Meet the man with the funniest joke
Tristram Fane Saunders catches up with Joke of the Fringe winner Adam Rowe
When Liverpool comedian Adam Rowe won the Dave’s Joke of the Fringe award on Monday, no one was more surprised than Rowe himself.
“When my agent called, I thought he was lying,” he tells me over a drink in the back of a quiet Edinburgh bar. “I was blown away. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a one-liner comedian. I’m all about observations and stories.”
But his winning one-liner does hint at the story of Undeniable, his sell-out show: “Working at the Jobcentre has to be a tense job – knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.”
It’s a joke that comes from personal experience. Although he’s never worked at a Jobcentre himself, Rowe is no stranger to them. “I’m from a really rough background: alcoholic single parent, parents broke up when I was nine, and we were on benefits – I know what it’s like to be in that system.
“That winning line comes at the end of a rant about benefits. It builds up a lot of tension, and that joke relieves it every night, so it’s an important part of the show.”
The Jobcentre might not be an appealing workplace, but the 26-yearold owes his comedy career to a stint somewhere many people might see as even worse. “I worked in Mcdonald’s from the age of 16 to 18, and while I was there I met a guy called Dave, one of the managers. We were both obsessed with stand-up, and we’d try and time our half-hour breaks so we could watch it together on the computer in the staff room.
“Eventually, he said, ‘I’m going to give it a go.’ I thought, that’ll never happen. It’s like when you’re drunk and say ‘Let’s start a band!’ But he rang me later that day and said, ‘We’ve got a gig: my local pub agreed to let me put a night on’.”
Growing up, he saw how stand-up could be a salve in difficult times. “The first comedian I ever remember seeing was Richard Pryor. After my mum and dad split up, me and my little brother would go to bed together – but when he fell asleep I would watch TV with my mum for a couple of hours, partly because she was lonely. I remember one time when she was watching Richard Pryor, and I’d never seen my mum laugh like that. I remember thinking, this is something different.”
His mother’s personality comes across so vividly through the stories he tells in Undeniable that I can’t help asking whether she’s been to see it. Rowe pauses for a moment before answering. “I never wanted to do a dead relative show, so I don’t say this onstage, but my mum passed away five years ago. If there’s an afterlife, I’m sure my mum’s watching it – if she’s got this channel.”
Rowe is an unashamed traditionalist when it comes to comedy, aiming to reach as broad an audience as possible.
“I’ve plied my trade in the clubs,” he says, “so I’m often labelled as a ‘club comic’ – [a term] which in the past has been used in a derogatory way at this festival. Just to make an audience laugh every six seconds for an hour takes a ridiculous amount of skill, and there are comics I know who’ve done shows like that in the past and got negative reviews. But I think there’s a change in the tide this year.”
Until his comedy career began to take off, Rowe wanted to be an accountant. Having got the bug, though, he now feels he could never do anything else.
“I have to do it. If I take a week off, I get withdrawal symptoms. Unless I can hire a room of 500 people to come live in my house and laugh at me every day, I’m gonna have to do this for the rest of my life.”