What I Talk About When I Run About, Talking is my 11th solo comedy show, and my first stand-up show. 

Well, I mean, I’ve done other shows which are stand-up, but not stand-up stand-up, if you know what I mean. Basically, a show where I talk to the audience in a conversational manner, as myself, prioritising laughter over coup de théâtres. 

This is a bold new direction for me, and I’m excited about the artistic potential. Which is a bit of a turnaround because I used to hate stand-up. So, why am I making a stand-up show? 

How did I move from hating stand-up, through grudging respect, to actually thinking ‘that’s pretty good actually I should do that.’

In 2024 I remounted all ten of my previous solo shows, which gave me a great opportunity to reflect on them and try to work out what I’d been doing. They include a show where I dressed up as my dead dad and performed him as an insult comic, a show where I gave all the punchlines away at the start, and a show where I performed the whole thing as mediaeval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, speaking in a made up middle English which sounded like Arthur Bostrom in ’’Allo ’Allo.

After finishing that retrospective project, I had lots of ideas for what to do next, and thought ‘what haven’t I done before?’ and realised the answer was: conversational stand-up. 

But what could I do with conversational stand-up that I hadn’t been able to do with other forms? To answer that question, I had to ask myself what I *had* been doing.

I’m a great fan of surprising forms – of art which jolts the audience with its novelty or strangeness. I think it’s a great way of taking the audience out of their comfort zones and getting them to (in however small a way) engage with the world slightly differently – to get them to look twice at what they take for granted (my show All I Wanna Do is FX GUNSHOTS With An FX GUN RELOADING And An FX CASH REGISTER And Perform Some Comedy was all about this.)

But there’s a downside to this absurdist alienation as well: some audience members will simply disengage. When I perform as Geoffrey Chaucer, I talk in a fake Middle English by changing the vowel sounds in words – it requires the audience to decode what I’m doing, to do the mental work to figure out what I mean. Some people’s minds just aren’t built to do that.

Some of those people laugh anyway, getting carried away with the mood of the room, but some check out of the room entirely. It’s true of other things - some people will not tolerate laughing at a man whose painted his moustache green and put a daisy on it and is pretending to be spaghetti. 

For quite some time, I resented those people – ‘why can’t they just join in the fun?’ I thought. But it was always alongside a grumbling thought of ‘I wish I could make them laugh.’

I’ve spent most of my time as a comedian performing solo shows, and performing to a largely self-selecting audience, who are there for me and want to laugh at me. Which is lovely. But I’d find a lot of the time when I’d go and play mixed-bill comedy clubs, I’d find myself unable to get the audience to laugh at the same material that was killing in my own special little rooms. 

I’d tailor it, put the most verbal stuff in, the simplest stuff, and still sometimes find myself running through the set to a quiet crowd thinking ‘why can’t I get them to listen in the way I need them to listen?’

Part of it, I realise, is a trust issue. I’m going to talk about one of my jokes as an example:

Q. How do you tell the difference between a bugler and a burglar?

A. One of them has a bugle, and the other one’s really upset that his bugle’s been stolen.

Comedy writer Joel Morris used that as a chapter heading in his excellent book on how comedy works, Be Funny Or Die,  and I shared a photo of it on twitter (RIP), where it got shared a bit and got a bunch of responses, many of them absolutely furious: one representative response was ‘This doesn’t make any sense, the bugler would have the bugle.’

They didn’t trust me enough to go through the thought process of ‘I don’t get this, oh but hang on I know this person writes jokes that work, so I will think it through, oh I see the burglar is the one who has the bugle, the bugler is upset by the burglar having stolen his bugle, and it’s the surprise shifting of what I thought to be the case at the beginning of the sentence, to what actually is the case at the end of the sentence which makes this into a joke. Ha Ha.’

I realised I love jokes that surprise me, and so I’m drawn to jokes that take more work –  when I’m listening to comedy, I’m always jumping ahead in the joke to look for what the punchline will be, and so I naturally write jokes which require the audience to do a bit more of the ‘putting together’ of the pieces to complete the joke. 

Some audiences just won’t do this, sometimes because they don’t trust me, because they don’t know me, sometimes because that’s simply not an amount of work they’re prepared to put into a joke – they want me to do more of the work.

And so I’ve thought, basically, why not? Why not try and learn how to take audiences on the same sort of stupid trains of thought I like to, but give them a few more steps along the way: instead of getting them to clamber over a 6ft wall, stick some footholds in it for them to walk up. 

I remember the Eddie Izzard specials I’d loved growing up, where she would carefully lead the audience through some maybe familiar beats, but that would allow her to take them on some fantastic, original jumps. That was something to aspire to. Why not open the door to more people? See how many people I can take to the absurd places I like to take people to, how to write material I love, and get a wider audience to love it too.

The specific way I formulated my plan for the show to myself was ‘what would conversational stand-up sound like in my voice?’ And I realised that *conversational* is the key.

You’re trying to make it feel to an audience that you’re having a conversation with them - and a conversation is a back-and-forth, of little steps of discourse building up to meaning. Stand-up just means doing both sides of the conversation.

Which is a very longwinded way of trying to make you think ‘Wow, a straight stand-up show? How exciting!’

• John-Luke Roberts: What I Talk About When I Run About, Talking is on at Monkey Barrel Comedy Club at 14.10 during the Edinburgh Fringe