Comedian Patrick Spicer's brilliant sketches and side-splitting crowd work have helped him build a massive following. From sketches on the Bible and the unfair nickname that the Virgin Mary got, to an all too relatable piece on batch cooking (after all, we all love spending seven hours cooking in order to save 70 pence), Spicer is one of the UK’s most exciting comedians of the moment.
In the middle of his tour, Absolutely, following his sold out London show, Patrick popped down to The Lucky Saint pub in Marylebone to catch up with us in our favourite boozer corner, to spill the details on his meal deal of choice, the worst gig he’s ever had, and the best pub snacks.
Shortlist: Cheers!
Patrick Spicer: Cheers! Thanks for having me.
SL: So Patrick, you’re a funny guy! You’ve done a lot of different stand up gigs and tours so you must have had some pretty interesting audience interactions?
PS: Yeah, I clip up a lot of my audience interactions [to share online] and a lot of people think that my audiences are always really funny but I just choose the best parts to share. Not to bring down the curtain, but I film every interaction. It’s usually one in ten that are funny. I don’t post the ones where it’s just people talking about working in marketing…
I think my most memorable one, which I didn’t actually end up sharing, was a guy who confessed he’d stolen about £10,000 worth of Bitcoin from his girlfriend after I asked him, almost jokingly: “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” It wasn’t even really funny in the end because it just was so awful and serious that I couldn’t joke about it. And it was a bit brutal, the audience really turned on him.
SL: Does the audience ever turn on you?
PS: Normally, the audience can turn on you on a dime. Even if you’re crushing for 50 minutes it doesn't matter, if you lose them, you’ve really got to fight to get them back.
If you’re on a line-up show, if you’re not hosting, then you don’t have to warm the audience up - the later you’re on, the hotter the audience tends to be. Whereas if you’re doing a solo show if you don’t have an opener, that’s all on you. You have to tell them off if they're breaking the rules and keep the show in check.
SL: How do you break the rules in a comedy gig?
PS: Basically if they keep chatting through it or they’re just being a dick.
It’s a hard line because obviously I chat to the audience a lot in my shows. It's hard to have a long interaction with someone and then if I’m going into a joke you don't want to cut them off and be like “actually, your bit is over now, like you’re done”.
SL: Do you ever get heckled? Do you have any very memorable heckles?
PS: Heckling is actually super rare, I’d say. It’s usually one of the first questions people ask me about comedy - do you get badly heckled?
SL: Oops [*minus 10 points for lack of creative interviewing*]
PS: But it doesn't happen that often. I got one once in Newcastle, I was really new to the scene - the hardest part about comedy is starting out, you’re just not funny.
But at this gig, I was very new, I didn't really know what I was doing. And I think having a Southern accent - you know, London boy performing in a place like Newcastle Comedy Club - now I would lean into it and make a joke out of it, but back then, I was doing more of a character and the joke was he was kind of arrogant and confident. So you can imagine how that went down…
Anyway this guy at the back heckled me and just went “shut the f*ck up!” and I was so new and nervous I went “did you say shut the f*ck up?” and he went “yeah”, and I just went “oh, okay” and tried to carry on. Stone cold silence.
SL: Do you have a post gig ritual?
PS: Here’s the thing, I don’t drink anymore, so my old post-gig ritual, if it had gone badly I would get drunk and if it had gone well I’d get drunk. I either needed a treat or a reward.
Now I don’t have that - now I just get ice cream, but I also started doing that too much! You replace a vice with a vice, right? Now I do almost literally nothing. Now I’ll go home and have some cashews, maybe a banana…
SL: Shortlist, lifting the lid on the wild, wild world of stand up...
PS: It's really rock n' roll - look, sometimes I’ll even have a pistachio.
SL: Goddammit, you’re crazy!
PS: It’s nuts…
*long silence*
SL: That was a great pun, more of this on his tour guys
PS: Wasn’t even intentional, that’s how good I am.
*Both take a drink to avoid the awkwardness*
SL: Best sketch or best gig you’ve ever done?
PS: I don’t do sketches so much anymore. During lockdown, my girlfriend (who is also a comedian) and I did them more because we physically couldn’t go out and gig. Sketches are a lot more embarrassing when they don’t do well - you know, you have the green screen, the wigs, the whole thing and then you get four likes.
I would say my sketch sense of humour is a lot more surrealist… I thought they were funny, but I’m not sure anyone else did.
I have no idea what my best gig was. They sort of all blur together. A couple of weeks ago I was in Amsterdam in The Royal Theatre Carre - it was my girlfriend [Micky Overman’s] tour but her support act got sick that day so I opened for her. The pressure was incredible - it was the biggest gig of her career so if I went up there and bombed for twenty minutes it would have made the gig even harder for her. Luckily, it went well though, the audience were great.
I think the Dutch don’t always have a great reputation as audiences because they can be quite direct, and just kind of go “yes, that was a joke, I see what you did there,” but these guys were really great.
If I had been watching it would have been a great gig anyway, but for us to get to do it together it was pretty unique. I don’t think many couples have that.
SL: Who’s funnier, you or her?
PS: I think she’s way funnier than me, but she thinks I’m funnier, which is sweet. No scoop here I guess.
*shudders in perfect couple*
*pretends to cancel the interview*
SL: Roadtrip essentials? You have to travel a lot for your job, with touring you’re doing big cities, even countries in one day, so you must be travelling a lot?
PS: Yeah, I don’t mind travelling actually.
SL: Any go-to snacks?
