We’re all familiar with that moment in a comedy special. There’s a hairpin tonal shift as the laughter stills and an air of expectancy fills the room: the comedian is about to get vulnerable. You can almost hear the rustle of the audience leaning in, ready for their next cue—not a laugh, but some variant of a sympathetic “Awww!”
James Acaster is not afraid of vulnerability—his last special, 2019’s “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” offers a candid account of a mental-health crisis that peaked in 2017, which he calls the worst year of his life—yet his work never demands that response, or even allows for it. In his podcast “James Acaster’s Perfect Sounds,” which also emerged from that difficult year, Acaster briskly begins each episode with the declaration “James Acaster here, and in 2017 I had a breakdown.” As he recounts in the show, and in an accompanying book, he weathered this period by immersing himself in the musical releases of 2016, an all-consuming project that led him to a bold, some might say wild, claim: that 2016 was the greatest year in music history. One gets the sense that this is a bit, but also that it’s dead serious. It’s what a lot of Acaster’s work is like—deep contemplations of his real-life difficulties, from breakups to despair over Brexit to the loss of religious faith, overlaid by a dazzling but transparent coat of absurdity.
It’s this quality that makes his standup impervious to “Awww”s. “Cold Lasagne” and “Repertoire,” Acaster’s remarkable 2018 series of Netflix specials, offer plenty of moments that evoke sympathy. Yet they’re almost always mediated by his intentionally flimsy personae, from a cop working undercover as a comedian named James Acaster, to an imaginary duck named Kyle, to his own former agent. Even when he’s telling stories as himself, Acaster’s most vulnerable moments constantly remind the audience of the ridiculousness of the situation—and, by extension, of the melancholy ridiculousness of life itself. In “Cold Lasagne,” Acaster talks about being depressed after a chaotic appearance on the celebrity edition of “The Great British Bake Off”; he calls a mental-health hotline, but, anxious about anonymity, adopts the persona of an apprentice baker in order to express his emotional distress. Such moments evince commitments both to form—the shows are marvels of precision and critical self-awareness—and to emotional honesty. Acaster’s work engages the audience’s sympathy but never relies upon it.
Now thirty-seven, Acaster first made his name on the British standup circuit following a career in music, and between 2012 and 2016 he racked up a record-breaking five consecutive nominations for Best Comedy Show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In the U.K., he’s a familiar presence on shows like “Taskmaster” and “Hypothetical”; internationally, he’s known for “Repertoire,” “Cold Lasagne,” and “Off Menu,” a food podcast that he hosts with Ed Gamble (in which Acaster inhabits the persona of a genie waiter at a dream restaurant), and U.S. tour dates for his latest show, “Hecklers Welcome,” sold out. This year, he’s been working on an impressively diverse lineup of projects: a new, independently produced podcast, “Springleaf”; his third book, “James Acaster’s Guide to Quitting Social Media,” which is out this month; and an album with Temps, a musical collective that he founded during the pandemic. In the midst of all of this, we found time to speak by Zoom about developing new ideas, reigniting old passions, and more. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
You started out as a musician, playing in bands and teaching the drums, before turning to standup. What led you to comedy?
Basically, I crashed my car when I was eighteen, and after that I got a bit obsessed with dying, so I started doing a bunch of things to tick them off my bucket list. As part of that, I ended up doing a standup-comedy gig, just to see how it would feel. And I enjoyed it, but was very much in denial about how much I enjoyed it. I was, like, “No, no, I want to be a musician.” So I would do comedy maybe once every four months, just as a fun extra thing. And then, when the band stopped, I thought, I’ll do that in the meantime, because I didn’t have any qualifications or anything. I’d stopped school halfway through sixth form, so I didn’t go to university. I thought I’d do comedy while I was figuring out what I really wanted to do.
And, as soon as I started trying to do comedy, it was really hard. Before, when I was in bands, I just got up onstage and messed around. Now that I cared about it, I was trying to write stuff that I’d be as proud of as the music I’d been doing, and I found it really difficult. But what I enjoyed was writing new stuff, trying to get better. If you like doing that sort of stuff, standup is perfect because you just get to go up every night and hone what you’re doing.
So you started standup because you were thinking a lot about dying—yet the word that comics use all the time is “dying,” the fear of dying onstage.
I haven’t thought about that before. It’s quite ironic that this fear of dying in my late teens has led to a career full of death.
In 2020 and 2021, you mentioned in a few places that you were thinking of stopping standup. What felt better about not doing it? And, then, what made you go, All right, I want to go back and do it again?
