Spontaneous laughter for improvised gags

Stand-up Stephen Frost and his sidekicks tour the world ad-libbing their jokes. They’re back at the Electric Picnic, says Richard Fitzpatrick

STAND-UP comedy is full of tired comedians rehashing the same show, with little room for off-the-cuff humour, save occasional banter with a heckler. Improvised comedy is a welcome antidote. It’s an hour of comedians performing on their wits, hatching gags, sketches and storylines on the fly, with suggestions from the audience. The Stephen Frost Improv Allstars, who are back at Electric Picnic this weekend, are among the best improv comedians.

“We travel the world. We go to China, to Hong Kong, New York, to Ireland, and journalists always ask who we get the craziest suggestions from. I’m not telling you a lie: it’s the Irish,” says Frost. “They always throw the Brits, especially, in the show. You have a fantastic, weird sense of humour. Especially when we go to the Róisín Dubh in Galway, we get really strange stuff.

“We were doing a gig one time and asked for a household object. People usually say ‘loo brush’ or a ‘loofah’, and someone said a ‘marmalade sandwich in a shoebox’. Another time, at a gig in Dublin, we asked for a regular job that someone might do and someone said: ‘A man that stuffs the figs into the fig rolls that I get for my mammy.’ You just don’t get that anywhere else.”

Frost will be joined at Electric Picnic by sidekicks Andy Smart, Steve Steen, and by Irishman Ian Coppinger.

“I think he’s one of the best improvisers in the world, and I’ve improvised with all of them,” says Frost about Coppinger. “Two things — I’m 6ft 5in and he’s 5ft, so there’s your first joke.”

Frost was born in 1955, the son of abstract painter Terry Frost. His father had never painted before his adventures in the Second World War. “He was in the cavalry,” says Frost. “He got transferred to the tanks, because the cavalry were turned into tank divisions. He didn’t like the tanks, because he was used to being on horses, so he volunteered for a new thing, which they never had before, called commandos. They put him on a rubber dinghy and pushed him off a submarine, with boot polish on his face, to Crete, where the Nazis landed, captured him and took him to prison in Austria for four years.”

While a prisoner-of-war, Frost’s father learned how to paint using brushes fashioned from discarded horse hair. He helped escaping prisoners forge documents. He had a lifelong precision when carving up food, as a result of his imprisonment, a skill he passed on to his son.

“When people come around to my house,” Frost says, “they ask me: ‘how do you do that’? I can cut a loaf of bread into exactly identical slices, because my father taught me. And when I peel potatoes, I just take the skin off, because in a prisoner-of-war camp that’s what you had to do. You couldn’t waste anything and everyone had to have the same quantity.”

Frost’s father also carved a sizeable reputation for himself as a post-war painter. He was knighted in 1998, although the day of the ceremony was one of mixed emotions for his son.

“I was standing outside and I said ‘my dad’s being knighted’, but they wouldn’t let me in — the busbys standing guard outside,” he says. “Then, this car came out and it was Elton John. He got knighted on the same day, in front of my dad. The window of his car rolled down and he said, ‘Mr Frost, your dad is next one out. He’ll be out in a minute,’ and then he drove off.

“My dad used to sell Socialist Worker on the street, by the way. I told him he was selling out and he said: ‘Damn it, Steve, they’re giving me a medal, I’m going to go and get it.’ ”

Frost’s career on the comedy circuit goes back to the early 1980s, when he was one of the pioneers of the UK’s alternative comedy scene, which replaced “middle-aged men in tuxedoes and bow ties talking about their wives”.

Through the 1980s and ’90s, he performed alongside some of the greats of contemporary comedy, many of whom emerged from The Comedy Store in London, among them Mike Myers, Paul Merton and Eddie Izzard. It doesn’t take Frost long to single out the one who is funniest out of character.

“I’ll tell you who’s funnier off stage than he is on stage — it’s me,” he says. “I must be great to live with.”

* The Stephen Frost Improv Allstars perform at the Electric Picnic comedy tent, Sep 1 and 2. Further information: www.electricpicnic.ie