When audience members aren’t lining up their shoes on the stage at interval for a lark (it’s a show ritual the comedian clearly enjoys), Noble’s doing something like inciting them into public disorder and leading a conga line to the nearby vegan food truck, encouraging patrons to demand sausage rolls. Given that the bulk of his shows are improvised and led largely by audience interaction, Noble’s gigs are renowned for inspired mayhem.
Of his knack for turning a mind meander into comic gold, Noble himself once put it this way: “If it’s in the head, it comes out the mouth.” Which begs a few questions – is he like this off stage, and does it get him into much trouble? Predictably, we don’t quite get a straight answer.
“Oh god, yes, so many times,” Noble says. “What happens is that onstage whatever pops into my head comes out of my mouth, but weirdly sometimes offstage. It’s in the head, rattling around, and I disappear into it and then I end up going into some sort of human-screen saver mode – people go, ‘What is wrong with him’. I’ll just be staring off into space.
“My wife goes mad at me for doing it in the middle of a sentence. It’s fine on stage, because I can interrupt myself and go off and do whatever, but sometimes I’ll start talking. I’ll say something like, ‘You know that couch that we used to have?’ and she’ll go, ‘Yeah,’ and I’ll go, ‘Well, I was thinking maybe,” and stop in the middle of the sentence. In my head I’m going off on some sort of delightful wander through my brain, and then return later. And that’s great onstage, but offstage it can be a bit disconcerting.”
Frustration with school (Noble is dyslexic), led the comedian to ditching it in his teens. First for street juggling, and later becoming hooked on stand-up after winning tickets to a local gig. So, why comedy over the circus?
“The main thing was that I realised you could do a show where you didn’t have to be covered in paraffin all the time,” he says. “I also realised, you didn’t have to carry loads of stuff. I think it was laziness really.”
Mirroring the randomness of his shows, Noble’s career has been similarly kooky, doing everything from writing and appearing in an episode of Peter Helliar’s show It’s A Date as a dude going on a date with Ian Smith (ie. Harold from Neighbours), to horror movies (including one in which he’s a murderous clown) and appearing in a Billy Bragg film clip. But maybe this one takes the cake.
“I once did a show called Storage Hunters. Ever heard of that show? Basically, I spent a day in a storage unit with the Happy Mondays”.
