“It's been intense but amazing,” says Mark Simmons, as he comes towards the end of eleven months of touring. “It's been a lot but I still feel energised with the show.”
The affable stand up comedian with his mop of red hair is a familiar face on social media, where his one liners regularly clock up views in their millions. It’s this popularity online that’s built the demand for him to perform his latest show Jest to Impress nearly 150 times this year.
“It's crazy the difference [social media] makes, because it just allows you to be in front of the people that like what you do,” he says. “And you haven't got to rely on a TV producer to like you.”
Having made his first steps into stand up in 2008, this shift in his career began during the pandemic. Unable to perform live in lockdown, he began cutting up videos he’d been making of his performances “just to watch back to try and improve.”
“I took that footage and luckily there are a few crowd interaction things that happened,” he explains. “When I put those up, they just blew up like crazy because no one was putting stand up videos at that point.”
I like it when something comes up that hasn't before, so I can think on my feet
Many of his best known clips see him riffing on the hobbies of audience members, showing off his quick-thinking ability to turn out a sharp gag. Having done this hundreds of times, he does have certain responses “in the bank”, but many do come completely off the cuff.
“I like it when something comes up that hasn't before, so I can think on my feet,” he says. “Like yesterday, weirdly. This sounds mad, but the inventor of the bungee jump was in the gig in Norwich.”
After chatting to “this old guy” about this unlikely but seemingly true story, Mark quipped, “‘What, I like about you is, you invented the bungee jump, you're down to earth.’”
That’s a pretty unusual example of an audience interaction that went well. But is he ever thrown by anything anyone says to him, I wonder.
“I mean, if it's something really mad, then you can get laughs out of not knowing what it is or asking more questions about the weird hobby,” he says. “Sometimes there'll be a hobby that's got a strange name. But actually, it just means something quite simple, and I'd be like, ‘Well, why don't you say that?’ and that'll get a laugh.”
Most curveballs come when Mark performs abroad, he goes on, where hobbies that differ from those at home come up. “In Australia, [someone said their hobby was] barefoot bowls. So I said I was going to try barefoot bowls, but I got cold feet.”
A bigger problem, he says, is people not wanting to divulge their hobby when he asks. Some people “think they're being judged for what their hobby is”, he speculates, or that he’s going to try to embarrass them. But, he insists, “I don't want anyone feeling uncomfortable at my shows.”
“All they're doing, by not saying one word, is making me talk to them longer, because it's awkward,” he says. “You can't just move on because there's a weird vibe in the room.”
Hecklers can also pose difficulties, although in his unique style, he also tries to avoid tearing the person down.
“I've always felt the best way to deal with any aggro or interruptions is just to try and be as nice as possible to the person,” he explains. “It's really hard to be horrible if someone's being nice to you. When comedians start, everyone's quite scared of hecklers. So the natural response is to go in hard. But I always try and see what happens and then just treat it a little bit like being a teacher, I suppose. What's going on over here?”
Telling one liners is a very distinct sub-genre of stand up comedy, and Mark acknowledges that “there's not many of us do one liners to this level”, estimating that in the UK they number five or six comedians. His own entry into the field came, he explains, at least in part due to nerves.
“I had a fear of talking in front of people when I was at school and university,” he recalls. “So when my mate eventually convinced me to have a go at [stand up], I wanted to get to the laugh as quick as possible.”
This sounds mad, but the inventor of the bungee jump was in the gig in Norwich
Although, he says, he “tried every possible type of comedy” during his early gigs, one liners were a natural fit. “I'm quite good at spotting wordplay just in life,” he says. “For some reason, my brain goes to the wordplay before anything else.”
While some people are natural raconteurs, he continues, “I've always been kind of quiet and then I'll [suddenly] say something funny in social situations. Which essentially is just a one liner, isn't it?”
As naturally as his chosen style might come to him, Mark explains that writing enough jokes to fill an hour long show is a long process, starting out with notes in his phone, before trying them out at new material nights and the Edinburgh Fringe to hone those ideas into gags that deliver consistent laughs.
The technical challenge of polishing each joke into its best form can come down to changing a single word over several nights to get the biggest laugh.
“The slightest change can take it from a little laugh to a big laugh,” he says. The first joke that made him realise this early in his career, he explains, originally went, “My nan's going a bit crazy. She keeps telling everyone she's being stalked. I've been following her, and I haven't seen anything suspicious.”
While this would work “okay, but not that consistent,” he recalls, that changed one night when he instead made the punchline, “I haven't seen anything suspicious and I've been following her.”
“Suddenly, it got a massive laugh,” he says. “That was because I didn't reveal what the joke was until the last moment. Whereas the first version, I reveal it and then say something else, which is pointless, because you're just talking over the laugh.”
However, he adds, for one liner comedians, it’s important to have jokes that deliver smaller laughs, particularly in an hour long show, as “no matter how good the jokes are, you start to get diminishing returns because people start to get tired.”
So he likes to drop in what he calls “thinkers” - jokes that take some of the audience slightly longer to get.
“On the last tour, I had one, which I really liked, which was, ‘If you're considering a job as a meteorologist, you need to decide whether or not,’” he smiles, pausing. “Then you’ve got some people going, ‘Why hasn't he finished his sentence?’ And then they're like, ‘Ah, I get it.’ I really like those ones.”
Before he tells this joke, he stops and notes that it puts quite a lot of pressure on me, as the lone person in the audience on our Zoom call. Luckily, I don’t sit blank faced. Actually, I thoroughly enjoy being an audience of one. As he is on stage, he’s very good company and naturally very funny. It’s only later that I remember that the joke he’s just told is the one that made me follow him on social media several years previously.
Still, I wonder, do those “thinkers” and the big laughs work the same everywhere or does he find that people laugh at different things in different locations? Not exactly, he says, although there are differences.
“Some places you go, they just want to have a really good night,” he says. “Straight away the energy’s there. It's big, it's in your face, the laughter hits you. Essex and Kent are really good for that.”
“Posher areas have more of a reserved reaction,” he goes on. “They don't let themselves go in the same way. They're still having a nice time and they're still enjoying it. As a performer, it's just understanding that and not letting it affect you if something doesn't get the same laugh as it did the night before.”
When Jest to Impress rolls into Ramsgate later this month, it will be the penultimate night of the tour. So the audience at the Granville will be able to see the show in its most honed form. After that, Mark takes it to the Leicester Square Theatre in London where he’ll film the show for YouTube - joining his previous tour show Quip Off the Mark.
“I’m looking forward to putting the next one on there and just having an archive of all my work,” he says. “It gives people a chance to see what the show might be like, and hopefully encourage them to come and see the next one.
“That motivates me to write the next one, because once it's out there, I can't sit back and rely on the old jokes. It's a nice process. So that's quite exciting. And Ramsgate gets my warm up for the big recording.”
Mark Simmons performs his show Jest to Impress at the Granville Theatre in Ramsgate on Saturday, November 28. Tickets £23.65.
