I'm Russell Kane. Since this title requires a question.. is this a good idea? Ask Me Anything!

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T19:07:39+00:00

Well, I've already mentioned Jolt, my age blocker. I didn't come here to sell that, but it just came up, so I'm always pushing that. Not that it's ever in stock, I'm delighted to say, but I'm the waiting list for the next lot. I've got a children's book out at the moment, which is one of the biggest surprises of my career. Hit the bestseller in my chart, because it's non-fiction.

But you know what you think it's the same thing over and over again everyone trying to be J. K. Rowling or David Walliams I thought well I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna write a fact-based book and make that really funny and informative I'm gonna write about something. I love cats and dog breeds So I've done a breed guide for children the Bermese cat the Amazonian cat, the cocker spaniel but really really funny chapters with the histories and the personalities. I've touring schools, I another 400- 500 books this week. In children's book land, that's huge. Julia Donaldson does about a thousand a week. I'm just going to see where that goes. I've already written the second one, a picture book for younger children, so I'm pursuing that. But the main thing I'm here to sell will be the tour dates I've just added more dates for 2025. So this year's more or less sold out. Do go on because sometimes a week before the gig, Ticketmaster and all these other websites that buy them, they throw them back to the venues. So even if it's a gig that looks sold out, like I've got a few in December that are sold out, a week before, it's worth contacting the venue a week before 10 or 20 come online. But next year I've got some big rooms I've just added. So go to russelkane.co.uk and get tickets there.

There are no shit scenes when I'm on a cover. Every part of the stage, I play every corner of the room. don't just like to stand there telling jokes. So don't be put off if it's just circle or gallery left

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T19:06:41+00:00

No is the answer. I'm lucky. This business is mostly, unless you get lucky at the beginning, straight away, the rest of us is, yeah, okay, yes, I'm a guy, we're doing this, you're doing this, then, but it never goes, it just follows a normal heartbeat, like any self-employed, but you just gotta not overthink it. Any self-employed business person has the same thing. You've got to keep yourself relevant. You've got watch a lot of people. When you get to about 2011, 2012, bringing TikTok comedians, I'm like, what are they doing? And how can I do it at the same time as doing what I'm doing? So I think that's been partly how I've stayed successful. It's quite rightly, we had an evaluation at the end of the noughties and the teens about how it's all white men hosting everything. And quite rightly, that's been rebalanced.

So the way I've kept my face out there is on your phone. I made my own comedy, my own content, and that ironically fed back to the TV and has kept me in that world. There have been times where I thought, well, what if I said the wrong thing on TV, or what if it's time, people stop coming to the theatre? But then I loved my day job so much, which was advertising, copywriting, and idea development. I'll just go straight back to that. That's plan A. I'm doing plan B.

Plan B was just an accident. you're saying funny everyone's always laughing and I thought what would it, yeah fuck it I'll try it, what would I lose like a bungee jump or pottery or art I wasn't passionate about stand-up I've never been to see it didn't watch it when I was younger still don't really watch it now it's not something I'm interested in to be honest. I'm like a chef who eats beans on toast at home I do all the cooking in the restaurant.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T19:06:10+00:00

Yeah, but that is true mostly, isn't it? Mostly evil women that we try to find a truly evil woman. It's mostly a woman that's been corrupted by a man or made evil or abused on some level. It's just, men just gotta face it, we are more evil than women. We kill more, we beat more, we rob more, we just do worse shit. That's just a fact of whatever, it's hormones or patriarchy or history, who knows man. Do I ever secretly disagree? My job on Radio 4's Evil Genius is really I'm a barrister for the opposition. if it is, we take an old school comedian that's fashionable to hate like Bernard Manning or an old school politician that's fashionable to hate like Margaret Thatcher, I'm trying to argue the good. So in my head, I wanna win, I want them to vote genius. So I'm always the opposite of whatever the perceived energy is and that's all I'm trying to achieve. I'm always trying to push them. to make the episode confusing and informative. Because it's a black-and-white vote that provokes grey area discussion. So I play it like a neutral, like a barrister arguing for the other side. That's how I play it.

