I'm not playing a character. What I'm doing though is taking the worst, most shameful, peculiar, or troubling aspects of my personality. So there are elements of me that are not there. The happy version of me is not really in the show, because there's nothing funny about being happy. So it's more like I'm poaching on the funniest parts of me rather than actually creating some other character.
Simon AmstellI'll just talk and talk for an hour, an hour and half, until funny things come out of my mouth - often things that I don't think will be funny, often things that I just thought were sentences, turn out to be funny, because they're the sentences of an idiot. There's level of self-awareness that develops, and I write down things that were funny, usually when I'm on stage, and that becomes the show.
Simon AmstellAt first I was very anxious about starting Twitter, because I didn't really know what was expected of me. I now feel fairly relaxed, in that's it a way of telling people things that you are doing, without any attempt to be entertaining. To me, even funny people who are tweeting, it just gives a glib impression. You know that it's been constructed, that it's not a thing that's just happened in that moment. So whatever you read, the best you get is, "Eh."
Simon AmstellI've stopped doing things that aren't clear comedy gigs - to do something that's not "comedy night," it's a difficult thing. People have to be given permission to laugh. You need to know it's comedy; otherwise you might just think I'm a man talking out loud.
Simon AmstellIf you have some problem in your life and you need to deal with it then use religion it's fine. I use Google.
Simon AmstellIf there's anything to be said in a broad way about different audiences it's that I live in a major city, and those themes of isolation, protectiveness, loneliness tend to resonate with other people in major cities. In a sleepier village, where people are married with their children, me standing up and saying, "This marriage idea is a funny old convention that we invented" - various things that are deconstructions of the norms of a culture - if people have already made decisions like that, they're more inclined to say "Please, stop talking about our marriages, 'cause we're here now."
Simon AmstellI am not keen on the idea of an oversharer. I don't like that as a problem. I have more of a problem with an undershare. If I'm talking to somebody and I ask them how their love life is and they say "fine," that's a problem for me. I want to know things about people, I feel like we're all here on this planet, and intimacy is important.
Simon Amstell