32 SAGA.CO.UK/AUG-MAG^ I 2018
O
n a recent Sunday
night, Paul Merton
was performing
improvised
comedy at
London’s Comedy
Store. It’s a gig he’s
been doing on and off for the past 35 years
and, as usual, he asked the audience for a
subject to start him and his fellow players off.
‘Somebody shouted out “Erotic Chess,”’
he says. ‘So it became, “I’m going to move
your... pawn”... and off we went.’
On Have I Got News for You, another
long-running gig, Paul generally plays it
deadpan, sometimes appearing not to get his
own jokes. But in person, and in particular
when talking about things such as erotic
chess, he is all smiles.
‘I never would have thought that there was
a word that connects eroticism and chess, but
“pawn” is there,’ he says. ‘So we started doing
a scene on that. It’s stimulating for the people
doing it and by that means it’s also stimulating
for the audience – they can contribute.’
Paul loves ‘improv’, or ‘impro’ as he prefers
to call it. ‘Everybody else uses the word
improv. It used to be impro here and then the
Americans called it improv. But if you’re
going to abbreviate a word why not abbreviate
it to its shortest, clearest meaning? So just to
be different we are the only group
that call ourselves impro.’
This month, he and his ‘Impro
Chums’ most of whom are Comedy
Store Players past and present –
including Mike McShane from the
ground-breaking 1990s Channel 4
show Whose Line is it Anyway? – will
do ten nights at the Edinburgh
Festival Fringe, as they do every year.
Then, next spring, they’ll set out on
a huge tour of Britain, from Brighton
to Basingstoke, Guildford to Glasgow.
Merton turned 61 last month and
with regular gigs on radio (Just
a Minute), TV (Have I Got News for
You), and weekends at the Comedy
Store, he has enough on that he
doesn’t need to be touring at all:
he does impro because he loves it.
‘I suppose it was something I was
doing at school. When I was eight or
nine, I started getting very interestedin comedy, all aspects of it. It’s a great way
to deal with making yourself popular. If you
make people laugh then they’re on your
side. I remember at that age I knew so many
jokes that I’d picked up from comic books.
I can remember saying to people, “Give me
a subject and I’ll tell you a joke about it”.’
In essence that is still what he does now.
None of Paul’s three main jobs involves any
writing or much preparation. He is paid to
wing it, and nobody does it better. Being
the off-the-cuff king has also helped to keep
his career alive: it’s less work, for starters.
‘Most people at my level wouldn’t keep
going back to Edinburgh and doing shows
because of all the hard work involved. I’ve
always found writing jokes on my own hard.
I wouldn’t be doing it if I was a stand-up and
had to come up with a new act every time.’
Paul was once a stand-up, and a very
successful one at that: his routines led to an
eponymous Channel 4 series in the early
1990s. But he reckons a one-man show
never really suited him.
‘When I started off doing [solo] stand-up
back in the 1980s, it wasn’t because
I particularly wanted to. This was the very
early days of what was called alternative
comedy and there was no “group” I could
join. A bit like a musician starts as a busker,
but not because he wants to be a busker – he
just doesn’t know anybody else.’
Paul is also happier not working on
his own. ‘I did a one-man tour 20 years
ago and I got tired of hearing my own
voice. I wanted somebody else to come
on as a comedy butler, or whatever.
Sitting in the dressing room at the
interval listening to the audience on
a speaker with a cup of tea by yourself.
You don't want to be doing the sad
parody of the clown with a tear in his
eye, but it felt a bit like that. It’s so
much better working with other
people on stage. You can bounce off
them. And then afterwards you have
the social aspect of it, which is great.’If you’ve only seen Paul on
HIGNFY – curmudgeonly, a little
dour – you wouldn’t peg him as
a social animal. That Paul Merton,
he says, is just a persona, and it’s true
that in real life he is less intimidatingI DID A ONE-
MAN TOUR
ONCE AND
GOT TIRED OF
HEARING MY
OWN VOICE.
I WANTED
SOMEBODY
ELSE TO
COME ON