Comedian Gary Delaney: ‘Laugh a minute? That means 80 per cent of my jokes have failed’

If you like your stand-up to be a series of never-ending, quick-fire gags and puns of the kind you won’t see too often on TV – and that are so funny they may well leave you struggling for breath – then Gary Delaney might be the comedian for you.

Indeed, the 49-year-old, who is married to fellow comic Sarah Millican, believes that if a stand-up’s performance is described as “a laugh a minute”, then they’re not doing their job properly.

“I always think that a laugh a minute is a terrible insult,” says Gary, who came to believe that stand-up comedy could in fact elicit non-stop laughter with no let-up whatsoever when he saw Harry Hill and Tim Vine perform in the 90s and laughed remorselessly throughout their entire sets.

“If you’re only getting one laugh per minute, you’re a bad comic. If anyone thinks my show is a laugh a minute, 80 per cent of the jokes have failed. It should be relentless – when you see one-liner comics, it should be.

“There’s lots of other great sorts of comedy. If you want to go and see a storyteller or a political comic or somebody who’s telling the truth about their sexuality, those are all great, perfectly valid things, but they’re not what I do. I just want to get out there and make people laugh till their faces hurt.”

Gary’s Gary in Punderland tour has already taken in a lot of dates all over the country and has certainly been very well-attended. I was fortunate enough to see him in action earlier this year and, needless to say, I practically fell of my chair from laughing so hard. The tour will call into the Cambridge Junction in November.

“Yeah, I’m really enjoying this tour,” says Gary, speaking to the Cambridge Independent while out walking his dog. “I’m 182 dates in and we still keep adding dates because they keep selling out, so I’m really enjoying the shows.

“I’ve been on the road for a year, and we’ll probably be another year by the time we get round all the places that we’ve yet to add and the extra dates and the like. After 18 months of enforced unemployment, it’s good to be working again.”

Gary says he’s loving this jaunt because he’s “reached all the right people, in that I put out my sort of bat signal and everybody who comes along to the shows knows what to expect. They know it’s just going to be loads of jokes, and everyone who comes along is quite up for a laugh and no one’s going to get offended and no one’s expecting me to tell stories or talk about my life...

“It’s just going to be loads and loads of stupid jokes until hopefully by the time you leave, your face hurts a bit.”

There are that many jokes at a Gary Delaney gig, that when you try and remember one to tell friends or family afterwards, you find you’re a bit stumped. “It’s great, that’s my secret weapon,” explains Gary. “I have a lot of people come to see the show multiple times on tour – sometimes they bring a different mate – because they say they want to remember the jokes.

“Well you’re not going to! If you do two one-liners, people remember them both, if you do 250 you won’t remember any because the human memory doesn’t work like that. And that works out surprisingly well for me. It’s now how it was planned but it’s certainly an unexpected bonus.”

Before he comes out on stage, Gary puts a series of his famed one-liners and doctored images from his social media accounts up on a giant screen, which serves as an excellent way to help build anticipation for the main event (he also has a warm-up act, mostly, he says, for the company and to split the driving).

“They’re all reject jokes, you see, they’re the B-grade jokes,” observes Gary, the only comic ever to have got two gags in the same top 10 for Dave’s Funniest Jokes from the Edinburgh Fringe.

“I only use five per cent of what I write in the live shows – I only use the very best five per cent. So there’s loads of other stuff; there’s another 10, 20 per cent that’s pretty good but doesn’t necessarily meet the standards for one of my tours.

“And then there’s a load of stuff that’s just not really good enough and then you go and rewrite it and try and make it better later. But all of the B-grade stuff that’s quite good but didn’t quite make it, that’s the stuff that ends up on my Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

“Then I pick a selection of those and put them on stage before the show on the screen and it works really well. The jokes come up every 12 seconds and there’s about 400 in all, for those who want to sit and watch them all, and on a good night you can hear the audience rocking before the show starts.

“You’re waiting in the wings for the last few minutes and there’s a laugh coming every 12 seconds, and I try to arrange the slides in approximate order so that the ones that come on just before the start of each section are bangers and go really well.”

The slides include the links to Gary’s social media accounts (he has also recently joined TikTok), which helps to encourage more people to follow him online, and this may then lead to more ticket sales next time around.

“It’s a great little bit of marketing and a great comic device,” notes the double Sony Award winner, “and I’m amazed nobody else does it. It’s not for every sort of comic but if you’re a one-liner comic, or somebody who has 10 jokes you don’t use for every joke you do, it’s a wonderful outlet – it’s really useful.”

Another enjoyable aspect of Gary’s live show is when he shows some Wikipedia pages that he’s gone in and expertly altered. “One-liners in disguise really, that’s what that is,” he explains. “When you’re doing a show of one-liners, it’s all about breaking it up into chunks to make it a bit more palatable.

“When I first tried to do a full-length show like 12 years ago, I’d just think, ‘Oh, I’ll pick 250 really good energy and people just come out going, ‘Oh yeah, that was all right’.

“And I don’t want people going, ‘Oh, that was all right’, I want people to leave going, ‘Oh, it was a great show, I’ve got to come again with my mates’. The word of mouth is really what sells tickets, so I want every show to be banging. I really want people walking out with a spring in their step.”

Gary has a background in business and did a degree in economics at the London School of Economics. “I just started going to comedy when I was student and never really had the nerve to do it,” he recalls, “and then eventually, as the result of a bet with a mate of mine, Martin Lewis off the telly... He bet me £20 I wouldn’t have the nerve to do a gig and I eventually did.

“That was how I started, and then I did a few gigs in ’97. Then I sort of lost my nerve and I stopped for a few years, because I was very young and didn’t know what I was doing – and, crucially, I didn’t realise how hard you had to work.

“I was quite young and quite lazy; I had to come back later on when I’d grown up a bit and was a bit more hardworking and would react to adversity or knockback by working harder, rather than giving up.”

Gary cites American comic Emo Philips, who he refers to as the “best joke writer in the world” in terms of lifetime performance, as a major influence, and calls another American comedian Anthony Jeselnik “probably the best joke writer right now”.

“Over here I like guys like Harry Hill, Tim Vine, Milton Jones, Jimmy Carr, etc,” he continues, “but to go back further I like the old-school comics as well. When I put my first show together, I went to see Ken Dodd and Mick Miller and Jimmy Cricket... I thought, ‘Well those guys have got some skills’.

“I used to be really dismissive about that stuff as a young comic – I thought, ‘What do they know?’ and I got a bit older and wiser and was like, ‘Well hang on, they know something here, I should be paying a bit more attention to this’. I saw Ken Dodd about five times – he was great.”

[Read more: Comedian Jason Byrne: ‘Let everybody laugh at whatever they think is funny and leave them to it’, Geoff Norcott interview: ‘My biggest fear in comedy is cliché’]

When he was still starting out, Gary opened for another American comedian, Jerry Sadowitz, who is also set to appear at the Junction in November. “I did seven dates supporting Sadowitz – it was so long ago, I remember I had to book a week off work to do it,” says Gary. “About 20 years ago he did a little tour and I did a few there. That was really interesting.”

Gary’s comedy has deservedly been critically acclaimed, with The Scotsman saying of him: “More quality jokes in one hour than most comics have in their entire careers... Quite brilliant”.

To see what all the fuss is about, come out and see Gary in Punderland at the Cambridge Junction on Wednesday, November 16. For tickets, visit junction.co.uk. For more on Gary Delaney, go to garydelaney.com.