I started open-mike comedy in 2008, and from then to the end of 2019 I was just gigging all the time. It was pretty constant, pretty relentless. I think I got to the point where I wasn’t really enjoying it. I was quite stressed a lot of the time; I’d be grumpy onstage with the audience or blame them for me not enjoying the gig, which is absolutely not the way it should be. And I was going to take a break for a bit anyway because of that.
And, in 2020, we all had to take a break and reflect. Whether it was your job or even just your social life, you had to renegotiate and ask, “How do I actually feel about that?” I definitely found I felt better not doing gigs every single night. I felt the absence of it as a positive thing: not feeling stressed before walking onstage and instead watching a boxed set with my girlfriend. So, whenever anyone would ask me if I missed it in the pandemic, I didn’t want to lie.
And then I got offered some gigs in Scandinavia. I thought, Well, if I did those gigs, then what show would I do? All the fears I had were like, Oh, if I say yes, then they’re going to heckle me again; they’re going to be on their phones again. And I’m just going to feel really dejected onstage again. So, if I do a show where I tell them they’re allowed to do all of those things and we examine that a little bit, maybe that would be better, maybe that would be interesting.
And I found for the most part that it’s been great. It’s just been a lot more positive, not doing as many gigs and making the gigs this kind of experiment where the audience can do whatever they like.
Is telling the audience that for you, for them, or both? Does it work because you know that you’ve allowed the audience to do whatever they want, or because they no longer want to do anything disruptive when it’s not forbidden?
I think it mainly started off for me. But it has had an effect on the audience. I’ve had people who say they just felt a different energy in the room. I think instantly they’re more relaxed because, if someone gets up to go to the bathroom, they’re not all going, “Oh, no, that person’s about to get picked on.”
I try to match their energy. If they’re being cheeky, I’ll be cheeky back. Sometimes audience members get annoyed by the heckling, and that’s really interesting, because it’s a gig where it’s allowed—all the publicity says that it’s allowed, and they knew when they turned up that it was going to happen. But they just innately find heckling annoying and disagree with it. And I think that’s interesting because the show is about the baggage that I bring to a gig when I’m performing, and how that can affect the gig, but sometimes it can become about the baggage that the audience brings and how that affects things, too. I think that sometimes, as a comedian, you can feel like they’re not treating you like a human being, if you get really upset about it. But we don’t always treat the audience like they’re human beings, either. At its best, this show just reminds us that we’re all people. We’ve all got our own things going on, and we’ve all ended up here, and it’s a bit messy.
In some ways, you’ve kind of—well, not turned them upon one another, exactly, but there’s something happening where the audience is asking itself what it’s doing. The traditional mode is that you’re up there and we’re over here, like a teacher in front of the classroom. But once the teacher is, like, “You don’t need a hall pass to go to the bathroom,” then the classroom has to regulate itself, and it seems like there’s a really interesting social shift.
Yeah. And, because the show is about that stuff, it means that no one can really “ruin” it, because if there is a heckler who heckles too much and the audience hates them, the audience still goes away with the things I want them to think about. It’s still within the frame of the show. Like, “I hate that heckler. Why do they have to shout out all the time?”
What do you think makes them do it? What makes a heckler heckle?
I think it’s all manner of things. I think it always comes from a better place than we think it does. A lot of the time, it comes from people who think that it helps the gig. That’s my main experience in the U.K., anyway—that they think it gives the comedians something to work with. Sometimes it’s just giddiness; they’re excited, they relate to what the comedian is talking about, and so they want to get involved and be, like, “I do that, too.” Sometimes they’re just drunk, so they think it’s funny to shout out something rude; those people probably wake up the next morning not delighted that they did that. And there’s a very, very small percentage setting out to actively ruin the night or upset the comedian or whatever it is. And who knows? That could be triggered by anything. But it is down to you as a comic to turn it into that memorable moment. You’ve got to really be up for that.
One of the things that really interest me is the way that you use different personae. They’re transparent—not full-on characters but filters through which you communicate your experience. In “Repertoire,” where you claim to be an undercover cop, it’s not like you’re fully playing Pat Springleaf, undercover cop; the only character you’re really playing is some version of James Acaster. And, in “Cold Lasagne,” you begin with a critique of the audience that liked the whimsical characters of “Repertoire,” and you say, Forget that, now I’m a cool guy who wears aviator sunglasses and swears a lot. Is there a new persona in “Hecklers Welcome”?
I think that will develop. Each show definitely starts off being informed by the one before it—you go, O.K., I don’t want to do that anymore, but I do want to do this. With this one, I’m pretty much me with a very slight persona. It’s a very no-frills type of thing, and that suits the show because it’s a bit more real about how I feel when I’m up there and how the audience feels; we’re all just being more open with each other in that regard. But we’ll see if that continues. It might not. Sometimes, the more you develop a show, you actually find other elements—and then you go, Oh, I should be this persona, and I should dress like this, and the set should look like this.
