What's Your Problem Articles

What’s Your Problem? is a podcast recorded at the Big Belly Comedy Club, where we try to figure out what’s wrong with comedians that makes them want to tell jokes on stage. 

Luke Chilton is a rising star of the UK comedy circuit, performing at venues across the country, as well as hosting at the Big Belly Comedy Club every Wednesday. Interview by Lance Carter.

Luke Chilton, what’s your problem?

I just never wanted a job, that was my main thing I guess. Well, two things – I have an absent father, which I refuse to believe has directed any of my behaviour, but probably has…

I really didn’t want a job, which sounds like a really negative thing, but I think in a philosophically informed way. In the modern world there’s so much extra resource now that pretty much every job I’ve ever done, it kind of didn’t have to be done. It would have been much better if they just gave me the wage and let me go home, and I might do something more productive.

The only job I think I had that was worthwhile was working in bars, purely because you chat to people and you make them have a good day. 

I was a consultant, and that’s considered quite a high status job, but it’s an absolute scam industry. You tell organisations you’ve got this expertise to help them perform better, but most of the time you’re just using fucking Google. They’ll pay you £60k to answer a question they could have googled themselves. 

My consultancy brought me in to work with a homeless charity and I had a week to write a report which should have taken six months, so I just copied and pasted some research that the charity themselves had conducted into homelessness, made a few edits and presented it back to them. 

And they fucking loved it! They offered me a full time job off the back of it. Are you kidding me? I scammed you because I had no time to do anything else! 

My boss thought I did a great job. But we weren’t making effective change or providing anything of value, we’ve effectively just stolen money off a charity for homeless people. I can’t live with that. How can I justify that existence? 

So how did you go from there to comedy?

Comedy is very rewarding, because there’s an objective; just make them laugh. If they laugh, you win. You’ve achieved the objective, you’ve made everyone’s night. If you don’t, you’ve lost and you feel bad, but that’s motivation to get better at it. 

That’s a clear sense of purpose to me. That’s really easy. I know what the job is. It’s a small thing to make people laugh, but the sense of achievement is huge. 

The positive thing you’ve done is you either made people think, or you’ve made people laugh. Unless you’ve made a bunch of drunk morons laugh, and you made their evening, but that’s fine too. That’s enough satisfaction for me in life. So it seems like a worthwhile thing to pursue. 

Also, it’s so time consuming to get good at comedy. You have to sit for hours trying to work out how you should structure a sentence so that creates the maximum amount of laughter.

You travel around a lot meeting a genuinely very diverse range of people in comedy, which I think is great. I love the fact that comedy has got woke people and then the most staunch free speech advocates – I actually love that sort of combination, even though they’re often arguing with each other and ruining comedy.

But I love chatting to both of those people. 

Is comedy your full time job now?

It is. Most of my money comes from gigs now. I mean, I earn fuck all money, it’s tight, but I’m happy with that because when I was a consultant I was earning good money but I felt like shit. I mean, I thought I was going to hurt myself or something. So comedy at least gives me purpose. 

Obviously there’s really scary things about doing comedy. Like, what if you’re 60 and you never had a family and you’re still making all of your money out of bucket-splits, and you’ve got no good relationships because you’re out gigging every evening, and people don’t even find you funny. You’ve got no transferable skills to change your life at that point. I think that’s a thing that all creatives are worried about. 

And I think it feeds a certain narcissistic quality which I don’t think is necessarily healthy. 

Before comedy were you the funny guy in the office, or the class clown?

I don’t know if I was the funny kid in school. I was definitely a weird kid in school. 

Actually, what really drove me was at the end of school they did that thing where they vote on which person’s most likely to become a fucking whatever, and I got nominated for Class Clown. I thought, fuck yeah, I want to be the Class Clown. I also got nominated for Most Shameless, and I won Most Shameless, but I came second in the Class Clown vote, and it drove me fucking mad because he wasn’t funny and I wanted to prove to all those fuckers that I was funny. The guy who won is an accountant now. 

So I need to prove myself to a bunch of 16 year olds who are now all in their thirties. 

What influenced your sense of humour when you were younger?

My brother was always naturally hilarious. But I used to go to the Cavendish Arms (Comedy Virgins open mic) when I was 14 and it had probably just started, and everybody was fucking terrible. It was the funniest thing in the world, these people thought they were funny, but the whole night was just beginners and nobody was funny, it was a train wreck from start to finish.

And it went on for three and half hours, it was a relentless gauntlet of mental health problems coming up on stage, and desperate people trying to find meaning in their lives. There was something so funny about that because it was kind of tragic but very humane. 

I found that because I find bad comedy equally funny and interesting as good comedy, I think that sort of solidified in me that this was something I wanted to be a part of, because there’s real magic here. 

I always quite liked comedy because it’s such a scaled back art form, if you’re gonna call it that. There’s just one person talking, which is old school storytelling. It’s the most basic, around the campfire, exchanging stories, and it’s kind of shit. But it’s so scaled back that it feels the most honest sort of way to communicate ideas. Even though it’s a lot of bullshit, it’s sort of like a metaphor for life in some way, because it’s deeply meaningful, but also a complete waste of time..

Did you watch many standups before you became one?

I think Bill Hicks was probably the biggest influence when I was a young person. But he’s also one, as I’ve grown older, I ask myself why did I like this? This to me it’s not good, it’s preachy. But it’s so of its time.

Also people like George Carlin, Louie CK, Eddie Murphy, Rick Mayall, Richard Pryor. 

I like that real confessional style. Standup is like a deception in the sense that it’s you’re trying to make people laugh, so a lot of those stories are embellished, they’ve been changed somewhat, they’re not exactly how it happened. But there is an artistic honesty to it in the sense that it’s like, here’s something really fucked up about myself. I’m gonna say it, because none of us are being honest about it. And let’s deal with it in a funny way. 

Which to me is just great. To me that is the top tier of comedy, that’s the kind of comedian I want to be.