially after you’ve done quite a few.
When you get a group of funny people together in a programme is it competitive?
I’ve known lots of those guys for years and we all get on and it’s fine. But the way it’s set up, it’s always seven people trying to get through a door for two. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a joke that would have fitted, and I just couldn’t get a word in. But I suppose from an outsider’s point of view, that is where the dramatic tension is, because you’ve got all these people trying to get a word in. It kind of makes for absorbing television.
And finally, we have to ask – where do you get your shirts from?
Usually retro shops around about. It’s tricky with shirts because people think, ‘Oh zany shirt!’ but actually the zaniest of shirts is too much. What I like are shirts that people go, ‘Oh that looks… hang on, is that good or bad?’ It needs to be quite subtle, in a way, and I’ve got 100s of them. But yes, they are usually from Oxfam or retro shops where the old lady says, ‘Oh, that looks just you, that does,’ and they’ve no idea who I am.
Milton Jones and the Temple of Daft, 23 October 2015, Concert Hall, Brighton Dome, £25.50, 01273 709709, brightondome.org
