Fowl Humour

What is Fowl Humour?
Fowler: I set it up back in 2012, originally in Hull where I was university before I moved it back to my hometown of Nottinghamshire. We started doing comedy nights, starting at the Nottingham Comedy Festival in 2013. It was called Fowl Humour at The Fleece, and was a sell-out show. I’d asked my good friend Andy to help me out on the door, and he ended up offering me some advice on how to make it a better night, and I took it on board. Two minds are better than one, so from there we started doing regular comedy nights for fun.

What sort of nights were they?
Fowler: Free stand-up shows. We got some really good award winning acts; people like John Pearson, who’s just had a sell-out show at the Leicester Comedy Festival this year, as well as Patrick Draper and Fran Jenkins. 

What are your own backgrounds?
Fowler: We're comedians ourselves. We did a two-man show at the Nottingham Comedy Festival in 2014 called Sexy and Happy. That was a sell-out as well. We both did drama at university and wanted to try and do something with those degrees. 

How has it been going so far?
Fowler: Last year we won an award for Best Open Mic Night of the Year at The Midlands Comedy Awards. That was brilliant, because it was chosen by comedians and industry promoters. We weren’t expecting it at all because we’re such a small night. But over the year-and-a-half all the local comedians and promoters heard good things about us. 
Hughes: I didn’t expect anything to come from it, because we were in such a tough category. 
Fowler: All the other acts nominated were based in big clubs in Birmingham, including the actual club that hosted the awards. We didn’t go to the awards ceremony because we assumed we weren’t going to win. I was in bed with my kindle when I got a tweet saying we’d won. I just replied, “I’m in bed. Rock and Roll”

I guess now that makes a better story though…
Hughes: Exactly. I got about twenty messages, but I didn’t believe them because I was drunk in the middle of Nottingham. I got back at about 3am and rang Andy asking him if it was real or not.  

What else is Fowl Humour aside from stand up?
Fowler: Instead of trying to do something huge, and failing, we’ve decided to take small steps to grow the company. There’s Fowl Humour Comedy and Fowl Humour Theatre. We’re launching the theatre side of things this year. 

What can we expect from Fowl Humour Theatre?
Fowler: Our first show is in production, and will be a forty-minute monologue piece. It’s called Honest, and is about a character you meet in a pub. It’ll be based in an unusual theatre venue in Nottingham.  

Will the theatrical productions be predominantly comedy?
Fowler: We stem from a comedy background, so the way we’ve angled the theatre company is that it doesn’t have to be a comedy play. But the whole point of Fowl Humour Theatre is to put on shows that experiment with the use of comedy. It doesn’t have to be a comedy play, but maybe we look at the way comedy is used in that play as a tool. Both the sides of Fowl Humour are about exploring what makes us laugh, why it makes us laugh and how far we can push it until it gets offensive, which is a really interesting boundary. 

What are your comedic styles on stage?
Fowler: We’re both fairly offensive, but I think any comedian is offensive because he’s willing to say things that other people aren’t.
Hughes: The way I work is that I take an idea, most of them are some way based in truth, some ridiculous thing that’s happened in my life, I expand it to the furthest reaches I can, and then I keep pushing and pushing. My favourite audience response is a laugh followed by an "Oooh, why did I laugh at that?" We should be pushing people’s boundaries. It might have been horrible of me to say that, but you laughed. I don’t feel threatened by people saying that they’re offended.  I have had it before, even from my own Dad. But there will always be someone that laughs.
Fowler: People do tend to get confused between them not liking something, and something being offensive…

Does the morality/outrage/censorship zeitgeist in modern comedy pose a genuine threat to the future of the art form?
Hughes: Obviously we had the whole Dapper Laughs controversy, and that was blown out of all proportion. I don’t like his style at all; he doesn’t really make me laugh.  But he has the right to do it, and people just love to have a hate figure. 
Fowler: That’s why people have different tastes. My style is different; it’s perhaps more macabre. Most of the topics I talk about are just things that piss me off. I get moderately vicious, mildly absurd to the point of exploiting my own absurdity. 
Hughes: You’re kind of like a man that is excited to be miserable.
Fowler: I’m do enjoy being miserable!  But when it comes to censorship, I do think there is a difference between pushing what you can and can’t say and actually just trying to be offensive.  People assume that because they weren’t expecting something, it’s offensive, when really it isn’t. I like pushing boundaries, but I certainly won’t ever tell racist jokes. I don’t have any sexist jokes either. If I ever did it would be ironic, and make me look bad. I wouldn’t tell homophobic jokes - I don’t believe that you should make fun of something that no one has control over. Because that’s not fair - why would anyone do that? Making fun of someone’s life choice is one thing, but when it comes to things that they have no control over, you should respect them.  That’s where you draw the line. 
Hughes: I agree, although I think it’s a personal choice, whether the individual comedian wants to make those jokes or not. If they said that you weren’t allowed to make jokes about X, Y and Z, everyone would just lose interest. Everyone has a taste, some people love jokes that make you squeamish. 

