thoughts on julian and horror
Nerdiest Exclusive Interview with Julian Barratt:
“I’ve been a horror fan pretty much in the sense that my sense of horror and my sense of humor were both equally kindled by films as a kid. I liked horror and comedy, basically, from a young age but I just ended up getting into comedy because there was, I could do stand-up comedy and that was my way into this business and then there was no stand-up horror and I didn’t know how to get into that world… I did try and do some spooky stand up once and some of my stand-up had, I tried to do some horror stand-up but it didn’t really work very well… I think I was always interested in trying to put horror and comedy together so, the short is, it’s more of a sketch really, with a gory ending.”
“Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance… I guess you could do both. Make the horror comedic; it’s like take the horror seriously and have the characters provide the comedy. I mean, I don’t know whether I’ve succeeded in that particularly with the short but I think for me it was just the beginning of trying to do something which had a bit of horror in it which I always loved.”
“In The Boosh, in The Mighty Boosh, we would sometimes push it into slightly scary worlds but that was never very… Noel Fielding, the other side of it, he kind of doesn’t like gory stuff very much, and I do, so I always wanted to have people getting chopped in half in stuff and he would say, ‘We don’t want that,’ [laughs] and then now I want to do more with being chopped in half!”
http://nerdist.com/exclusive-interview-with-abcs-of-death-2-director-julian-barratt/
I’ve had thoughts about Noel and Julian’s styles when they’re producing their own material before, kind of similar to these. The thing I find interesting, at least, about their baby stand up stuff is that Noel’s was very much about making the bizarre seem kind of familiar and accessible. Not all the time, but as a general rule, he told these absurd, surreal stories, stories that could have been alienating and confusing, but did so in a fashion which invited the audience into them, to see them his way and find the emotion and the logic within the bizarre and make them something people can connect with.
Whereas Julian’s material in his stand up, the material itself is less out-there than Noel’s, but he delivered it in a way that was frequently off-putting and uncomfortable-making. He made himself weird and vulnerable onstage and didn’t bother pulling the audience in with him, full of twitchy, manic, nervous energy that’s occasionally almost painful to watch.
When Noel makes a gag about death, it’s in the context of mistaking a child for a snowman, or Ceruvial Brooks accidentally crushing the woman he’s trying to woo with a drawbridge. There’s pathos and absurdity there. When Julian does, it’s about stalking someone off the tube and skinning them to wear their skin as a leisure suit, or a crazed cackle followed by an unnervingly straight face after assuring the audience that he isn’tsome kind of axe-wielding maniac.
As well as the taste in horror stuff, I’m sure this has to do with their relative needs/desires for attention and approval; Noel likes to provoke and throw people off balance, but ultimately he doesn’t want to drive them away. He’s a people pleaser. Julian, who has a much more complicated relationship with the attention of his audience, isn’t afraid to put them off.
(Which isn’t to say Noel can’t be very aggressive as well; he can be downright vicious to hecklers, jumping on tables at smaller gigs, getting the whole audience to shout ‘fuck off!’ etc, but that’s a different beast, not being about his own comic material.)
You see this a bit in hearing Noel talk about making Luxury Comedy as well; when making the first series, he was very concerned that it didn’t come off as ‘cold’, he talks about how too much weird can seem cold and alienating, and how he wanted to make something warm that brought people into it, however weird it was.
It’s also interesting when you look at the monstrous characters they’ve both played in the Boosh. Noel’s monsters are almost always either sympathetic or just enjoyable in some way to watch. Ceruvial and Old Gregg are horribly lonely, both physically marked as ‘other’- Ceruvial’s back-to-front ram’s legs and Gregg’s downstairs mixup. The Hitcher, while not sympathetic, is so outrageous in his villainy that he becomes fun. (This isn’t entirely true in his appearance in ‘Eels’, in which he is genuinely quite nightmarish). Julian’s stand-out monster, on the other hand, the Crack Fox, is… not. He has the potential to be a figure of sympathy- he is an addict- but he knows that and instead uses it to manipulate. The Crack Fox is fucking creepy; physically filthy and degraded, sexually predatory (though that’s a common theme amongst Boosh monsters, and one I WILL ONE DAY write that essay about), megalomaniacal; he’s got weapons built into his flesh in a thoroughly body-horror way, his voice makes you twitch. His murder of Donnie the Tramp is absolutely the stuff of horror films.
Take the Future Sailors tour, where both the Hitcher and the Crack Fox show up to interact with the audience. With the Hitcher, there’s no shortage of laughter; people heckle and shout and engage with him. With the Crack Fox, even when he encourages the audience to answer him- ‘Where you from, front row? Don’t be afraid to answer me; I’m in a bin!’- people are hesitant. There’s still laughter, but there’s a definite nervous edge to it; much like some videos of Julian’s early stand up, there’s the feeling that people have suddenly walked into something they’re not quire sure how to handle.
