Comedian Pierre Novellie talks about autism, the Isle of Man and his dislike of mouth noises

Pierre, you played Nottingham quite recently. What's changed with your show?

Well, it's a new show. In fact, let me just double check, because you know what, it might actually be, two shows for one for the people of Nottingham.

Buy one, get one free?  

That's it. I was about to do a show, when Covid hit, but you don't want to throw a whole show in the bin. This meant I entered a cycle where I was doing a new show at the Fringe in the same year as touring the old show. It was very confusing for me and the audience and a real nightmare. And in order to fix that, what we're doing with this tour is last year's Edinburgh show and this year's Edinburgh show as two halves of the same show. It's actually two different years of shows in one go.

Wow! Why are you calling the show Why are you laughing?

So, I got my own autism diagnosis-a lot of people in comedy are autistic and ADHD. And it turns out a lot of comedy, or the way people come up with jokes, comes from being neurodivergent. It seems to almost be the majority of comedians. And so, then you stop and think, well, why are you laughing? Why do people laugh? Is it because we're different that people are laughing?

Has the diagnosis of autism changed anything for you?

It's definitely helpful. I mean, it doesn't change who you are, but it’s very useful to know why and how you work. It makes it a lot easier to explain yourself and allows you to understand why you react to certain things in a way that seems illogical even to yourself. So, you don't waste energy trying to figure out why something is happening to you. You just go, oh, well, it's because of that, and let it go.

I have some dear friends on the spectrum that have challenges around a lack of reasonable adjustments to their work. Have you had any experience of that?

I'm very fortunate to be self-employed and in quite a weird business where any amount of eccentricities are generally tolerated. I've got a book out ‘Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things?: A Comedian's Guide to Autism’. It's not a stocking filler book. It's got references and footnotes and stuff. Bill Bryson, I was aiming for, factual funny. There's a whole lot of stuff in there about how, for example, I hate people's mouth noises. I hate people chewing loudly with their mouth.

(Leftlion reporter anxiously covers his mouth)  

No, no, no, not that extreme. But it's a big thing for me. And a friend of mine knows that, and read the book, and still makes mad chewing sounds. Like you can tell people and tell people, but ultimately… neurotypical people need things repeated to them about 500 times before they take it seriously. It really needs to be hammered home relentlessly. Repetition is the key. Whereas, if I'm told sufficiently seriously something, then just once is fine. I'll remember.

You were born in South Africa, but grew up in the Isle of Man?

The Isle of Man was supposed to be two years for my dad's work, but then we were sort of already looking at emigrating. Because my mum's British, we could get an ancestral visa. And we stayed because we liked the Isle of Man. It was very peaceful. And at the time, Johannesburg in particular, was very dangerous. I had very little to do with the decision. My parents thought probably nicer to raise kids on the Isle of Man than Johannesburg.

Did you enjoy growing up in Isle of Man?

Yeah, I did. It's a weird place, but it's quite a good place to grow up as a kid, because it’s obscenely safe, and you can cycle around the hills and walk around. Growing up in the Isle of Man is like growing up in the past, everyone knows everyone, and doors left unlocked and all that sort of nostalgic stuff you hear that's often not true. It is true on the Isle of Man.

Why did you go into comedy?

I always knew I was going to give it a go. I could do public speaking. I did it a couple of times at school, and it went pretty well. It's quite a rush public speaking, because of the adrenaline. Plus, I was obsessed with comedy growing up. So I thought, okay, I'm obsessed with comedy. I get a rush out of public speaking. I'll do an open mic night and see how it goes. And it just snowballed, really.

This was at university?

Right, Cambridge.

A lot of comedians seem to go to Cambridge or Oxford.

Yes, it attracts a certain type of person. After a while, I'm sure it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, but ever since Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, right? That was the start in the 50s. And then the Goodies? Then Python, and Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry. You know, there's always going to be a few every year who want to squander their degree.

If you hadn't been a comedian, was there anything else you fancied for a job?

Until I was 15 or 16, I was very keen on joining the army. But I was quite asthmatic, and you can't join the army if you're asthmatic. You have to not need your inhaler for five years. They'll be annoyed if you needed it but just toughed it out.

At 16 I thought, okay, maybe I can't do that. And then I was going to do the classic, retrain as a solicitor after doing your history degree sort of thing, the generic solicitor pathway.

But comedy saved you?

Hey, for now, right? Yeah, I never know.

What advice would you give anyone wanting to get into stand-up?

The only way to do it, is to do it. You can't dither around or Google it. It's not a musical instrument. You can't practice on your own. You can't watch a YouTube video on how to do it. You have to just start failing and doing gigs and destroying that part of yourself that cares about failing. It takes ages, but you just have to chisel away at it. And get into writing. Write stuff down every day, if you can,

You're a writer too?

I'm a writer in that sense, and literally, I've written for various people and shows and things. But, yeah, I had to learn the self-discipline of writing. It's not easy. I used to do a lot of the writing on stage, making it up as you go along, you can find gold that way, if you're lucky, but it's not sustainable over the long term. It stops working after a few years and you need to supplement it with some actual discipline and some actual writing.

You're very prolific on radio, TV, and stage, which do you enjoy the most?

Stage, definitely. It's always live. You do get the adrenaline from radio, but it’s heavily formatted. You have to play a song and you have to play the news. And TV is cool, but there's a lot of waiting around and fiddling, that can get in the way of the comedy. Whereas the thing with stand-up is, it's just a direct connection between you and the crowd in a room.

Is the thrill of hearing people laugh and applaud addictive?

It's direct feedback. You know it's good, because they've told you. But even if you bomb, you still get the adrenaline rush, probably more adrenaline if you do badly. So the whole experience is addictive.

So, ‘Pierre’ -is there a French aspect to your ancestry?

There's a lot of French names in South Africa, if you look at the rugby team and so on. François Du Plessis and stuff. They tend to be Huguenot names.

So French Protestant?

Yes, that's it. They fled to the Low Countries because the Netherlands was a sort of Protestant stronghold, and from thence to the Cape. So, there's a lot in South Africa. If you have a French name, culturally, people expect you to be Afrikaans because the Dutch Huguenot link is so close. And there were a lot of French settlers on the Cape, but the law, the legal language and the business language was Dutch, and so it had no reason to sustain itself, and through intermarriage, disappeared. That's one reason why Afrikaans is actually most similar to Flemish, not Dutch, because it is a little bit French.

Anything you wanted us to know about the show?  

Just if you saw me at the Canal House last year, come again. It was such a nice crowd, and it's a nice room as well. I like Nottingham. I've been there a few times, and I don't think it gets enough credit as a city. Maybe that's changing, but there's quite a few places in the UK, like Nottingham, that are a bit, as the young people say, slept on. It's like all the canals and the brickwork and everything, yeah, so if I saw you last year, hopefully I'll see you again.

Pierre Novellie's Why Are You Laughing plays at the Canalhouse on 5th October 2024.