The Thursday Interview… Scott Capurro
May 24th, 2007
Of the review quotes featured on the front page of Scott Capurro’s website, our two favourites are this one from Australian talk show host Rove McManus: ‘It’s like watching a car accident’, and this one from the Daily Mirror: ‘He’s evil and should be forced to leave the country’. When we met him for sausages and mash in Spitalfields earlier this week, we found Capurro intelligent, surprisingly serious but unsurprisingly acerbic, fast-talking and very funny, despite the fact that he’d been ‘watching Glitterball at 3.30 in the morning with half a sleeping pill and a big mug of white wine’. But still, we may well have missed something. So. Be warned: this interview may contain evil.
Scott Capurro spends about eight months of the year in his East London home. He loves it here, he says, but he’s ‘overlooking certain characteristics of the British and British culture…’ Which characteristic does he find it most difficult to overlook? ‘The autism. People have no spatial awareness here, when you’re walking in the street or in a club, they have no idea how wide their shoulders are, how big their umbrella is, how clumsy they are or how much they smell. And it’s an island mentality, a very insular culture, and I think that’s one great thing about Tony Blair, who I consider a hero.’ Then he’s off, spouting forth on Blair, unironically, and what he considers – the nightmare of Iraq aside – as his multiple achievements. ‘I think you’re gonna miss him. I think people miss him already. He’s a true statesman, and he gave glamour to this country and brought it forward into the 21st century.’ George Bush meanwhile is ‘a lame duck now… I don’t think about Bush that much, I think about the CEOs of national corporations and international businesses. I think the presidency is run by economics and I think that Bush is just a figurehead… But anyway, I really like it here, socially. But the main reason is the work. London is the epicentre of comedy in the world.’
Scott Capurro likes to talk. He has a brain that flits from one subject to another and back again, always back again. He is a born stand-up, a born communicator.
A regular part of Capurro’s set involves him coming on to a guy in the audience, offering to visit all manner of sex act upon him, from tea-bagging to skull-fucking. Usually they play along. They laugh, because it’s funny. However, when we saw him in Covent Garden recently, the guy he picked on wasn’t particularly amused and at the end of the show refused to shake his hand. A low boo rang out through the rest of the audience. ‘That was a great moment,’ says Capurro. ‘A great moment.’
But messing with the audience can be a dangerous game. A couple of weeks ago in Manchester, ‘spaz-approved’ comic Jim Jeffries was assaulted. It’s not exactly clear why but presumably someone didn’t get one of his jokes. ‘I don’t want to give someone a reason to hit me,’ says Capurro, ‘but I did want that guy [in Covent Garden] to know that he wasn’t steering the ship. I was. And it’s my cruise, and he can stay on the boat or he can jump. It’s not about you, it’s about me. It’s always about me. So – I don’t care if you stay or go, but you’re not going to sit there and talk, and if you try to intimidate me, it’s not gonna work.’
When he talks about unwanted audience participation – heckling, chatting amongst friends, mobile phones going off – there is the same sense of annoyance, outrage even, as was present when Bill Hicks went into his notorious ‘Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever’ rant. Basically both men are railing against retards who have no respect and will gladly, stupidly and usually drunkenly ruin something for the rest of us.
The problem with the guy who wouldn’t shake his hand though, was clear to Capurro: ‘Big fag-hater. That’s why he didn’t shake my hand. It wasn’t about my being white, or a comic, or American. It was about my being queer.’
Scott Capurro had no intention of ever becoming a stand-up comic. It wasn’t his ambition and, he says, ‘it still isn’t. They needed a compere for a variety show at my high school – just a couple of remarks and then it turned into a 15-minute stand-up.’ He then enrolled on a comedy course in which he learned ‘that actresses fuck their way to the middle’, but little else. Soon after he went away to college to study acting, but the die was cast. He was already a stand-up and even if he gives the impression that he would rather have done other things, comedy is what he does.
