Gag Merchant
What I can’t bear is people who are never willing to be the fool in any part of their life, to win my favour, tell me a story where you didn’t win." Meet Stephen Merchant, comedy’s highest achieving underdog.
WORDS SOPHY GRIMSHAW
‘I’M SLIGHTLY ANNOYED that I don’t have an interesting back story about why I became a comedian,’ says Stephen Merchant. ‘Richard Pryor grew up in a brothel. His mother was a prostitute. He was black at a time when that was still very difficult. He had a lot of fuel for his comedy fire. I was a middle-class kid from Bristol who was slightly gangly. As a back story, it’s a bit thin.’
He’s right, although at 6ft 7in tall, few are as gangly as Merchant. ‘It has defined me in many ways, because I was always noticeable. I stood out in a crowd. Heads would turn when I passed, particularly when I was younger [he’s now 36], which makes you uncomfortable in your own skin. It’s not a sob story; it’s just an annoyance. I have to bend down every single time I walk through a door. But if I’m going to pop psychologise, my feeling was that, if I was going to be noticed, then I may as well be noticed for my accomplishments rather than simply for being tall. People may as well go; “There’s that bloke from the telly,” rather than, “There’s that freak who lives down the lane.”’
We’re sitting in Merchant’s suite at the Beatles- themed Hard Days Night Hotel in Liverpool (one of the stops on his current stand-up tour), which is dominated by a disconcertingly large photo-portrait of Paul McCartney. A former Xfm and BBC Radio 6 Music DJ, Merchant is not staying here because he’s a Fab Four obsessive; he says it’s his tour manager who’s the fan and who booked this place. Merchant’s tastes lean more towards Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
The night before we meet, I see his stand-up show, which is called Hello Ladies… – a shout-out to the fairer sex, the members of which Merchant claims steadfastly ignored him during his teenage years (and beyond). His material draws on a rich reserve of poor dating performances and social awkwardness, and there’s a particularly funny re-staging of an earnest school play about peer pressure and prejudice that Merchant wrote as a kid. He doesn’t need to worry about winning over the audience; despite not having performed a major UK stand-up tour before, he is playing to theatres full of loyal fans who are on his side from the get-go. Many leave having laughed to the point of tears.
On stage, as on his radio shows and podcasts, Merchant claims that his lack of success with women has lingered into his post-fame years. The co-writer with Ricky Gervais of the international hit TV series The Office and Extras and the film Cemetery Junction, Merchant’s wit and good manners – not to mention the fact that he’s a multiple Bafta-and Golden Globe-winning millionaire – make it hard to believe that he is still socially and romantically inept. For the length of his show though, Merchant makes it work.
One of the stories he tells is of the beautiful girl who approached him in a crowd in Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve, asking, ‘Are you going to be here for while?’ He said he was, only for her to respond: ‘Oh good, because me and my friends have arranged to meet back at you.’ He’s so tall, he’s treated as a landmark. He riffs on it in his set, joking that students put traffic cones on his head and drunk people urinate against him. The story of the girl is true, although he freely admits that much of his stand-up is a ‘massaged’ version of his real personality and experiences. It’s also true that he’s single at the moment. Beyond that, it gets a bit hazy.
Merchant may not really be an outsider any more, but he can’t shake the feeling. It partly comes back to his height. ‘However much I might like dancing, I look weird doing it because I’m 2ft taller than everyone else on the dance floor. And I’ve never had a sense of style because I can only wear what’s available for me. I can’t be a rock dude in vintage leather because I wouldn’t be able to find vintage leather to fit me.’ That said, he claims he’s totally comfortable with who he is. ‘The version of me on stage is not the real me. Only parts of it are: different parts from different times in my life. That’s true of almost all stand-up. Ricky Gervais isn’t the same on stage as he is in the pub, and I’m not sure why people think he would be. If you write in the first person in a song, it doesn’t mean you’re the person in that song.’
