CityLife

Interview: Stephen K Amos

Stephen K Amos

Stephen K Amos isn’t a big fan of ‘victim’ comedy. You’re not likely to find a barbed jibe or bitchy aside in his set.

“That just doesn’t rock my boat at all,” he divulges.

“I much prefer to be cheeky, you know, a little wink here and there some reminiscing really, just a really kind of positive vibe.”

His latest and eighth solo show, The Feelgood Factor, encapsulates that positivity.

“I was just thinking about how to follow on from Finding The Funny and I just thought of the things that make you feel good, little things that happen that remove the cynicism we feel when we get old and adult, that inner child that we all have.”

The inspiration for which came to him close to home.

“I was at my brother’s house, one of his sons was just laughing uncontrollably and I said, ‘What’s funny?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ And that just tickled me. Oh, that innocence that we had – when did that get beaten out of us?”

The Feelgood Factor ran at the Edinburgh Fringe last year and you could say it was a hit as it played to near on 17,000 people across the run.

Maybe a bit of optimism was what people wanted given the economic climate, not that Amos had any grand plan.

“Actually to be honest some people think I’ve been really clever in calling it The Feelgood Factor but it’s just turned out that way.

“People think I had in mind all the gloom and doom in the world the financial crisis, but actually no, you can think that I’m a genius but actually no,” he ­chuckles.

Last year was an unusually busy Fringe for Amos as along side his own show he appeared in the comedian’s play School For Scandal produced by fellow comic Phil Nichol’s acting company.

“It was an eye-opener, bearing in mind that the cast were a lot of comics.

“It was a hoot dressing up, putting make up on, being silly with your mates every day.

“Trying to keep these comics in check was a bit different but in the main it was just a great piece of fun.

“You either loved it or you hated it,” he laughs.

Notes

A personal high point, he admits, was appearing with a shoe shuffling legend.

“For me the crux was working with Lionel Blair, the legend that is Lionel Blair,” he adds.

“Having grown up watching him on various things on the box, who’d have thought he’d be in Edinburgh and I’d be alongside him?”

All in all, the last couple of years have seen Amos’s career taking off.

My Country, the sitcom pilot he stars in, penned by Simon Nye and co-starring Omid Djalili, looks set for BBC1.

Plus, he’s had his own show commissioned by BBC2 in the autumn.

Not bad for a guy who never planned to become a comic and originally trained as a lawyer, only stumbling into stand up after meeting an English woman, Delphine Manley, on a trip to America.

“She said to me one day over drinks or something, ‘You’re really funny why don’t you do stand up,’ and I said to her, ‘Don’t be silly, I haven’t even seen stand up. I’ve never even seen a black stand up’.”

Despite his initial reticence he eventually followed her advice.

“It’s such a learning curve, my first gig I remember well. My friends were there, I had notes on a piece of paper that I was reading from – in the days before Jimmy Carr made it cool to do that, I should hasten to add.

“Inevitably, it was the wrong thing to do but I’d never seen anybody else do comedy before and it was great.

“My next gig, my friends didn’t turn up so obviously it was a proper audience and, of course, they let me know I wasn’t that great, then I realised actually you need to work at this.”

Needless to say, he’s ditched the notes now, though many don’t realise the work that’s gone into achieving where he’s at today.

“Over the last two years momentum has picked up for some reason and people come up to me and say how long have you been going? And you kind of go ‘15/16 years.’ ‘Really?’

“What I should say is that I only started a week ago so people think I’m really good…”

Stephen K Amos spreads the love at the Lowry on February 21, 2010.