View from the top

Stephen Merchant chases women and comedy gold in his new standup show, writes Steve Kilgallon.

‘‘A STRANGE calm descends when you realise you are just freefalling, and you just ride it out, leave the stage feeling humiliated and ashamed, and then you drive home thinking ‘ Oh well, tomorrow is another day’, and it is surprising how it’s quite character-building. But I certainly wouldn’t relish it again.’’

Stephen Merchant recalls his first comedy ‘‘death’’, in an upstairs room above a pub in Bristol in 1997, with a grim glee. For four years, he gigged ‘‘intermittently’’ – both in quality and regularity. Then he took a job assisting a radio station producer. The producer was Ricky Gervais. Together, they wrote The Office, which was universally admired, won awards, was bought and copied by the Americans, spawned Extras, then a recordbreaking podcast series, then

‘If I was as pathetic in real life as I was on screen or on stage, I would be really in trouble.’

Life’s Too Short (yet to be screened here), then the travelogues An Idiot Abroad. And, quite reasonably, he stopped performing standup. Now, sunning himself in Los Angeles writing a pilot for HBO, Merchant is starting again and he doesn’t quite know why.

The answer probably lies in his academic approach to comedy. Even as a teenager, Merchant was studying the two Ronnies and Tommy Cooper. The challenge of rebuilding a standup act in the light of newfound fame and, perhaps, his typecasting as Extras’ inept agent, Darren Lamb (the loser who shows Robert De Niro a pen decorated with a nude woman), made him think. He talks about considering people’s preconceptions, and accommodating them in reworking his comedic persona. ‘‘It was confusing,’’ he says. ‘‘I felt I was having to learn the craft again but in the public eye, and that made it quite difficult and quite slow.’’

Merchant says a sideline in standup isn’t breaking away from his writing partner, because it’s a return to his roots and he never ‘‘felt we were a double act in the traditional sense’’. He says it’s a chance to explore the fertile ground of romantic failure in which Gervais, who has been in a two-decade relationship with author Jane Fallon, has little interest. Hello Ladies – which comes to New Zealand in December, making Merchant’s mother, who has had a penfriend here since she was 16, insanely jealous – is about an ‘‘awkward nerd’’ who can’t get a girlfriend. Merchant says it’s deliberately a very physical show, to exploit his height – he’s two metres, Gervais once describing him as ‘‘a big lanky goggle-eyed freak’’ – and to make it more than just something you could watch on television. The Guardian, not known for gushing comedy reviews, rather liked it.

Merchant, who is single and says he’s not enjoying much luck with the LA ladies, insists there’s a fair degree of separation between that awkward nerd Stephen Merchant and the comedy writer Steve Merchant.

‘‘If I was as pathetic in real life as I was on screen or on stage, I would be really in trouble,’’ he considers. ‘‘Obviously, on stage, you are condensing your most pitiful moments into an hour. They are true, but they are cherrypicked across the years so it’s not like I am just walking from disaster to disaster.’’

The PR burble about Merchant’s show laughs about him riding on Gervais’ coat-tails, but he mounts a similar defence when asked about their relationship. Gervais constantly takes the piss out of Merchant, not just in their shows, but when they appear publicly together. If he’s the alpha male and their idiot savant mate Karl Pilkington – the unassuming star of An Idiot Abroad – is the runt of the litter, is Merchant the middle child? ‘‘There’s always that danger that people assume the personas they see are the real dynamic,’’ Merchant says. ‘‘Karl isn’t as constantly humiliated by us in real life. But the irony is when I do the standup show and tell all the most pathetic and shameful stories in my life, people meet me afterwards and say ‘You are so tragic, so sad, you pathetic soul’ and I want to go ‘No, I was telling you those stories to make you laugh: if that was really my life constantly, I would hang myself’.’’

Actually, reporting that the sunshine and optimism of Los Angeles rather agrees with him, Merchant is feeling rather cheerful at the moment, although he’s aware he and Gervais have suffered something of a critical reappraisal back home. Once universally celebrated for The Office, some of Gervais’ bad-taste material, particularly his use of the word ‘‘mong’’ has gone down badly and even The Office has suffered some revisionist history.

‘‘I felt the tall poppy thing almost instantly,’’ says Merchant with alacrity. ‘‘It’s funny, because I have always been something of a fan historian of comedy and in a sense, I could see our career path playing out exactly the way I had seen those of all the people I admire; an initial period where you are feted because you are fresh and new, then you become stale because you are part of the furniture, and if you’re quite lucky, hang around enough to become a national treasure . . . feel like if I just bed down and don’t die of a drug overdose, in 20 years’ time, I could become one of those. Like Elton John or Stephen Fry.’’

Standup, he concludes, was ‘‘agonising’’ when he first began. He reckons he’s enjoying it more now. Well, sort of.

‘‘I still find it very hard,’’ he concedes. ‘‘It’s definitely the

I toughest thing I do, but I guess I’ve got the bug again and it’s not the applause or the laughter, but the sense of being in front of a crowd.

‘‘It’s the challenge of it that’s so exciting and trying to work out why a joke doesn’t work. It becomes quite mechanical and academic and there is something about that aspect of it I found very interesting.

‘‘I don’t climb mountains and I don’t bungy jump, so in terms of throwing myself into something outside my comfort zone, this is it.’’ Stephen Merchant Opera House, Wellington, December 17; Town Hall, Auckland, December 19 and 20.