A recurring theme of Merchant’s comedy is being the butt of your own jokes, which he says he learned from his hero Woody Allen. ‘I’m always happy to humiliate myself for the amusement of others. There’s an honesty to that and I hope people can relate to it. What I can’t bear is people who are never willing to be the fool in any part of their life. To win my favour, tell me a story where you didn’t win. You know those macho guys who can’t ever be the loser in anything that happens, ever? I find that really exhausting.’ Merchant says that, in contrast to Gervais, who is ‘more provocative, more punk rock’, he writes jokes as a self-styled ‘low-status comedian’.
The pair met when Gervais, then head of speech at the London radio station Xfm, hired Merchant as an assistant. By then, Merchant had started doing stand-up. ‘My first gig was when I’d just finished uni. I did five minutes in a comedy club in Bristol and it went really well. I thought, “I’m amazing at this!” About a month later, I did the same show at the same venue and died on my arse. I couldn’t understand why. What was interesting to me was building the act, figuring out how to do it; why did that work and not that?
I like the mechanics, the puzzle of stand-up. Later, when I was gigging regularly in and around London it started to go well, to the point that I could have made a living from it, but I wasn’t enjoying it enough and I got busy with other things.’ Soon he and Gervais were fulfilling a mutual ambition to write a seminal sitcom, The Office.
Merchant says that pursuing comedy writing and performing was a natural choice because humour was always the thing other people told him he was good at. ‘Being funny was what I had, and everyone tries to use what they’ve got. It wasn’t born out of “I must win the bullies over” or anything like that, though. It was just what I did. I had funny friends, and my dad is very witty. I made it into a career because it seemed like a better way to make a living than to work in a bank.’ He now has a gig doing voiceovers for Barclays Bank’s TV commercials. ‘So you see, things come full circle!’
Merchant is known for being, as he puts it ‘sensible with money’ – something that Ricky Gervais frequently makes fun of in public, and probably half the reason Barclays chose him for the ads. In the stand-up show, he cracks jokes about splitting the bill in restaurants, and how it was probably what drove Judas over the edge at the Last Supper.
‘The money thing I’ve exaggerated slightly for stand-up, but it is true. I’m not stingy in social situations any more, but the thing I haven’t lost sight of is value for money. If you’re stitching me up, I’m never going to think, “I’ve got loads of money, so I don’t care.”’ He advises everyone to start using a supermarket loyalty card. ‘Why wouldn’t you want to save £2.50 on your shopping, if you could?’
The latest TV project from Merchant and Gervais is BBC sitcom Life’s Too Short, starring the dwarf actor Warwick Davis. ‘Stylistically, it’s a conflation of the documentary feel of The Office and the showbusiness focus of Extras,’ he explains. ‘Warwick plays a version of himself. In real life he’s very happily married; in the show he’s getting a divorce. In real life his career’s going fine; in the show his career’s on the skids. He comes and bothers Ricky and I for work, so we’re playing ourselves.’
He says appearing in front of the camera more and headlining a stand-up show might look like a game plan to step into the limelight, but isn’t. ‘I haven’t become more comfortable in front of the camera; I was never uncomfortable with it. With stand-up, it’s not so much about deciding to put myself out there as feeling that I’m already out there to a degree, so why not go back to something I used to do and try to do it better? When it comes to screentime, Ricky and I honestly just do what we think works best for the project. We’re not in Life’s Too Short a lot, because we don’t need to be. Warwick carries it.’ The impressive roster of celebrity cameos includes Liam Neeson, Sting and even Johnny Depp but, Merchant says, ‘The core of the show is Warwick – and his performance is brilliant. It’s about his attempts to be something he’s not. If he just accepted that he’s 3ft 6in he’d be fine, but he constantly wants to be something else. The height aspect is almost neither here nor there, but that’s just his quirk. It could have been another quirk. It’s the character that’s interesting.’
I wonder if, ironically, Merchant can easily relate to Warwick because he, too, operates in a world not made with him in mind. ‘Absolutely, completely. My hotel bed is slightly too short for me, for instance. Tonight I’ll have to sleep diagonally.’
Stephen Merchant’s show, Hello Ladies…, tours the UK until the end of the year. For dates and bookings, visit www.stephenmerchant.com. The DVD is released 14 November. Life’s Too Short airs on BBC2 this winter
