Simon Evans: Comedy, Politics and Discovering 1,000 Half-Siblings

Ask Bigger Podcast

Comedian Simon Evans joins the host to trace his unconventional path from law and journalism to stand-up, reflecting on how starting at 31 shaped his delayed

Key takeaways

• Simon Evans began stand-up at age 31 after realizing his law career was built on TV misconceptions and finding spontaneity in improv comedy classes.
• Evans discusses the 'right-wing comedian' label, attributing it to post-Brexit political polarization rather than policy advocacy, noting how GB News amplified the perception despite balanced content.

Main topics

• Stand-up comedy origins and improv
• Class and politics in British comedy

Notable quotes

"I think it's having a very serious and regrettable impact on creativity at the moment."

Conclusion

The episode offers a candid look at how Evans navigated industry shifts, personal

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to the Ask Bigger podcast. Today's guest is one of the most thoughtful voices in British stand-up. You've seen him on Live at the Apollo, Mock the Week and Debate in Politics on Question Time. Behind the scenes he's written for shows like The Big Breakfast, They Think It's All Over, 8 Out of 10 Cats and the list goes on and on and on. A bit like my teleprompter. But comedy wasn't the original plan. Before this stage there was law and journalism and improv. Simon Evans, welcome to the Ask Bigger podcast. Speaker 1 (0:27) Thank you Simon, lovely to be here. Speaker 2 (0:29) and it's great to Speaker 1 (0:30) meet a man with such a good name. Speaker 2 (0:33) Let's go back before the comedy and your life was heading towards journalism right? Speaker 1 (0:38) Well I mean depends exactly where you want to pick it up as you say studied law at university but I had the idea then to become a barrister. And I realised fairly early on that I didn't really have the capacity for the reading. I'd overestimated the ability of barristers to think on their feet. I'd been misled by TV dramas, like Rumpole of the Bailey and so on, and various American dramas where the sort of DA or the district attorney or whatever was both a sort of barrister and a private detective rolled into one. And it looked quite exciting, and it turned out that there was an awful lot of poring over ancient dusty texts in dimly lit libraries. And I literally found myself falling asleep quite often, you know, would just like me wake up with my face on the book. So that plan had to be changed. And I spent my 20s sort of careering left and right, really not quite working out what, you know, I had a vague idea. Yes, journalism, but I didn't want to be a traditional news reporter. I actually wanted to launch my own magazine initially. I thought it would be fun to do something a little bit like Private Eye, but for the younger audience, maybe a kind of student version of Private Eye. a little bit like Viz, a little bit like Punchard used to be many years earlier. Comedy, cartoons, satire, maybe some filth and you know see whether that could get off the ground as an underground, off the ground underground but I never really got any momentum going on that. I did a short course in journalism at the London College of Printing when I was about 25 and then started making myself available for freelance commissions. and a local newspaper asked me to write an article about improv comedy classes that were springing up around the place. And so I signed up for one of those and a little light bulb went off in my head at that point. And I realised that that was kind of where I was meant to be on stage being funny. It never really occurred to me before then. But quite soon after that, I started trying out stand up and quite soon after that, people started paying me and then it all just sort of fell into place really. I mean and getting up on the stage is quite Speaker 2 (2:45) quite scary right? Speaker 1 (2:47) Yeah it is I don't think anybody gets up there and doesn't feel that knot in the stomach you know and um and in and out the loo about half a dozen times in the build up to the very first open spot but it's when you actually stand on stage and something changes I think the actual I think there may be a chemical moment you know when the adrenaline or whatever it is sort of becomes fuel you know that you can use and and i think that may be the difference between people who pursue stand up as a career and people who are funny but don't fancy it is how how you feel once you're behind the mic i think everyone's nervous in the five minutes beforehand but it's the question of whether once you actually sort of sit in the saddle you go okay this is where i'm meant to be and Speaker 2 (3:31) what was it about the improv what kind of hooked you Speaker 1 (3:34) I think it was the spontaneity of it. There are a certain set of rules that you can learn in improv, and that's why they do classes in it, which are how to cooperate with other people, essentially, and not try and get laughs at the expense of the general world-building that you're all sort of cooperating with. But I think also it was actually, in a funny way, the... It was sort of the helplessness. It's kind of the degree to which you realise you're not in control of it because you don't know what the other person's going to say next. And you can try and steer them in a certain direction. But if they have their own idea about where the thing is going to go, it will go a third place that neither of you wanted, you know. And that in itself just used to make me fall about laughing, really. But I suppose I realised, I learned... to be honest, that I was reasonably good at it, that I could get laughs. And so I enjoyed that sort of sense of, you