Julian Barratt
This business is ephemeral, and you have to maintain a healthy cynicism about it. There's a 'flavour of the month' aspect to it, so you have to keep moving on and mutating.Collection: Moving
I was in a band called Groove Solution. Because there was a groove crisis, and we solved it.
I like the countryside. I like chopping wood. I'd like to be a carpenter.
For me, there's no dichotomy between being shy or a performer, because I think it's more a way of slightly presenting a version of things to the world.
My dad listened to a load of jazz - Mahavishnu, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock.
When things start running a bit too well on the tracks, I tend to derail them if I can.
The profession is rife with fear about your age, about your validly, longevity, appearance. It's vanity, and it's hard to sort of avoid all those things; they come at you as an actor.
In comedy terms, usually when the weather's bad, it goes much better. When it's sunny, people don't come to see comedy gigs because they're all really happy and don't need cheering up.
We're so insecure, comedians. 'Did you laugh? Do you think I was funny?'
I miss quite major cultural signposts quite often.
When you're really laughing, you feel like a little kid, and nothing matters.
I ran off stage at my first gig. Halfway through it, I forgot my lines and didn't know what to do, so I just ran out of the building down towards a lake. I was going to throw myself in, but the compere came out and said, 'No, it's going well, come back and finish the gig!'
The secret of comedy is don't grow up. That's why some comedians are a nightmare, because they never grow up.
We used to have to convince people we were funny, and it didn't always work.
Sport doesn't do anything for me. And I don't do anything for it.
I am a man who dreams of culture.
We have a need to make people laugh at things they'd never thought about, make them laugh at things that aren't logical.
People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.
It's good to give people a jolt. If they're expecting one thing, it's important to give them something else. If you do something startling, audiences might at first freak out, but then they start to think, 'This is not going to be conventional. I'm going to enjoy this.'
Most stand-up is incredibly boring. It's time for people to do something else.
I'm always trying to do anything between comedy and horror.
I can't do jokes. I've always come from left field and tried to subvert conventional comedy. I started as a rebellion against that - albeit a very soft and surreal rebellion. It's escapist.
I want to create a world where all the rules are different. It should be magical to enter.
Sometimes it takes you two or three seconds to get your head round a joke and laugh at it. With a snot-bubble laugh, it comes instinctively - almost in spite of yourself. It's caused by something silly - like when a little kid says something unexpectedly bizarre.
It's strange, but something about lack of structure needs a structure itself. Otherwise, after a while, it's like looking at a Rothko painting or a Peter Greenaway film. You think, 'OK, I want to see something else now.'
I was going to be a jazz-fusion guitarist. I came to London at one point with my mate, and we were going to make it. We spent three days there and went back home to our mummies.
It's not immediately categorisable. I don't know what to say when anyone asks what the 'Boosh' is.
'Galaxy Quest' is a fantastic film.
Adapting a book doesn't mean the book stops just because you've made a film out of it.
With the 'Boosh,' we were trying to do this strange, weird thing that had its own language and visual style, and it wasn't really what the powers that be wanted.
We just thought of 'Boosh' as an extension of our childhoods in a way, the stuff we had grown up on and loved: 'Monty Python,' The Goodies, Frank Zappa. It spoke to a certain type of person, and we just carried on doing it.
I've been a horror fan pretty much in the sense that my sense of horror and my sense of humor were both equally kindled by films as a kid.
I liked horror and comedy, basically, from a young age, but I just ended up getting into comedy because there was - I could do stand-up comedy, and that was my way into this business, and then there was no stand-up horror, and I didn't know how to get into that world.
I did try and do some spooky stand up once, and some of my stand-up had - I tried to do some horror stand-up, but it didn't really work very well.
Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.
I think with performing, initially I was terrified on stage, absolutely terrified. And I did it again and again and again, and I learned sort of how it works, and then I was able to do it.
Performers often can be quite socially inept, you know? And even great comedians are like that.
I don't like talking about myself; I'm not good at analysing myself. I don't want to analyse myself.
I've got a lot of friends with whom I discuss jazz.
I've done interviews in the past where, apparently, I didn't give the journalist any eye contact. I'm a bit shy, yes. I've thought about refusing to do any press at all.
Most comedians are borderline psychotic. It's what makes their work interesting.
If the 'Boosh' was a bit more of a specific thing, or less multi-limbed, we would probably have done it and moved on.
I don't do stand-up anymore.
I write tragedies and things when I'm alone. Chekhovian dramas.
Musicals are just funny to me.
I don't have any friends with cool clothes.
My dad wanted to be a musician, so when I started playing guitar, he was like, 'Go for it.' That is what I did for ages; I was in bands. And then I went to university and got into comedy somehow.
If you come away from a show thinking of an image, that's as good as remembering a joke. A lot of those shows, like 'The Office,' they are brilliant, but they're not visually interesting.
I love 'Airplane,' and I love 'Naked Gun' and all those films, where you're parodying.
Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.