“I’ve been a horror fan pretty much in the sense that my sense of horror and my sense of humor were both equally kindled by films as a kid. I liked horror and comedy, basically, from a young age but I just ended up getting into comedy because there was, I could do stand-up comedy and that was my way into this business and then there was no stand-up horror and I didn’t know how to get into that world… I did try and do some spooky stand up once and some of my stand-up had, I tried to do some horror stand-up but it didn’t really work very well… I think I was always interested in trying to put horror and comedy together so, the short is, it’s more of a sketch really, with a gory ending.”
“Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance… I guess you could do both. Make the horror comedic; it’s like take the horror seriously and have the characters provide the comedy. I mean, I don’t know whether I’ve succeeded in that particularly with the short but I think for me it was just the beginning of trying to do something which had a bit of horror in it which I always loved.”
“In The Boosh, in The Mighty Boosh, we would sometimes push it into slightly scary worlds but that was never very… Noel Fielding, the other side of it, he kind of doesn’t like gory stuff very much, and I do, so I always wanted to have people getting chopped in half in stuff and he would say, ‘We don’t want that,’ [laughs] and then now I want to do more with being chopped in half!”
http://nerdist.com/exclusive-interview-with-abcs-of-death-2-director-julian-barratt/
I’ve had thoughts about Noel and Julian’s styles when they’re producing their own material before, kind of similar to these. The thing I find interesting, at least, about their baby stand up stuff is that Noel’s was very much about making the bizarre seem kind of familiar and accessible. Not all the time, but as a general rule, he told these absurd, surreal stories, stories that could have been alienating and confusing, but did so in a fashion which invited the audience into them, to see them his way and find the emotion and the logic within the bizarre and make them something people can connect with.
Whereas Julian’s material in his stand up, the material itself is less out-there than Noel’s, but he delivered it in a way that was frequently off-putting and uncomfortable-making. He made himself weird and vulnerable onstage and didn’t bother pulling the audience in with him, full of twitchy, manic, nervous energy that’s occasionally almost painful to watch.
When Noel makes a gag about death, it’s in the context of mistaking a child for a snowman, or Ceruvial Brooks accidentally crushing the woman he’s trying to woo with a drawbridge. There’s pathos and absurdity there. When Julian does, it’s about stalking someone off the tube and skinning them to wear their skin as a leisure suit, or a crazed cackle followed by an unnervingly straight face after assuring the audience that he isn’tsome kind of axe-wielding maniac.
As well as the taste in horror stuff, I’m sure this has to do with their relative needs/desires for attention and approval; Noel likes to provoke and throw people off balance, but ultimately he doesn’t want to drive them away. He’s a people pleaser. Julian, who has a much more complicated relationship with the attention of his audience, isn’t afraid to put them off.
(Which isn’t to say Noel can’t be very aggressive as well; he can be downright vicious to hecklers, jumping on tables at smaller gigs, getting the whole audience to shout ‘fuck off!’ etc, but that’s a different beast, not being about his own comic material.)
You see this a bit in hearing Noel talk about making Luxury Comedy as well; when making the first series, he was very concerned that it didn’t come off as ‘cold’, he talks about how too much weird can seem cold and alienating, and how he wanted to make something warm that brought people into it, however weird it was.
It’s also interesting when you look at the monstrous characters they’ve both played in the Boosh. Noel’s monsters are almost always either sympathetic or just enjoyable in some way to watch. Ceruvial and Old Gregg are horribly lonely, both physically marked as ‘other’- Ceruvial’s back-to-front ram’s legs and Gregg’s downstairs mixup. The Hitcher, while not sympathetic, is so outrageous in his villainy that he becomes fun. (This isn’t entirely true in his appearance in ‘Eels’, in which he is genuinely quite nightmarish). Julian’s stand-out monster, on the other hand, the Crack Fox, is… not. He has the potential to be a figure of sympathy- he is an addict- but he knows that and instead uses it to manipulate. The Crack Fox is fucking creepy; physically filthy and degraded, sexually predatory (though that’s a common theme amongst Boosh monsters, and one I WILL ONE DAY write that essay about), megalomaniacal; he’s got weapons built into his flesh in a thoroughly body-horror way, his voice makes you twitch. His murder of Donnie the Tramp is absolutely the stuff of horror films.
Take the Future Sailors tour, where both the Hitcher and the Crack Fox show up to interact with the audience. With the Hitcher, there’s no shortage of laughter; people heckle and shout and engage with him. With the Crack Fox, even when he encourages the audience to answer him- ‘Where you from, front row? Don’t be afraid to answer me; I’m in a bin!’- people are hesitant. There’s still laughter, but there’s a definite nervous edge to it; much like some videos of Julian’s early stand up, there’s the feeling that people have suddenly walked into something they’re not quire sure how to handle.