know, basking in people's approval, I suppose. I've always been quite approval seeking. So that was enjoyable. But it also was genuinely creative. And I thought we'd make some scenes that were... that were as funny as anything I could imagine being written. And also, and this was quite important, there were some people there, some practitioners that I got to know and perform with and then occasionally just watch in actual live shows that people pay to see, who were just brilliant. And the sense of being, you know, in the presence of people who performed and developed their skill years ahead of you, you know, and being seen where you could be drawn up to that was quite important as well. I think there was a real... yeah there's quite a nice nurturing mentoring sort of um culture or there was then anyway within improv you know and uh yeah it was an exciting i guess i was you know discovering that i was a theater kid so much later than i hadn't previously realized but it still has a certain kind of it's quite sentimental in a way as well you know there's there's a kind of um bohemian squalor to it that i like as well but uh but it is warm-hearted do Speaker 2 (5:31) you think the because you got into it a little bit later than some people do that experience Speaker 1 (5:34) helped you i think possibly as doing stand-up when i was i was 31 on my my second ever gig was on my 31st birthday which is quite late yeah it made it different certainly there were some people who come in to stand up they'd come to london to do stand up and their all their mates were stand-ups they often be in house shares with with other stand-ups you know and stand up was their life Whereas I had a lot of friends from university and sort of settled a little bit. I didn't own my own home or anything. But yeah, I think it maybe gave me, I don't know, I was quite eager though, even so. I really was quite keen to crack on with it. Once I realised that I could do it, I remember banging out phone calls, you know, daily, trying to get open spots and that kind of thing. You know, you have to be willing to put in quite a lot of donkey work to just get and, you know. I didn't have a driving, I didn't have a car, I don't think, at that point. I can't remember. I think I bought, I think I went between cars for a while. But anyway, so travelling out of town would be a schlep, you know. Yeah, I don't know whether it gave me life experience, because to be honest, I didn't really, I didn't really lean on that particularly heavily. I created a persona quite early on, and not, I don't know how consciously, but one sort of emerged that was... quite arch and sort of ironic and detached, you know, it wasn't really me as such. It was a quite callous, middle class, sort of disparaging, contemptuous of the lower orders, you know, of seeing how people get themselves into a pickle and what have you, you know, and actually that, I mean, that wasn't really who I was at all. I think I'd actually based it to some extent on people I'd met while I was studying law. who were lucky enough to enjoy privilege and comfort and wealth and so on that allowed them to behave like that and I never really had. Speaker 2 (7:33) I mean British comedy has always had a kind of interesting relationship with class from Basil Fawlty to Alan Partridge. Do you think class still shapes comedy today? Speaker 1 (7:46) It's a good question, that. I think class is a big part of British comedy traditionally, you're right. I think in a way we are becoming slightly confused about it lately. In America, the big kind of axis, the fulcrum of comedy is often around race and ethnicity, which is interesting because America is still just one country, but a lot of stand-up comedians would traditionally come and say, I'm half Italian and... half Jewish or whatever and then they would play on those kind of tropes you know and their expectations whereas the Brits would always be yes I'm lower middle class so I'm a snob about the working class that I've only recently escaped or whatever. I don't know that it sticks quite as much as it used to and I wonder whether we would you know there's been this huge kind of wave of identity politics in the last few years so that is a lot of that is either around race or around what is known as gender or around sexual orientation or whatever and class actually feels like a slightly outmoded prism or you know focus or filter or whatever to understand somebody through. But I suspect it's still there, lurking in the background. But it was obviously, it was a huge thing, as you kind of referenced in sitcom. British sitcoms were always based around class, high synth bouquet, you know, desperately trying to establish middle class credentials. And Dad's Army, you know, the joke was that mannering was lower class than Wilson, but had authority over him in uniform and so on. That is, you know, that is a traditional part of British society. I'm not sure if it quite sticks so much now. Speaker 2 (9:22) I mean, you talked about persona there. I mean, when you look you up, when you Google you, one of the things that comes up is that right wing, right wing comedian. Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:31) How true Speaker 2 (9:32) is that? Where did Speaker 1 (9:32) that come from? I think it came to some extent after Brexit. I think I didn't actually support Brexit or vote for it, but I did support the right of people who had done to see it happen. And I became quite vocal in that. regard and I think that became the new sort of axis of politics, you know rather I mean left and right it's a it's a It's a very blunt tool for analyzing somebody's different political opinions or whatever I'd never done a great deal of political comedy and I certainly wasn't sort of saying I think you know It's about time we we cut cut back on the welfare state or there's too many people claiming benefits or anything of that sort, you know You can't really get anywhere with that kind of thing in comedy. There's not many really strong left-wing comedians either who actually do political material and usually it's lampooning political figures rather than, you know, policy. But Brexit broke a lot of people's brains I think and a lot of people could just not understand that it had happened or why. And anyone who was remotely defensive of the right of the 52%, you know, started to be thought of in those terms. So I think it was that, partly. And I think it was odd because... Comedians, generally speaking, would probably like to think of themselves as being anti-establishment, you know, the voice of the dispossessed. But the funny thing was, it was the middle class, the educated, the people who'd been to university, and indeed most of Parliament and so on, who all wanted to remain. And even though they were often portrayed as bigots, it was actually the dispossessed, the less well-off, you know, the traditional working class or whatever, who attended to vote for Brexit. And yet suddenly the comedians were against them. which was a kind of curious inverse of how things were traditionally supposed to be, I thought. Speaker 1 (11:26) As time has gone on, I mean since then I did four year stint hosting a show on GB News which I suppose would probably hammer on my right-wing credentials. If anyone actually watched it they would see that it was a very balanced show. We would always have on at least, we had only me hosting and two comedians. I did hosted a couple of nights a week and it was an unscripted you know assessment of the following day's newspapers basically. and I think it was probably more balanced and fair than Have I Got News For You or any of those sort of BBC topical shows but there's no escaping the fact that it was under the GB News banner which is you know a right-wing show a right Speaker 2 (12:02) -wing channel rather. Do you mind being labelled like that? I did Speaker 1 (12:06) wonder for a while whether it would limit my appeals, you know, whether, I mean, I go on tour and hope to sell tickets and you don't want people who think, well, he's funny, but I'm not sure about that. It doesn't seem to have. No, I think it's been okay. You know, I wasn't sure initially. And I was, it was a bit of a gamble, but actually in the end, I think it has actually slightly increased the number of people who come to see me. A few more people have, you know, tuned in. Not huge. viewing figures, but a few of them have tuned in and gone, oh, he's coming to our local town. You know, we like him on the GB News. We'll go and see him. So it's probably worked in my favour. I don't think anyone who would previously have enjoyed me has decided, you know, to disavow. Speaker 2 (12:47) Do you think comedy is a good way to kind of explain and discuss some of the political issues and some of the more complicated issues sometimes? Speaker 1 (12:56) It can be, but I'm always cautious about overstating the effect to which you can change anyone's mind with stand-up comedy. The truth is most people laugh enthusiastically when they hear comedy that the subtext supports things they already think. Sometimes, just occasionally, you get tricked, you swallow a hook, and then it turns out to have been... baited to reveal your own inconsistency or hypocrisy. But most of the time, people laugh when they hear a view articulated that they have sort of half thought before, but never quite put into so many words. And so actually, it's not a brilliant tool for changing people's minds. But if I'm honest, I don't think there are many great tools for changing people's minds. What mostly happens in politics is, you know, people mostly vote one way or the other, or they can't be bothered to vote. So if, for instance, you know, there'd been a Tory who'd been voting Tory since 2010, and by the 2024 election has just had enough of them, they've let him down, he won't go and vote. He's unlikely to go out and vote Labour, in my view, not many people do that. And comedy has not got any kind of secret weapon for doing anything like that. I think the whole idea that it can make you see things from another point of view, it can conceivably, but it's a big risk if you're a comedian trying to make people see things because that doesn't tend to provoke laughter. That tends to provoke, interesting, let me think about that. If people go quiet and ponder and re-examine their prejudices, it doesn't usually... Get a gale of laughter, which is what you're being paid to deliver, you know, I Speaker 2 (14:45) mean comedy Back in the years used to be able to discuss most things, right? Yes. I think that this day and age it always seems like You have to be careful what you say. Mm-hmm Do you think that what you can exactly talk about on stage is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking a little Speaker 1 (15:01) bit? Yes, I mean It's there's there's two sides to this on the one hand. There's always an edge you know, by which I mean like this is as close to being offensive as you can get in any given comedy club and whatever it is, maybe 30 years ago outright sexism would have been fine, maybe 40 years ago, now not so much. On the other hand, you know, other things that you couldn't say 40 years ago, maybe about the royal family or something, you know, you can do now. There's a thing called the Overton window in politics. And if you've heard of that, the Overton window is basically the window through which acceptable opinions are visible at any given time. And Speaker 2