Tasty Cook

GEORDIE comic Jason Cook is obsessed with the truth to the point of basing most of his popular act on some of the zanier practical jokes he tries out on long-suffering wife Clare... like pretending to be an intruder climbing into bed with her.

“It’s really funny at the time, but you don’t get any sex for a long time afterwards, but that’s not the worst thing I’ve done,” he admits about his marriage of 18 months.

Now based in Manchester, Cook has a regular spot, called the Asylum, at the city’s Frog and Bucket comedy club and has just returned from a record-breaking 50 shows in 25 days in New Zealand.

On Saturday, he’s returning to one of his favourite venues, Stockton’s Arc, with his hit show, called Joy, which also went down well in Edinburgh.

“It’s been my favourite gig in the world because when Peter Vincent took over the bookings I was put in as the resident compere and we started with 150 people and it’s an unparalleled gig when it’s flying,” Cook says.

He started out with a Tyneside sketch troupe known as Soup 2 “the name came from the show being a mixture of different ingredients” – before cutting his teeth as a stand-up at Newcastle’s Hyena Club.

“I was basically working there at weekends doing the sound and if there was a cancellation they’d put me on which is the hardest way to learn. Usually you start off by doing gigs for about 40 or 50 Geordies in a pub and learn quickly.

“Watching three shows a week you discover what not to do and how the room and the audience works, but my first few appearances were awful. My funniest and worst review ever was about the third time I’d ever done a show and I had an awful gig and a woman came up and shook the other two comics hands and looked at me and said through pained teeth ‘eeh son! That was ***** wasn’t it’ and there was nothing I could say to her.

That’s my best and worst Geordie review,” Cook says.

Having come a long way since then, Cook still feels he’s learning and feels that it will always be the same however big he gets. And with plans for a BBC radio show moving forward, that might not be long.

“Two weeks ago in New Zealand I was talking about the first time you say you love someone and I was finding couples out at different stages of relationships. There was a couple who had been together for a while and another for three months. I said to them ‘you’ve obviously said I love you’ and they just looked at each other and I said ‘No?’ and it suddenly got really tense. So I learned from that to leave some subjects alone because it can run away with you,” he explains.

Cook reckons he’s been lucky to fall into a job where that “inner voice of mischief, which seems to be stronger in me than most people” is a benefit rather than a curse. “Every comic has overstepped the line in their career but, usually, there’s not a newspaper there to report it.

Some comics talk about race, personally I don’t, and if it’s being funny at the expense of a racial minority then there’s no place for it,” he says.

“You can do Geordie jokes and some people will say ‘you’re going too far’ and I think some people do like to be offended and genuinely annoyed. There’s a friend of mine who made the front page of the Liverpool Echo with a joke and someone wrote in and said ‘I didn’t hear the joke but I’m deeply offended’. If you look at the psychology involved it’s those people being offensive to the people they purport to protect because they’re saying the others aren’t strong enough to voice an opinion,” Cook says.

HE got himself into trouble by once calling a heckler a spastic and found himself confronted by a wheelchair-using woman. “I only meant it in the schoolyard term, but this woman did the most powerful thing, she asked to shake my hand and then for ten minutes she didn’t let go and told me what I’d done to offend her,” he adds.

Favourite Geordie joke? “It comes from my late dad. He was talking about the credit crunch and said ‘how’s that going to affect us in the North... more nowt’,” says Cook, who finds that his North-East humour travels well to Manchester. “I moved over there because there are more gigs. When I left Newcastle the only big gig was the Hyena,” he adds.

Cook is back at Edinburgh this year with a show called Fear, which he’s based on the idea that fear stops people doing things and the comic talks about facing up to your fears. “It’s the biggest show I’ve ever done and I’m just in previews now. It’s pretty hard having two shows in your head,” he says.

He took his mum out with him to New Zealand and recalls: “She saw the show every night, which was weird. She was helping to sell my DVDs and I asked her how many she’d sold because the first show was packed. She replied ‘one... I got talking to a lovely woman’ and I realised that the rest of the audience had just filed out. So I incorporated that into the rest of the shows.”

■ Jason Cook with special guest The Boy With Tape On His Face from New Zealand, Stockton Arc, Saturday. Tickets: £10. Box Office: 01642-525199 arconline.co.uk