Comic with dyslexia finds his strength in improv

From The Times in the UK:

By anyone’s standards, comedian Ross Noble (pictured) has had a momentous year. In the past 12 months he has become a father for the first time, had a critically acclaimed stadium tour of his adopted homeland, Australia, and lost his house and every single possession he and his family owned during the recent Melbourne bush fires. How the hell do you recover from that?

“I’m a bit displaced at the moment,” he says phlegmatically. “We’ll find somewhere to buy, but you have to rebuild one knick-knack at a time. We were aware it could happen ... we knew it was a possibility, but fear’s a relative thing. You can’t spend your whole life worrying about what’s going to happen or you’d never do anything.”

Facing down fear is a subject that Noble, now 33, returns to several times. He’s not gung-ho exactly, but in the best traditions of British pluckiness, he’s willing to give things a go. If ever he was fazed by striding out on to a stage with nothing more than a few ideas and some apparently half-formed stories, he is no longer. In fact, he seems almost underwhelmed by the bowel-weakening challenges of the six-week West End run of Things, his latest one-man show.

“It’s not nerve-racking at all,” he says. “It’s like driving — when you first get in a car and you pull out into traffic, you’re just thinking about not hitting the kerb. But then you get comfortable and you’re enjoying the exhilaration of it and at no point are you thinking ‘What if I’m thrown off the road and hideously mangled in the wreckage?’ It’s all I’ve ever done since I was a kid.”

Noble started his comedy career in Newcastle clubs at the precocious age of 15 — he gives me a sample of his early material, which involved penalty notices in The Highway Code. “It used to say: ‘Driving while disqualified — six months in prison (or 12 months in Scotland).’ I’d say that’s not really a punishment, a nice year in the Highlands.” To be honest, it’s not that funny, and seems worlds away from the combination of tortuously strung out anecdotes, banter with the audience and surreal ad-libbing that form his shows nowadays. He has been described as “the supreme master of spontaneous stand-up” and is arguably the finest live performer of his generation — captivating, imaginative and hilarious.

Nevertheless, despite the success, there remains an element of chippiness. “I like going somewhere smart and standing out a bit,” he says at one point. We are in a fairly swishy London hotel and Noble is dressed in baggy khaki shorts and a grey, shapeless T-shirt: backpacker chic. His wardrobe doesn’t help him to blend in, but then he would cut an extraordinary figure anyway. It’s hard to better his own description that he “looks like every single character in Lord of the Rings” — certainly there’s something a little Dungeons & Dragons about him — the huge, diabolic eyebrows, the big round eyes and the hair. My God, the hair. He has been growing it for years, but it has become increasingly Messiah-like and now all but deserves its own billing as Noble strokes, scrapes, twists and flicks it around. “It’s slowly dreaded up over time,” he says, pulling at one strand fondly.

Of course, he gets away with it because he is famous. He has a TV series about to air — Ross Noble’s Australian Trip, his road trip across the Outback, spliced together with footage from the shows he played there — but has only occasionally appeared on television in the past years, limiting himself to seven spots on Have I Got News For You, “the daddy of them all”. Generally, he has resisted becoming a fixture on the easy-quip TV circuit and made a virtue of not chasing an acting career, but I can’t help wondering if his dyslexia has held him back in this respect — learning a script would be problematic and his improvised stand-up seemed to be one of the few careers open to him.

“When I do try and make any sort of notes, the one thing that people point out is that it’s never in list form, it’s always . . .” he stabs his finger about in the air. “I don’t know what it’s like not to be dyslexic. Maybe if I could write things down, I would have been a one-liner merchant.” He laughs at the absurdity of the idea.