Top 35 Julian Barratt Quotes

In comedy terms, usually when the weather’s bad, it goes much better. When it’s sunny, people don’t come to see comedy gigs because they’re all really happy and don’t need cheering up.

I liked horror and comedy, basically, from a young age, but I just ended up getting into comedy because there was – I could do stand-up comedy, and that was my way into this business, and then there was no stand-up horror, and I didn’t know how to get into that world.

We should send a load of bad celebrities to colonise Mars. They would have to mate in space, and then their children would be sent back to Earth in 50 years’ time.

Writing can make you feel a bit psychotic. You create a world, and you’re sitting inside it all day long, talking to people who are not really there.

With the ‘Boosh,’ we were trying to do this strange, weird thing that had its own language and visual style, and it wasn’t really what the powers that be wanted.

My life is divided up into before I had kids and after.

I don’t have any friends with cool clothes.

I find the pressure to be funny when you’re being interviewed live – quite intense.

Most stand-up is incredibly boring. It’s time for people to do something else.

With something that’s not based just in comedy, you can be a bit weirder in a slightly realistic way.

I like the countryside. I like chopping wood. I’d like to be a carpenter.

I am a man who dreams of culture.

We used to have to convince people we were funny, and it didn’t always work.

I think with performing, initially I was terrified on stage, absolutely terrified. And I did it again and again and again, and I learned sort of how it works, and then I was able to do it.

My dad listened to a load of jazz – Mahavishnu, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock.

Not really a good idea to eat things fans have made because you don’t know what state of mind they were in when they made them.

I write tragedies and things when I’m alone. Chekhovian dramas.

Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.

I was in a band called Groove Solution. Because there was a groove crisis, and we solved it.

My dad wanted to be a musician, so when I started playing guitar, he was like, ‘Go for it.’ That is what I did for ages; I was in bands. And then I went to university and got into comedy somehow.

We’re so insecure, comedians. ‘Did you laugh? Do you think I was funny?’

I can’t do jokes. I’ve always come from left field and tried to subvert conventional comedy. I started as a rebellion against that – albeit a very soft and surreal rebellion. It’s escapist.

Me and Noel went to HBO once and pitched this really ludicrous idea about us driving around in a haunted car, and they just stared at us. Literally stared at us! It was awful. Luckily, we were together, so we could laugh about it, but if we were on our own, it would have been one of the worst moments ever.

I always dreamt of being in ‘Kerrang.’ That was my ambition. I read that religiously when I was into heavy metal. Then the jazz magazines took over.

‘Galaxy Quest’ is a fantastic film.

It’s strange, but something about lack of structure needs a structure itself. Otherwise, after a while, it’s like looking at a Rothko painting or a Peter Greenaway film. You think, ‘OK, I want to see something else now.’

I’ve got a lot of friends with whom I discuss jazz.

Sometimes it takes you two or three seconds to get your head round a joke and laugh at it. With a snot-bubble laugh, it comes instinctively – almost in spite of yourself. It’s caused by something silly – like when a little kid says something unexpectedly bizarre.

I have trouble keeping a lid on the self-hatred.

I ran off stage at my first gig. Halfway through it, I forgot my lines and didn’t know what to do, so I just ran out of the building down towards a lake. I was going to throw myself in, but the compere came out and said, ‘No, it’s going well, come back and finish the gig!’

I was going to be a jazz-fusion guitarist. I came to London at one point with my mate, and we were going to make it. We spent three days there and went back home to our mummies.

We just thought of ‘Boosh’ as an extension of our childhoods in a way, the stuff we had grown up on and loved: ‘Monty Python,’ The Goodies, Frank Zappa. It spoke to a certain type of person, and we just carried on doing it.

I’m not very funny at all in real life.

I don’t like talking about myself; I’m not good at analysing myself. I don’t want to analyse myself.

Comedians are not well people. Well people are not drawn to creating.