Geoff Norcott: Right Leaning And Right Funny
By Fred Spanner
“It was similar to liking Coldplay. Millions of people do, but few will admit to it in public.”
Geoff Norcott isn’t your lefty comedy circuit darling. He’s the bloke who turned up at the gig with a Tory membership card in his back pocket and still walked off with the laughs. A working-class lad from London who swapped teaching for tearing it up on stage, Norcott’s made a name for himself by saying the stuff most comics wouldn’t touch without a ten-foot bargepole.
He’s sharp, he’s cheeky, and he’s just as likely to chat Brexit as he is football or family life, and somehow he does it without sounding like your dad after three pints. In a world of safe jokes and polite applause, Norcott’s the pub mate who’ll stir the pot, buy the next round, and have you snorting lager through your nose while he does it.
Geoff’s currently at home and preparing to embark on a monster UK tour of his new show, Basic Bloke 2, which has already been well received at the Edinburgh Fringe.
You came from a teaching background. How did that evolve into stand-up?
I had a mate at university, and we used to make each other laugh by creating alternative biographies of famous people. We used to write a line each and pass it back to each other. Stuff like D.H. Lawrence being a football hooligan. We had a double act called the Bubka Brothers, and we did all right with it.
It turned out that the stand-up life wasn’t really for him, but I had a theatre booked in Wimbledon and I was into the theatre manager for 300 quid already, so I thought I’d better put on a show. I got a few comedians together and tried to collect as many funny thoughts as I’d ever had, and had the arrogance to think I could just do it. I think it went well on the night, but mainly out of goodwill.
Over one hundred people would have been a decent start to a tour, but after that, I had to go back down again and do the rooms above pubs and open mic spots, and it built from there.
Who are your comedy heroes?
When I was younger, I used to watch Dave Allen. I always thought he was a very classy performer. He’d do a bit of politics and a bit of religion. He liked to play to a broad audience, a bit like me. You don’t want to exclude anyone.
I was at the Fringe this year, and I watched a comedian so clearly trying to mine a niche that they almost seemed annoyed that there were some people in the audience who weren’t in that niche. That particular niche seemed to be mainly young women, and the performer seemed quite pissed off that a few middle-aged blokes were there. It’s maybe a young person thing.
My generation of comedy asks, “Can you play any room? Can you be broad enough that you can dip in and out of different subjects?” Dave Allen did that. I also love Bill Burr. I love the way he keeps evolving. A little while ago, all the left hated him. Now the right thinks he’s woke. What he does do is he says whatever is on his mind.
When did you start to get a feel for what you really wanted to talk about?
A long time ago. In 2013, I said to my wife that I was done just being a weekend comedian, and I wanted to work out what else I could talk about. She pointed out that I voted Conservative, which was weird for a comic. It’s even weirder now, of course. I always thought it was semi-preposterous that there were all these people who had done something really mainstream, but weren’t prepared to admit it.
There were people who did it, of course. It was similar to liking Coldplay. Millions of people do, but few will admit to it in public.
When I won the Leicester Comedy Show award, I did a bit about politics. I don’t think it was all that good, but I did feel there was a bit in the air of something that was being said that maybe hadn’t been said for a while.
But then some people would relate that to old-style comedians in their dickie bows doing mother-in-law gags. In most political comedy, you don’t go out and say what you support; you take on the other ideas. There were some things at that time that seemed a little deluded.
I think things changed briefly after Brexit because we were suddenly given labels. “Are you a Brexiter or a Remainer?” Most people weren’t at the far end of either scale. They just weren’t sure. I was probably a bit more “front foot” after that, but I’m not looking for conflict. I like to bring everyone into the show. I think eventually people realised that maybe there were more important things than whether we were in a customs union.
What were your thoughts on the recent Unite The Kingdom march through London?
I was surprised at how broad it was, and I wasn’t sure what the actual objective was. At one end, you had people talking about freedom of speech and the danger of 5G masts, then at the other, you had Elon Musk basically inciting insurrection. We’ve lived in an age where people from all sides of the political spectrum have searched for an identity, and that includes British people. From about 2010, people have been waving a flag, whether that’s an identity flag or whatever. It’s not exactly where I’m at.
