Kaning It

Storming onto the Edinburgh scene in 2006 with his hyperactive brand of observational comedy, Russell Kane was rapidly propelled to stand-up fame. Every Essex mums' favourite, the loquacious cockney rogue has wooed radio, TV and live audiences alike on his path to multimedia comedy success.

“Jesus, it looks like Robocop’s sex toy!” Kane is jumping around in his seat like a kid on Haribo as he stares peculiarly aghast at my Dictaphone. “The furry mic only comes with the deluxe model. It's really hard to get off to the standard model actually, it's just a rubber probe. They didn't produce many of them – too many injuries.” Perhaps he’s had a few too many Starbucks’ golden roasts for one day?

Having just got off the phone to Reader’s Digest, Kane looks a little on edge: “It’s really weird. I’ve been talking about myself all day and all night as well. I’m starting to go a bit crazy.” Oh dear. Nervously, I entertain the idea of asking a question: “How are you?”

As the comic launches into his spiel about Edinburghs past, present and future, I’m certain I needn’t have worried. Always one of the Fringe’s hardest workers, Kane has lots to talk about; this year offers not only the usual premier of a brand new stand-up show but also the latest in his Fakespeare line of iambically pentametered commentaries on modern life.

Apparently, as with many of Kane’s greatest conceptions, the Fakespeare series was born accidentally out of a gag ending in the cryptic punch line, “Thou art a crow.” A few adjustments and extensions later and The Lamentable Tradgedie of Yates’s Wine Lodge—an hour long poem in blank verse—debuted at the Fringe for a limited run.

“I don't know where it all came from,” he pleads. “It all just started coming out of me and now this is the third play. I'm just really comfortable writing in 10 syllables with lots of similes and using old English. Just genuinely totally comfortable.”

Having put off staging the second play owing to the “mega” cast it would involve, Fringe audiences will this year be treated to a full run of The Tragickal Saveings of King Nigel, the credit crunch tale of an Essex banker’s unspoken lust for his PA, framed by the darkness of his financial ruin.

Yet despite having taken …Yates’s Wine Lodge to the RSC’s main stage in Stratford, Kane remains remarkably modest about his achievements: “I just get into a rhythm with it—using similes and imagery to express thoughts—and it starts to make sense. The actual metering of it, the ten syllables, I don't do automatically. But in English, most sentences are in iambic pentameter anyway – not that one.”

It's a small slip-up. In reality, Kane has had a very successful year since Edinburgh 2008's If.comedy nomination. Touring from Brisbane to Hull whilst keeping up commitments to radio and TV, the comic has had a tough time of it: “It’s been a bit too busy really. I pushed it a bit and then I was struggling in Kilkenny – I had a bit of an energy crash and scared myself.

“I went to Australia for nine weeks; I'd been writing every day, taking calls, staying up till three in the morning, things going on and on. I landed in Kilkenny and this throat infection I had went to my ears and I just folded basically.”

Still fidgeting in his seat and jotting down ideas for jokes at regular intervals, Kane is clearly back on form now and ready for another Edinburgh show. Talking about the themes he’ll be covering this year, I wonder if his much maligned Dad will get another mention?

“Oh God...” Touchy subject? “I don't know how much longer I can mine that. It's been heavily mined!”

Jokes about his Dad’s right-wing views and restrictive beliefs on the activities permissible for a "real" man have peppered Kane’s comedy throughout his career: “All the stuff about my dad, what's tragic is that there's hardly any embellishment. Like when I talk about the only time I’ve ever seen him cry, when the Akash Indian restaurant closed down in Potters Bar. Most people would think, oh that's very clever he's made that up. But it's exactly what happened. My friend remembers the door opening and my dad sitting there crying. And it was such a crushing moment for me in my childhood. I realised then where his priorities were. There wasn't this big mystery buried inside him that I was going to uncover one day. It really did begin and end with money and food.”

Having discovered that the Akash in question actually moved just five miles down the road, I think myself a little clever in bringing this to Kane’s attention. Something to tell his Dad about? Looking a little shifty, he confesses, “Actually, that is the only thing I am untruthful about on stage – the extent to which my dad is still alive.”

In fact Kane’s father died the month he began his career in comedy, and his troubled relationship with this powerful figure in his life clearly still consumes him: “I'm not scared of him. He never physically abused me, he never touched me. But he had such an authority over me that there's no way I could have said this stuff while he was still alive. It's ridiculous. He never even raised his voice to me. But he was such a powerful man in every other sense that it's just impossible.

“Sometimes I feel really guilty that I started comedy the month he died. To what extent are those two events linked? Who would chose for their dad to die? No one. But then would I be sat here with you if he'd lived? It's a horrible thing to ponder, but it might just be true.”

Stuck with a father who valued the primordial pursuits of curry-eating and racism above all else, Kane found an odd form of teenage rebellion in the collecting of long words on small white cards, and the inhalation of literary classics by the ream. A little unconventional for a North London lad? “Exactly, that's the point. That's totally the point. You get anyone who can be funny or smash up a bus stop but there was no one round my way who was doing what I was doing. No one was teaching themselves the meaning of the word impudent when they were 11 – there's an irony in there somewhere.”

But whilst some solace could be found in the annoyance a Penguin Classic on the coffee table would cause his Dad, Kane certainly doesn’t view his formative years as the genesis of his success: “I fucked up my whole education.  Outside my school, that way was for amphetamine," he gesticulates, "that way for cannabis and opposite for the rest. I was 12 years old with a crushing desire to be popular in a comprehensive full of scum bags and drug dealers. How do you think my education finished?"

Picking up his love of literature again at the age of 21, Kane went on to earn a 1st in English at university before finding his feet in comedy: “Between 11 and 21...it’s not like I got heavily into drugs. Nothing bad happened. It was just empty. An empty childhood I suppose. I wasn’t lonely, I wasn't sad. Just nothing. Boring. It was just me and my imagination and I suppose my Mum didn't really understand what I was like. I wasted 10 years. But I'm making up for it now.”

Russell Kane - Human Dressage Pleasance Courtyard 9-31 Aug (not 17), 9.20pm, £9.50 Russell Kane's Fakespeare - The Tradgikal Saveings of King Nigel 9-31 (not 17, 24), 2.10pm, £8.50