COMEDY
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STEWART FRANCIS One-liner maestro gets serious for a minute As a warm-up for his next national tour Pun Gent (yeah, you get the picture), Canadian one-liner machine Stewart Francis is in town to play his part in a charity gig for MND. This will be his chance to road-test some gags that may or may not make the cut when he kicks off in April.
‘Remembering them all and in the right order is the tricky part of my style of comedy,’ he confesses. ‘I approach it the way I do a script, so there are chunks that lead on to other bits while one joke will tell me that I’m at the end of a certain part. The beauty of
being a one-liner guy is that while there’s a flow, I could still pop a joke in from the middle of nowhere that I might have forgotten to do earlier.’ Sharing the King’s bill is, among others, Frankie Boyle, but don’t expect Francis to emulate the shock-Scot’s tactics. ‘I just want the jokes to be funny and in terms of closer-to-the-bone ones, I wouldn’t run three of them in a row because then that would become a theme and I’m then a comedian I don’t want to be.’ (Brian Donaldson) ■ King’s Theatre, Glasgow, Mon 23 Mar.
5 Feb–2 Apr 2015 THE LIST 55