British comedian Paul Foot is one of comedy’s most unique and wonderfully unusual voices. It’s apparent that he’s always had a vast, incredible imagination. “When I was a little child, I used to invent space rockets all the time and I was always living in a sort of fantasy world,” he recalls. “Often, people would ask my mother: ‘is your son all right?’
“I would be in one little corner of the room pretending to be in some sort of strange, fantasy world. And my mother would say, ‘oh, he’s fine – he just invents his own things’, so I’ve always invented silly things like that. And now I have a whole life of coming up with silly ideas all the time, which is a nice sort of job to do, really.”
Foot realised that he wasn’t interested in a normal life. “I did my first ever gig when I was 19 at university – I only did it because I thought I’ll just do one and see what it’s like,” he relates. “I had never planned to do any other show. I just thought it was going to be a one-off thing and I was probably going to be an accountant or something. But as soon as I did that first show, it was sort of like a road to Damascus moment. So I knew I wasn’t going to have a normal life then. As for the actual comedy, I suppose – like any artist – I never planned to be unusual or different; I just did the comedy that seemed obvious to me and the sort of thing I wanted to do. It was a gradually dawning realisation from quite early on, actually, that I was not like a normal comedian.”
Foot’s new comedy festival show, Hovercraft Symphony in Gammon # Major, will be one of his most unusual shows to date. “It’s certainly pushing the envelope a little bit more than the previous shows,” he informs. “I’m excited about it. There’s a piece about a woman struggling to live with snakes. There’s a vegetable-based tragedy involving the death of a beautiful cauliflower. And there’s a lot of other strange and ridiculous things in the show. My new show is very different to any previous show, really, and it’s pretty weird.”
Foot has a cult following named The Guild of Connoisseurs, who give him nice gifts and pictures of himself, but that’s certainly not all that he’s given. “It’s always lovely to meet the Connoisseurs,” he enthuses. “Some people, who have met each other through being Connoisseurs, actually get married and then some people even make baby Connoisseurs for me – well, I suppose, they’re not actually for me; I guess it’s for themselves, really, or for the world, but it’s always nice when they make baby Connoisseurs.”
He’s influenced comedians such as Russell Brand with his inimitable language, delivery and style, but Foot’s also impressed by Brand: “Russell Brand is a brilliant comedian, a lovely friend, and a hilarious and absolutely ridiculous man.”
Like the best of them, Foot aims to provide audiences with a unique perspective into art and life: “People laugh in their real life all the time at all sorts of things – no one laughs more than when a member of their family trips over a chair and all the soup goes all over the floor, so why do people go to see comedy? Because comedians make them think about things in a different way. They sort of change, in some ways, people’s view, so a comedy show must be funny, but it must also, in some ways, make people think differently and be calibrating their brains.”
BY CHRISTINE LAN
