Why The Aim Is To Laugh Your Balls Off For An Hour

"I was probably gone nine-and-a-half months of last year and I've already been away a fair chunk of this year," he tells. "It's going great — it's my first time in London and I'm doing Soho Theatre for two weeks, so I can't complain. It's the way to roll into town.

"I get reviewers in for all of the shows — and I love the reviewers — but every reviewer takes a different theme out of it, and I've never set a theme."

"It's actually been really good because I haven't done Beard Game Strong since Edinburgh because I've been working on stuff for the new tour, so it was nice to pull out a bunch of the classics. I'm excited to come home to kick off the brand new show."

This new show is called Come Get Some, and Cody explains that that any perceived themes will be purely accidental.

"It's just an hour of cracking stand-up — you're not going to be sad, you're not going to learn anything," he chuckles. "Over the last few years on the Australian tour I get reviewers in for all of the shows — and I love the reviewers — but every reviewer takes a different theme out of it, and I've never set a theme. I've never once said 'This is the theme.'

"So who am I to say what people are going to take from it? I love the UFC, the martial arts — I find it to be a beautiful sport — but some people find it violent and over-the-top. So I leave it up to people — if they find a theme in it, fucking great work. If you just laugh your balls off for an hour: that was the aim from the start."

Fortunately making people laugh away their private regions has long been Cody's dream.

"I always wanted to do stand-up comedy since I was about five or six," he reflects. "My parents got me into comedy albums early on — my parents loved stand-up and would play me Billy Connolly records and stuff like that and I always found it amazing, I just didn't know you could do it for a job. Then I realised that there were all of these festivals and comedy clubs where you could go and try out, and over the last nine years I've just been working away hard.

"The thing is that because I listened to so many [comedians] what I learned was that the best ones are always themselves. But the ones that I still love the most and listen to would be Jim Jefferies, Phil Burr, Lawrence Mooney, Tom Gleeson — people who are brilliant storytellers and just brutal about things that have happened in their lives. The ones who don't take a backwards step. They're not worried whether someone might get upset about something because they're so funny — they're brilliantly funny and they've all got a particular charm about them as well."