“I was booed off every night,” he deadpans. “The show’s great fun, actually. It’s sort of a comedy chat show. I come out and do a bit of stand up at the top, and then I bring people out of the audience and interview them. Everyone has a story, that’s the crux of the thing. People volunteer – I don’t pull people out of the audience who don’t want to come up.
“This whole thing about ‘everyone has a story’, we’re sort of realising that the onus is on me to be funny. I can’t wait for funny stories to come up. Sometimes the stories are odd and you don’t expect them to end where they end. On the form you write your name, what you do for a living, has anything ridiculous happened to you, and sometimes someone will say something like, ‘I found a bat in my handbag’ and you think, ‘This will be a great story’. So you go, ‘What happened?’ and they go, ‘Well I found a bat in my handbag’. The title of the story was the whole story,” he laughs. “‘I found a bat in my handbag’, ‘Right, great.’ Part of the joy are all those moments where we seem to be getting nowhere. There’s fun in there, and I’m always throwing gags in along the way.”
Vine is a one-liner legend, a pun king, a patron saint for dad jokes. Not that he likes that term, however.
“I’m not a big fan of the dad joke tag. To me, it’s me being silly. A dad joke kind of means it’s unfashionable or something, which is fine, but that’s not how I think of these jokes. I love them, like my children. So I’m a dad, I suppose – there you go, I’ve just confirmed it,” he laughs. “They may be silly jokes, but we laugh at them. I think people are afraid to be silly, generally in life, and comedy is all different styles and that’s great, but Charlie Chaplin said it takes courage to be a fool, and I think there’s a lot of fun to be had if you can get past the fear of making a fool of yourself. And I think that’s part of what this phrase ‘dad joke’ means, it’s people’s way of distancing themselves, ‘I wouldn’t want to tell those jokes’.
“That’s the best thing about kids, they haven’t gotten to the point where someone’s said, ‘Listen, you need to be sensible’ so I feel like children’s way of thinking is similar to my way of thinking. To make a child laugh, you just do something stupid, you don’t have to do all that much or make up some clever little word play.
“I think it’s a part of everyone’s nature when they’re younger, and maybe something went wrong in the gene that’s meant to make me grow up. I think that’s true of a lot of comics; to get up onstage you are risking making a fool of yourself. I didn’t make a conscious decision to be silly, I just didn’t make a conscious decision to stop being silly.”
BY NICK TARAS
