CORK comic Chris Kent had a few problems coming up with the title for his new show. Kent comes to Belfast on Monday as part of a run of previews for his month-long stint in Edinburgh next month and says he took his time before calling the show Stop Stalling.
“I had a load of names but I just like the sound of `Stop Stalling’,” he says. “It’s a real thing in Cork, where people would say 'stop stalling’ or 'stall on’. I was going to call it 'Stall On’ but people wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.
“Then I was going to drop the 'g’ and call it `Stop Stallin’ but that made it look like `Stop Stalin’, as if I was doing a show about Stalin. It just didn’t look great on the poster. People would have thought I’d gone in a completely different direction.”
Kent is one of the best Irish comics on the scene and his dry wit would remind you of Kevin McAleer. One of his best routines to date sees him discuss struggling badly with the art of counting sheep and of having night terrors and flinging his girlfriend across a bedroom, in the belief that he was saving her from a speeding car.
He is now a married man and says much of Stop Stalling is about getting hitched and honeymooning in Vegas.
“The whole show kind of all revolves around that, although it didn’t start out that way. I just had more material than I expected on it. It’s about events that happened around our wedding and our honeymoon, so you could say it’s about getting married but has nothing to do with marriage.
“I got a good bit out of Las Vegas. As the honeymoon deteriorated and fell to s**t, I knew that I had some material in the bank. As terrible as things are going, you’re always like `Ah, there’s something here that I can use. But I won’t say it just now because it’ll spoil the mood.’”
After moving to St Albans in Hertfordshire, Kent is starting to make a name for himself in Britain now. He played the Latitude festival last weekend, shared a bill with Reginald D Hunter on Monday and is booked in for a run of UK dates later in the year.
Before embarking on his Edinburgh run, he plays the Vodafone Comedy Festival in Dublin this Sunday, Belfast on Monday and then Bray and Cork.
“I love gigging in Belfast. It’s always great. The first time I went up was maybe six years ago and I just wasn’t sure if people would get me or not, but I very quickly realised that they did and it’s been going great ever since.
“I think I’ve done previews for all my Edinburgh shows in the Black Box. I did it one year and it was pretty quiet, but I think that was because it was a matinee and it was about 50 degrees outside. There was nobody there but I didn’t blame them.”
His show on Monday is a joint headline gig with Eleanor Tiernan. “Last year we did quite a few of them together, so we just switched it every time. Usually whoever wants to go first will go first. We’re both fairly laid-back. Eleanor’s great and I’m a big fan of her stuff. We’re well suited together.”
As a married man now, Kent says it’s hard to be on the road without his wife but says she does go up to Edinburgh to see him.
"She comes to Edinburgh for a couple of days every year. It’s hard for her because I’m just so busy there and I don’t get a chance to think. It’s tough enough being away from home for a month. It is good but at the end of it you’re looking forward to getting back home and to taking it easy in September.”
And does Mrs Kent mind that she features so heavily in his new show? “No. She saw it once and she doesn’t mind. She’s very laid-back. She knows that bits of it are fabricated and that it’s like a story written as a joke. There’s nothing bad about her in it.”
So she’s happy as long as she gets 10 per cent of his takings then? “Exactly. She gets 10 per cent of nothing and I get all her money.”
- Chris Kent plays The Black Box in Belfast on Monday at 8pm, along with Eleanor Tiernan. For tickets (£7), visit BlackBoxBelfast.com or call 028 9024 4400.
