Tony Law: Go Mr Tony Go!

You're taking last year's award-winning show, Go Mr Tony Go!, to the Glasgow Comedy Festival next month, what can we expect? 

New nonsense and old nonsense, last year's nonsense and next year's nonsense! All the nonsense! Last year I sold it as if it was the sister piece to the movie The Tree Of Life by Terrence Malick, although I hadn't actually seen the film at the time. My show was what I guessed the film ought to be about. It was pretty profound.
 

Do you find that this allows you to pick and choose the kind of gigs you do more than you used to be able to? 

It took a transition of about three or four years where I had to move away from the big clubs, because I wasn't going down too well. It just meant I had to find enough places where I could still play and make a living. In the last few years there seems to be more comedy nerds out there now, which is good for me!

How do you explain your recent success? My theory is that it's because you now have a beard.

I think it started the year before the beard, though. I hadn't been at the Edinburgh festival for three years, then when I went back up in 2010 I did a show at noon which acted as a really good filter. The only people who came were those who really wanted to and that meant that they were my kind of people. It built from then by word of mouth, I suppose. I think then it just happened to coincide with the beard. Now there's too many people who know me and like me for my beard, so if I got rid of it, they wouldn't know who I was. I'm stuck with it.

Tony Law in Glasgow last year