We sat down for an exclusive interview with Ollie Horn, who will be performing two comedy shows, ‘The Most Toast’ and ‘Let’s Listen to Some of Lou Bega’s Other Songs Together for an Hour’ at the Edinburgh Fringe.
The Most Toast will be performed at 3pm on the 8th August and ‘Let’s Listen to Some of Lou Bega’s Other Songs Together for an Hour’ at 10:30pm 12th, 19th, and 26th August at Just the Big Room at The Caves- tickets here and here.
Both of your Fringe shows start with an absurdly simple premise – what makes you confident an idea is strange enough to sustain a whole show?
What really matters is whether the audience cares enough about the show through to the end, and what unites both shows is that I’m taking something very unserious very seriously. And they’re both pretty relatable: toast and Lou Bega. I think if an idea was too strange then there might not be enough mileage in it to spend an hour in that space, so the trick is finding something that seems esoteric but is actually pretty mainstream.
And like with everything creative I think the execution is far more important than the idea, and the reason I’m able to do these sort of shows is I’ve done comedy long enough that I’ve learned the skillset of working out a format on the fly, knowing how to interact with an audience, and work off-the-cuff without getting flustered.
The Most Toast turns a trivial statistic into a major event; what have audiences taught you about the things people become surprisingly competitive about?
I’ve noticed that there’s a switch that goes off when people decide they’re committed to the format. While fans of the show are engaged from the very beginning, people who have been brought along or who bought a ticket on a whim take a bit of time to get on board with the idea that we really are all working out how much toast we’ve had. The reason these shows can only work live is that something is intoxicating about seeing other people get very involved and passionate about a topic, and being dragged along with that energy.
Interestingly, people aren’t bothered about how much toast people have had; they’re far more interested that people have arrived at the correct answer.
I think humans get a huge amount of pleasure from solving problems, and it’s interesting to watch an audience work together to solve problem after problem. It’s just in this show the problem is “how much toast has this person had?”
After performing in more than 25 countries, have you found that silliness translates more universally than traditional stand-up?
Yes, but what I do in these shows is still joke telling. All comedy performance comes down to telling jokes in some form, and jokes are just problems to solve that you offer a surprising resolution to. With these semi-improvised shows, the problems are just things that have occurred in the room.
What changes when you perform in different countries to different audiences is the shared context will change an audience’s approach to problem solving. A punch line makes an audience laugh because the audience has reached a different conclusion to the one the comedian eventually offers, and the conclusion audiences are likely to reach surely changes from place to place.
I also have a theory that the only big laughs come when you tap into the sort of laughter that people remember from their childhood, and they were always about low stakes things.
What is it about Lou Bega’s catalogue that convinced you it deserved an hour of serious critical attention?
Nothing.
Do these shows begin as genuine curiosities that spiral out of control, or do you deliberately go looking for ridiculous premises?
I don’t think all the consultants at McKinsey could come up with these premises if they searched for them! They come from a very, very small seed, or passing thought, that I’ll test out by talking to my friends or mentioning in passing on stage, and only very occasionally do they reach escape velocity. They’re always genuine curiosities that I find legitimately funny myself, and if they weren’t, an audience would see right through it, I think.
Having built a career on inventive concepts, are you ever tempted to write a more conventional stand-up show, or does that sound far too sensible?
Been there, done that! Maybe in the next few years I’ll have a yearning to do another more ‘normal’ show, but I’m happy dancing this dance for now. It’s pretty obvious that if I want to release a stand-up special, it’ll have to be more typical stand-up; I’m really not sure whether any of these fringe shows would be as enjoyable if recorded and watched at home.