Salt Chats with Milton Jones

Salt Chats with Milton Jones

‍

Comedy star brings Ha!Milton to all corners of the nation

‍

“This isn't going to change anyone's political opinion,” Milton Jones tells me; talking about his current tour, Ha!Milton. “It's going to be escapism for a couple of hours. You’ll have to find some kind of joy in silliness. But if that's you, then you'll definitely enjoy this. It’s a bit of an escape from the darkness.” Now plotting a haphazard course across every region in the country, audiences may (or may not) be surprised to learn he isn’t picking through the exploits of the prominent American revolutionary figures. It owes almost nothing to the Lin-Manuel Miranda production, although the show does promise a little bit of singing.

‍

“It says on the poster: ‘This is not a musical. Milton Jones is tone deaf and has no sense of rhythm, but at least he doesn't make a song and dance about it.’ It should be fairly clear to everyone that it is not a hip-hop show about one of the Founding Fathers. However, it is loosely about my musical journey, which is short and dangerous, and starts with me being in a nativity play aged five years old, as Angel A. Or, as the other children called me, Angela…”

‍

There’s a bit about tomatoes, which we’re assured is fabulous, in a show packed with his trademark quirkiness and stunning wordplay. “It basically follows my family life, my career, the good things and bad things, the odd topical joke…  Like the Russians have infiltrated everything, even the instructions to my cottage pie last night. It said: ‘Putin microwave’. It’s the standard Jones fare. There are probably 200-250 gags in the whole thing.”

‍

A Perrier Best Newcomer winner and Best Show Nominee, as well as having won two Sony Awards, Jones new tour takes him into spring next year – a mammoth string of dates which includes visits to Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion on Thurs 9 Jan, Theatre Royal Brighton on Sun 26 Jan and Worthing Assembly Hall on Weds 26 Feb. But don’t think this is an unrelenting barrage of one-line gags. “After 15 minutes of jokes, people need some kind of other angle. So, there’s big props. There are animations. There are pictures. I use artificial intelligence… or what some people call an overhead projector.”

‍

Regularly appearing on Live At The Apollo, Michael Mcintyre’s Roadshow and House Of Games, Jones is probably best known to television audiences for his work on Mock The Week. While he has no complaints about the platform offered by the show, it arguably didn’t showcase the full breadth of his creativity. “It brought me to a whole new audience,” he muses. “But it was quite a ‘narrow’ place to be seen. Although I got on with everyone else, there was always lots of interruptions. It was like seven people trying to get through the same door. It's better than not being allowed to go through the door, but it's quite stressful.” His approach ended up with contributing a lot of short gags to the shows. Which worked well, but he always wanted to break out his usual, longer material.

‍

Appearances on that now-defunct comedy institution went some way to create a misunderstanding about his craft. While the throwaway gags and surreal one-liners are still present, his own live performances are beautifully structured. “You need something to hold it together, because otherwise it's just random and people can't quite get a grip on it. I mean… in a way, it's a veneer of structure.” He admits to doing a lot of reverse engineering; both in terms of the individual jokes and slipping them into an order which might suggest an overarching theme.

‍

“The gags need to be structured in such a way as the similar ones aren't together. You want the audience on the back foot, rather than knowing what's going to be coming. That takes a while to work out, and inevitably, you write far more than you actually put in the show… because some of them work well, but others are quite similar to stuff which is already in there.”

‍

After doing six big tours in the last 15 years, each playing to over 100,000 people, he reveals that his secret to writing a critically acclaimed show is to first book some live dates. “Get people buying tickets for a show that I haven't written yet,” he says with a chuckle. “I need that. It's like doing your homework at the last minute. You need that deadline to push yourself. There’s an art to writing a great gag. It involves rhythm, a bit of wit and playing with people’s expectations. It can all be about emphasis on one syllable, and you've got to try that out several times. There’s plenty of ideas I’ve had for over 10 years that I haven't been able to work, and then suddenly I just turn the wording round or say it in a slightly different way. The motto is, never throw anything away. I try out a lot before doing a tour. I think I've done about 30 shows in different small places around the UK, just trying out new stuff.” 

