Working The Awkward Into Rap

For his Pretty Fly show, Chris Turner invites audience members to present a word, and after about three or four options, he works them into a rap. “There’s been a few tough ones,” laughs Turner. “One time in Perth I was chatting to a comedian and he asked me if I’d been stumped by anything, and I said no, and that I didn’t think I ever would be... I got up on stage and asked people what they wanted me to rap about, and he just stood up and shouted, ‘Ninth century crop rotation!’ I was just like, you horrible, horrible man. This weekend I was in Brighton, and... someone shouted out ‘Je Suis Charlie’. You could feel the whole room go really awkward, thinking, ‘Really, are you going to do that?’ so the challenge was working in, because people do sometimes shout out real genuine stuff like a phobia, or someone will shout ‘disability’, and you have to be willing to work that into a rap alongside comedic topics, and you have to tackle it without offending people, which is hard when the main criteria is that it has to rhyme, make sense, make a valid opinion and be funny. It’s my favourite part of the show though, the challenging words are the best.”

Turner’s bringing his new show XXV to Fringe World next month – a much more personal performance. “I was about 15, I was at an all boys school... and they told us one day they were going to do some bone scans. About a week later we got a call and they were like, ‘You have to come in for some tests because you have quite hollow bones.’ Over the next few months I was visiting doctors and things because they’d said, ‘Ah, you might have this thing that will kill you and your life expectancy would be about 25.’ There were no blood tests you could do for it, they just did all these other tests and then would decide based on your symptoms whether you had it or not. They initially said, ‘You probably have this, and we’ll find out in two months whether you have it’, so there were two months where I thought I’d only have ten years to live. This show is about that... Being a teenager who’s been told you don’t have long to live, it’s not like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do everything I wanted to do,’ it’s more like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be dead soon.’ And that makes it sound really unfunny. It’s tremendously funny; it has to be because it’s a comedy show.”