In an apartment in Brooklyn, Chris Turner is recalling what makes his daughter laugh.
“I make her laugh a lot,” he says. “But you have to keep mixing it up. She’ll laugh really hard at one thing, but if you try and do that same thing again, she’ll be like, ‘Um, I’ve seen that. New thing, please!’. It’s challenging. You have to keep innovating, as innovative as entertaining a toddler is.”
The British-born comedian has been performing stand-up for adults since 2009. Since then, Chris has made audiences laugh across the globe, including on ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ where he also dazzled viewers with his talent for freestyle rapping.
After an eight-year absence from the Adelaide Fringe Festival, Chris will be making up for his time away by returning with two shows, ‘Childish’ and ‘The Family-Friendly Stand-Up Show’.
‘Childish’ began to form from when Chris remembered what he wanted to be when he grew up.
“I always say to people that when I was a kid I wanted two things,” he says. “I wanted to play video games without having anyone telling me that I couldn’t, and I wanted to stay up as late as I wanted.”
“I also wanted to be things. I have the pieces of paper we had to fill in at school about what you wanted to be when you were older. Mine were always a musician, a guitarist, or funny – I didn’t know what a comedian was so I didn’t put that – or I wanted to be an actor or a rockstar. I was thinking about that and how cool it is that that is actually my job now. I was like, ‘Why don’t I do a musical comedy show where I’m being a musician and a comedian together?’”
It’s a dream come true that few ever achieve. While Chris certainly has the talent for comedy, he says it is mostly thanks to encouragement from his father that he has made it to where he is today. It’s this encouragement that is the point of the show.
“When I told my parents that I wanted to be a comedian, my mum was like, 'But you’re going to Oxford and you’re going to be a lawyer’,” he says. “While my dad was like, ‘That sounds pretty cool. You should be a comedian’. So, my dad is a huge reason that I’m a comedian and the show is kind of inspired by him.”
“I make loads of jokes about it in the show, but if my dad hadn’t driven me to shows and told me I’m really funny or posted my videos online on forums and shared them around, I wouldn’t be doing comedy because I would’ve been like, ‘Can I do this?’ I had someone who said, ‘You can do this’”.
Chris’ other show is ‘The Family-Friendly Stand-Up Show’ and is exactly as the title describes. It’s a show he’s performed long before becoming a father himself and has taught him a lot about children.
“Kids are a lot smarter than some people assume,” he says. “They get a lot of stuff. You can tell them an interesting story, and a parent might be like, ‘They don’t care about this because it’s not about poo’. But actually, they do like it.”
Both shows will see Chris joined by musicians to flesh out his comedy songs – his long-time musical director, and a drummer he notes is an ‘actual professor of jazz improvisation’. But among making people laugh with his jokes and songs, Chris hopes audiences come away with the inspiration to encourage others.
“The idea is I want everyone to leave the show and immediately text someone and tell them you think they’re really good at whatever they do,” he says. “My wife [Alice Winn] wrote novels for nine years. But I’ve always said she should write novels. Her book [‘In Memoriam’] came out last year. Last year in the UK, this was the best-selling debut novel. It was the 23rd biggest selling book in the UK out of all books, that’s including the likes of Prince Harry and Stephen King. It won two major literary awards. Just give them that little push to follow the thing they care about.”
Chris Turner plays ‘Childish’ (5-17 March) and ‘The Family-Friendly Stand-Up Show’ (9-17 March) at The Kingfisher at Gluttony – Rymill Park (Adelaide Fringe).