What about supposed ‘offensive’ jokes that aren’t lifestyle choices or things that people are born with, like a celebrity dying for example?
Fowler: That’s a tricky one. It’s all a matter of taste or perspective. We’re quite young to remember the death of Princess Diana, but I think that any respectable human being wouldn’t make a humorous comment about it within an immediate period of time out of respect for that person’s life. Where as some people just don’t think that, and that’s where taste comes in to it. I like to think that people are generally nice, who will give people respect. 
Hughes: It’s the old saying: tragedy + time = comedy.

Like the fact that they have inflatable kids Titanic slides…
Fowler: The more you are distanced from an event; the more acceptable it is to make light of.  But I see being addicted to humour as the same as being addicted to hardcore pornography, you don’t go back to softer stuff – you just get deeper and worse, it’s all about exposing yourself to a new depth. I think half the time with a comedian, it isn’t how well they tell their jokes, but how well they gauge their audience. 
Hughes: We’re lucky that the majority of the comedians we’ve had are really nice people, and when they make a joke that could possibly offend, they are doing it to make light of a situation rather than just wanting to be dicks. 

There really aren’t that many young Jim Davidson or Roy Chubby Brown types around thankfully.  If you do want to make a joke about race, for example, you have to work a lot harder then just putting on a voice…
Fowler: I think a big part of that is generational.  We’re far more accepting of other people.  We’re more aware of other people and their cultures.  That can only be a good thing. 
Hughes: In the last comedy night we put on, I did quite a big joke about taking MDMA. After my set, I was worried that people were going to say, "He was promoting drugs a lot there wasn’t he?" So I actually added a whole thing to the end of it that was more of a moral message.  Someone came up to me afterwards and said that I really didn’t need the moral message, the joke was better without it. 

Do you ever worry that you’re just one sentence away from losing your career?
Hughes: I try not to think about it, but you are always aware that it is the case. One joke can make or break you. Again, with Dapper Laughs. He made one joke, it was taken out of context, and they cancelled his show. If every time I went on stage I was worried about getting lynched, I wouldn’t be able to perform…

Is that part of the excitement?
Hughes: Completely. 
Fowler: I’m a big believer in that the more confidence you have as a performer, the more the audience will accept you. Jimmy Carr is a great example. He says some of the most horrific things, but in such a calm and confident manner, and no one blinks. He’s in complete control.  To an audience, confidence is control. But comedians are the most insecure people in the world.  They might go in front of crowds and say bold and brash things, but they are people that, on a nightly basis, will completely expose themselves on stage, then spend the rest of the night worrying about what people thought of them. 

The need for people to laugh at them?
Fowler: It’s a need for acceptance. Please accept what I’m saying, and please enjoy it. If you don’t, then everything I’m doing is worthless. 
Hughes: What we like about we do is that we give people of a lot opportunities to try out new material, stuff that they wouldn’t have tried out before. You can see that people are thinking ‘ shall I go through with this’. Before you go on stage, usually the only person to have heard your jokes is you, in a mirror. 
Fowler: Which is why the first time you do a new joke, that first laugh you get is the most rewarding thing in the world. Because it says that those weeks and months writing and talking into a mirror have paid off. It’s a vindication that you can trust how funny you are. 

What events have you got coming up?
Fowler: We've had some great times with Fowl Humour at The Golden Fleece, but ultimately we need to move on to bigger things that that venue just can’t offer. We’re currently in talks with The Ned Ludd, and I think I can confidently say that that will become our new home. We want to try and put monthly nights on there with professional comedians from across the Midlands.The capacity is about 60-70, so it will be an intimate gig, but a professional gig. It is going to reflect the fact that we’ve just won The Best Open Mic Night in the Midlands. 
Hughes:  It’s because of the people in Nottingham that we won it, so we want to say thank you.  The least we can do is put on a really good night for them. 

Fowl Humour are part of FONT Festival at Lee Rosy's on Friday 29 - Saturday 30 May 2015. Their regular Ned Ludd Comedy Nights will be starting monthly from June.

Fowl Humour website