Bill Bailey: How I Write

You have to discipline yourself when you're writing, otherwise it becomes "Oh I thought of a funny thing on the bus, that'll do me for the day." Or "Oh I thought of a funny remark", then you call people up and say "I made an amusing remark during dinner at your house eight years ago - can you remember what it was?"

You have to actually set yourself a goal and have a routine. What I do is go to my office and I write: turn up at 9 o'clock, start work, and work through the day. That structure itself is good, setting yourself a deadline. The difficult thing with comedy is that unless you're booked into a tour or show, there is no deadline. So you need a spur, it focuses the mind in a way you wouldn't necessarily have.

I also try to process a lot of information. I read a lot about subjects for the show, do a lot of research and reading, feeding the brain, getting it to work a bit harder and I think that creates a fertile, creative atmosphere.

Comedy changes, audiences change, taste changes, certain comedy comes in and out of fashion. And you yourself change as a person, think things differently, perspective changes, and that starts to alter your comedy. There are always ways of refining it; it's always a learning process, you have to be open to that.

Writing can be quite an antisocial process. You end up working all hours. I can work all night on something. If you feel like you've had a Eureka! moment, you can't stop; you've got to go on till you're falling asleep at the desk. But it is also quite an exciting phase because there is nothing greater than writing new ideas, songs and thoughts.

I've often found I've written material during a show. It happens all the time, most of the time the show will never be as I imagined it, or every show will be in a different order or something will occur to me on the night. I like to build the show organically. You think of something, and you put it in the show that night. That can be difficult when you're doing a huge arena show, which is one reason why I've decided to keep this next tour to smaller venues.
 
This latest show has been a real revelation. Large sections of it are improvised around a framework. It's sort of free fall comedy, which I'm not always a huge fan of, but if you have a point to make and a structure, then it can be a way for the audience to see you as a comic - just riffing on the spot - which can be great fun.

The nature of stand up means it works better when you can hear the audience and hear what they say, have a bit of banter. You can't do that in a stadium. In fact, I've just done a tour in Ireland and Scotland, playing in little community centres and it was brilliant fun, and the audiences were great. I had an absolute ball doing it, and it reminded me: "This is why I do comedy." You don't get that engagement with audience in an enormous crowd, you can put on a spectacle and it turns it into something else, like an event, a live comedy event, but it isn't the same as doing a gig to a small number of people.

The theme of this new show is doubt, and part of doubt is a good thing. It's about being curious all the time, always trying to figure things out.

Bill Bailey Live, State Theatre, 23–26 Jul

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