[laughing]

None of his spells work.

There's a...

I've got a mage here who says there's a pill for that.

Oh.

[laughing] Tell him to meet me in the throne room.

Let's cut the shit and do this now.

That's on me.

Oh, I thought you were a child.

No, no.

So I w- w- uh, first time I went to Disney [laughs] I was about seven or eight.

When I was 21, because my parents had been, like, very supportive of my career early on, and, like, they, uh, lent me money for my first fringe, and I thankfully made it back, and then I was able to use that money for the following fringes.

When I started making a bit of money, I wanted to thank them, and, oh, and also I couldn't not take my brothers, so I took them all out to Disney when I could.

... did he put your penis between their toes? Was it like that, or was it just-

I didn't do anything.

Yeah.

Oh, I thought you were a child.

No, no.

So w- w- first time I went to Disney [laughs] I was about seven or eight.

When I was 21, because my parents had been, like, very supportive of my career early on, and, like, they, uh, lent me money for my first Fringe, and I thankfully made it back, and then I was able to use that money for the following Fringes.

When I started making a bit of money, I wanted to thank them and, oh, and also I couldn't not take my brothers, so I took them all out to Disney when I got-

[laughs]

But also, like, I...

The only times I ever find pushback is, like, uh, you know, say what you like about this country, I can stand on stage and I can say horrible things about, uh, Boris Johnson, or Keir Starmer, or Nigel Farage, or the Queen or the King or whatever.

And you're like, "Yeah, move down this-"

Well, one of the weird ones, I was in Leeds, and I'd done a show, and afterwards there's this, I'm gonna say like a 19-year-old girl tapped on my car window just as I was, uh, pulling away, and she had divorce papers for me to sign.

And I was like, you know, uh, the number one thing I ask is like, "Are you better for it?" And the answer is always yes.

I'm like, "Is this a happy divorce papers?" She's like, "It's very, very happy." And I'm like, "Excuse me for asking, but you seem, like, a bit young.

Did you, like, get married at 16?" [laughs] And she was like, "No, this is my parents' divorce papers.

Uh, me and my brother made them watch the special last year over Christmas because we felt that they were staying together for us, and it was just making it more of a toxic relationship and a situation.

So we made them watch the special on Boxing Day, and by New Year they had filed for divorce." And then her dad, like, came out from, like [laughs] the shop-

Yeah, yeah.

So what was the premise of this show?

Oh, I just got out of a relationship, a very bad relationship, because my parents married when they were young and my aunts and uncles and everyone in my family married young.

It was like the sort of done thing that you just got married young and you compromise and you change things about yourself in order to be happy in a relationship.

And then I sort of found after several years of doing that, I was actually very sad because...

I was just changing who I was to end up in a relationship because that's what you were to do.

So I decided to write a show that was essentially meant to be like a love letter to single people, which was just like saying it's okay to be single and it's okay to take time and not settle for less than you're worth.

And then when I was doing that show on tour, I would see people in the audience breaking up.

how did that happen? You just decided when you were still in school you were going to go out and do some stand-up someplace?

You know what I mean? Instead of having a separate

seat.

Two under.

They fly free in business.

They don't count.

So that's just, you know, they fall asleep.

Also, I would much rather ruin people who've bought business class days with the sound of a screaming baby than I would add to the stress of people who are flying on me for 24 hours.

Comes to the school play auditions, he's like, do I need the audition? Do I need the audition or are we just giving me the part?

Good on you

... you did it all." I would...

The saddest my wife has ever seen me, and I'll never fucking forget this, it was during fucking COVID, like, I'm learning about the fucking algorithm and, like, the how the game's fucking changed.

My wife is outside and she comes in and she's like ... what are you watching? I'm like, "What do you mean?" She's like, "I've never seen you angrier.

Like, I, like, your resting face was so filled with rage that, like, I assumed you're watching the Holocaust."

The young ones, yeah.

Yeah.

And these are the formative years.

Talk us through the line of thinking in that bit of material.

Well, that was a bit where, obviously, being a guy, it's not something I'd ever thought about with periods or giving a shit or anything, but if nothing directly affects me, why would I care? That's how things work.

And one of my best friends in the whole wide world, Jean... it's a girl we've been best friends for about five years now and uh living together and stuff obviously living with a girl we're talking about stuff and talking about tampons and stuff and she was like it's just so fucking expensive and i'm like what if we should like boo fucking who and then she was like no not really boo fucking who like it's bullshit and i was like is it like go fuck yourself and then she explained it to me with the whole fucking and i was just like oh holy fucking shit like i mean and so the whole bit is like how as a nation we have free health care cancer treatment's free cancer which you caused yourself is free like that treatment's all free but yet something that just fucking happens through no choice uh because fucking eve ate an apple two and a half thousand years ago like half the world now has to suffer just because some pedophiles wrote it in a book a while ago And we all just went, sure, yeah.

And I'd never thought of it before, and I suddenly went, oh, that is fucking bullshit.

I'd like to sort of talk about that because...

And also with the tampon bit, I really enjoy that routine because I...

I think it's in a very pretentious way.