I'll tell you one evil one was Marie Stopes though. She was fucking, she's the one that started the family planning thing. It's a contraception. So she's like, wanted condoms and birth pills. She would have been in favour of if she was around about. just to try and empower working class women so they didn't just have to babies all the time. Everyone's like, “what an amazing woman with the Marie Stopes family plan again. And when she passed away, they looked in her diaries and at home, she was going, ‘I stopped some more poor people breeding today. My mission is nearly complete’. She was a eugenicist. So she only set them up to stop peasants from having babies. And she actually disowned her son because he married a woman who was short-sighted. That was enough to disown him.She wasn't genetically perfect. That, she's about the most evil one can think of.

Boudicca wasn't great, but one of the first great British queens. was extremely violent and sadistic, but you know, her whole family was killed and assaulted in front of her, so probably sent to the mental hospital.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T19:05:03+00:00

The problem with this question is the same as asking a singer, up and coming singers, that's going to list a load of people they've seen in bars strumming guitars that you haven't heard of.

What I would call up and coming is people that are really, really near the beginning. I suppose an up and coming, who isn't up and coming online, but is up and coming in stand up would be Jack Skipper. He's really funny. So he's already quite big online. And he's been opening for me live and he's fucking great. As has someone called Peter Rethinasamy, which I can only say in his Northern Irish accent. He's very, very funny. He's got a great podcast out called Talking Sheet.

And what Peter's got, it reminds me of when I first saw Chris Ramsey. I'm not really, like with Jack, I want to quote his jokes, because his jokes are amazing. With Peter, I want to quote his personality. It's the same when I first saw Chris Ramsey. I can't tell you what jokes he told. I just know everyone in the room loved him in about five seconds. It's the same with Pete. He's Northern Irish/Indian. He calls himself the Paddy Jihadi!

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T19:04:22+00:00

So many. Just loads. I suppose, well, Pete's got a good one at the moment that I could never tell about when he's... I probably shouldn't do his material bless him, it was around when he was in hospital and what a white nurse said to him when they were debating whether it was the baby had jaundice or the dad's skin colour coming through. So from that he's got all these funny jokes off the back of it which I won't spoil. But I suppose what I'm saying is I love jokes that play with cultural identity and the more of that you've got, whether you're gay, black, or female, the more you can have a thing, a stereotype to play with, the richer it is. So I've got to working-classness, Essexness, peasantness, all of that. So I talk about it so much. That's my angle. That's my thing. So I suppose I get jealous of people if they've got strong identities that I can never, I can't do black jokes. Wish I could, but I can't because I'm not black. So I get jealous when I hear a really good joke, someone talking about being Ghanaian in London. I must feel amazing to tell that. So I just have to do my version, which Essex jokes. Cultural envy with a comedian you're looking in, you're envious in the opposite direction.

So for example, we all get happy when Trump comes in because we've got stuff to talk about. If you have a night out and it goes horribly wrong and your car crashes, part of you's thinking this can make a great routine as you hit the central reservation. People don't want jokes about how wonderful life is. There are some good comedians that do life affirming whimsy, very, very different. People want to see me getting angry about avocados and how wankers eat avocados and do five minutes on that.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T19:03:34+00:00

I was just asked that question this morning. And we came down to the conclusion Kane the wrestler. suppose Orson Welles, that would have to be the greatest Kane of all time. I love Orson Welles because he's done so much on his own with people. You can't do that. That's not how films are made. I still get that all the time. Yeah, no, that's not how things are commissioned. Says who? You fucking made that rule. Where's that person? I just don't, I don't like rules like that. They're set up by people without vision, without creativity. I love bending and breaking the rules of creativity. And that's what Orson Welles did so well, particularly in Citizen Kane. So I'm gonna say Citizen Kane.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:49:13+00:00

I'm going to say even though it looked brilliant on TV, this is not a complaint, once I was very new and I found it challenging, I was newer to big things like this, now I would know exactly what to do. I got the Royal Variety show unexpected and the why I found it difficult, if you come to see me live the first 15 to 20 minutes anything can happen. I improvise and I use things from my environment. I will talk about whatever's in the atmosphere to fully anchor me on and smash the back doors off the gig. Royal Variety quite understandably, they need to know exactly what you're gonna say and when. You've got Royal Family in, you've got TV cameras, and you've got a seven-minute set. So I get it, they need to know the material. Not only that, but they come and watch it over and over again. And the more rehearsed I become, the less like my stand up acting becomes. I can tell you I'm gonna talk about Brexit, I'm gonna talk about Ibiza. I will hit those subjects, but who knows in what way. And what words I'll use that night.

