Ross Noble is rewarded by badgering fans

COMEDIAN Ross Noble’s mind is like a pinball machine.

His shows are largely unscripted. Each one is freewheeling whimsy, observation and pop-culture reference. Ten minutes could be eaten up playacting with the stage’s curtain or jabbering about pirates. Anything goes. His inventiveness merits his inclusion in the Top 10 of Channel 4’s list of the 100 Greatest Stand-Ups.

Noble got his start in live comedy at 15 years of age at an open spot night in Newcastle. “The club was called Chirpy Chappies Comedy Café. I had visions of it being like a greasy spoon – a café with a stage in the corner, but there was a bar with a stage. I had no idea what to expect. The act that was on before me was this Australian woman who made all these jokes about teenage boys. I couldn’t repeat it for polite company, but it was filth. When I walked on, the whole room went, ‘Oh, my God, he’s a teenage boy’. I made reference to it, and it went well.”

Noble returns to Ireland this weekend for gigs in Cork and Dublin, almost 20 years after his first visit to the country, which included a stint at City Limits in Cork. He recalls being surprised by the country he found.

“I thought this business of the Irish being all about ‘come and join us for a drink’ and being up for the craic, and that was what life was all about – I took that with a pinch of salt, that it was some sort of tourist affectation. I turned up for a Friday night in Cork, and it turned out they were underplaying it.”

Noble’s silliness on stage is reciprocated by his fans. They leave him the oddest of presents at the intervals during his shows. One of the last shows he did in Dublin, someone left a badger stuffed by a taxidermist, which tours around with him and is set up in the dressing rooms of the theatres he plays. His favourite audience gift, however, was an oil painting left to him a few weeks ago.

“It’s a proper portrait of me,” he says. “I’ve got a rippled torso and the body of a centaur. There’s a French fancy with wings flying past my head, with a rainbow coming out of it.”

The painting hangs in his house. In a freakish act of God, Noble’s worldly possessions were wiped out in a forest fire in February 2009. He had bought a 100-acre farm some 20 miles outside Melbourne a few years beforehand.

His wife is Australian, and was attracted to her homeland by her compatriots’ laidback nature, optimism and their “mental animals”.

Noble was doing a gig when the bushfire engulfed their farm and whole communities in the hinterland. He came back the next day and the area was cordoned off for miles around like a crime scene. “It was post-apocalyptic with everything still on fire,” he says.

Noble’s wife and baby daughter, who had been visiting Noble’s mother-in-law, narrowly escaped death. “Five minutes either way, she would have been trapped in the house,” he says. Everything was destroyed except their horses and cows that had instinctively taken refuge.

What he learnt from the ordeal was that if your house burns down and you lose all your possessions, don’t try and lift your wife’s spirits afterwards with some sarcastic humour as you’re looking at the embers. It just didn’t work.

• Ross Noble performs at Cork Opera House on Sunday and at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin next Tuesday