I’m at the milder end of the right. I'm supportive of the armed of the armed forces and I like the royal family, for all their faults. I think most people would fall in the middle ground of those sentiments.
One thing I should say is that I get way more stick from right-wingers than I do left-wingers. And some from Reformers, ‘cause Reform aren’t my cup of tea. Some right-wingers think I’m a traitor! I’m centre-right, socially liberal - in the old-fashioned way- and economically right wing. It’s funny when people go further right and presume that, because you haven’t followed them, you must be going left.
You’ve done five frontline tours of Afghanistan. What was that like?
The first time was scary. We were on a passenger plane and at a certain point, they killed all the lights. And I mean that. You couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face. This was followed by a steep descent. What I experienced was a fragment of what the frontline soldiers were going through.
It gave me a lot of respect for the British armed forces. I defy anyone who’s worked with them not to come away with a deep admiration for what they do; their mission, sense of purpose and duty. It was at a time when some people were a bit firebrand about the British army in comedy. I was then forced to compare what was being said on the left to what I’d actually seen.
That’s not a view on the conflict, or whether we should have been there or not. What I came away with is the image of a lot of young men and women in a very stressful situation.
That’s what comedy is supposed to be: a left turn before oblivion. It was the most extreme, but pertinent iteration of comedy.
Let’s talk about your fantastic book, The British Bloke Decoded. I see myself in so many of those chapters, not least the one when you’re at a restaurant and someone utters the harrowing words, “We’re not quite ready to order. Can you come back in ten minutes?”
Well, I’m always very hungry when I arrive at a restaurant. It’s just the performative way they say, “Oh, we haven’t even looked at the menu, yet.” What they’re actually saying is that they’re raconteurs and they’re getting on so well, yet all I could think about from the moment I got there was, “Bring me some bread and olives.”
If I’m honest, I get quite a lot of social anxiety going to restaurants. You’re kind of stuck. You sit down in this place you don’t know, and you could be there for hours. And I feel a bit trapped, so the very least I want is an idea of what I’m going to be eating and when I’m going to get it.
Another funny one is how blokes order steaks. There’s a certain kind of bloke who, when he orders a steak, sends a message as to who he is. The guys who order blue steaks can’t wait to tell you. They can’t wait to let that one out of the bag.
“Blue steak love. Just breathe on it and stick it by the radiator.”
I mean, seriously, Steve. You work for the council doing a desk job! I think medium-rare is about right for most people. I’m very close to the centre on most things. I think a medium-rare steak is the centre-right of steak eating.
And if you’re going for a curry, make it a spicy one?
Yeah, I think you go up the spice chain and come back down as you get older. I’m back down to a Rogan Josh at the moment because of the problems it would give me otherwise.
You have a chapter devoted to penis size.
The thing is, it hasn’t been discussed much, and most blokes will fit in around the middle of the spectrum somewhere (5.17 inches). In fairness to people with large penises, I’d want people to know, so it’s not surprising they bring it up in conversation. I mean, you can’t whip it out in public. You’ve just got to hope that the myth and legend circulate on your behalf.
Having a large penis must be like having a superpower, but you spend all day being Clark Kent, when really you want to strap on the cape.
The two things that men perceive are important ot women are penis size and height. You can’t do anything about those. But women can enhance their breasts or bum, and do lots of other things to alter their appearance. With men, things like sense of humour, you can’t enhance. Instead, you’ve really got to work at things. That doesn’t mean women don’t face challenges of their own, but we also have our anxieties.
Doing the chapter on penis size, I knew that people would presume I had a small one. But the thing is, everything about me is average. I’m five foot nine, and thirteen-and-a-half stone, so that was another thing that fell within that spectrum.
What’s the future looking like for your average bloke?