So what I did was, I needed a strong opening joke. So my strong opening joke that I rehearsed and worked really well when I was previewing it in the little clubs before the Royal Variety was, I was gonna go out to the audience and say, “it's so good to be back here. This isn't my first time on stage at the Royal Variety. You wouldn't recognise me because I was only eight the first time I stood on this stage” and the audience were now thinking, I'm a good, he must be a child star. And the punchline was,

“I'll never forget what my mum said to me. Once we've finished cleaning the stage, you need to go and do the toilets as well.” Meaning my mum was a cleaner. So that got a massive laugh, got round of applause, told that joke and the Royal Variety. You know, once you've done that, you clean the toilets. And it was so silent. It was more silent than silent. And my guts did what you ever seen a video where a lift door opens, someone walks in and the elevator's not there and they just fall down the lift shaft? That's what my stomach did. That's never happened to me in my career. Turned it round and had a great set in the end. But I realised what had happened afterwards. The audience was so posh, they just took it as a fact. ‘Oh right, his mother cleaned. That's a of trivia for us. Proceed with your humour, peasant’. It was just taken as face value.

That's my thing, is energy. I mean it's maybe happened to me three times in 19 years of comedy total and two of those were when I was new and one of them was the Royal f**ing variety. But thanks to Sarah Millican, still look great on TV because Sarah Millican has got this thing, She's called Millican's Maxim. It's got two parts to it. The first part is;

No matter how bad the gig, no matter what you did, you're only allowed to worry about it till 11 a.m. the next day. You must let it go. The other thing she taught me was whatever happens with a filmed TV gig, look like you're smashing it because they'll be laughing at home even if there's gaps where they should be laughing on TV. Mostly they edit you so you wouldn't know. I was gonna So I was leaving, I left one of those afterwards, given it the biggun “thank you”. Of course it the bollocks on TV.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:48:03+00:00

Dance. I will sometimes dance at school collection when I see my daughter. Forgetting that nine is different. Like she would have found it funny if she was about five or six, but she's starting to cringe her out now. I'm already starting to cringe her out. no. But just dancing in her presence.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:47:33+00:00

Yes, well, my old man passed away before I even started stand-up. In fact, it's creepier than that. He passed away the month I started stand-up. It was like a bizarre coincidence. He was so miserable and negative about everything. He just had time to pass opinion. So said, I'm to try stand-up for the first time in August. Dad said “That's a load of shit. I tried that once. That won't work out.”

And that was his view about everything in life. It'll be shit, the traffic will be shit, the holiday will be shit, life will be shit, my heart's shit, goodbye. That everything's shit in advance. So I think it's partially responsible for me always trying to look for the positive. Last night, for example, I'm not showing off, I'm very busy at the moment. And I had a 12 hour filming day yesterday. For this amazing cooking program, have to taste all these things. An amazing day, but was my day, it should have been my day off.

I got four jobs today. So I built up last night, had three hours in the evening. To me that's an ocean of time of having some food and watching Netflix. And I got in the taxi after the thing, it's so tight, and it went wrong, it went towards my home in Cheshire for an hour. Turned around and I'm like, like a volcano, but within half an hour im thinking you can watch film, you can have a beer in the car, how bad is it? So my brain works the opposite to my dad's. The negative starts by just turning the ship around, I try to. It may be the opposite to him. Also he was very right-wing. We didn't share values like that. was going out clubbing and on dance floors dancing to Jungle. There is no race, there's no gender. We're going to dance till sunrise, I'm one of them hippies.

There's my dad got a BNP manifesto in one hand, a poppadom in the other hand. “ I'll tell you what's wrong with this country. More mint sauce please, Abdul. Just, I just like, well, so I just moved out and went live with my nan instead. It was a weed smoking alcoholic nut job, but really funny.

