‘People think I’m mad’

TIM Vine admits he no longer bothers to count how many one-liners he packs into each show, but the prince of puns pays a heavy price for having to carry so many jokes around in his head.

“My Joke-amotive tour starts next month and I’ve been walking around running through everything to see if I know my act. I do find it quite hard to tell the jokes and count them on the night, and I may chuck in some things that occur to me on the night… I suppose I might get through 250 to 300,” says the man who broke the Guinness World Joke Record in 2004 with 499 in an hour.

Vine, 44, is particularly pleased with the Edinburgh Festival show he’s putting on the road to York, Middlesbrough and Newcastle because it contains the Dave Joke Of The Fringe Award winner.

“I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what. Never again.”

The comic was delighted – “having never met Dave” – because he’s no longer eligible for the IF award.

“The fringe comedy award is for someone who hasn’t appeared on television, which takes some of the excitement away from Edinburgh.

Sometimes you think if you could just win this King Arthur’s sword, everything would fall into place,”

says Vine, who did manage to collect the Perrier (now the IF award) newcomer trophy in 1995.

Vine’s done Edinburgh around eight times and will be there again this year.

“Once I know the act I’m doing, I run through it every day. I’ll go out for a walk and talk to myself and local people think I’m mad… wandering around, mumbling jokes at high speed,” he jests.

So does he ever get distracted by the audience when he’s firing off jokes?

“Yes, but I duck. I like to hit them with this pretty much planned barrage and occasionally I might get the audience to shout out subjects for me to joke about. I have these silly little songs and things with props which break it up a bit as well,” Vine explains.

So what set him out on the tough one-liner formula in a world of stand-ups who tend to tell funny stories?

“It’s tough to listen to,” he responds modestly. “You know, I’ve tried the shaggy dog stories and they always end up being a one-liner in the end. I start doing these stories on stage and then I realise you don’t need bits of it and, before you know it, I’m down to one line. You know what gets overlooked? garden fences.”

Vine is even more modest about his musical ability. He’s made an album of non-comic songs and put it on sale at pretendpopstar.co.uk.

“I deliberately didn’t put my name on it in case anyone thought it was comedy, but the rush has been such that my dad has about ten Jiffy envelopes left and I think we’ve sold about 13 copies. I think my dad is quite happy with the state of things.

He rings me every few months and says ‘I’ve sold another one’.”

Vine says there’s more to his act than a parade of puns but admits: “Early on when people said that’s what I do, I thought it was good for it to be ‘my thing’ and I was happy to make it that. I think what started me off was that I got a bit nervous between laughs, so I tried to get to the next laugh quickly.

“People often say to me that my powers of memory must be phenomenal, but they really aren’t. It’s the opposite, it’s the nature of the way the jokes appear because I’ve learned them in clumps. It looks like you’re talking about random subjects, but they are quite tightly knitted together. I’m sure it’s harder to learn King Lear or Hamlet.”

Vine recently appeared with children’s TV comics Dick and Dom and confesses that he was intimidated by the size of the script involved.

“But when I got there the whole lot was on auto-cue. There are five cameras pointing at you and all of them have the words. So you can look up briefly and then read a bit. I said to the director ‘doesn’t it look like you’re reading?’ and he said ‘don’t worry, there’s always one shot that’s okay’. So it looks like the editing is down to the shot that doesn’t look like you’re reading. I want to do shows like that in future,” he says.

Isn’t his hugely successful TV comedy series with Lee Mack like that?

“I wish. We’re all clinging to our lines by our fingertips. It’s nervewracking.

When you do have a bit that won’t stick in your head, but they want to get on with it, then someone will hold up a bit of A4 with the crucial lines you need. I’ve done that before,” Vine says.

He won’t take any of the credit for the BBC series, which is written by Mack.

“I think he’s locked away in a shed or something writing series five. I do chuck in a few ideas, but by and large, most of the work is done already.

When Lee first writes it, we have a readthrough in front of a live audience and we film it a bit like a radio play. Lee gets an idea from that where the laughs are and which sections to drop. Then we spend a week on each episode,” he adds.

“I do wonder how many more of these hour-long shows of stand-up I can write, when it’s just one-liners. I have to write sketches instead, rather than joke after joke, which is a hoohah to learn,” he says.

Would he fancy a radio show like brother Jeremy?

“The thing my brother does, if I can blow the family trumpet, is the whole light magazine thing, which many can do, plus the ability to grill someone when necessary,” Vine says.

• Tim Vine’s The Joke-amotive tour calls at: York Grand Opera House, April 3, Box Office: 0844- 847-2322; Middlesbrough Town Hall, April 18, 01642-729-729; Newcastle Journal Tyne Theatre, July 19, 0844-493-9999.