What sorts of things do you turn down

And it's it's interesting to hear you say that switch, because did all of that happen organically or was there like was there a moment after you realize, oh, I got to take care of my mental health, that it changed the way that you

you do things on stage? So the first time I did jokes about Josie, my sister, I was in LA and there was a show where they were like, go on stage and tell a story that you've never told before.

So I was like, cool, here's four funny sex stories.

And they were like, people do sex stories all the time.

Like, is there anything that like you genuinely haven't spoken about on stage? And I was like, I've never spoken about my sister dying.

And they were like, would you? And I was like, yeah, let me think about it.

So I messaged my mum, one of the funniest people that's ever lived.

Yeah.

Explain why that's not true, what I've just

said.

I was in a very toxic relationship when I was about 23 years old and when I sort of forced myself to stay in it because my parents are very happily married.

There's lots of very happy marriages in my family and I was always taught that compromise was a big part of marriage.

a successful relationship.

And I found myself very unhappy and then I found myself very elated when I got out of that relationship.

So I wanted to sort of do a show which was, it was meant to be like a love letter to single people, to just sort of be like, there's nothing wrong with taking time to find the right person instead of throwing yourself into relationships.

What was the personal aftermath for you like?

Oh, right

... two minutes I enjoyed.

John McGinn's goal, two minutes afterwards, and then just... 'Cause Haiti were, in the second half, all over us, right? Faster, running around.

John McGinn was getting his big, fat, sexy arse out every five minutes trying to win a fucking free kick.

And it's like, "Buddy, just I need you to fucking snap someone here." [laughs] Like, it was so stressful.

And, like, the au- most of the Scottish fans were in, like, the away end then.

Imagine if I'd been sat down there, like, with the hype and things.

Yeah, but also on the flip side, the unbelievable elation to say, "I was there when we won the quarters against England." Like...

He was

huge.

Wild.

The historical inaccuracies.

I still love the movie Braveheart.

But the only reason that the Scottish beat the English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge isn't because we were better fighters.

There was the Battle of Stirling Bridge obviously famously involved a bridge.

My

It's on Netflix.

Yes.

And when I was touring it on the road, I would see people breaking up during the show.

Like, never verbally, but it's like, you know, if you can see, like, the front couple of rows as a stand-up.

Uh, couples would come in, and they'd be touching each other, holding each other's thighs, and playing with each other's hair, and then I would get to, like, this bit at the end where I was talking about why I was single at the time and, you know, why I, why I got out of my previous relationship, and you would see people's body language, like, changing.

Ooh.

"The owners know I arrive between 10:00 AM and w- half past 1 in the afternoon.

This is not a surprise window.

Yeah.

And I would show him Conor McGregor.

I would talk about how excited I was by the prospect of Conor McGregor just knocking everyone out left, right and center.

And then I think it was before the Chad Mendes fight, the booker from Conan was like, "The UFC have asked if Conor McGregor will be on the Conan O'Brien show.

Do you think he would be good on the Conan show?" And I was like, "100%.

He's funny as fuck in interviews.

You tell him not to swear, he'll be fine.

Can't imagine so that early on.

Mm.

So Tesla not only fixed the machine, fixed it faster, and made it, a- a- put vast improvements on it, and then Edi- when he asked Edison for the money, Edison said, "Oh, you clearly just don't get the American sense of humor." And that started the rivalry between him and Edison.

The problem was Edison, being American, and especially the, the, you know, the height of imperialism, capitalism, would patent everything-

Oh, yeah?

Tiger Woods.

My favorite stat about Tiger Woods.

In...

So the way golf works is there's a bunch of tournaments.

It's been a decent organizing principle for millennia, yeah.

Yeah. Um, yeah, no, the only reason Scotland didn't vote, uh, uh, yes in the independence referendum is because we were told to under no, uh, doubtable circumstance by the Tory government of England that if we, if we stayed in the UK, we'd stay in the EU, and then we all voted to stay in the EU, and because the fucking English believe the Rupert Murdoch fucking magazines, we're being dragged kicking and stre- and screaming, uh-

I'll talk every day on the radio, it's mostly an opinion show, on the podcast, and then people in my own life, I have no chance of convincing, and I say to myself, "What am I doing wrong?"

Um, I think it depends how you go about it. Pe- you're, pe- we live in a society now where everyone tells each other how, how to think or what to fucking think. Whereas what I've slowly and very, very slowly over the years learned is that you cannot tell people what to think unless you run the media. Uh, if you're a human being, all you can do is go, here are my experiences and here are the conclusions I've drawn from them. And people can choose to understand that or not. But that's the thing I always say to my audience as well, and w- I think it's important, is you're allowed to disagree with me, because also you might have had different experiences that made you arrive at different conclusions. Now, neither of our experiences are invalid. They can't be. They're experiences, right? Our conclusions can be invalid. We can arri- have arrived at the wrong conclusion, but I'm never gonna begrudge you for that because we've lived different experiences. But I just, for some reason, now we live in a world where if you disagree with someone on one thing, and I think it's a very, very left wing thing, which is if you are not as left wing as the person you're talking to, you are a Nazi.