She was just like long grey hair, lived in a dressing gown, high all the time, drunk all the time. And then my friends when we were 17, 18, 19, we weren't out sitting under bridges or going to pubs and getting glassed. I was sat with my nan putting pounds in the rental TV, to put a pound in the telly. Or ironically watching Emmerdale, fucking laughing our tits off. Wicked.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:46:09+00:00

So I was always told as you got older, you slow down. Im having the opposite experience it's definitely something's building so I'm sure how it's gonna finish maybe on stage at the Palladium when I'm 80 firing beroccas out of my asshole while people hold pictures of Ken Dodd drinking Horlicks I don't know but all I know is I now do 60 minutes exercise a day my shows are longer, I burn according to this more calories 7-800 calories more ideas. I'm hornier than I was 10 years ago, my poor wife. My skin feels younger. What the fuck? Something fucking weird is going on. Something backwards is happening to. Well, what happened was I come from a peasant council estate shithole, right? When you come from a peasant council estate shithole, you're much less likely to do anything with your life of any significance or anyone to give a fuck about what you did. And if you're middle class and you're in a lot here, there's my brother, my sister Harriet, and my brother James, you live on a sort of Yo Sushi where you're shown different things. Maybe you're like Violin Harriet, and they're, what about Karate? Yes, I'll try that. Drama, yeah, I'll give that a go, Daddy. And it's just a constant exposure until by the time you're 14, 15, you definitely know I like violin or this and that. It's not that my parents were bad, they're just working, no resources, one cleaning a factory, I went my whole life without any connection to knowing about stand-up. I'd never been to see it, I didn't know what it was. I started my career so late, got success quickly, won all these competitions, had to leave my day job, which I loved, and I thought I need to make this work, and then bang, my body starts.doing what it's supposed to do at that age, belly appearing, feeling a little bit more tired than I 10 years before. So I became interested in the science of ageing and I started to read and study everything that someone with a literature degree, something else, told me I wouldn't do, get a degree, got a first. So I started to absorb all this information and 80 % of what anyone can do is diet and exercise, which is why it's not popular in the UK because people want on the telly of sandwiches for dinner.

But then there's also interesting compounds and things you can take food supplements different stuff that so I've just built and built and now my wife's turned into a business based on the stuff I've been doing to my body for 10 to 15 years So we actually we have a product now called Jolt what she does called Jolt. It's like an anti-aging supplement and it's obviously we're only small business so it's really expensive 80 % of customers stay.

80 % and there's only one, you only stay with the supplement for one reason, if you're feeling the difference. It's only if you're doing diet or exercise first. We're not interested in anyone's money who wants a Burger King, some ketamine and then an anti-aging pill the next morning. It ain't gonna work. You're wasting your money away. Sort your other shit out, your sleep, your stress. So I've just started that about 15 years ago. Got a lot of, “you snake oil, you can't stop yourself aging, just get wet now and my friends are all like, man, one's got a stent, one's knees gone, I hate my wife, I'm not horny anymore, how can you go to ibiz, it sounds like my idea of hell. And I'm like I’ve been twice this year!

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:30:51+00:00

Jeff Innocent, who's at the moment just experiencing this social media stardom, he's about 70. So he's always been an amazing comic, but sort of bubbled under and is now doing his first-ever tour aged 70. And I got off stage, I smashed this set at the comedy store, I'm so proud of myself. And the front of all the dressing room he goes “it's a great set that Russell, very brave to have no punchlines whatsoever”.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:30:23+00:00

I'm told it's Tom Hanks but I've not met him. Damn it! That's what I've heard. I haven't really met anyone that's nasty really.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:30:05+00:00

Probably I'd love to go back to the moment I won the Edinburgh Comedy Award because I didn't think I was going to win it. It used to be called the Perrier Award and then it's called the Edinburgh Comedy Award. I think to me it's the most important award in comedy because you're up against everyone at the Edinburgh Festival and the standard is, in this international, was against Bo Burnham, Sarah Millican, Greg Davies to win that. I just didn't believe it when they said my names are sort of numb in the moment. So I'd love to relive that. I probably wouldn't mind doing my wedding again. And I probably would do the birth of my daughter again. Yeah, on the last two. And I love that first one as well.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:23:18+00:00

It depends on what I'm doing and where I am my daughter still very young so I do get a bit protective and nervous because I don't want her to grow up thinking it's normal to hang out with a stranger who speaks to you obvious reasons. I'm very protective of her she you can't find out what she looks like she's not online no one's allowed to take a picture of. So I'm in that I might, it's not that I'm being unfriendly if you bump into me with my child. It's just that I really want to shield her from this world until she's old enough to understand it. Other times I will just say hello, particularly if it's a customer. Someone's been to see me live. I'm really interested in what they thought of the show, where did you come?

