Chris Kent: Time offline meant getting creative and staying away from toxic culture wars

'I went back to work during the pandemic as an electrician. It was probably one of the happiest periods I was ever doing comedy, because I didn't have the financial pressure'

Comedian Chris Kent: "You’re always kind of just waiting on a little break or a little phone call or a little email to say you’re on the TV show or you’re doing that. And then that sort of turned into, ‘You can do that yourself now on social media.’" Picture: Dan Linehan

A qualified electrician, Chris Kent knows a few things about getting people wired up. In his latest show, however, the Corkman is more focused on his own disconnection — specifically, from the internet.

The 41-year-old, from Knocknaheeny in Cork City, crafted Offline from an old idea, and one that likely has huge appeal to the smartphone-weary hordes now sinking in a sea of online vitriol and ambient, algorithmic rage.

“It was kind of an amalgamation of different things,” Kent says. “I’ve been a stand-up comedian for nearly 20 years. Social media has been a big part of that for a long time now. And you’re
attached to your phone all the time. And I had played with the idea back in 2012, for a different reason, I think I got a bad review or something. And I was like, ‘Jeez, I hate the internet. I’d love to just give up the internet.’ That kind of sat there at the back of my mind.

“And then, obviously, with the stand-up, you’re looking at your phone and not necessarily for that reason. You’re always kind of just waiting on a little break or a little phone call or a little email to say you’re on the TV show or you’re doing that. And then that sort of turned into, ‘You can do that yourself now on social media.’

“So I went back to work during the pandemic as an electrician for two years, doing comedy as well. And it was probably one of the happiest
periods I was ever doing comedy, because I didn’t have the financial pressure, because I had a proper good job in a pharmaceutical plant. Because I was working in pharmaceutical plants, you weren’t allowed to have your phone anyway. So there was probably 12 hours of the day where my phone was in a locker.”

Kent’s return to the life of a leckie has been well documented, and he says there was a nice balance in his life during that period, “but something had to give”. 

His wife Niamh persuaded him to go back into comedy full-time — “she could feel me slipping down a very comfortable path of having a job and picking whatever gigs I wanted”. So the phone came back out of the locker. 

“I was probably putting up a video or editing, learning how to edit, learning how to cut up a video, every day, for a number of months,” he says.

“So there was a lot of work in that. And then you’re incessantly checking the video and how it’s doing, you know what I mean? It’s kind of a vicious circle. I’m checking my ticket sales to see if it’s having an effect on my ticket sales. And it’s a kind of a loop that, for someone creative like me, that takes me out of creativity. Like, there’s
nothing creative about this at all.”

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He recalls asking himself, ‘I’d love to see if [going offline] genuinely has an effect on my creativity?’ 

"That was my kind of biggest question, because it got to a point where I was trying to write a new show and, honestly, 40 minutes and I was done. I would get distracted — even if I wasn’t going to pick up my phone, my phone was calling me.

"I was getting a text message, which then sends you down a rabbit hole, because all of a sudden you have a text message or there’s also a DM on Instagram, and there’s also this other thing and, lo and behold, two hours has passed and you just picked up your phone to check the text message.”

This will be familiar to so many of us, though whether we could then turn it into an entire stage show, as Kent has done, is open to question. A skilled storyteller, he usually takes around a year to write a new show, but he set himself a target of approximately two months for the Offline edition. He did it, aided, he believes, by the very fact that he didn’t have a smartphone to distract him in the first place.

“I had the Nokia phone, so I had the buttons, there was no internet on it, so you pick that up, and it’s like, even if you do go off and play Snake, you’re not going to lose two hours. You’re going to lose 15 minutes.”

Niamh took charge of his smartphone, effectively becoming a sort of superhuman PA, including becoming a dab hand at the cutting and editing of
various clips from his show. So far, so good, but that’s not to say that life without an online anchor is easy.

“I almost missed a gig, a couple of gigs,” Kent says. The lack of Google Maps had him going around in circles in Belfast, despite a well-plotted route using proper, actual maps. 

Comedian Chris Kent. Picture: Dan Linehan

“I was following the signs and I had a plan and, of course, then a bus passes and they block the sign and you’re like, ‘Shit — what do I do now?’

“I got to the gig, and I did the gig, and the guys, one of the lads, was like, ‘What hotel are you in? Look, I’m
actually driving past that hotel, just follow me.’ He said, ‘I’m driving a little Citroen there. Just pull around and follow me.’ And, of course, I pull around the corner and there’s two
Citroens right in front of me, and I didn’t ask for information, and they’re both driving at the same time, so you have the dilemma of, like, following these two Citroens...

“I remember trying to park my car one time in Edinburgh. I get to the car park again, I have to scan the code on the thing, like, ‘Oh shit, I had my Nokia phone.’ 

"I was ringing my wife, who was with my kids back in Cork and I was like, ‘Can you pay for this parking online for me?’ Then we couldn’t find a car park.”

And as for the long-suffering Niamh? “She was like, ‘Oh my God, my head is going to explode with your phone.’”

News stories have appeared recently positing the theory that some Netflix shows have been purposefully dumbed down in their creation so they can be half-watched while the viewer continues to comb through their phone while slumped on the couch. 

As apocryphal as that may sound, Kent does believe that the ‘clippability’ of elements from stand-up shows has likely had an impact on how some comics actually script their material.

He freely admits that he has never approached his own shows in that way. “Some of my stories would be 20 minutes long,” he adds.

The Corkman says he “hasn’t had a massive problem” with people disrupting or distracting from gigs through their phone use, but clearly he feels that when everyone is “genuinely present” at a show, both audience and performer, it makes for a more complete experience.

Comedian Chris Kent. Picture: Dan Linehan.

Kent also says his time offline meant getting away from the toxicity and the vagaries of the culture wars.

As he recalls, where he grew up, the big thing was to learn a trade, which led to his training as an electrician.

“Getting into the arts,” he explains, “I come from a very working-class area, it has a bad reputation in Knocknaheeny, that would be more surprising than me going into a trade.

“I think Des Bishop did a show in Knocknaheeny, and I knew a couple of people that were doing the stand-up on us. And my biggest inspiration was them. I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus, I remember going to see them.’ And I was like, ‘These guys, this is not Tommy Tiernan, and this is not Des Bishop. And, wow, they’re actually making people laugh or not making people laugh.’ But you can be just as inspirational.”

He has managed to turn his smartphone into a dumb phone and employs it as much as he can, but not as often as he’d like.

“I can definitely see myself cracking it,” he says of the ultimate smart/dumb phone balancing act. 

“Maybe I’ll get to a level where I can hopefully just kind of outsource my social media altogether, that’s the dream, and just to be able to be like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, I’m not on social media.’ So that’s where I want to get to. And I just want to do stand-up and also maybe work on other creative stuff.

“Because at the back of my mind. I’m always like, ‘What am I?’ You know, I am still putting quite a lot of time into it. I could be, I could be doing something else, because there’s other issues there to do, sort of, maybe TV stuff, or maybe, you know, write a sitcom or do podcasty type of stuff.

“All I can manage to do at the moment is kind of scratch the stand-up itch. But that is the priority for the moment.

“I am just happy to be really happy and really grateful to be touring, and to be able to facilitate that, and to be able to do stand-up all over the country and all over the UK, and hopefully some day further afield, America or Australia.”

No bother, surely, for a man who has proven he can bin off social media platforms. Just watch out for the roaming charges.

• Chris Kent brings ‘Offline’ to the Marquee Cork on Friday, July 11