Well, I think that we’re at a point where a man’s identity is being recalibrated. We’ve had a decade of the word ‘masculinity’ coming along with a negative prefix. If you’re a boy of fifteen, it’s probably all you’ve ever heard. We’ve had a point where we’ve had more female equality, which is good, but you have to also look at what’s happened to boys during that time. The metrics suggest there are plenty who are struggling.
If there are a lot of angry and unemployed young men, they’re more likely to take to more extreme forms of politics. The rise of the far right terrifies me as well, but in the States, we've also had young men from the left involved in ideologically motivated associations, so it’s in society's interest to make boys happier as well. Saying, “We’ve got to have better boys”, isn’t enough. How about making boys feel better about themselves?
I do see a lot of hostility with younger women, particularly on TikTok, mocking the male loneliness epidemic. They might have grown up with folk like Andrew Tate saying misogynistic things. Social media is setting us against each other all the time, but it’s not like that in real life. The moment you step outside your house, you’re in the real world.
You see casualties of this all the time. They spend too much time on social media, and the moment they step outside their house, they go to their pet subjects. There are problems all around the spectrum. God, if you could just uninvent smartphones…
Do you think the tech companies have got us by the balls?
I don’t think it was by design. I think they just looked at what human beings responded to, and the thing that mobilises humans more than anything is fear. When you have a panic attack, your body is telling you that you’re in danger. You have to do something; fight or flight. There’s no other emotion that makes you do something as radical as fear. In some ways, those apps are just reflecting who we are, but they magnify it on a massive level.
You’re a big advocate of men’s and boys’ mental health. How can we improve things?
I think there’s a problem with the emotional language available to men. If you look at a program like Loose Women, for example, you can see that women will get together, talk about their feelings, and maybe have a moan about their fella. One thing I’ve always said about blokes is that women might not realise we don’t tend to slag off our partners to other men. It’s seen as disloyal.
I think it’s about trying to find a language that works for us when we check in on one another. It’s all well and good checking in with someone, but if that person doesn’t want to open up, the process is made redundant. Men respect each other’s privacy, but sometimes we have to know where and when to push.
Sometimes the problems go much deeper, and all you can do is be available when that person wants to talk. We’re talking just days after Ricky Hatton passed away, which - at the moment- seems to be a death of despair. When we talk about feelings, counselling, or whatever in public, it’s considered a more feminine language. What’s not talked about so much is the difficulty of one man piercing another man’s privacy. It’s often seen as disrespectful or even nosy.
Just saying things like, “It’s okay to cry,” or “It’s fine to express your feelings,” isn’t enough. We’ve been saying these things for years, and it hasn’t really made a breakthrough. We need to think more carefully about men’s emotional evolution.
Your podcast, What Most People Think, is building up steam nicely.
It’s great. We’re doing it twice a week, and it’s something that gives me the freedom to say what I think. It’s something I really love doing. Stand-up would be the apex, but this is the next best thing. Again, it’s a really broad audience. It’s not just blokes in vests with cans of Stella on their laps. I’d love to get Bill Burr or Bill Maher on. I also like getting folk on who I disagree with politically. I’d love to get Stewart Lee on, but I’m not sure he’d be up for it.
Your tour kicks off in Tring shortly. What can we expect?
There’ll be some politics at the start, and there’s plenty of talk about with this government. When Labour got back into power, I thought that the grown-ups were back in the room. What they’ve reminded me is that even grown-ups can get shitfaced and make a mess of it, too. Being older isn’t any guarantee of common sense.
There’s a bit of politics in the first half, and in the second half, I talk about being a father, which is still this role that isn’t defined properly. We know what it is to be a mother and the high esteem they’re held in, but fatherhood is one we’re still grappling with. Being a dad has been the best thing in my life, but the shared language of discussing the role of fatherhood doesn’t really exist. So I take the piss out of blokes a bit.
I did some previews at Edinburgh, and it’s been the best reaction I’ve had to a show. I think it’s got more of a through line than my previous shows. It feels more coherent.
If you missed Geoff’s previous tour, grab your tickets now. If you saw the previous one, you’ve probably already booked. Tickets are available at geoffnorcott.co.uk.