‍

He's a big fan of doing these ‘work in progress’ shows, having recently run a slightly shorter performance for two weeks at Edinburgh Fringe - just to get round the idea of new props, and doing the same thing in the same place at the same time every night. “It was a very good rehearsal for the tour. So that's, that's the process, really. I get a director in as well. Stand-ups don't get directed very often, to be honest. We tend to do what works and take the line of least resistance. It's interesting for me to have someone outside to go: ‘Why don't you try doing this? Would it be better if this other thing was before that thing?’ I like the challenge of that, I don't even always agree, but it gives me a reason to justify what I'm doing.”

‍

The extra input has enabled him to keep up the tempo in his performances. He says a decent joke should be like putting a small film in people's minds - which has an unexpected ending. “If the image isn't clear enough, then they won't, you know… laugh. They'll be confused. Sometimes, you know what you mean, but someone else can help you communicate what you're trying to get to, and that's valuable. I ended up with a team, in terms of director, promoter, who does the publicity, a tour manager, who drives me and does the technical side of the video and the support act. Although it's my name on the poster, there's quite a few people behind it.”

‍

The absence of profanity in Jones’s work almost seems subversive in this age. He doesn’t have a big issue with swearing, but it doesn’t really contribute to his creative ambitions. “I don’t need to do it to get a laugh. But then, there are other people like Billy Connolly... That's just how they talk. You're not even trying to shock anyone. You're just describing stuff. And there are jokes in there as well. I always wanted to have an accessibility for my own children and families. In a way, it was like a further edit on the one liner just to take away anything that would be confusing or distracting.”

‍

‍

No matter how surreal the jokes might be turning, there must be some kind of internal logic. Or at least a framework to stop everything decaying into chaos. You can't shout aubergine several times and expect people to find it funny. “You say that, but I quite like the idea of shouting: ‘AUBERGINE!’ A lot of reverse engineering goes on…  in the sense that you hear a word, or you see something, an image, or you're talking, and someone mentions a concept, and you think: ‘What would the ultimate exaggeration of that be?’ or ‘What's the worst possible misinterpretation of this word?’” From here, he builds a tiny story around the concept, while using the minimum number of words. Which hopefully becomes a one-liner, with the reveal as near the end as possible. “I mean, that's a rather unfunny explanation of how a lot of my jokes are made. It's quite scientific in a way, but once it all comes together, it's far more organic.”

‍

As a child, he says he wasn’t really into playing with words or nonsense verse, he just thought it all was a bit strange. “My mum was from Belfast, and my dad was from Swansea. We thought they were doing funny voices for 10 years of our lives, and then realised they were accents. And accents make some words sound different. I think me and my brother were always messing about with tape recorders and doing jokes and stuff. So, I began to play with all that kind of stuff early on and enjoyed doing it. Then a proper job seemed too much like hard work.”

‍

Away from TV, other broadcasting duties have seen Jones as a regular guest on Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue, appearing on their last UK Tour. He’s also created a series of successful comedies for BBC Radio 4, and this has seen a new dimension to his work. With shows like Thanks A Lot, Milton Jones! he’s found himself with the space and means to create whole new worlds of dizzying silliness. “There’s other actors as well,” he says. “You get characters you can bounce off. Also… the joy of radio being that if you want to go to Africa, all you have to do is play the sound of elephants.”

‍

“I’ve been lucky enough to do it since 1998 and we've done 15 series of different iterations. The good thing about radio, of course, is you can read stuff out. You don't even have to learn it, because no one can see you. I like the idea of that. We certainly made our own little radio programmes and very poor sound effects as kids. So, it always felt like playing rather than working.”

‍

There seems to be a slight shift with Ha!Milton, as Jones starts to explore where he’s come from and where he’s going. It might be a sign of a contemplative stage in his career, as his work starts to become even more intricate and unique. “I am getting… no, we're all getting older. It's that fine line between people wanting to see the sort of thing they've seen you do before… but not the same thing. As an artist, if I can call myself that, you want to do something which is a bit different, but you can't become a different act, obviously. It's pushing those disciplines together and trying to come up with something which stretches you and takes you slightly outside your comfort zone. I do actually sing a song at the end. Deafness and lack of rhythm means that doesn't necessarily go well!”

‍

Milton Jones brings Ha!Milton to Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion on Thurs 9 Jan, Theatre Royal Brighton on Sun 26 Jan and Worthing Assembly Hall on Weds 26 Feb, as part of his nationwide tour.

‍

www.miltonjones.co.uk 

www.dlwp.com 

www.atgtickets.com/brighton 

www.wtm.uk