Meet the One-Liner Storytellers

One-liner comics tend to be outsiders, a breed apart. Clinically sniping from the darkness like Jimmy Carr or Gary Delaney; detachedly hiding emotion behind Steven Wright's monotone or Mitch Hedberg's sunglasses. Or forging their own eccentric worlds like Milton Jones, Tim Vine and Emo Philips. Behind the deadpan delivery or Hawaiian shirts, they share little of themselves. Unless Jones genuinely does have countless grandfathers.

But some younger joke merchants are challenging this standoffishness. Admittedly, Adele Cliff is her high-achieving, scientifically academic family's designated black sheep. And Glenn Moore tried fleeing to Mars when his relationship ended. But their social awkwardness only inhibits them so much, as they combine a rat-a-tat onslaught of gags with revealing, personal anecdotes, even sustaining a through line from joke to joke.

After trying sketch and being one half of double act Biscuit and Brawn with Kate Cherrell, Cliff actually first approached standup as a storyteller, before realising “that the best bits of my sets were the one-liners. I then tried doing a list of jokes in whatever order felt most logical.

“Yet I found that when I started to do jokes that linked together, telling people something about myself, it made the audiences I spoke to feel as if they got me a bit more. It seemed to get a slightly better reaction.”

Moreover, “there aren't many female one-liner comics who are also vegan,” she observes. “So when I write a joke that addresses that, it feels more personal. Like you couldn't tell it to your friend in the pub as well as I can on stage.”

For Sheep, her first full-length show, she's reflecting on individualism, conformity and the difficulties of fitting in. That's something Moore explored in his initial Fringe offerings too, eliciting laughs from his lonely adolescence and romantic angst growing up in an isolated village in West Sussex.

“Obviously,” he says of his latest hour, Glenn Glenn Glenn, How Do You Like It, How Do You Like It , “I deal with things in the way I normally deal with them on stage – in a really dumb, silly way”.

Nevertheless, his application to join the Mars One programme to colonise the red planet was real. “In the middle of a breakup,” he points out, “suggesting that on a sub-conscious level, I couldn't bear to even share the same atmosphere as this person. The show looks at why I applied five years ago, and if I was chosen now, would I still go?”

Like Cliff, he relishes the challenge of choosing a central narrative, then writing as many gags as possible to fit. “The thing I like most is looking at a joke I've written and thinking: 'how can I top it? How can I combine it with another joke and turn it into a bigger thing?'" he says. “Combining two jokes on one topic allows it to veer off in a surreal direction, allowing me to be distinctive.

“I also like how jokes return. I love callbacks, especially increasingly obscure ones where they pop up in a situation that has nothing to do with the original context, uses none of the words in the original setup or punchline, but is clearly referencing what the audience heard earlier.”

Influenced by the cutaway and callback storylines of US comedies like 30 Rock and Review with Andy Daly, he's “obsessed with structure”, recounting his prospective space mission from “a variety of different angles: what the application process was; why I had to go; what I'd miss.

“I love jokes more than anything else. But a story can be so rewarding. Even if the style isn't for some people, or the jokes, it's not disconnected. At least there's coherent shape.”

With the best jokes tending to rely on novelty and surprise, coherence and consistency might seem anathema to the one-liner comic. Yet one of Cliff's “pet peeves" is when the logic of a comedian's set doesn't hold together.

“At one point they've got a wife, then they've got an ex-wife, then a girlfriend they haven't mentioned before. Their kid was seven, now they're 15. Obviously all comics distort the truth. But I want a persona to be fully rounded."

She continues: “Giving away a little is nice because when I talk about one of my sisters again in passing, it doesn't feel like someone I've introduced for the joke's convenience. Although I do love Milton having all those grandads...”

Hoping audiences “take away plenty of jokes but also an opinion of me as a person”, she appreciates that it's hard for her to be as forthright as a tubthumping political act. She's cut lines about the age of baby animals when they're slaughtered. “I was basically calling the audience monsters,” she reflects. “I don't try to push it too much. I just keep it as a point of reference so people know where I'm coming from.”

Similarly, as Moore has found, the tonal shift between a light-hearted quip and lamenting lost love can disorientate. And “a couple of my favourite jokes I've never performed because they're too dark. Audiences think the tamest swearword from me doesn't sit well with my polite persona,” he explains.

Indeed, Moore has only recently begun acknowledging his other job as a radio newsreader on stage – a sometimes strange combination, with the potential to perhaps present the News at Ten from the scene of a terrorist atrocity, before being seen cracking wise on Live at the Apollo straight after. As he puts it, he's like “a significantly less successful Clark Kent".

“What I've actively embraced this year is setting up the idea that most people don't believe what I say anyway,” he admits of his comedy, if not his journalism. “There's a lot of stuff in this show that's completely true and a lot that completely bends reality. Almost as if it's in a parallel universe.

“It toys with what the audience can possibly believe. The most unbelievable thing is that I applied to go to Mars. And yet that's absolutely true.”