Comedy Interview: Ben Macpherson from Nottingham Comedy Festival

You're appearing at Nottingham Comedy Festival. What's it about? 

So, my show is Ben Macpherson Does Poems at Adults. It's possibly the most accurately titled show that's ever been created. I, Ben Macpherson, will do poems at you adults. It's a spoken word comedy cabaret which I've spent a couple of years developing up at the Edinburgh Fringe and touring around the place.

You're going to get stories, anecdotes, poems in this really fun, interactive way. We're on the fringe of the main comedy festival. The show starts when the audience take their seats. We have thirty numbers up on the wall, each with two different vibes, and the audience yell out what they want to see. If you want silly ones, we do the silly ones. If you want sad ones, we do sad ones. If you want sexy ones, we've got a couple of sexy ones for you as well. The idea is that comedy can filter through any medium, so let's make it poetry this time.

What label would you put on your comedy? 

Oh, probably eclectic. I grew up loving sketch shows and I've written a few of those as well. But as my work as a poet gets bigger, I find myself trying to merge those two worlds. So coming from that background in sketch, the idea is that I tell a bunch of little different things rather than one big overarching thing.

And that ties beautifully into poetry, because we all have that version of poetry from secondary school with that English teacher who we hated and therefore we hate poetry. And actually poetry is just a way of playing with words at its heart. There's a surprising overlap between comedy and poetry, the efficiency, trying to get a tight effect from the words, whether that's laughter or whether that's ‘oh, he's got a point’.

There's a lot of overlap in the skills. And that filters through this taste for ‘I want to do a bit of everything’. We're going for a proper variety here.

Can we have comedy without sadness? 

Oh, very good question. I think comedy is often viewed as this very frivolous thing. But when I think comedy is at its best, it touches on something deeper than just a gag.

We also need space to laugh at just dumb things, right? If we can't laugh at the silly stuff, then how on earth are we going to laugh at the big stuff? And if we can't laugh at the big stuff, it has too much power. 

Often in the lives of people who make comedy, a sadness is the thing that primes you to finding what is funny. But you don't necessarily have to bring that origin all the way through the experience, right? You can become absurd, surreal, and suddenly the world gets a little bit odd.

Think about a show or a performance like a recipe: you can't use sweet all the time. You have to have some protein in there. You have to have, I don't know, I'm thinking about meringue now.

You have to have the protein. You have to have some acid to make sure it stays soft. You need a dash of the bitter bicarb agent to make sure it fluffs up and grows the way you want it to. We have sweet and sour for a reason. They're a good combination. 

So why verse and not straight prose gags? 

Partly because I am a poet and my job as a poet is to get people to go ‘oh, wait, no, poetry is all right in the end’. Like a deathbed conversion to poetry. We'll get your last rites before we send you off into the abyss.

Also, so much of comedy is attached to rhythm. Comedy is a very musical art form, not necessarily singing or musical comedy, but in the idea that you have your setup, your suspense, your punchline, you break it, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.

Similarly, my poetry is very rhythmic and you have that playing with expectation and whether it’s leading you to somewhere that's absurd and subverts what you've initially thought of, or whether that's going to a place that, oh, you've really twisted that rhyme to force it to meet my expectations. We either make your audience correct, but in a silly way, or you make them incorrect in a way that felt very sensible up until the moment you pull the rug out from underneath. It's the same with joke writing or poetry to come up with that subversion.

Did you ever have a comedy idols that influenced you? 

I grew up loving the Two Ronnies. I was lucky enough that at the age I was deciding what I wanted to watch for myself on TV, there was the Two Ronnies Sketchbook on the BBC.

In terms of poetry, I grew up loving Roald Dahl, Spike Milligan. There's a writer called Hilaire Belloq who wrote wonderful, horrible poems about atrocious things happening to misbehaving children. So, comedy and nonsense poetry got me into writing poetry.

And now I have a spread of work that is from the serious to the sublime and having that space to play around and know that it's all part of it and it's all valid by seeing these people who've gone before me makes it so exciting. 

Do you ever get nervous before a show? 

I've been doing this for a while, so nerves go straight to excitement. I can trust myself now. Having come through improv theatre and improv comedy, the idea that I get on stage and I won't know what to say, well, actually, that's the place where I get to play. And I'm not doing all the poems from memory. I've got a reference book to go back to.

So, if I do forget what to say, there are books there if I can't improvise my way through it. When it feels like it might be a big show, you'll find me beforehand chanting over the complicated poems. Like something with a tight rhyme scheme or if there's very specific words I need to get in a very specific order, you'll find me chanting it like I'm doing a rosary.

How did you get started? 

Well, going freelance in the middle of a pandemic was a bold choice. But a round of voluntary redundancies came up where I worked and I wanted to take a chance on it.
At that time, I had no commitments to any other people. My rent was low, and hey, the world might be ending. So, let's roll the dice.

Was there a moment growing up when you thought I'm going to be a comedian slash poet? 

Absolutely. I was a lonely nerdy kid who didn't really have many friends. But that need to create a space that felt attractive and welcoming led me to learn what comedy was and how to quip and joke. Gradually, you stop being a person making snipe comments. And it's like, okay, I'm holding onto this space. Everyone loves a funny guy.

There's been learning how to rein that in because you can get to a point where you're just making jokes and you stop being a person and start being a gag machine, which isn't what people want. But I'm lucky I learned that in my early 20s. And I'm now a pretty balanced, all-round human being.

Are you saying that there were difficulties growing up and you were creating a safe space? And that was comedy and performance?

Absolutely. You get to that space when performing, no matter what happens, where you control your actions. The stage serves as an excuse.

You do comedy and poetry. And theatre? 

I've been part of the project with Chronic Insanity to bring immersive theatre to Nottingham. We've had the Apple of Discord show that went very successfully. And we're currently working on a new show, which is going to be in January. Keep your eyes peeled for that. 

You were one of the performers and writers in that? Wow!

Well, we’re going bigger and hopefully better in January. So that's one of my today jobs. I've got to get another ten pages of script written. But then there’s my solo work, I'm developing a show called Fat Gut, which is about plus size male bodies in queer spaces and how they're viewed, reviewed, accepted or rebuffed. A mixture of poetry, theatre, little bits of dance and even burlesque.

Brilliant. Anything else to share with Left Lion? 

I'm really lucky to be part of a wonderful line-up with Club Wormhole at Fishergate Point. Club Wormhole is Nottingham's alternate comedy hub, basically. There's a monthly show featuring some of the best names and rising stars of the UK alternate comedy scene. And alternate comedy pretty much is anything that is different from a person stood on stage with a microphone doing observational comedy.

It's the stuff you don't see on Mock the Week or Live at the Apollo. But thanks to folks like Katie Mitchell and Rosa Keaton, we've got a beautiful line-up of strange, weird, wonderful things. Comedy storytelling, drag, we've got a clown church coming. And it's the idea of community, a communion of assembling together.

If you ever think, I don't really like comedy, and you're judging that based on what you've seen on TV, come along and see our weirdos, because we're a fun bunch.

Ben Macpherson appears at the Nottingham Comedy Festival on Sunday 8th November 2026 at 5pm. Venue Fisher Gate Point.