Darren Walsh. Fringe aficionado, winner of many a pun award and famous for his Jokes on the Street videos where strangers pick themes and Walsh works his pun magic. He’s back to pun-ch the streets of Edinburgh with his fast pace, witty quips and electric energy. We chatted to Walsh about his show Do You Like Puns which tours to Edinburgh’s The Stand on Saturday 9 May, his upcoming Fringe gigs, and his work as a comedian in this quickly evolving theatrical field.
Walsh never had an initial plan to become a standup comedian, mentioning how he “just started doing it and it was like an experiment […] it’s kind of like an accident, really.” His comedy influences were not from standup but from sitcoms such as Peep Show and Father Ted, well-loved by his Irish family. His journey into standup was an unpredictable one: “I’ve never had a five year plan or anything like that […] it’s like I’ve just rolled with it for the last ten years or so.” Walsh initially pursued a career in animation and motion graphics, a field which gave fame to another famous Darren Walsh. Audience members at his shows sometimes get mixed up between them: “everyone thinks I’m the Darren Walsh that did Angry Kid. They come to shows with DVDs asking me to sign them […] I get email messages all the time like, when’s Angry Kid coming back?”
Walsh follows quite an authentic, intriguing style to his comedy, drawing upon his fascination in tech and IT through multimedia elements. Often his shows involve fast-paced slide shows, which have fast-paced jokes running alongside them. As a self-proclaimed tech nerd, this is where Walsh found his groove in the comedy world. His touring show Do You Like Puns combines multimedia, stand-up and his pun-style comedy found in his Jokes on the street series on TikTok and Instagram, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of views. He discussed these videos as both a way of marketing and also a way of putting comedy on our screens. The process behind them is simple: he would “ask people if they liked puns, and if they said yes I’d ask them for a subject, and then I’d give them a joke. If they laughed at the joke I’d give them a flyer. That’s how I got people who liked my show […] I’d rather have 12 people who liked puns rather than 30 people who didn’t really like puns and just would rather shelter from the rain.” Do You Like Puns has built-in audience interaction, where audience members can submit any topic on their phones, for Walsh to come up with related puns on the spot.
Edinburgh is no alien place for Walsh, who highlighted how it is a tough atmosphere during the Fringe period but also how it is the “where you earn your stripes as a comedian.” Having performed at the Fringe over eight times, he is aware of the pressures financially but also in terms of the emotional toll: “Sometimes you perform to 120 people, and then the next day you’re performing to 12 — it’s a real emotional rollercoaster.” However, he also acknowledges how Fringe gives opportunities for comedians to broaden their audiences, as it’s the “only place where you can put a show on on a Monday night and people can come.”
In more recent Fringe experiences, Walsh has taken platforms other than the Royal Mile by storm, through many Jokes on the Street videos in Edinburgh. When we ask if he has any favourite Edinburgh Fringe related puns, he tells us “I went to the hairdressers in Edinburgh and they went, is the fringe too long? I said, yeah I’ve been here for 25 days.”
Darren Walsh: Do You Like Puns? Is playing at The Stand on the 9th May.
Image provided by Pomona PR.