Silliness and Wrestling: Phil Wang interview

Phil Wang is letting himself be sillier (watch out, world). It’s not as if he were an austere man before (the sensible approach rarely wins hearts on Taskmaster), but looking back on old performances he wonders if he wasn’t a bit too deadpan. "Apparently when [Chris Rock] tries out new material, he does it with no performance element at all. He does it very straight, just to know that the underlying material is funny in and of itself.” Wang thinks he might have taken a version of that philosophy to an unhealthy extreme, so now he’s letting loose. Wang In There, Baby!, he says, is his silliest show so far.

What he really likes in a comedy show is the suspension of adult life – that the things outside of the room don’t matter while you are sat in it. Silliness cuts straight to the heart of this because it abandons the mores of mature society: “there's kind of an innocence to it. That's what silliness is: it's inconsequential…ality…”

Goofiness is the closest the show comes to a running theme. He’s not trying to “say something”; there is no higher meaning. As with most of his sets, he’s exploring a series of more or less unrelated ideas (take the hot topics of ‘race’, ‘family’ and ‘nipples’ for starters). He’s spoken before about the pressure that exists on comics at the Fringe to work a poignant storyline into their shows – he feels he succumbed to that pressure with his 2015 show Philth, resulting in an hour he was ultimately unhappy with. 

Clearly comedy reviewers play a huge part in this (leaving reviewers to ask themselves: "Did I do that?" Or, depending on which age bracket you fall into, "We’re all trying to find the guy who did this"). Last year The Guardian elicited backlash from the likes of Fern Brady and Mark Nelson after its 3-star review of Thanyia Moore’s Fringe show asked ‘Can a comedy set get by on laughs alone?’. Wang says this phenomenon is more or less unique to comedy festivals – particularly because there isn’t the same comedy reviewing culture in the States. 

“I think the reviewers reviewing and the shows sort of work in tandem and produce an environment where these narrative-based shows are encouraged, because it's something that makes for good copy on your end and then on our end it makes for a good pitch. I think for some comedians that works really, really well. Some comedians are really suited to that kind of storytelling stand-up – I'm not one of those comedians.”

Wang's of the generation of comedians for whom The Simpsons are a near-universal formative influence, but another has recently occurred to him. The first people to show him how to do public speaking? Who else but the great orators of the modern world: professional wrestlers.

Recently watching a match (it was the WrestleMania 38 Stone Cold Steve Austin comeback match, in case you’re interested) he was struck by how well they speak. They perform something akin to stand-up with a flawless rhetoric, without stumbling, hesitation or repetition (it’s a wonder more of them don’t make a living off Just a Minute appearances once their knees give in).

“They're able to put across the storyline, they're able to reiterate the relationship with the wrestler they're talking about while also dropping in all the promo bits.” What’s more, so much of their dialogue is about hating one anothers' guts, and they have to do it all in language acceptable to a ten-year old. “‘You broke my back. You slept with my wife. You destroyed my favourite car. And now this Sunday I'm gonna destroy you, you nincompoop’. What?! He's a grown man. And they're calling each other nincompoops and candy asses.” 

Nowadays he isn’t actively influenced by other comedians (although he references one particularly silly Glenn Moore joke that he wishes he’d written, and cracks himself up reciting it). “I've sort of lost my hero worship of comedians. I used to date comedy, and now I'm married to comedy.”

So what next then? Wang says he’s exploring scripted ideas – a good old-fashioned scripted comedy show with recurring characters and storylines, maybe even a couple more books. But stand-up will always be The One. “Live comedy is always the most visceral experience of comedy. That's what I'll always love.”

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Phil Wang: Wang In There, Baby!, King's Theatre Glasgow, 2 Apr, 8pm, £22
Phil also comes to Dundee's Whitehall Theatre, 5 May and Edinburgh's Queen's Hall, 6 May