Comedian Daniel Sloss' career is no joke as he loves every minute of it
DANIEL SLOSS likes to go on holidays with five fellow coedians.
They include the Irish comic Andrew Stanley, who Sloss got to know from gigging at Dublin’s International Bar when the Scot was starting out as a comic, Sloss’s flatmate Kai Humphries, Milo McCabe, Barry Castagnola and Tom Houghton.
The group went to Benidorm earlier this year. It was more of a trip then they’d bargained for.
“We all got spiked by acid,” explains Sloss.
“We were hammered. We’d been drinking since 6pm in the sun. We met this Dutch guy. I remember him saying something horrible like, ‘I hate Muslims.’ We were like, ‘What?’
"He said: ‘Do you guys hate Muslims?’ We were like, ‘Well, we’ve not really met them all.’ Kai is going out with a girl who is half-Muslim.
"So we got really tetchy with him. To apologise, he bought us drinks, which he spiked with acid so we freaked out in a hotel room for the next 16 hours.
“Me and Milo got chased — or we think we got chased — back to the hotel.
"Barry and Kai were so drunk that they didn’t realise they’d been spiked until they came back and found us and we had to explain to them why they were seeing weird shit.
“They were shrieking with laughter. Andrew and Tom got lost. Tom tried to sleep on the beach and bury himself in sand. Andrew went off and ate a full breakfast. It was traumatising.”
Sloss has been making people laugh from an inordinately young age. He did his first set at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe at 17 years of age, and proved such a hit — which included a shortlisting for that year’s ‘So You Think You’re Funny?’ award — that he deferred university to give stand-up a go for a spell.
He hasn’t looked back. By 19, he’d done a run of solo shows in London’s West End.
There were jibes along the way from his grizzled cohorts about his youth. “They’d say things,” he says, “like, ‘I remember being your age.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ I’d reply. ‘You have Alzheimer’s.’”
There was also an occasion during a gig when an older woman tried to rescue him when he’d rather she didn’t.
“I remember I was getting heckled when I was 17, and I was dealing with the heckler, and I was dealing with him well, but there was a hen do in.
"I was so young looking that this woman from the hen party leaned over, smacked the guy in the back of the head and said: ‘You let that little boy finish.’ It was like somebody had let me mum in.”
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It was Sloss’s mother who introduced him to fellow Scot Frankie Boyle. Sloss clarifies a story in circulation that he worked writing gags for Boyle on Mock the Week, a tale he says that has been blown out of proportion.
Boyle met Sloss’s mother at a corporate gig. When she told him her 16-year-old son was interested in doing stand-up, Boyle let Sloss hang out at some of his gigs and introduced him to some other stand-up comics like Adam Hills, Glenn Wool and Andrew Maxwell.
As a writing exercise, Boyle said if Sloss wanted to he could try writing some jokes for him to use on Mock the Week.
“He was kind enough to give me some money for the work I did,” says Sloss, “but it was very much encouragement.
"At no point was Frankie ever backstage going, ‘I can’t go on. I need the 16-year-old’s material!’ At no point was I an asset to him.”
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