Thinking Outside the Box: Brendon Burns on his new tour
Touring the nation with a brand new comedy show, but actively avoiding comedy clubs? Incendiary Aussie Brendon Burns tells us why he's gigging everywhere but the places you might expect him
If you haven’t heard of Brendon Burns, then you’ve been missing out. When the Aussie comic scooped the Perrier in 2007 for his show So I Suppose THIS Is Offensive Now, it cemented his reputation as a firebrand with a firm handle on tricky material. As he puts it: “The one thing I’ve always been able to do is make uncomfortable subjects funny. Generally, it seems I’m able to make people feel good about bad things.”
This year he strikes out on his latest UK tour, Outside the Box. The hook? He won’t be playing any comedy clubs. Any and all other types of venue are on the table: theatres, cinemas, a burrito bar and a small zoo in Great Yarmouth will all be playing host to his vulgar wit. In the Northwest, he’s playing at Liverpool’s Lantern Theatre and Manchester's Deaf Institute: both venues that have hosted live comedy before, but crucially aren’t typical comedy clubs.
His inspiration comes from the American alternative scene that grew up out of the shtick superstars of the 80s, “guys like David Cross, Patton Oswalt and pretty much all the indie/alt guys in the 90s when the US firm was subsiding.” These are acts who, when the comedy industry was crumbling around their ears, moved to the indie music clubs and forged a new living on this bold frontier. It’s very much become the new model in the US now, with alt acts like Neil Hamburger and bigger names like Doug Stanhope both plying their trade outside of the metropolitan laugh shacks.
“There are guys in the States that you have never heard of that make a fantastic living – I mean, we’re talking second-home living – through just booking their own shows and just going to a town,” Burns tells me; and it’s no coincidence that the tour is being managed by Perfect Strangers, who’ve previously helped American heavyweights like Todd Barry and Bill Burr break Britain (and who also run Gorilla’s monthly alternative night Group Therapy).
Burns had a further revelation at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, when he dipped his toes for the first time into the egalitarian free-for-all of the PBH Free Fringe, a festival within the festival that stages free-entry shows. He quickly discovered that the non-profit had listed his venue at the wrong address, potentially scuppering any promotional work he'd undertaken – but an administrative error that would ruin a newcomer’s show turned out to be the best thing that could happen to him: “I loved it. It worked really well for me, because people had to work hard to find me and there was nothing but die-hard fans.”
The heavy burden usually attached to staging a Fringe show was also lifted from his shoulders. “I didn’t hand out a single flyer, I didn’t pay for a single poster. I never rang my PR. I never rang my promoter. I never looked at other people’s posters and wondered why mine wasn’t there. All I did was, me and this very tight-knit, ear-to-the-ground fanbase went to this secret location and had a blast.”
Although he’s added a ticket price for the national tour, he’s bringing along a lot of that pioneering spirit from the Free Fringe. The tour seeks to recreate the circumstances of his Edinburgh show in cities across Britain: “If I’m not your cup of tea, there’s no way you would’ve found me," he explains. "So the impulse of the tour is [that] who doesn’t come is equally as important as who finds it. Who doesn’t find it is just as important as who does.”
“I do believe funny is a language, and there are many different languages, and not everyone speaks it,” he says. He’s not pitching to comedy fans, he’s pitching to people who get it. “There’s that level of communication, because when people laugh it really is the sound of comprehension.”
As a storytelling comic with a bawdy tongue, his material requires both an attention span and a suspension of one's ordinary moral sensibilities, both of which are qualities that can be lacking in mainstream audiences. “We live in the era of the selfie, figuratively and literally, and if people don’t see themselves in what you’re doing [they switch off]," he says. "My favourite comedians growing up were always someone that had a point of view and a voice, and I thought the point of this was to find your voice. Not to insert everyone else into it.”
Absolving him of the need to pander has freed him up a lot creatively and ensured he no longer has to worry about whether an audience are onside. The economically squeezed clubs, deadlocked in an artistic nosedive, put pressure on acts to be their broadest and most crowd-pleasing – “because, let’s face it, in a club, you do what works. In front of your people, you do what you and they find funny. Now more than ever, people aren’t allowed to fail and I think that is creating a lot of acts who just do what works as opposed to what makes them particularly funny.”
He’s clear that while Outside the Box is an alternative tour, it’s not just a tour of weird venues. “Some people wanted us to come to their venue because it will be interesting because ‘Ooh, we’ve got this group of people and we’re a pug cafe. It’s all pug enthusiasts.’” The venue’s just a pen for his flock, a place for his fans to congregate; he’s not consciously trying to attract other kinds of weirdos. “We do have the zoo, the zoo might be the one exception.”
Playing solely to your fans isn’t a luxury enjoyed by most comedians, their followings being spread so thinly as to make it impossible to fill the most modest rooms – but like an increasing number of his peers, Burns has a large and loyal podcast following. The way podcasts are consumed gives a level of intimacy not available elsewhere, tripping the line between the casual and the deeply private. A running joke about toaster gags led to an audience member turning up to a Sydney show armed with a framed picture of his toaster. The logic follows, if you can get someone to bring you a picture of their toaster, you can get them to come to your gig at a zoo.
“I’m basically giving them something they can latch onto rather than hopefully hearing when I’m in their town," he says. "Because I can’t afford massive publicity campaigns.”
But beyond fiscal prudence, the tour, like the podcasts, is about something more important than a following – it’s about achieving that deeper connection between performer and audience, something that Burns can’t achieve in the thronging attention-deficit pit of the modern comedy club. To paraphrase the author Kurt Vonnegut: “If you open the window and make love to the world, you’ll catch pneumonia.” If you haven’t heard of Brendon Burns, then you’ve been missing out – but he hasn’t.