Bec Hill on fun, puns and getting Caught on Tape
Lovers of terrible puns, rejoice! Australian comedian Bec Hill is the founder of a unique pun-based comedy night, Pun Run, as well as an ace standup in her own right. She tells us about her new show, Caught on Tape, and turning regret into humour
“That was genuinely quite a painful experience.”
Bec Hill is talking about making the poster for her latest show, Caught on Tape.
“It’s electrical tape that’s in my hair. It’s lots of nice colours, but removed a bit of hair when we took it out...”
For all the trouble and pain, couldn’t she have just done it in Photoshop?
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Fun is key to understanding Hill’s cynicism-proof brand of comedy. It’s strange, then, that she’s got such a downbeat mission statement for the new show. “I had one massive regret in life, which I decided I needed to try and deal with and get over,” she explains. “So I asked people on social media what their biggest regrets in life were and how they got over them, and got 297 replies. So the show’s essentially about regret and the things that we all regret, but no way near as bleak as I made that sound.”
Crowdsourcing comedy
Finding the daft side of your darkest hour is no mean feat – and the material from the show is crowdsourced, which is a tricky line to walk if you don’t want to plagiarise your audience. Hill finds balance by using the stories as a launchpad. “Two or three stories in [the show] were almost entirely from the people who contacted me that were just too good for me to try to mess with. They were such great stories.”
The paring down of this collected material is less documentary-style, and more like reverse-engineering observational comedy. “A lot of the show is me drawing from other people’s experience and then realising that I’ve got quite a few things in my life that are parallel to the experiences that they’ve had,” she says.
Hill is not the first comic to turn to her audience for inspiration, and she won’t be the last – god knows what comedy-by-committee trash will be rolled out once the formula is picked up by lazier comics – but she’s keen to move on from it. “I think it’ll be the only mainly crowdsourced show [I do],” she says. “It’s hard to tell really – I mean, I wouldn’t not do it again. But I kind of like to tackle each show with a different approach.”
Taking a different tack when creating each new show means she guarantees something a little different every time. “It means that it never gets old,” she says. “I see lots of comics who, growing up, I adored, but when I see them now, no matter how good they are, I see their formula. And that eventually starts to get a bit tiresome.”
One of the ways Caught on Tape differs from Hill’s previous work is that it’s a lot more stripped back. Previous shows have been tech-heavy and spiked with her trademark flair for arts and crafts.
“The show I did before was really fun but involved a lot of tech cues and sound cues; there were a lot more props involved,” she recalls. “So it was just that little bit more difficult to tour and I couldn’t do it in any sort of venue, it generally had to be in a theatre or somewhere with good sound and lighting.”
Here, she’s ditched the PowerPoints and just gone for raw standup. Well, almost. “Obviously I still have the flip charts, because I’ve too small of an attention span to just speak for an hour.”
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The Australian comedy scene
Hill cut her breezy style in her home town of Adelaide. “The comedy scene in Adelaide is really... it’s like a family, it’s the only way I could describe it,” she tells us. “Everyone looked out for me and was incredibly supportive and patient, really patient. Looking back on how I was when I started out, I don’t know if I’d have had time for me.”
Her career took off when she was spotted at a competition and taken under the wing of one of the judges. “He ended up mentoring me and got me to be his support act during Melbourne Comedy Festival, so I was doing five minutes opening up for him each night. He was doing a 55-minute show every night and he had way more stuff to worry about, yet he was still taking time out to sit down with me after the show.”
It’s a rare bump, as she acknowledges: “I’m really thankful for that because I realise now how rare that is. I think when I was starting, I thought, ‘Oh, every new comic gets a mentor, that’s how it works,’ and it wasn’t until I was older that I realised I was incredibly fortunate.”
It’s unlikely that Hill would’ve had the same leg-up if she’d started out in London. “Moving to London made me realise what the big, wide world is actually like and I had to buck up my ideas pretty quick,” she says.
With the biggest standup scene outside America, the diversity of comedy in London makes it welcoming, but the sheer size of the scene makes it incredibly cutthroat. “I love watching comedy, that’s part of the reason I do it,” Hill says. “I love staying around watching the rest of the show seeing what other acts are doing, I find it inspiring. And there’s a lot of people out there who I think miss out on that, because they’re so competitive and they forget that actually the enjoyment part is that you get to work with some amazing people.”
For the love of a pun
Hill has been nurturing a project of her own on the scene since 2011. Pun Run began as a one-off gag competition, and a release valve for the sort of jokes that weren’t landing in the clubs. “I tweet a lot and I found that my most popular tweets tended to be sort of really bad puns,” she explains, “but whenever I tried to tell them on stage, people hated them.”
It turns out she wasn’t the only one sitting on a dearth of unappreciated puns. “I had about 20 people wanting to be on the line-up and after [the competition] finished, everyone who attended asked when the next one was, and it’s been going every couple of months since then.”
The night has gone from strength to strength, touring festivals and even spawning its own rules of engagement. “They’re waiting for a different punchline, they’re not listening the same as they would if you were just telling a normal joke,” Hill says of the audience. And with a normal joke, “people will be like, OK, what’s he going to say next, where’s the pun part? And then they realise there is no pun – they get confused and so the joke falls flat.”
In the cynical, career-minded scrum that is modern comedy, it’s funny to see that there’s still room for a night like this, and for an act like Hill.
“Sometimes comedy can be so hard and so lonely and can really take a toll on your confidence,” she says. “I think if you’re not in it for the love of it then it could really destroy you.”
But daft humour and silly fun aren’t just a shield against a cold world: they’re something to aspire to. You’ve just got to chase the fun – even if it gets stuck in your hair.
Bec Hill plays The Dancehouse, Manchester, 6 Feb