PS: I’m usually a meal-deal guy when I’m in the UK. Although very recently I’ve gone plant-based so I haven’t actually had a plant based meal deal yet, not massively high hopes. I think I’ve become my own worst nightmare; I’m the guy who gets bottled water in the meal deal! I’m just cutting out all sources of joy in my life, clearly - no alcohol, no caffeine, no sugar…
SL: The next question was going to be “what’s a guilty pleasure for you”, but we’re guessing you don’t have one?
PS: Yeah, no joy allowed…
No, I love Love Island, if that counts. We started watching Lockdown with the series that was on, and then went back and watched the old series because there was nothing else to do. Series Three was the best - the older series where there were fewer rules were the best ones.
Everyone gives it a hard time because they say it’s fake and staged but what it does well is those moments where people get into disagreements and all they can do is argue in a really authentic way which is always embarrassing. You’ll see men just not listen to other people’s points, and keep arguing, even when a really rational point is made to them, they can’t hear it. It's so hard for men to say they’re wrong about stuff, it’s fascinating.
It’s pretty much just a Love Island though. I tried watching the other ones - Too Hot To Handle? But I didn’t get into it.
SL: There are so many great comedy shows in the UK, do you have a dream gig you’d want to do? Other than Love Island?
PS: I’m not sure I have a must-do gig. I have a weird obsession with the Royal Albert Hall - it’s so cartoonishly huge and artistically important, I just think it would be really funny to do stand-up there - the least valuable art form that we have. For me, to be in the Royal Albert Hall and do smut jokes and just abhor tradition, I think would be really funny.
In terms of TV shows, I think Taskmaster is the one all comedians want to do. You don't have to do any prep, you just turn up and be yourself. Even if someone didn’t necessarily do something funny in the task, they edit it so well that it’s always entertaining to watch.
SL: So any show where you can be unfunny and do no prep, is the dream?
PS: Exactly - why do you think I agreed to this interview!
SL: It’s how we reel everyone in… You’ve lived in London most of your life - do you have any go-to spots or favourite things to do?
PS: It’s a classic but walking down Southbank, that’s what I’d do with anyone coming to visit.
SL: Any overrated London spots? Landmarks, places, shops, restaurants?
PS: Overrated spots, probably the M&M store - why is there always a queue? Do you know what, come to think of it, any place that has a queue is probably overrated - why are there salad places with huge queues around them? Whenever I see a queue, I think, you idiots.
SL: Not to throw shade, but there was a queue to get into your show on Saturday…
PS: Was there really?!
SL: So do you think you’re overrated?
PS: Absolutely. I go to these cities on tour and see people filing in and I just think - “you do know it’s just me, right?”
SL: Have you always been a comedian?
PS: Since birth, yes, I came out of the womb and was handed a microphone… No, I only went full time in comedy four years ago and was working for the NHS for ten years before that, as an operations administrator. So I was working for the cardiologist services across three hospitals - the real NHS heroes work in admin, guys.
SL: So did you just get addicted to the clapping during COVID, for the NHS, and that’s what made you decide to go into comedy full time?
PS: Yeah, I loved it, I was just walking down the street [as they were clapping] going “you’re welcome guys”, I mean, someone has to send those PDFs.
SL: That’s what we were clapping for, the PDFs!
PS: Yeah, who cares about saving lives? It’s saving Word documents as PDFs that’s impressive…
Initially I was a project manager at the NHS but I hated it so quit to do comedy. However, it really takes years to make any kind of money doing comedy. I worked part time as a kind of Deliveroo rider - actually one of my favourite jobs I ever had. You know, have a cycle, sometimes get a tip, you get to explore parts of the city. Most of the time I was delivering to big hedge funds and investment companies. You’d be there with about 10 other Deliveroo drivers, with this pile of fancy food piling up.
SL: Do you have a memorable work fail?
PS: Before I worked actually in the hospitals, I worked in the workforce planning part of the NHS which looks at how many actual doctors and nurses you need in each department. I was in my early twenties, and I independently invented the concept of workforce planning. I went to my bosses with this thing I’d worked on and gone “Guys, I think this could be a really good thing, we could plan and forecast how many doctors and nurses we actually need”. They just looked at me and went, “Um, yeah? That’s literally your job…”
SL: You mansplaned your own job as a brilliant idea?
PS: Exactly yeah. And my boss was a woman at the time.
SL: So did you get cancelled out of the NHS and that’s how you wound up in comedy?
PS: Yeah, they went, “This guy keeps ‘inventing’ things we’re already doing.”
SL: Our last question was going to be “What would be your alternative career” but it sounds like that would be Deliveroo rider? If you weren’t doing comedy what do you think you’d be doing?
PS: I mean, I love spreadsheets. That’s how I got into project management. I have so many spreadsheets in my life, just for things in my life. I actually planned my current tour myself on a huge Excel doc.
Spreadsheets are my joy. If I have a good gig that’s what I do, I go home and I do some conditional formatting.
SL: And you said you’d cut out all joy… Is your Guilty Pleasure actually spreadsheets?
PS: It really is, yeah... Did you ever strawpedo back in the day?
SL: ...We were known to. Were you?
PS: I did yeah back in uni. You always regret a strawpedo - god, that’s really not a good name for it is it? Do you remember Reef?
SL: *Completely blank*
PS: It was pretty disgusting - they were like Bacardi Breezer or VK.
SL: The grown up J2O?
PS: VKs were pure sugar weren’t they? You’d never sleep again… And that’s why I'm sober - could you imagine? Addicted to strawpedo-ing a VK, that would be so embarrassing.
SL: It’s like how there was the Sunny Delight girl? Whose skin went yellow cause she drank so many?
PS: Yes, I remember.
SL: You’re the VK boy!
PS: [laughing] That’s me! I am the VK boy.
You can catch Patrick on his Absolutely tour this summer in Bristol and Liverpool
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