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A funny thing happened to English comic Ross Noble one day, trying to order a "vegie burger" at a McDonalds in Mildura. Ross claims that the woman behind the counter "just looked at me as though I'd asked for a polystyrene head.", before replying that all McDonalds hamburgers featured vegetables among their ingredients. When Noble explained that, as a vegetarian, he didn't want any meat, the woman offered him a chicken burger.

"Chicken's a sort of meat isn't it?' he pointed out. "We can do you a regular burger and just take the meat out of it," the woman offered. Ross decided to just "get some fries". Wanting to make a meal out of it, Ross asked for both small fries and large fries. This must have thrown the woman, because she wanted to know why he didn't "just have the medium fries" instead. "She couldn't grasp and concept of space, time or what was animal, vegetable or mineral," Ross says. "I was literally standing there going 'what the fuck have i walked into?' "

If you have seen Noble on stage you may empathise with his McDonalds misadventure. Ross noble is a kind of comedic alchemist who seems to create something out of nothing as a way of life. He effectively grabs all manner of concepts of space, time and what is animal, vegetable and mineral, and contorts them, taking them apart and rebuilding them in a different order. He improvises material around whatever prompts his audience can give him. However Ross himself is loathe to put it in those terms. "If you were to come out and fire yourself from a cannon, land on top of a big ladder, do a big somersault, land on the floor and present a cheque to a crippled kid, someone would say "What about the guy with the crippled kid?" Noble is at pains to point out that there is a bit more than merely "improvising around the audience" taking place. Although it isn't necessarily obvious, Ross's performances always contain developed or developing 'material' within them. As he puts it, "stuff that I've done before."

"With material," Ross explains "I'll try to expand it to see where it goes. I'll have an idea and I'll play around with it each night, try to take it in different directions and see what happens with that idea." If he wants to, Ross can improvise a whole night's show, or he can do an hour of "solid material". The problem is that if he improvises everything, people complain that he "hasn't got any jokes", and if he only does material, his dedicated fans bemoan the lack of improvisation. Furthermore, there are always critics who need to know just how much is improvised and how much is "material". As a result, Noble doesn't draw the distinction between what is improvised and what is developing monologue. "For a while i used to try and really pick it apart: "Is it this? Do i do that?" In the end, it's more a matter of 'if they're laughing, what difference does it make?' I just go out there to have a laugh, and hope i don't get bottled off."

Ross's allusion of being "shot out of a cannon" is a telling statement. Such imagery recurs in Noble's casual metaphors, and stems from a childhood obsession with circuses. This obsession pretty much formed Ross Noble as a comic. When he first became a performer, it was one of the street theatre variety that juggled and rode a unicycle. The way he performed was to know how each stage of the show ended- with a trick- allowing the rest of the performance to consist of free-form dialogue and gags lading eventually to that end. The tricks, which had no set order, built dramatically to the end finale. As a standup, Ross's performances are the same, with 'ideas' in the place of tricks. "Stuff fits together in any order," Noble explains. "You can link all the thoughts together" However he does admit that the interconnectivity of all things can sometimes be overwhelming. When that happens, it's time to "sit down and watch Burgo's Catchphrase" ".

Noble's obsession with the circus continues on another level: his biggest hero is Evil Knieval, and Ross admits that his house is "one big homage" to the stuntman. Noble is also into all modern manifestations of the circus- "monster truck shows, guys on motorbikes jumping double decker buses," as well as the guys who fire themselves out of cannons. Ross himself is into tamer versions of the same- though to no great proficiency- such as skateboarding, surfing and rollerblading. "I always buy whatever new thing comes out," Noble admits, listing "boots with springs on them, one of hose BMXs where you can spin the whole thing around on the front wheel...but I'm never at home so i never get the chance to play with them"

I would go so far as to say that Noble's work is the stand-up version of extreme sports, his humour bridging the gap between disparate topics as the comedic equivalent of the motorcyclist's leap across double deckers. And Ross agrees. It is conceptually a "big extravaganza", but, he says, "not in the sort of pretentious Circu du Soleil climb into the world of mystery type thing" Rather, Noble is of the opinion that his show is
"the best live experience that anyone will ever experience and if they don't come and see the show, they'll die."

By Demetrius Romeo

Revolver 30/4/01