Tweaking tabboos, tickling ribs

Although happy to be presented with the gong, Brendon reckons winning the award doesn’t have quite the impact that it used to.
“I think that’s partly because of people denouncing it, and partly because of the panel trying to make their own obscure discovery,” he proffers. “But I think now that it’s a new award, they’re kind of going back to picking Edinburgh veterans, such as myself and Phil Nichol, who won in 2006. I’m currently working with Jon Plowman at the BBC, for a series based on my show, which is what used to happen with the award.”
What sort of format will the show take?
“No one’s done something like Fist Of Fun or The Mary Whitehouse Experience for a while,” replies Brendon. “Those programmes were clever and cool, everything. The project I’m developing is based on my Edinburgh show, which is basically about outrage and the nature of offence. We’re trying to transfer that to the series, in terms of talking about taboos. Not taboos in the sense of, ‘Woah, look at how edgy I’m being’, but more from the point of view that a taboo is something that makes people feel.
“They’re emotional issues, and that’s why they’re taboo, because people don’t want to feel. There’s a certain way in which we like being complacent and numb. But I want to do it in a way that has fun with these issues, rather than taking an approach where – and I’ve been guilty of this in the past – you slap people in the face. I’m too old for that now, and I think that it was a petulant outlook.
“In the first episode we’ll be dealing with race, but being funny about race, not offensive. We’ll also be covering beliefs, sexuality and gender, mental illness and disability. Again, the tone won’t be like, ‘Lookout! We’re covering taboo subjects!” Other people have given me the label of being taboo. I don’t think I’m taboo busting; I think I’m perfectly reasonable. I’m comfortable talking about these things, I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
Burns says that one of his formative influences as a stand-up was Sam Kinison, the preacher-turned-comedian noted for his vitriolic rants. On Full Mountie, Jack Dee’s programme about the Montreal Comedy Festival, Dee related the experience of being in the dressing room with Kinison and sundry other comics. As each performer took their turn going onstage, Kinison would observe their performance on the monitor, then say, “Yeah, that’s good. Now MAKE ME LAUGH!”
“That’s right, they could hear him downstairs,” says Brendon. “Of course, Kinison is dead now. He died in a car accident, a few days after he got married to his long-term girlfriend. She turned out to be ropy as fuck, she didn’t even turn up to the funeral. But he was the rock ‘n’ roll comedian, that’s kind of how he got his start. All the bands were into him. I remember reading in his biography, written by his brother, that he’d hang out in this place where all the rock bands would go to eat when they were on tour.
“They’d all been handed his album to listen to on the road. So he was hanging out in this place, and ZZ Top turned up. They all went, ‘Holy shit, it’s Kinison!’ They had their picture taken with him and everything.”
I remember reading this unusual story about one of the guys in ZZ Top. He was in bed with his girlfriend and got up to get dressed. He forgot that he’d stored his gun in one of his boots, and accidentally shot off one of his testicles.
“There’s a Kinison story as well, that he got in an argument with his girlfriend, so she hid a gun in his luggage before he got on a plane. Actually, I’d recommend that biography by his brother, in fact I think it’s called Brother Sam. I remember in my drug-fuelled days, I read a section in it about how he’d snorted coke off a John Belushi album. A week later I was snorting charlie off the Kinison book. Thankfully I found out that’s quite an empty chalice.”
Also during his hedonistic phase, Brendon gave out magic mushrooms to an audience at the Glastonbury festival.
“I think it was a vain attempt to get to talk to my ex-girlfriend again,” he reflects. “She was in South Africa. I got enough mushrooms to get a thousand people high, so that I could call her one year to the day after we’d broken up, and compose a song to her, in a vain attempt to prove that God existed.”
Did it work?
“No, I went mad. Clinically insane. We filmed the whole thing as well, I still haven’t seen the footage. It’s going to be a tough watch, I was a nightmare. Myself and Paul Provenza were going to use it for a documentary, but that’s a matter of finding time to do it. It’s a tough call, given the way both of our careers are going. But one day we’ll get it together I’m sure.”
Another interesting chapter in Brendon’s career was his stint co-hosting Channel 4’s The Eleven O’Clock Show, on which he worked with Ali G and Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen.
“He was fearless,” recalls Brendon. “On one of the pilots, we went on the street, with Sacha as the roving reporter. It was the day that Gazza had paid one of his friends to be burnt on the face with a cigar. So we went out with, I think, Linda Lusardi, and asked people on the street what they’d be willing to be paid for her to torture them in different ways. And in the middle of this, a bank heist went on in the background.
“Without skipping a beat, while the coppers beat the robbers to the ground, Sacha went up to them, stuck a microphone in their faces and said, ‘How much do you want for this?’ You can’t teach someone that unflappability. Sacha was just excited that we’d captured the footage, and I remember thinking, ‘Jesus, this guy has got balls of steel.’ You look at what he’s doing now, and I’m not remotely surprised.”