Capurro is very much a personal comic. His act is all about revealing things about himself. He’ll take in every subject under the sun along the way – AIDS, the Holocaust, Chinese food, Anne Frank, cancer, Ian Huntley, George Bush – but his act is essentially him communicating how he thinks and feels to an audience. It’s an intimate experience. It’s also quite shocking, ad it’s not uncommon for him to split an audience in two: those who find him hilarious and those – well, those who suspect he may be evil. ‘I really don’t go out of my way to shock people,’ he says. ‘I would like to change their minds… I think I’m being unclear on that – I want to change their minds on how gay men are. That’s what I want to change their minds about. I don’t want them to think that gay men are all fat, wall-eyed, Irish cunts with one joke and no friends. I don’t want people to think that that’s all there is.’
Capurro was banned in Australia for doing a bit on children’s television about Jesus. More specifically, about fucking Jesus. ‘I’ve made a lot of mistakes,’ he admits. ‘And I stand in the way of my own success and happiness.’ Yet when he’s up on stage, he’s unflappable, infallible. And he was always funny. ‘When I was a kid, I was a weird, freaky, six foot two 14-year-old. It made grown-ups feel creepy to be around me. My father told me that once, that there was something wrong with me. We were in the car going home one night and I was singing along to a Sinatra song on the radio. He was like, “You shouldn’t know Sinatra. You’re 14. There’s something wrong with you.”’
Are his parents happy with his career? ‘I think they’re happy as long as I don’t get AIDS or cancer. That’s all they care about… But they’re fine, they’re very supportive. And when I did movies it was a big thrill for them.’ He had roles in Mrs Doubtfire and The Phantom Menace. But this was a while ago. Now he suspects that along with the occasional TV appearance (he’s doing another series of 8 Out of 10 Cats later this year), ‘this is it’. Again that feeling that he’s not quite satisfied with his lot – that being one of the most respected and certainly one of the funniest comedians on the circuit is not quite enough. Yet at the same time he’s fully aware that, certainly as far as TV is concerned, ‘most people who work in comedy wouldn’t know a joke if it fucked them’.
When he first started coming to England, Channel Four were all over him to do something, but it never materialised. Although this is very possibly still a cause for some sullenness for Capurro, we can’t help but feel that he’s at his best in a room full of strangers, where he gets to say exactly whatever he wants and there’s no TV exec trying to get him to be more like Victoria Wood. It’s on stage where Capurro comes alive and where certain sections of the audience will always be wondering how he dares say the things he says.
We ask him what’s the worst reaction he’s ever got from an audience member. He tells us:
‘I had a lesbian throw ice at me once. And it’s really scary when things fly out of the dark at you and hit you in the temple. And I lost it, I lost it… It became a brawl. Chairs were turned over and stuff. Someone said afterwards that it was a masterclass in destroying a good audience and bringing them back… I can’t destroy a good audience. It’s not up to me. I wish I had that sort of power. If I had that sort of power, I would do both good and evil in my act. I’m not out to destroy the room. I’m out to just do my dick jokes and get off the stage. It’s the arrogance of the straight, white, middle-class comic that thinks that any of us can either make or break a room. And I just did a gig with some middle-class, white comics, and I gotta say – in this country, white boys, they got it all handed to them, the way they talk to cab drivers or waiters, that’s one thing, that’s embarrassing enough – like, they’re not your mother – but anyway, that aside, the way they talk about audiences and how their act went, and how that joke went – you know what? Tell your dick joke and get your fucking white ass off the stage.’
He goes on to tell a story of performing in a couple of working man’s clubs, one in Scotland, one in England, where his fellow performers were dissecting the shows afterwards, wondering why they sometimes lost the audience. ‘They would say, “Wow, it was weird because the audience really went for the one-liners”. Yeah, well, that’s what audiences do. It’s their Friday night out, you little cunt, how about doing your act. They don’t want to go on your journey, thank you. They’re not interested. They’re 45 years old and they have their arms crossed and they’re waiting for a punchline. Friday’s their big night. Fucking… do your job. Do it. Do it! DO IT!’
Tomorrow night Scott Capurro will be doing his job at the Banana Cabaret, in The Bedford in Balham. If you haven’t seen him before, we urge you to do so. He’s not evil. Just funny. Very, very funny.
Note to reader: After I read this on the site, I noticed comments below, where some people remark on my stand up. They’re terrifying. Some like me, some don’t, that I can handle, but it seems as though some folks take my act and the interview personally. I suppose I have great power. Maybe I’ll be sainted. Or beaten to death in the back of a comedy club.