Yet, at the same time, you have this book coming out that has the most fictional James Acaster yet—your self-help parody, “James Acaster’s Guide to Quitting Social Media, Being the Best YOU You Can Be and Saving Yourself from Loneliness, Vol. 1.” I’m interested in this more honest onstage persona coinciding with the image on the cover of the book, with you dressed up as a sort of nineties self-help guru. How are those things coexisting for you right now?
It feels like standup isn’t the place for me to do that at the moment, so to do a book that’s just silly, nonsense fiction was really fun. I came up with the idea for the book because I would get asked a lot in interviews about not being on social media, and my answers were so boring—“Well, I deleted the app, and for a while I’d get back on and check it, and over time that happened less and less, and now I’m not on it anymore.” I was boring myself in interviews. And I found it more fun to make up silly things about how I quit—just over-the-top, nonsensical things. And, the more things I made up, the more I was, like, Oh, there’s a whole book in this: what if you behaved the way you behave on social media in real life?
What I didn’t want to do was write a book where I seemed like I was genuinely looking down on people who use social media. I didn’t want the book to seem holier than thou. And so I thought, That’s what the character will be: a person who thinks they’re better than everyone else for not being on social media anymore. The self-help guru comes from that idea of someone who literally thinks he’s got all the answers because his life is so great—when, clearly, if you read the book, this person’s life is an absolute mess.
You’re working on a podcast about Pat Springleaf, the undercover-cop character from “Repertoire,” which looks like a scripted true-crime parody. What’s up with Pat Springleaf? Because in “Repertoire,” again, he was more of a screen for you to talk about real-life things. When he gets his own spinoff, is he going to become his own man, or is he still another James Acaster persona?
I think he is more his own man, although he’s still undercover as a comedian named James Acaster. When I did that standup show originally, in 2014, I had a section where I played the undercover cop’s wire recording for the audience. At the time, I was, like, This would be a really fun way to do an audio sitcom—having it pose as a true-crime podcast, with an undercover cop who’s playing the wire recordings of his biggest case to the audience. You could do the sitcom’s whole story line in the wire recordings, but have this extra element where he can stop the tape at any time and justify his decisions or reflect on his actions.
Pat Springleaf is still a standup comedian, and James Acaster’s standup career is still in the podcast, but it’s a bit different than my real life. I’d been wanting to continue doing fiction, and having an idea that specifically had to be an audio sitcom, that wouldn’t work in any other format—that excites me. I used to listen to “The Goon Show” when I was a kid, and as I became a bit older I would think, It’s just the best format for this. [The creators] actually thought, We’re doing a radio show, therefore we can do these types of jokes, and they will work on the radio better than they would work anywhere else. And I feel like that’s what this is.
One of the things I’ve been wondering is how much collaboration is a part of your work. On one hand, standup is a famously lonely pursuit. On the other, you have all these projects that are very collaborative—the new podcast, or your new music project, Temps, which is a collective of musicians. Could you talk a bit about what you love about standup—honing material, writing it yourself, that kind of individual pursuit—and how it balances with collaborative work?
Doing stuff on your own, you get to be completely laser focussed. With collaboration, you just have to find the right people, and then it can be like that. I’ve done collaborative projects that have never seen the light of day because certain people didn’t work as hard or we didn’t really know what our roles were—sometimes that can be difficult, when you’re not sure who’s actually in charge.
With this music project, I’ve been the main organizer. I contacted everyone and produced it, but I don’t know how to play all the instruments on the album, and I haven’t got as much of a background in songwriting and composition, mixing, all that stuff. And so I’ve contacted these people who know way, way more than me. They’ve all been so generous with their time. It’s been, like, forty musicians, and then probably another ten or fifteen people involved in the engineering and distributing. When you find people that enable you to do stuff you just couldn’t do on your own, and they’re a pleasure to work with, it’s a really exhilarating feeling, because it’s bigger than you. Sometimes when it’s just you doing a project, you take all the credit for it, and you also take all the criticism. With something like this, I find it easier to be a fan of the thing itself because it wasn’t all me. So much of it is still magical because I have no idea how those people did the things they did.
How has it felt to go back to music after being away from it for so long? Has it fed back into your comedy, or do you have a separate music brain and comedy brain?
