Tim Key is somewhat of a peculiar comic. His trademark quirky, untraditional-styled poetry, delivered with impeccable timing, makes his new show Masterslut one of the must see shows at this years Melbourne International Comedy Festival. I chat with the British comic while he’s unpacking his belongings. ‘Oh did you just get in?’ I ask. ‘No’ he laughs ‘I’ve been here for two days, I just haven’t had time’. Key really has been a busy man, setting up for his latest performance of subtle ingenuity and fighting off a terrible bout of jet lag.
It’s a bit of chicken or the egg scenario with Key, is he a comic that writes poetry, or a poet that writes jokes? ‘ I think I’m probably a little bit from Column A and a little bit from Column B. I sort of failed… I did stand up for a little bit and I found that very difficult, but I had some poems up my sleeve, and I did them, and I found it much easier. So I like to think I’m a comedian who has got poems under his sleeve’. As mentioned before, Keys greatest asset is his amazing sense of delivery, his jilted pauses and off key comments give his poems that extra incentive to make people laugh, luckily for him that sort of rhythm comes easily. ‘I think it just sort of happens that I time things like that, it’s not something I kind of plan’ he chortles down the line. ‘ I don’t know, like I said I used to do some stand up and it was just rubbish, it’s just being comfortable I guess. When I worked out what my thing was, everything else just slots into place, so how I deliver stuff is just naturally how I do it.’ He got to put his impeccable timing to use on one Simon Amstell, as he was given the opportunity to interview the awkward, former Never Mind The Buzzocks host. It features Key interviewing the aforementioned in an empty church, as Key continually quizzes, and cuts Amstell off to hilarious effect. ‘That was a very peculiar job to get given, getting asked to interview Amstell in a great, big church. It was in a church because Amstell had decided he wanted to it somewhere that had some sort of grandiose-ness and weirdness to it. It was quite good, but it was strange because obviously I’m not an interviewer, and he hates being interviewed so it was a peculiar clash of styles.’
His latest show Masterslut is one of the late starters at this year’s festival, opening in its last week; Key affirms it’ll contain a variety of styles. ‘ Well I did a couple of shows already with poetry and my second one of those Slutcracker, is most like this. It’s a combination of things, there are poems in there, but there’s a lot more talking this time, I say funny things in between the poems. There’s also this element of black and white short films, and all these sort of things that play behind me. And then I’ve got a bath’. He didn’t to elaborate on that last bit, because it’s pretty self explanatory, I think you’d all agree. ‘It’s a confusing mess really, when it works it feels like a show.’ While his show is an array of entertainment, Key finds his muses in the same places as everyone else. ‘I always carry a little note pad around and if things pop into my head I write it down, or if I hear people chatting and I like the sound of something I’ll just write down a word of a phrase. I do sometimes just go to the pub though, with a notepad and just write down any old rubbish, and then just sort of say it.’
While his brilliance is undeniable, Key admits he couldn’t do the shows without his beloved hand cards, which contain his poems and notes. ‘It’s a genuine necessity. When I first started doing it like ten years ago, like stand up and other bits and pieces, the bit I hated most was trying to remember what to say. When I do watch stand up my main thing I can never understand is how they remember it all, I just can’t do it. So out of necessity I started reading of notepads, and scrawlings off napkins and things like that. This is show is more advanced than that, I tend to read of pornographic playing cards. It’s a real advantage to get right up there, some of these models… I don’t expect they’re premium quality, they’re not particularly expensive playing cards so they’re by no means sort of A-list models, but there’s a certain charm to them.’ It’s at this point in time I begin to get particularly excited about the front row tickets I had purchased to Key’s show the week before.
One thing that is capturing a lot of comic’s attention right now is the collaborative show Set List, which is kind of like the Whose Line Is It Anyway? of the stand up world. In a recent chat with producer Paul Provenza, Provenza stated that the amount of comedians that have ever turned him down, from six countries worth of touring, could be counted on one hand. Key falls under this category. ‘Um, NO!’ he defiantly chuckles down the line. ‘ I’m really bad at doing stuff when I’ve got my show, I get obsessed with my show, and when I get it up and running something like Set list would just mean I’m just frightened all day, I’d just be worried about that, it’s no good for my health. So yeah it looks like a frightening prospect’
Key, like many successful British comics, has gone onto broaden his horizons from the stand-up stages, making several TV appearances including an quick cameo on UK ‘teens who do things I’ll probably never do in my lifetime’ drama Skins, as well as host of his own radio show which is based around the comics kooky poetry. He has stepped out for a while to travel Masterslut around, but he certainly has plans in sight. ‘ I really want to get a second series of the radio thing, because I really enjoyed doing that. I’m doing some filming with Alan Partridge for his Internet thing. But I don’t know other than that. I’m doing a tour of my show, so that will be my main focus when I get back to England. I’ve got a little bit of time at the moment so I’m starting to write new stuff, I’m quite open-minded, I wouldn’t mind writing stuff for some film or a sitcom or something like that’.
Key also dabbles in book writing, and just recently released his third publish work in the form of The Incomplete Tim Key. ‘I’ve written a couple of books already, and done them in a small boutique-y way, just with my guy who I write the live shows with. I really like these books, they’re kind of noodley, and weird and peculiar, and then this guy in Edinburgh asked me to write like a collection of poems. I really quite enjoyed it, because I have so many poems, and they’re spread out all over the place, so I put them together in themes, completely arbitrary themes that don’t mean anything, and then wrote foot notes, then they made it – I quite like it, it’s nice. It’s different to the others because it’s all of my favourite poems at this point in my life, at some point I’ll move away from poems ideally, and it’ll be nice to have this as a record of what I was up to’. Sounds great doesn’t it? Too bad Key hasn’t brought any along for the trip, so you’ll have to resort to Amazon to purchase one (which I highly recommend). He brought one book with him, which he is reading himself. It must be that good.
