Smart, baby-faced posh boy actor turned stand up comedian Finlay Christie and human train wreck purveyor of comedy as a dark, dark art, Bobby Mair did not seem to me like the ideal pairing. Hah! Was I ever wrong!
This, it transpires, is something of a love-in, as well as a creative powerhouse project. Pretty much the only non-adulatory comment in our entire conversation is Bobby’s observation that “Finlay eats disgustingly fast”. Mair is directing Christie’s Edinburgh show. And young Finlay is thrilled.
“I remember watching Bobby on Russell Howard’s Good News when I was a kid.” he says. Yes, that is how young he is. “I watched his set over and over. Now I have the pleasure of working with him, and he’s one of the loveliest, most emotionally intelligent people I’ve ever met. My parents would love him.”
Now, be honest, when did you ever think you would hear someone say that about Bobby Mair?
Parents’ favourite Bobby is equally impressed by Finlay. They met during lockdown at a Top Secret Comedy meet up.
“He was excited to talk to me!” says Mair “and I had been inside for a year and forgot what it felt like for anyone to be excited to talk to me so I was basking in the attention of a young man who listened when I spoke.”
“Inside”, in case you are alarmed, was lockdown, not prison.
At the time Christie was thinking of stopping the whole stand up thing and Bobby advised him to keep going.
That is the sort of thing, according to Bobby, that he does a lot. “My best and worst trait is that I give advice to people when they don’t ask for it”, he says.
“Next thing I knew Finlay was a viral sensation and had millions of views on these really funny sketches. On top of that, I saw his stand up and … he was so much better at comedy than anyone else his age”.
So when Finlay felt he was ‘missing’ something in how new show for this year, who ya gonna call?
“He is a comedy genius, and can pinpoint exactly why a bit works, or doesn’t. We have exactly the same shared vision of what comedy should be. Tight, punchline-heavy and making an important point.” That’ll be Bobby Mair.
So they talked.
“I’ve seen Finlay enough to know he’s a child prodigy who always kills very hard but he was telling me about his show and the hook or theme he was going with just didn’t grab me and I told him that. What he had was forty minutes of killer material and to anyone else would be a great show, but I felt like he had something else in him that wasn’t onstage yet.”
Bobby suggested he help out.
“We ended up doing a writing session together at a cafe near his house where I drank cokes while he typed constantly. This kid works so fucking hard. He writes and rewrites and writes and can do it for eight hours straight. I’ve never seen anyone be able to do that with stand up in twenty years.” Bobby, fairly immediately “overstepped the bounds on normal social interaction” and asked a load of seriously personal questions. “He surprised me by not telling me to fuck off”.
That was never in the boy’s mind.
“His voice is a lot darker than mine, so occasionally he’ll take the material to a darker place than I can pull off with my posh boy face, but it’s always hilarious.” To be fair, few people take comedy where Bobby Mair does.
“I think I am riskier than I look,” protests Finlay “But I look like the Milky Bar Kid. It’s not hard. I want to give my jokes some meaning, because otherwise what’s the point? I’ve got jokes about class hypocrisy, young people having victim complexes, white people who seek cultural validation i.e. me. Comedy is supposed to be subversive, that’s why it’s exciting.”
Finlay Christie: I Deserve This, 22:40 Monkey Barrel, July 29 – August 25
Read Victoria Nangle’s five star review of Finlay Christie’s show on Entertainment Now here:
