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.
— Julian Barratt
It's not immediately categorisable. I don't know what to say when anyone asks what the 'Boosh' is.
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'm always trying to do anything between comedy and horror.
It's good to give people a jolt. If they're expecting one thing, it's important to give them something else. If you do something startling, audiences might at first freak out, but then they start to think, 'This is not going to be conventional. I'm going to enjoy this.'
I am a man who dreams of culture.
The secret of comedy is don't grow up. That's why some comedians are a nightmare, because they never grow up.
I miss quite major cultural signposts quite often.
The profession is rife with fear about your age, about your validly, longevity, appearance. It's vanity, and it's hard to sort of avoid all those things; they come at you as an actor.
Adapting a book doesn't mean the book stops just because you've made a film out of it.
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.
I want to create a world where all the rules are different. It should be magical to enter.
Most stand-up is incredibly boring. It's time for people to do something else.
People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.
Sport doesn't do anything for me. And I don't do anything for it.
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!'
We're so insecure, comedians. 'Did you laugh? Do you think I was funny?'
'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 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.
This business is ephemeral, and you have to maintain a healthy cynicism about it. There's a 'flavour of the month' aspect to it, so you have to keep moving on and mutating.
We have a need to make people laugh at things they'd never thought about, make them laugh at things that aren't logical.
We used to have to convince people we were funny, and it didn't always work.
When you're really laughing, you feel like a little kid, and nothing matters.
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.
