Interview: Stuart Goldsmith
Stuart Goldsmith is a comedy explorer, a stand up comedian, a leading podcaster on the mechanics of comedy with his acclaimed The Comedians’ Comedian, and last year an experimenter with the world’s first crowd-sourced set. He speaks with Victoria Nangle
Hi Stu, what can we expect to see in ‘Like I Mean It’?
Bundles of silly, open-hearted jokes about David Attenborough, bomb-disposal robots and blueberries, and a secret theme about marriage, parenthood and compromise. PLUS a genuinely terrific bit about a French chef torturing a frog emotionally to improve the flavour.
You’ve had some incredible comedians on the ComCom Podcast. How do you think constantly examining your craft (I’m using that word so that you don’t have to) has affected your own comedy performance and writing?
Thank you! The biggest lesson for me personally is to let go of the analytical lens when I’m being creative and just splurge it all out there, plenty of time to edit and second-guess later in the process! Weirdly, it took me a lot of analysis to realise that…
It reads like an encyclopaedia of advice and experience. What are the three best hints or tips or downright instructions you’ve gathered from your interviews?
My favourites include:
Gary Delaney says, “talent is piss” (e.g. although talent exists, it’s nothing like as important as hard work).
Arthur Smith said: “think of the third idea”, meaning that the first idea you have is so obvious other people will have thought of it and it won’t be surprising; the second is what the clever kids will have thought of already; the third is where the gold is – it’s about pushing your creativity to work harder.
Sara Pascoe said that if you examine it honestly enough and with enough detail, anything can be funny.
A genuinely terrific bit about a French chef torturing a frog emotionally
You crowd-sourced a show for Edinburgh 2017, in addition to your own fully written and polished show. What was that experience like?
Oh my god it was so exhilarating! It was like jumping out of a plane really – I hadn’t read any of the submissions (from fans of the podcast who had no professional comedy experience) so I was just trusting them to be funny,
and I was also adamant that I wanted to make the writers feel like heroes rather than mocking them if a joke died. So I felt this huge responsibility, not just to the 150 people who turned up to see it, but to the material itself. It was incredibly funny and exciting and really stretched me as a performer to think on my feet and perform a sort of live re-purposing of some of the ideas, into a joke that would work. And every so often there’d come along a belter of a gag that would make the writer shine and the audience cheer as well as laugh because they recognised the talent in that particular joke, and then I could just bask in all the reflected glory!
You’ve hinted that there might be another project in the works off the back of that – any tips of exclusives you could share on this?
I can’t say anything about it, which might mean everything or nothing. But I’m very excitedly not saying anything about it…
If your beautiful child turned up from the future tomorrow aged 20 and said they wanted to be a comedian what advice would you give them?
Haha, he’s quite a dish isn’t he? I’d be thrilled that there’s still a planet in 20 years, and after grilling him on the future of Bitcoin I’d tell him to follow his heart. Always worked for me.
Taking a cue from you… are you happy?
Very. Part of that is the family, part of it is the love I receive from my listeners, and part of it is having learnt that travelling hopefully is always better than arriving. I do a lot of hopeful travel!
Stuart Goldsmith – Like I Mean It, The Hawth, Saturday 17 February 2018, 7.45pm, £11.50; Komedia, Sunday 17 June 2018, 8pm, £10