It’s been completely separate, which has been great—just like how comedy was when I started, when it was a thing that I got to enjoy outside of music. It began accidentally. The whole “2016 was the greatest year for music” thing was me rediscovering current music. That evolved into making music again, because I was interviewing these musicians, and it made me want to do something. [Temps] started when my parents said, “This drum kit has been in our house for over a decade, and we want you to pick it up.” And then I went, Well, if I’m going to pick up the drum kit, I want to do something with it, so let’s record loads of drums and see what happens. And then I just followed that impulse until I’d collaborated with thirty-nine of my heroes and they’d all given me amazing stuff. I was lucky—it’s vulgar, using this term about the pandemic—but I was lucky that they were all locked down around the world, and bored. I was able to go, “Do you want to play along to this drumbeat?” And they were, like, “Yeah, all right.” They were able to give me something that was interesting and engaging and quite alive. It’s just been great to discover that the part of my brain that thinks about how to structure songs and put them together still works.
Does music feel different this time around?
Before, it was me and my friends playing in our kitchen together, writing songs, doing gigs, trying to get a record deal. But this was just me making music on my laptop; there were no expectations. I played the drums, but I improvised them, so I wasn’t precious about it. And then everything that people would send me—I didn’t write any of it, so I could just listen and decide what bits I liked. When you’re in a band and you’ve all written your own bits and you want them to stay in, you can’t really see the wood for the trees a lot of the time. With this, I felt like I was more of a listener, a fan. All these people that I’m already a fan of were sending me stuff, and I got to go on my daily walk, listening to the latest versions. If I didn’t like a song, I could change it.
It was a really fun way of doing it. I thought, Oh, this is what I liked about being in bands: composition and recording. What I didn’t enjoy was band practice and doing gigs. Now I just get to do the two fun bits, and then worry about maybe having to re-create that live at a later date. I have no idea if we’ll be able to, but I won’t worry about that for now.
This project, and the work it comes out of, is so much about listening. I was especially interested in the podcast “James Acaster’s Perfect Sounds,” where you invite people to listen to albums with you. What does listening mean for you?
I don’t do it enough. Even though I’m not on social media anymore, I’m still on my phone all the time: texting, WhatsApping, watching YouTube, checking my e-mails. One of my friends wanted me to get on Signal, so now I’ve got that to check as well. But, when I was working on these songs, I wasn’t checking my phone, I was just locked into listening to what these musicians had recorded, getting it just how I wanted it to sound, then sending it off to someone else. I’d be so excited every time there was a new e-mail from a musician because I knew it was a part that I was going to get to listen to and play with.
With this new standup show, it was about listening to the audience—forcing myself to engage with them and not just get angry. It just all feels a little bit healthier, really.
What role do you think obsession has in creativity? Is there a point at which it becomes unhealthy?
Yeah, I think it could become unhealthy. I don’t think I’ve got to that point yet. It’s always important to be aware of things outside of your current obsession, and to know that they deserve time as well. Lockdown got me back into just sitting down, watching TV, being with someone I love—and that’s every bit as good as getting obsessed with a comedy show or music. But I’m very, very lucky that I get to make a living from stuff that I enjoy. They should be things that I get obsessed with, because other people are going to be spending money on them, whether it’s tickets to a show, or buying vinyl, or donating to the Kickstarter for this audio thing—they deserve that money to be for something that’s worthwhile, especially now that every creative market is saturated.
The 2016 project was an obsession. That obsession can be pinpointed: it came from struggling with my mental health and then finding a positive thing to do. I wouldn’t have been as obsessed with each project if it wasn’t coming from an actual, real emotional response to something. But it usually has much more fun and discovery to it, whereas the 2016 music thing was an obsession, in the pure form of the word—like, I know that I’m doing this because I need to. But, if I stopped doing standup, I don’t think I’d be, like, “Oh, no, now I don’t know what to do, I need standup.” That’s one of the reasons I’m doing standup again—because I feel like I don’t need to. It feels a lot better as a choice.
One of the things that struck me about “Perfect Sound Whatever” is how many of the stories about the musicians mirror your own experience—so many of them describe this narrative from a breakdown to a new artistic phase. Do you think some sort of collapse is necessary to get to a new creative level?
I don’t think it’s necessary. I think that if you’re making something artistic there has to be some sort of catalyst. When people have a crisis in their life, that can be the catalyst—and it can also not be that. Plenty of people have gone through that stuff and not made an album. . . .
Most, in fact.
I think you can keep on top of your mental health and not have a breakdown, and make loads of really amazing art along the way. But I do feel very lucky to work in a job where, when I did have a breakdown, I was able to make something out of it that felt positive. And, definitely, discovering that all these musicians had come from that place—I really felt very connected to them. One of the reasons that I decided to be a bit more open about myself and my mental health in my standup was that I’ve really benefitted from people turning those experiences into art. It’s made me feel less alone. You really see the benefit of it when you’re in the audience, and you want to do the same. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