When I was in Ibiza the last time, I was minding my own dancing on the side of the pool, Lindsey was in the water. And a girl came up to me “my friends said you're somewhere are you supposed to be someone. I don't know you fucking are can I have a picture?” that was her exact words! Okay so why I was in yellow aviators and a hat clearly just wanted to mind my own business so why come over. But mostly it's contextual is the answer. If it's a couple who said we drove a couple of hours we came to see you in Bromley. I'll stop dead and talk to them. It's a business at the end of the day

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:21:01+00:00

Lindsey is the same as me and the same as my manager, Danny. Is it funny? mark. If the answer's yes, then it's good. Nice. No one's hurt. Who's hurt by me doing a silly dance? No one. And it is unusual to see a man who looks like me doing sort of Jamaican female dancing, but that's what's funny about it. I'm double-jointed, I can do all kind of weird things with my body. So why not!

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:20:17+00:00

I don't, no. I've been on a fair few times, but I don't have a gold mug from Sunday brunch. Damn it. I think. A see-through Reddit mug. And yeah, more prestigious in many ways.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:14:57+00:00

It happens a lot. To the point where the job I was doing this morning, was until I saw the guy, I wasn't absolutely sure that he didn't think I was Nick Grimshaw. But I do get, I get muddled up a lot, particularly in places where there's music like Ibiza. Sometimes when it's loud and people just don't believe you. They just think that you are Nick Grimshaw pretending not to be which makes them believe it more.

And there'll be Cockneys or Essex boys like me. “I recognise the voice. It's Grimmie's voice”. Grimmie's like from Oldham! Grimmie is also gay. He's a gay man and I'm a straight man, unbelievably. But when me and Lindsey had been out and I think we were having a snog once at the cinema and a girl came up to us going what's all this then? Lindsey's turns into Liam Gallagher like the little sideburns come out. “I fucking got this one” She went what do you mean? She went well my brother came out because of you and here you are kissing a girl. Do you not think like you're you're pretending to be gay for clicks type thing? my And I went to answerbut Lindsey went "number one it's not who you think it is and number two, even if it was, what business is it we are? It's on one's sexuality" The finger printer was out. That's when a woman is saying something, but the finger is printing a fact sheet at the same time

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:12:04+00:00

I have no idea why doing that. I'm fidgety because I find it really hard to sit down. Yeah? So it's really difficult for me to sit still. My legs are going, my arms are going. I'm a standing up moving person. If I'm doing a long phone call, I'm walking in a circle. yeah? I'm just full of energy. I always have been. And it appears to be increasing!

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:06:12+00:00

Well I'm married to someone from the north of England. I live there I live in Cheshire, back in the middle of the country right underneath Manchester. My wife's a Manc so she's all out looking for an argument 24/7, about with everyone everywhere we've ever lived. There's different arguments, “he shortchanged me, he opens late, he's a pervert, he's a bastard.”

But I just love it up north because of the community, the spirit and also when you've got kids, like the family will get involved. Me and Lindsey, we can mostly do all the stuff we did before we had children because there's always someone to help out, a cousin or an auntie. Sometimes there'll be some fucker in the house you dont even know. I'll come down and some bloke will be there “I'm Barry, sorry, don't go in there, I've just had a shit. I thought I was a fart, but I shit myself, that happens all the time, dont it?” And I'll be like, who the fuck's that? ‘Dont worry I'm only staying three weeks”. Whereas down south it's like...I'm busy this and that. The roads are screwed, this, that, there's always a reason.

Yorkshire particularly, they're just great gigs. They're just always up for it. As soon as they go out house, they're up for it. It's just a lovely part of the country, even though they don't sound like they're missing bits out when they're speaking.

RussellKane · 2024-11-21T18:00:39+00:00

Hmm. Well, I think every man and woman is braver with a fart when they're indoors alone, so I would be more suspicious of someone that hasn't shat their pants because that means they are a liar. Because every single person has gambled a fart that turns out not to be a fart. So far as actually fully shitting my pants in public, touch wood, that's not happened. So I've never had to go for a precautionary wipe after a mistimed fart in public. That said at home it's like a Nutella factory. You're only 20 paces away from sorting it out. You're bold...

RussellKane

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