Comedian Seymour Mace on being "Niche as Fuck"
Self-confessed bitter old man Seymour Mace talks to us ahead of the final outing of his Foster's Award-nominated show, Niche as Fuck, at Liverpool's 81 Renshaw Street
Last summer, Seymour Mace arrived in Edinburgh with a brand-new show – his 12th in a career spanning 15 years – and a bleak outlook. “I was kind of going up with the impression that it might be my last show for a while," he says. "Take a bit of time off, do something else with the rest of my life. 'Cause my earnings were kind of gradually going down year-on-year, and I’m fairly lazy, I’m not very good at being my own agent."
That show was called Niche as Fuck and it went on to be nominated for the Foster’s Award – it was a stark contrast to the rest of the shortlist, most of which were big-budget, big-venue shows. Since then, Mace has been touring the show on and off, with appearances at smaller comedy festivals and a short run at the Soho Theatre. The show has its final outing on Thursday 5 May at Liverpool’s 81 Renshaw Street.
Over the phone, the Geordie comic is modest and restrained – a far cry from the big, daft clown you see on stage. “It’s just me being stupid for an hour: there’s ridiculous game shows, there’s some of my fantastic artwork, there’s songs, there’s puppets. There’s even a bit of science thrown in. So yeah, just me in the middle of it, dicking about like an idiot.”
Structured around DIY set pieces, such as a cardboard puppet theatre, the show unfolds like a one-man variety show – a Morecambe and Wise Christmas special where they ran out of money and had to dress Vanessa Redgrave in discarded pizza boxes. As the title of the show states, it really is niche as fuck. “It hasn’t changed much really," Mace says. "I’ve changed little bits because there were certain elements I said in Edinburgh that were specific to Edinburgh Festival, in-jokes and things like that... But otherwise it’s pretty much the same, except all the props are a bit knackered and falling apart.”
Comedy and popularity
The show couldn’t have come at a better time for Mace. “It kind of reinvigorated my career in a way, I suppose, so suddenly I became a bit more high profile and, like you say, I got the run at the Soho and then I managed to get an agent, so here we go again, at 47.” In an industry that’s always chasing the newest hot young thing, that’s quite an age for a second shot.
The show’s not shy in taking aim at the industry either, with comedy behemoth Avalon bearing the brunt of it. It’s a ballsy move that evidently paid off, which makes you wonder if the bigwigs nominated him just to spite him. “I don’t think being part of the comedy establishment means you’re blind to the fact that there’s things wrong in your world, and if comedians can’t talk about that then nobody can – because that’s the job of a comedian, to get up there and knock down those sacred cows,” he says.
This strand of venom could sit awkwardly with the lighter end of his material, but Mace’s comedy is a comedy of extremes. When he’s angry, he’s pointed and spitting with rage, but when he’s being silly, he can really dial that up too. “I tend to write the show around the games and the puppets and that. Then the asides and things come after that: that’s just the way my natural bitterness [comes through] after working in comedy for 15 years.”
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Mace’s approach to making comedy is playful and experimental, and a far cry from the writerly, chin-strokey comedy that dominates the modern alternative scene. “The writing process for the kind of stuff that I do really doesn’t involve a lot of writing, in terms of physically sitting down and writing stuff," he explains. "It’s more kind of playing with ideas and seeing what looks funny and what works, you know. All the Niche as Fuck stuff, all the puppet theatre stuff – that just came over a few months of sitting and looking at a cardboard box and thinking, ‘What could I do with a cardboard box?’ and thinking, ‘Oh, I could do that,’ and eventually you come round to the idea that you present on stage, but it takes a while to get there.”
One highlight of the show in Edinburgh was very dependent on the first-floor location and layout of the Stand 2 venue, and it’ll be interesting to see whether Mace has been able to replicate it on tour when those conditions have been taken away.
“I think the show in Liverpool is the last one I’m doing, so I think I’ve got a photo session a couple of days after that where I’m going to be smashing up all my props,” he says. Although constructing props is intrinsic to the process, he’s not sentimental about them. “I should probably give them to the comedy museum, but I’m not sure they’d want to take them. But I don’t mind getting rid of 'em, I think people have too many material things. It’s the memory of the show that’s important, not the cardboard box that was in the middle of it.”
Seymour Mace versus shit titles
With Niche as Fuck out of the way, Mace is returning to the Fringe this year. “My show is called Shit Title, 'cause I couldn’t think of a decent title. And at least Shit Title is upfront about it being a shit title, isn’t it? Most shit titles are trying to hide under a veil of being a good title, but with Shit Title it’s out there, innit?”
He’s got a real knack for naming shows, with his previous efforts ranging from the punny – 2011’s Happypotamus – to the brochure-unfriendly (2013’s Marmaduke Spatula’s Fuckin’ Spectacular Cabaret of Sunshine Show). Despite his past form in the naming game, he still finds it a struggle. “The amount of titles I went through this year, so I came up with Shit Title. But that’s something I can talk about, isn’t it? To explain the title. But yeah, it’s a nightmare coming up with titles. I just want to be famous enough to call it ‘Seymour Mace.’”
He’ll also be returning to the same venue and the same time slot: half two in the afternoon at Stand 2. For some, it’s a lucky venue: it’s the tiny SNP club room where luminaries such as Tony Law have broken through. After the success Mace had in 2015, many would be tempted to upgrade to somewhere a bit bigger, but he seems more than a little attached to it. “It’s a bitter-old-man venue, Stand 2,” he explains. “Every year they put a couple of, like, young, you know, bright-eyed, hopeful people in just to make it seem that it’s not a bitter-old-man venue, but it is. There’s me, Michael Legge – although Michael’s not going this year, unfortunately – Gavin Webster, Martin Mor, John Scott, Phil Nichol. It’s just full of bitter old men. But that’s the way we like it.”
Seymour Mace: Niche as Fuck is at 81 Renshaw Street, Liverpool, 5 May, £7 (£5)