Daniel Nils Roberts talks about Honey.
1 Tell us about your Fringe show
It’s clever but also very silly, and will whizz by in a flurry of high-octane characters, gag-packed PowerPoint madness, yoghurt, daft videos and a poem about a bear.
2 How does it feel to be playing the Fringe for the first time?
I’ve been coming to the Fringe for several years with improv shows (this time around I’m also performing with Austentatious and Aaaand Now For Something Completely Improvised), but this is my first full-length solo effort. It’s stressful but exciting to go it alone – like leaving home. I can do whatever I want now. Try and stop me. I’m gonna be joyriding in a Nissan Micra and bingeing on pop tarts.
3 Best live act seen at the Fringe?
Hans Teeuwen. Crazy, gurning witchery from a kind of devilish Dutch lounge crooner succumbing to hallucinatory glossolalia. Doubt I’ll ever see anything better really.
4 Best thing about the Fringe?
It’s like you’ve been sucked through some Star Trek portal to a crazy world where everyone is a comedian. Is that Alan Davies buying an orange? Al Murray kicking a bin? Mark Watson struggling to tether his bike to a tree? Comedians everywhere!
5 Worst thing about the Fringe?
It takes a physical toll. Now I know there are people out there fighting warehouse fires, scaling Himalayan peaks and doggedly performing CPR in the back of a speeding ambulance, but this comedy stuff is hard, guys! It is!
6 If you were not a performer/comedian what would you be doing?
I make films as well, so probably that. I recently made a short documentary about moths. So I’d probably forge a long and glittering career in moth films.
7 How do you combat pre-gig nerves?
Very ineptly. It’s a Charge of the Light Brigade situation.
8 Worst on stage experience?
I went to Specsavers and they said it looked like I had something up with my retina, but I had to do a show before my emergency appointment at the eye hospital the next day, so I spent the evening playing an approximation of Vladimir Putin whilst constantly squinting to test if I was going blind yet or my eyeball was falling out. Turned out I was fine. Pretty good show as well. Not sure what conclusions to draw from that. I guess I’m good at disguising white-hot existential terror beneath a veneer of jollity.
9 How do you recover from a hefty heckle? Do you have a set of stock replies?
I hope my improv training will kick in. Sometimes it kicks in two minutes after the show is finished though. No use at that point. It’s like that Japanese guy on an island who kept fighting WWII for years afterwards.
10 What do you love about Scotland?
It’s like if England was beautiful and had people with principles in it.
11 What do you like about Edinburgh?
It’s architecturally ridiculous! Kind of collapsing in on itself like a hubristic sponge folly in the early rounds of the Bake Off.
12 What’s the most Scottish thing you’ve done?
I was born and grew up in Aberdeen. Which is quite a Scottish thing to do, despite what the rest of Scotland might say.
13 Who’s your favourite Scottish comedian?
Limmy. He’s inventive, completely apart from anything else around, and an unlikely but wickedly incisive comedy poet.
14 Favourite joke?
The fruit are having a party and then suddenly all the lights go out, and the apple says to the banana, “why did it get dark?”, and the banana says, “because the pear’s gone”.
My girlfriend excitedly told me this one once, and then realized towards the end that it only made sense in her native Norwegian, as the words for light bulb and pear are the same. I prefer it in English though.
15 Favourite Scottish food/drink?
Roast haggis-stuffed venison, lathered in a whiskey and Irn Bru jus, with a side of mashed shortbread, porridge and herring, sprinkled with desiccated Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and basted in clootie dumpling herb butter, served with a decanted blend of water out of Bannockburn and Billy Connolly’s beard hair, all displayed on a hipster platter hacked into shape with Denis Law’s studded boot from remnants of the Stone of Scone, eaten with a single-screw propeller from a Govan-launched passenger liner instead of a fork.
Daniel Nils Roberts will perform Honey at Pleasance Courtyard until August 29.
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