Interview: Jim Jefferies. comedian

Published on Saturday 18 July 2009 16:05

'HANG on a sec," warns Jim Jefferies down the line from his rented home in Malibu, California. "I'm just trying to find a flat surface to roll up on." Fittingly for a comic with a reputation for happily violating the boundaries of decency and taste, he chances upon an appropriately improper object for the task in hand: "It's an illustrated children's Bible," he snickers. "Now, where were we?"

Good question. We were trying to figure out how an Australian who trained as an opera singer became a UK circuit comic, ended up living in Los Angeles and is now in a position where he can return to the Edinburgh Festival just to do a five-night greatest hits show. The first bit is easy. Jefferies studied musical theatre and opera at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. "It's where Hugh Jackman went," he muses. "They list me on their brochures now as one of their kids that done well. I didn't even graduate."

Throat nodules put paid to Jefferies' chances of becoming the next Pavarotti so, like many a young antipodean has done, he took the well-travelled route to London, where he chanced his arm as a stand-up. It turned out he was a natural.

Over the past four Festivals, Jefferies has rapidly carved a name and cult fame for himself as a comic who gleefully stomps where angels fear to tread. Christian Voice has branded him "sick and repellent". Thanks to routines that mention rape and his distinctly non-PC views on the differences between "studs" and "sluts", he has been labelled a misogynist. Famously, he so incensed one member of his audience at the Comedy Store in Manchester that they felt moved to storm the stage and try to punch his lights out.

So far so Sadowitz, but Jefferies is an equal opportunist when it comes to his targets and he is regularly the butt of his own brutal humour. His abuse at the hands of a scout master, his penile cancer and even the suicide of a girlfriend have all been bleak and sometimes uncomfortable grist to his mill. Jefferies shrugs off criticism that his comedy can go too far by pointing to Lennon's idea that all art is pain trying to express itself. "All the really good comedy comes from the idea that when something bad happens you have to laugh."

A big Richard Pryor fan, Jefferies talks of the American comic's routine, detailing the time his wife threatened to leave him. Pryor's solution was to shoot up her getaway car in his driveway. "The way he tells it is hilarious, but for his kids, that must have been one of the most harrowing moments of their childhood," says Jefferies. "Mum is leaving; Dad has shot the car and the police have come to arrest him. That is bleak but you watch the show and think, 'Richard, you lucky bastard. That is comedy gold.'"

Jefferies' blithe talent for attracting controversy is an enviable skill for a comic keen to be noticed, but not the most obvious trait to endear him to the God-fearing American public. Many of the USA's citizens seem to spend a lot of time asking "What would Jesus do?" Whatever the answer may be, it's fair to assume that it would be the opposite of what Jim Jefferies would advise.

Despite this, the Americans have clutched a bemused Jefferies to their bosom. Well received sets at the Montreal Comedy Festival led to a storming appearance on American TV show Down And Dirty With Jim Norton. In turn, this led to him being given his own one-hour special on the influential HBO channel, an honour normally reserved for the likes of Robin Williams, Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard. Called I Swear To God, Jefferies hopes that he can parlay the HBO show into a Hollywood career.

"I've been doing two or three auditions a week," he says. "I haven't got anything but, allegedly, everyone thinks I am really good. That may be LA talk; if I was really so good why doesn't someone give me a movie? I've gotten call-backs, which means they like you."

On the day we speak, he has just auditioned for The Zookeeper, an Adam Sandler film which is due out next year. "I auditioned for the part of the zookeeper. They want me to be the guy in charge of the monkeys, which is ironic because I have an irrational fear of bananas. Still, if they can make Eddie Murphy look like an 80-year-old woman then surely they can make me a banana out of marzipan or something?"

Even if Jefferies doesn't become the next Ben Stiller, his stand-up career in the States is going great guns, and his boozy, blokish, onstage demeanour hides a steely, workman-like ambition. It's a far cry from his early years in the UK.

"A few years, I was living in Manchester with Steve Hughes and Jason John Whitehead," he recalls. "They were probably the happiest times of my life. We were sitting around getting stoned every day and doing three gigs a week."

These days, Jim Jefferies is a business with a bottom line and, in America, he has the agent, manager, accountant and lawyer to prove it. Most days, he wakes at six in the morning to contribute to four different radio shows. In preparation for his HBO special, he even stopped drinking beer and went to the gym for two hours a day. For a man who has cultivated an image as a slob, the thought of the tab-smoking, ale-loving, late-night Jefferies working on a Cali-style beach body is a disturbing one, but when it comes to his career he is nothing if not determined.

"That whole thing about looking ten pounds heavier on TV is true," he says ruefully. "The DVD of that special may be the best I ever make in terms of the quality and the money that has gone into it. I thought it would be a bit of a time capsule so I would like to try to look good for it. I lost the weight off the stomach but not my face. I learnt that the hard way. I could go to a concentration camp and walk out with a double chin." v

Jim Jefferies is at the Udderbelly as part of Edinburgh Fringe (0844 545 8252), 17-21 July, 8.35pm.underbelly.co.uk