Comic Gary Delaney on the road to Telford Oakengates

Gary Delaney is on the road – he plays Telford’s Oakengates Theatre tonight – with a riotously funny show that features more jokes than you’d find in the combined works of the rest of the nation’s stand-ups.

The rat-tat-tat of Delaney’s routine leaves audiences numbed by laughter.

So we need to talk about Gary. And the something we need to talk about is that he likes to write jokes. An awful lot of them. Also he appears to have something in his hair. There’s that as well. He thinks a good joke should be like a drunk Glaswegian, short and punchy. He loves each and every gag, and you can’t help but be carried away by his infectious charm.

He’s a regular on Mock The Week, a double Sony Award Winner and a Chortle Award Nominee.

Over to Gary: “I’ll tell you where the title came from, it’s a play on words from the Cameron Diaz film and the thing she’s using instead of hair gel.”

He’s glad to be on the road. “This tour is bigger than the last tour. I am in brochures with people more famous, it’s great. I just had to put a load of stupid jokes together. I just do one liners. I don’t tell a story or bang on about politics or life or opinions. I want to make people laugh as many times as possible. I want them laughing from start to finish.”

Gary is good at short jokes. Very good at them. Most comics aren’t. He’s in a very select group.

“A lot of comics find it hard and they are stumped if someone says tell us a joke. I often get texts from comics saying cabbies want them to tell them a joke. With me it’s the opposite, I find it hard to tell a story. I think you just need to get to the funny bit as soon as possible. You cut out all of the fat and get to the action.

“When I get a bit of telly, I have an audience and they are the ones who like the short silly jokes. They don’t come expecting a story telling night.”

Gary is remarkably humble. He downplays his gifts and has a sense of proportion. “The reality is that there are a lot of people who are quite funny. It’s not that rare a skill. It’s about spending the ten years packaging that and doing it professionally. You dedicate your life to learning how to do it. They are not magical skills, they are quite common. Probably as a teenager, I realised I could make people laugh. At school, it was handy to make people like me.”

Gary used his talent to impress his older sister’s friends. He liked being liked by girls. And after years on the circuit, he’s still trying to improve his craft. “A lot of things are trial and error. You know, I died plenty of times. The secret is, that never stops. You’re always going to die. As you get older though, you learn what you are doing. But live performance is high risk. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You never know whether or not you’ll smash it. Your odds might improve and get to be pretty damn good. But no comic can ever say they will never die again.

“You have to accept you’re going to get kicked and that you’ll learn and get better. There are lots of young boxers who made the wrong decision and get punched in the head. It’s a bit like that in comedy.”

Gary is from the Midlands, in Solihull, but lived in London and worked as a conference organiser for 12 years. His early gigs were in London but he didn’t enjoy the London comedy scene. “It isn’t so great if you’re new. It’s great if you’re established. So I started travelling to pick up better gigs and being on proper bills. Then my career started progressing. Then I jacked in my job. I didn’t have a mortgage or job or children. I jacked in the job a week before 30th birthday.”

He moved to Birmingham and then moved again when he got married to Sarah Millican. He enjoys playing the Midlands, where the crowds are more appreciative than those in the south.

“Comics always like interviewers the place they’re coming up to is their favourite place. But that’s rubbish. My favourite is the West Midlands and the North East. I like Birmingham Coventry, Leicester and Dudley, then Newcastle, Durham and Sunderland.

“The reason I like all those places is because the audiences are great.

“There’s two types of audience, there are people who are nice and clever and get subtle humour but don’t like rude stuff. I will call those southern audiences. Then you get the ones that love a rude joke – but an hour of that can get monotonous. So the best audiences get subtle and smart but don’t mind rude and revolting. And that’s what they’re like in the Midlands.”

His marriage to Sarah Millican has been a blessing. And, yes, they do laugh over and over when they’re at home.

“We have very different senses of humour, which helps because you don’t want to be this thing in comics when everyone turns round in the dressing room ‘are you going to use that’. Sarah has a distinct style that’s about life and observation. Everything she talks about is true. Everything I talk about is a load of made up old nonsense. Mine is the puns and one liners and the stupid things. So it works for us.”

He gives us an example, a real joke. “We have a dog, a nice little thing, and it’s my job to walk him. So, here’s the history of a joke. As I was leaving the house, Sarah said ‘don’t forget poo bags.’

“She meant the poo bags for the dog. But the name Poo Bags made me laugh, so now I use it in the show.

“This is how it works: I went round grandma and grandad’s to walk their dog and as I was leaving grandad said ‘don’t forget poo bags’. I said, oh, OK, gran can come too.’”