Interview: Joe Sutherland

This Easter Sunday, April 21, Bristol’s newest comedy club is putting on a special showcase, with headliner Joe Sutherland, Jen Collier and Joe Jacobs filling out the bill.

This will be the fifth instalment of The Cheese Comedy Club, located in the basement of The Crown Pub in St. Nick’s Market. “It’s kinda the perfect room for comedy,” says host Tony Chiotti, who books the space and hosts most nights there. “It’s subterranean, with low ceilings and it feels like a cave. It used to be a smuggler’s passage and trading vault. There’s a lot of history down there, but we like it because the laughter fills that space like nowhere else. You have to be in there to believe it.”

Over the past two years, Chiotti has built up a reputation with his weekly Thursday comedy night at The Lazy Dog Pub. He started The Cheese as a more central venue to hold slightly bigger shows, with names and bills that wouldn’t be feasible in a neighbourhood local (the club has already hosted big names, such as Jayde Adams, Laura Lexx and Sean McLoughlin, and that streak continues this time around). “Joe is someone I’ve wanted to have out since I got here, and I’m just happy this has all come together,” Chiotti said.

Joe Sutherland is on top of his game. His most recent show Toxic was ranked one of the Top Ten best reviewed shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. He is currently in the middle of a two-week run at London’s Soho Theatre.

We grabbed a quick chat with the effervescent Mr Sutherland.

So, Joe, we gather that The Spice Girls were your icons growing up. Tell us more.
No one has fanned as hard as I fanned over The Spice Girls. I had the dolls, I knew every lyric to every album track and b-side. I saw Geri’s last UK concert before she quit the band and, when she did, I cried for a week.
I’ve written about them in my last two shows and have decided that their reunion tour is the universe asking me to do it a third time. I’ll be in the front row soaking up every bit of that potential disaster.

I’ve read reviews describing you as aloof on stage, whereas in interviews you seem anything but. Is there a bit of a stage persona going on there?
They’re probably old reviews. When I started out doing stand-up I had a character who saw himself as better than everyone else in the room, untouchable. That was the only way I could get myself on stage, to become a fictional person who simply deserved to be there. If I’d tried to do it as myself then nerves would have just gotten in the way.

Joe Sutherland: “When I started out doing stand-up I had a character who saw himself as better than everyone else in the room, untouchable. That was the only way I could get myself on stage”

Tell us about your former lives as a model…
I’d rather tell you about my Saturday job in Greggs.

… and appearing in the film Pride.
The briefest ‘appearance’ in cinematic history! I was unemployed and occasionally working as an extra in the background of reality shows and sometimes films, including Pride. There was a scene where the main character was talking to some extras pretending to be journalists and they’re supposed to jostle to ask him the next question. None of the other extras were putting in any effort so I saw my moment to ACT my way into the front of the scene.
The main actor said his line ‘you there, the cute one..’ to no one in particular and I was like, ‘I’m having that’ and did the best little bit of reacting bashfully that you ever did see. It made the final edit and they cut out the actor who had actually been hired to give a line.

You grew up in a working-class Coventry family. Was that quite a hard setting in which to explore who you really were?
We were actually quite a middle-class family, certainly by Coventry’s standards. It was tough in secondary school but that’s just because kids can be awful, especially if teachers are too weak-willed to address homophobic bullying. Sorry this isn’t very funny, but neither was the bullying, LOL.

How are you liking your career in stand-up so far? What are its pluses and minuses? How far do you hope to take it?
I just want to be successful enough that I can unsubscribe from the Megabus newsletter. The travel is both the best and worst part of the job, depending on what form of transport you’re taking. A Megabus is not the worst, because it has free wifi, but it’s far from the best. The best is obviously hovercraft.

I just watched your actor showreel on YouTube. Your accents list is impressive and quite eclectic: Pakistani, Latvian, ‘Evil’Russian, ‘Evil’ Cornish. Tell us more…
This was a canny implementation of ‘irony’ and out of context it looks very bad. The actual list of accents on my CV is incredibly narrow. I used to think I was really good at accents but I did an acting job recently where the character was written as American. I did one reading and it was quickly decided that the character should actually be English.

Joe Sutherland headlines The Cheese Comedy Club, beneath The Crown Pub, BS1 1JH on Sunday, April 21. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.getawriggleon.com/o/bristol-the-cheese-comedy-club-21-april

Read more: Introducing… The Cheese Comedy Club