BRENDON Burns is outrageous. He doesn't believe that he is, of course, but the Australian-born Fringe favourite of a dozen years, culminating in his winning the if.comedy awards in 2007, is a bona-fide outrage.
It doesn't really matter where it is that one says the things he says about animal genitalia, Michael Barrymore, Arnold Schwarzenegger or the royal princes and their mother, it is still fantastical and outrageous stuff. The fact that it is so hilario
us, when heard in the right company, makes it so.
"I don't particularly want to upset people," he protests. "I have always contested it when people say: 'Look at how outrageous he thinks he is'. I don't think I am outrageous at all. Look at the way I market myself, I am only outrageous if you stick me in the wrong
environment. I'm too old to deal with walkouts and people being upset by me. I am too old to argue."
You can see what he's trying to say. No-one at The Stand on Sunday night for Brendan Burns Special is likely to be offended or too upset. After all, they will be there precisely in order to bask in his outrageous remarks and revel in the way he applies a hugely humane sensibility to anything he perceives as being wrong.
Not everyone is so, however. As he found out when he took the award-winning show to the Duchess Theatre in London to record it for posterity on DVD. Despite the fact that it carries the giveaway title of So I Suppose THIS Is Offensive Now!
"People did get outraged," he admits. Adding with more than a hint of glee in his voice that "there was a woman who kicked off. But we had said to the audience they would be being filmed and this woman heckled so we decided to keep it in".
The real difficulty with the show is that it contains one of the biggest twist endings since the Mousetrap, and is even more reliant on the audience not knowing the secret to make it work. But such was Burns' finesse at bringing the twist to a head that, for once, even the most loquacious of critics and audience members kept schtumm about what it was.
"I can't give away what the secret is," says Burns when pressed. "Which, just as I thought I was away from it, pulls me back in now it is being released on DVD. Every time I think I can talk about it, it turns out I can't. It is basically about being inclusive. It is about the nature of outrage."
What made it stand out is the way that the piece as a whole had been put together. Unlike a normal stand-up gig which emerges spontaneously on the night, everything from the poster down to the last piece of material had been carefully thought through. Ever magnanimous, Burns gives a lot of credit to his editors, Matt Holt and Ro Acharya, for the way they made him take out everything that wasn't relevant. There was, he says, a lot of funny stuff that had to be dropped because it didn't help guide the show to its boiling point.
If being awarded one of the best-known and most hotly-contested comedy prizes did no harm for Burns' profile in the comedy world, success was something of a double-edged sword. Not that it drove him to drink, drugs or emotional breakdown, as he had already been through all of those things, culminating in a month-long stretch at The Priory. Which, in truly heroic fashion, he related in his own show in 2006.
Rather it left him with the tricky decision of what to do next. Insofar as stand-up comedy goes, there was no way he could surpass the theatricality of his award-winning show. The big question was how audiences who had seen it would react when he went back to straight stand-up.
"I have spoken to other acts who have done shows similar to mine," he says, "ones with theatrical elements and a sad ending or a bittersweet ending or so forth. There is a tendency now in comedy where a lot of people are going: 'Yes, you made me laugh, but I didn't learn anything'. They are like: 'Oh, wow, it was so moving, you had me laughing like a drain up until then'.
"Believe you me," he continues, "that is the hard bit because laughter is such an involuntary response. Every other emotion can get there by suggestion, but you really have to work hard to make someone laugh. I think we have kind of lost our way a bit and forgotten the importance of that, forgotten the importance of just being stupid."
Which is where playing venues like The Stand comes in. And to be fair to him, if.comedy success – and being the first ever winner to see his award-winning show get picked up for international DVD release – has not gone to his head. He still tells mean jokes against himself and is in stitches remembering the last time he played the venue, headlining in a charity gig compered by Arthur Smith, when one of the punters not only had no idea who he was but let the whole room know in no uncertain terms.
"I'd just come on and I'm just back-referencing stuff, so that people would have to know me to get the joke, and people were laughing and howling," he recalls. "This Edinburgh guy with a thick Edinburgh accent, just goes: 'Who are you?' He was utterly exasperated as to why anyone was acting like you should know who they are and I cracked up laughing.
"That sums it up perfectly. Even in Edinburgh where I won the top Edinburgh comedy award, there's a guy going: 'Why are some people acting like you are famous?' – in a comedy club no less. I have constantly had my comedy bitch-slaps."
Maybe the problem is that he's not on television. Although he's working hard on changing that and is currently working on a pilot for the BBC with Jon Plowman, producer of such hits as The Office, Absolutely Fabulous and Little Britain.
"I want to do it for minorities – not about minorities," he says. "Take a socially disenfranchised group and include them in the British sense of humour.
"There'd be an episode on race, an episode on sexuality, on being differently abled – I might call that one Special – and about religion maybe. Class I think is a big one and mental illness, because it is the only one I fall into."
And as he goes off into another huge digression about realising that everyone in the front row of one particular gig was mentally challenged and how he turned his whole show round to create comedy which worked for them, as well as everyone else, you realise that the idea that Brendon Burns could carry off such a difficult piece of comedy is not actually so outrageous after all.
• Brendon Burns Special, The Stand, York Place, Sunday, 7.30pm, £10, 0131-558 7272.• The So I Suppose THIS Is Offensive Now! DVD will be released by Universal Pictures on Monday, November 17.The full article contains 1223 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
