Odd-Ball Brit Comic Paul Foot On How There's Method In His Madness

Donald's in the White House. The Brits are facing Brexit. Racists to the left of me, homophobes to the right, here we are, stuck in the middle with Pauline. Make no mistake, these are troubled times we're living in, but there's one descriptor being used to sum up the current geopolitical status quo that's been getting on British comedian Paul Foot's nerves: surreal.

"A lot of people have been saying to me, 'Oh isn't everything so surreal now?' I don't know what they mean," he declares incredulously. "I mean, I guess Trump is pretty odd, because no one's ever had a leader like him before. But let's face it, it's not surreal - it's not surrealism, it's not surrealist. I'm a surreal comic, and the world right now isn't surreal in the least. It just isn't. It's perhaps a bit peculiar, or a bit unexpected. But that's not surrealism."

There's a good reason why Foot is such a passionately protective surrealism purist. His comedy, and the Foot-sian subculture he's built around it, has been proudly eschewing the conventions of stand-up for years, via the ridiculous, the strange and the wonderfully weird. Instead of fans, Foot has "connoisseurs", who bow to him at gigs to distinguish themselves from common or garden comedy punters. Instead of jokes, Foot's comedy deals in "musings" that bubble across an oscillating spectrum between awkward befuddlement and raving eccentricity. "I like to fiddle around with things," Foot explains. "I've always liked playing with pronunciation and funny words for things, but I think that's something lots of people enjoy. I have a tour manager who always starts to talk the way I do when we're on the road. When we stop touring it takes him two or three days to re-learn how to talk properly."

"A lot of people have been saying to me, 'Oh isn't everything so surreal now?' I don't know what they mean,"

There's much that can be categorised as "silly" where Foot's comic instincts are concerned, but there's no hint of pretension or affectation in his madcap gags. His particular brand of bonkers is entirely authentic. "All that silliness just happens organically. I just tend to think in a very silly way - I'm always thinking of silly stuff," he admits.

But while absurdity may be his muse, there's an awful lot of intelligence galvanising his chaotic antics. You need only look as far as the title of his latest show to see this in action: 'Tis Pity She's A Piglet makes reference to an obscure 17th-century play by John Ford, with a big dollop of porcine nonsense to keep it unmistakably Foot-ish. "When I write a silly thing, later I realise that there's always something underneath it. There's always some sort of message or some depth to it or something quite clever," Foot observes. "It's like I'm consciously drawn to stuff that's a bit ridiculous, but subconsciously drawn to things that have some reason or meaning to them."

It seems Foot's conscious and subconscious have been sharing the same brain space in preparation for this latest production, as the comic has elevated his unique, surrealist viewpoint to near academic levels. "I've invented something called 'Literal Surrealism'. I've been wanted to do it for a couple of years actually," he reveals. "At heart, I'm a surrealist. I love surreal ideas, but I wanted to make those stories a little more accessible, and the easiest way to do that is for there to be some meaning to it, some relatable observations. Sometimes surrealist comedy can end up being really quite difficult, because it can be like, 'Well then this happened and then a big cloud that was shaped like a bloody face came along and then a milkshake with wings flew by.' It's just baffling. So, I decided to try and fix that problem."

Given his penchant for the spontaneously bizarre and the extreme, untamed physicality that is his comedic weapon of choice, you could be forgiven for assuming Foot's performances are largely off the cuff. But for all his comedy's seemingly erratic freewheeling, Foot is a stickler for detail and form. He brings a level of painstaking diligence to his writing that is a rarity amongst stand-up comedians, spending two years honing a show before unleashing it on the public. While this might seem like an ocean of time for writing a single evening's entertainment, Foot's timetable is tried and true. "One year just isn't enough time. By the time you've toured the previous show to various different places and perfected that, there just aren't enough days in a year left for writing anything new," he insists. "Two years gives me just the right balance between pressuring myself to come up with new material and being bored enough with the old show that I actually want to come up with something new."

Paul Foot presents 'Tis Pity She's A Piglet, 30 Mar — 23 Apr at The Famous Spiegeltent, part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.