Interview: Ross Craig, Comedian

Published on Saturday 6 March 2010 19:20

WHEN Dunfermline-born comic Ross Craig – aka Teddy – was first attempting to get a toe in the stand-up door, he attended a comedy workshop co-run by Johnny Vegas.

Although the hefty Merseysider was not quite as famous as he would soon become thanks to a digital-TV-promoting woollen monkey, Teddy still felt overawed.

"I was very self-conscious and had my arm wrapped round me while performing," he recalls. "Johnny said, 'That stance you've got is great, it makes you look different from everyone else, you should definitely keep that. And if this is the first time you've ever done anything, you've got potential.' So, he's a nice man but a poor judge."

Some 12 years later, Teddy has crafted his own technique and is as suited to being on stage as any of his peers. That said, he describes himself as having "found a talent for not winning competitions on a regular basis". He was runner-up in the last two Scottish Comedian of the Year tournaments, and thinks he's unlikely to be striding on to the winner's podium at the Scottish Variety Awards at the end of March – in which he's been nominated in the Best Up and Coming Scottish Comedian category alongside SECC-playing act Kevin Bridges, TV star Limmy and fellow circuit comic Elaine Malcolmson.

Despite his humble viewpoint, there are few of his Scottish-based contemporaries that can spin the same high standard of punchlines that Teddy has been consistently delivering. He's even been able to prove his writerly mettle with work for the Comedy Unit, his own blog and columns on the STV website.

Being a modern comic, Teddy has been given the platform to rattle the nation's moral compass with some taste-testing material about modern terrorism, ex-girlfriends and fatal diseases, which has very nearly led him to coining his own catchphrase. In the face of audience revulsion, he has implored his crowds to "toughen up". "There's no coherence to what an audience will laugh at or be offended by because it's an emotive thing, it's whatever touches them," he says. Teddy experienced this reaction first-hand a few years back after a Sunday night gig at The Stand when a couple complained to the compere about his "cancer bit".

"There had been a news story about Scotland no longer having Europe's highest cancer death rate by 2020 and I said something like 'There's not many things that we're the best in Europe at, let's not lose this one. Get some fags and booze into you'. These people had been to two funerals that week so one of them said, 'We liked everything else you did, but you can't say that', meaning they liked all the jokes about Aids and the homeless. People always seem to think that to protest, they have to heckle or have a go at you later. Well, no, the perfect protest right there is to not laugh."

For Teddy's upcoming Glasgow Comedy Festival gig – where you will be free to laugh or not – he is still tinkering with the show's format. "I had these grand notions that because I've written hundreds of one-liner jokes I'd get them down to 100 for the show. But then I thought 'That's not enough to fill an hour, plus I don't understand how anyone could remember even 100 jokes'. I don't know how much fish oil Jimmy Carr takes." v

Teddy: I've Got More Jokes Than You is at Brel, Sunday, 21 March. The Scottish Variety Awards are announced on Friday, 26 March

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, March 7, 2010