Steve Wright meets shambolic stand-up Ed Aczel.

Ed Aczel’s one of the more unusual properties on the comedy circuit: a 42-year-old project manager for a business marketing company who took up comedy in his spare time after doing a beginners’ stand-up course. Aczel’s low-key, shambolic sets tend to feature him deconstructing his own performance with the help of graphs, PowerPoint presentations and the like, and floundering apologetically as he goes. It’s a deconstructed, warts-and-all style that most audiences seem to love ("turns unprofessionalism into an artform… scintillatingly shambolic," praised The Times), although there are a few detractors – one reviewer noted that the show seems to be “One joke: isn’t it funny how unprepared and unscripted I can be and get away with it?”

Ed brings his new show ‘Edward Aczel Doesn’t Exist’ to the Rondo Theatre this month, fresh from an Edinburgh Fringe run.

Well, Ed, tell us about the new show… It’s designed loosely on the idea of me trying to sell my services to the comedy industry. It’s a kind of selling show, where I encourage people to buy me as a product. Lots of comedians come up here to put themselves in the shop window – I just happen to be doing a show about putting myself in the shop window. Ultimately, it’s me doing what I do best, which is… messing around.

Your shows have a shambolic, on-the-hoof quality. Is that a comic contrivance, or is that truly how you are? I’d like to tell you I wasn’t shambolic in real life, but in some ways I am – I think we all are ultimately. I’m good at naturally portraying a shambolic air, and I have developed that as my act. When you first start out in comedy, you look at other comics and realise that they are all portraying themselves in one form or another. I looked at a lot of the very slick comics – Russell Kane, Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr, and I thought, “I could never attempt to do that”. So I’ve gone down the route of it being a shambles, because that’s something I can do.

Does that mean your sets take less preparation than those well-crafted shows? Are you in fact winging it a lot of the time? I’m sad to say that the show is deceptively organised, in terms of the length of time it takes to write a show and of coming up with different ideas. Unlike other comics who come up with jokes or routines in the traditional sense, I tend to come up with sections and themes – a presentation section, a graph section, a true-or-false section – and then work the material into those sections.

Your shows are a kind of deconstruction – we get to see the workings of comedy... I like to give people the bare bones, and to see whether those bare bones work. I think that, if you see the inner workings, it’s easier to see the outer shell without some of the sheen and airbrushing that can go into comedy.

Audiences and reviewers have had some widely differing verdicts on you… I split rooms. There have always been a good chunk of people saying “I don’t get it”, and a greater number, thankfully, who love it. I think part of the charm is: here’s an individual standing on stage for an hour, and somehow he’s gotta get away with it. The humour largely comes from the idea that my back’s against the wall, but somehow I will come out fighting. Some people don’t see that – some just like the sheen, they don’t want to see how it’s all working. But I think a lot of people sympathise with the struggling, the underdog… there’s a sort of loser mentality in comedy which I tend to encourage.

How does this all work with the day job? Do you become a different person as you go from one to the other? Before I started comedy, I would do presentations and meetings where everyone would spend the entire time laughing. Which was great, but the difficulty there is that you don’t achieve anything. I’m doing a day job which is ultimately serious, and I’m doing the comedy for pleasure. One of the reasons I’ve kept the day job is that I don’t ever want the comedy to be dependent on money. When you start to get gigs at the bigger clubs like Jongleurs and Highlight, you have to change your act, do something you didn’t sign up for – you have to appeal to the masses, not take any risks. I don’t really want to answer to anyone in comedy, I want it to be pure art.

EDWARD ACZEL DOESN’T EXIST WAS AT THE RONDO THEATRE, BATH ON SAT 24 SEPT. FFI: WWW.RONDOTHEATRE.CO.UK

Copyright Steve Wright 2011