Method in the madness

“I am a bit of a nerd actually,” says Alex Horne, seated in the midst of his favourite writing spot – Heston Services off the M4 (Eastbound). He looks around at a Costa, a Burger King, a WHSmith and five slot machines. "I like service stations. If you think about it, you get all forms of human life here.“ A man walks out of the toilets wearing sunglasses. It’s raining.

Horne is inspired by being among people. Seven Years In The Bathroom has him emulating the life of an average male, breaking down all significant everyday activities and fitting them into an hour, with one year of a life lasting 45 seconds. This takes shape mostly at the service station and in a selection of rubbish cafés.

"Crap ones are good because there's no internet and I don't get distracted, but I do go to Starbucks. You get coffee for a pound with a giftcard!” His method consists of internet research, calculators, recording himself during car journeys and drawing inspiration from listening in to snippets of conversation. Oh, and special offers in shops.

“I saw these ridiculous extendable torches with magnets for fishing your keys out from under the sofa. I bought three. I love things like that.” Though this won’t directly influence his material, such oddities put him in the right frame of mind. "When I’m thinking, I've got to be out and about. I can’t sit in a room or I’d go mental."

Dave Gorman does sit in a room but does not go mental. Meticulous, and with an almost mathematical approach, he only works at his dining room table and always uses the same equipment – one laptop bought for PowerPoint, and another for scouring the internet. "Working, for me, is running between two rooms with five dongles," he says, “or running up and down stairs getting screengrabs off my desktop.”

The slides are the focus of his show—the aptly named Dave Gorman’s PowerPoint Presentation—with acute attention paid to the art of gag placement. “Reactions depend on the ordering. I spend ages thinking ‘Ooh if I leave that slide ‘til later, this one becomes funnier’. Once I figure that out, the words come naturally.” It’s a bit like algebra, but with more embarrassment riding on getting it wrong.

“Dying onstage is fucking painful,” Gorman points out. “That’s why we all put so much effort in!” The quality of a set can be floored by just one slightly misplaced word: “We've all seen comics who storm it on Friday and die on Saturday. I find that fascinating. Taking jokes out of minutes 1, 2, 3, 4 makes stuff that was doing okay in 5, 6, 7, storm.” In this sense, if one was to seek his complete antithesis, they would be hard pressed to find a better match than Henry Paker.

“I just sort of talk and see what happens. I can’t sit down and have an idea,” says the public school-educated Cambridge graduate, somewhat woefully. “I get distracted. Can I have a bit of paper?”

Sitting in the Rooftop Café above the Lyric Theatre, Paker is comprised almost entirely of solidified whimsy. For him, ideas appear haphazardly. He draws a diagram, depicting them as flying shrimp and himself holding a fishing rod. I ask what he would use for ideas bait. He replies: “An emotion. Suspicion, perhaps. Or envy.”

Between writing for Mock The Week and 8 out of 10 Cats, Paker tricks himself into thinking he isn’t working. He borrows a pen. "I can’t write in the same place every day – the moment a place feels like work I have to leave.” Where does he plan to go next? "I'll perch on a bollard or something.”

He begins doodling pictures of arrows and faces, often ever so slightly skewed. Cabin Fever will work because of this ability to see sense in the nonsensical, mixed with a chaos reflected in his writing process – scrap paper, word documents and texts he sends himself. “If you take something rational and tweak it a little, it becomes mad and that’s a lot of fun. I don’t do structure. I probably should.” There is a pause. “Do you have any advice? I mean, for structuring myself better?”

Horne struggled with this concept of structure for Seven Years, and after much adlibbing finally hit on a simple A-Z format. “I like alphabetising things,” he pauses, “actually I never alphabetise anything. But I regret this. I would like to alphabetise more.” There are some letters he was, however, forced to omit. “I start with B because nobody does anything beginning with A. Apart from abseiling and, you know, auctions.”

Format is even simpler for Gorman, whose shows have often stemmed from real life occurrences that happened while working on other shows – which is just as well. "Reasons To Be Cheerful [his 1998 breakthrough Fringe show] was supposed to be 57 reasons I’d found in the Ian Dury track, but it turned out the lyrics were impossible to find.”

The sections where he explained his research in a pre-Google world got more laughs than the jokes. So he started taking the jokes out and replacing them with how he’d written them in the first place, learning to judge the audience reaction. Such cleverness trumps gags for gags’ sake. After years of practice, he’s learnt the most important part of Fringe prep is, of course, testing one's material. “I couldn’t turn up to do a ten-minute set with a massive projector so I started a night in Hoxton. Much easier. I think you’ve got to trust the laughs.”

This is something all three comics firmly agree on, as it really is the only barometer amid what is essentially, utter chaos. Gorman is quick to dispel any misconceptions of organisation: “It sounds like I’m ordered but I’m not. In the morning I’ll sometimes have nothing, but then adrenaline kicks in and I’ve done it, which is both incredibly stressful… and brilliant when it comes together.”

The routine only serves to focus such a sporadic and unpredictable process, whether it involves crap cafés or multitudinous laptops. Before we leave, Horne stops to look at the special offers in WHSmiths: “A woman said the other day she’d filled her car with diesel. I like the idea of her having filled the inside. All over the seats. Things like that can spark something, even if I don’t use it. Which I probably won’t.”

Gorman shows me a picture of an amusing poster he took the previous day on his phone. “It doesn’t really read, but I take pictures and screengrabs of everything just in case.” Snippets of overheard conversation, fleeting thoughts and casual doodles can spark an entire show.

After he returns my pen I look at Paker’s paper and notice words between the arrows and faces. Lozenge. Halloumi. The word "Goggle" transformed into a small man wearing scuba diving equipment. "Pistachio". "Macadamia". “Maybe I’ll incorporate something about nuts into my show,” he muses.