Post Modernist

A couple of years have passed since comedian Danny Bhoy has been out our way; so how's he been? “Oh, you know. Still lonely, single, depressed, angry, frustrated... Brackets – Scottish,” says Bhoy.

Fortunately for us, that's the state of mind in which comedians usually do their best work, so Australia should be in for a treat when Bhoy brings his new stand-up show Dear Epson down under this year. It began innocently enough, when Bhoy penned a letter of complaint to printer company Epson about the price of their ink. He forwarded it to a couple of friends, who said it was so funny he should write more. He sat down to pen a few letters to companies. Thinking he might not hold the attention for a full 80 minutes with just those, he started writing letters to people from his past and his childhood.

“I wrote to people who've affected my life, for good or for bad – usually for bad,” he says. “So it's taken a really interesting turn, the show – it starts with the usual stuff of attacking companies and it turns into a really personal journey. I've also tried to make the letters as original as possible. There's no point writing to Starbucks or Shell, everybody knows they're pricks. It's more about little products or systems that annoy me, personally.”

Bhoy said he's taken a different approach to his stand-up for this show. Actually taking time to craft the letters has meant his linguistic flourishes are more “grown-up”, he says.

“A lot of people have said, 'Have you been back to university or something?'” he says. “When you're doing stand-up your brain is constantly grabbing for the right word, but when you have that fall-back of a letter you've carefully honed – highly sarcastic, without sounding overtly violent or nasty – it makes for a very good show.”

Bhoy's writing talent recently manifested itself on a wonderful blog he wrote before the US election for The Huffington Post, a scathing attack on rightwing bias in US political coverage. While he doesn't tend to do political material, he admits to being obsessed by American politics and went to New York for the US election in November. “I booked the trip a couple of years ago – I get really excited about the American election and I can't really think about anything else. I love the whole theatre of it,” he says.

However, Bhoy says while he enjoys a certain level of recognition in the UK and Australia, he's not close to cracking America anytime soon. Nor does he want to.

“It's very much uncracked,” he says. “If anything, it's been boiled so it's even harder to crack. I'm not giving up on America, I love it – but I'm not chasing it anymore. It becomes a bit too soul-destroying. I'm happy with what I've got. I don't want to break myself trying to break America. I spoke to too many people who just had dead eyes – actors, who had lived in LA for 25 years of their lives just above the poverty line and had got just one or two adverts. It's not that they were bad, it's just you need that break there, and it's hard to get. Every comedy club in LA is jam-packed with comics doing five minutes for free, trying to get spotted, and it's not my cup of tea.”

Danny Bhoy will be playing the following dates: