Gary Delaney has been touring up and down the UK for 22 years, but next week his new show Punderland will bring him to Dundee for the very first time.
And the 49-year-old comedian, known for his one-liners on TV’s Mock The Week, is determined to leave the City of Discovery “aching” with laughter.
“You should be laughing more than your muscles are used to,” he says ahead of the sold-out Gardyne Theatre show, which takes place on Saturday February 18.
“If you don’t come out aching from laughter, I’ve not done my job properly.”
Punderland – which has nothing to do with Alice’s Wonderland, beyond a “press shot of me in a Mad Hatter hat” – is Delaney’s “best written” show yet, according to the man himself.
Written in 18 months over “the pando” (as he calls it), he confesses he whittled a “huge lever arch file” of around 6,000 jokes down to a tight 250 for the tour, with some help from his wife and fellow comic Sarah Millican.
“We will sometimes work out material together, but we’ve got really different styles,” he explains, as the couple’s schnoodle (schnauzer x poodle) woofs away in the background.
“Sarah writes about her life and I basically write literal nonsense. Broadly speaking, the stuff she says is true and mine is made-up!”
Made up or not, the success of Punderland so far has meant that a second Dundee date, on Saturday August 6, has been added to the schedule.
‘One-liners, willy jokes and puns’
“After 22 years travelling the UK, there’s not many places I haven’t been before, so it’s a novelty to come to Dundee,” Delaney says with a hint of pride.
“This tour has got so big that I am now turning up in places where I never really had an audience before.”
Unlike many stand-ups in an increasingly politicised comedy scene, Delaney insists he is “not there to change anyone’s minds or persuade anyone”.
“I just want to make people laugh as much as possible, from the second I get on that stage,” he says, laughing himself.
“It’ll be as many one-liners, willy jokes and puns as I can cram into two hours! I try to make it as relentless as possible.”
For Delaney, joke-writing is less about creating a narrative, and more about playing around with words and language.
“I look at language as little mechanical puzzles, like engines that I can pull apart and put back together,” he explains.
“One-liners are usually based on your expectations of language. And the English language in particular is a tremendous mongrel!
“It’s got influences from here, there and everywhere, and everything could mean about five possible things.
“So I’ll try to listen to how people speak, hear the words they choose and see how that can be turned around, and reverse engineer a joke out of that.”
‘Stand on stage and see if they laugh’
Swapping out Wonderland for Oz, he pulls back the curtain entirely to give a working example of his clever writing process.
“We got a dog, and it was my turn to take the dog out,” he begins. “And as I was taking it out, my wife said: ‘Don’t forget poo bags.’ Now, if you were speaking proper English, you’d say ‘don’t forget the poo bags’ – but she dropped the ‘the’.
“But when you say it that way, it starts to sound like it’s a proper noun… so then you’ve got: ‘Don’t forget, Poo Bags,’ which is a very different sentence, and you can reverse that into a joke.
“So I had a joke in my last tour, which was: ‘I went round granddad’s to walk his dog. As I was leaving the house, he said, “Don’t forget Poo Bags” and I was like “Alright gran, you can come as well!”’
“So you can see how that started as a conversation and turned into a joke!”
But a joke, after all, is not only meant to be clever – it’s meant to be funny. And the only way to tell if it’s funny, insists Delaney, is to “stand on stage in front of an audience, and say it, and see if they laugh”.
It sounds nerve-wracking, and in true showbiz spirit, I wish him a broken leg – only to find out he already has one.
“Actually, I broke my ankle – it’s still in a splint now,” he reveals.
“The amount of people who have said ‘break a leg’ to me over the last two months, it’s like: ‘yeah yeah yeah’.”
Oops.
Gary Delaney’s Punderland tour will stop at the Gardyne Theatre in Dundee on February 18 and August 6 2023. Tickets and more information are available from the city box office.
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