This jazz is a total joke

Alex Horne's jazz-based comedy sounds odd, but it's in keeping with his eclectic projects. He talks to BRIAN BOYDabout meeting all London's nationalities, getting a word in the dictionary and living forever

JUST AS stand-up comedy hit the 10,000-seater arenas thanks to the massive box-office appeal of acts such as Peter Kay, Lee Evans and Michael McIntyre there was a type of self- regulatory karmic balancing, with the emergence of a new group of creative acts who didn’t necessarily want their names in lights but did want to poke around in the corners of stand-up comedy and take it in interesting new directions.

Acts such as Mark Watson, Tim Key and Alex Horne were intent on recapturing the original “fringe” spirit of stand-up, and through a variety of off-beat ventures they have established themselves as the new alternative to the “alternative” mainstream. Mark Watson once turned his entire month-long Edinburgh Festival run into an excuse to gradually write a book live on stage – with a lot of help from his audience. Tim Key helped devise an after-hours shambolic quiz, We Need Answers, which was like It’s a Knockout crossed with Mastermind. The show ended up on BBC TV.

As for Alex Horne, he once toured around all the Roman towns in the UK doing a show about Latin. He also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to meet a person from every nationality in London. The whole exercise took a year, and he discovered that there is nobody from Tuvalu, Palau or the Marshall Islands in the British capital.

He is now trying to get a word of his own invention into the Oxford English Dictionary.He is also attempting to become the oldest man in the world.

His latest venture, though, has become his most popular yet.

Horne fronts a jazz quintet called The Horne Section. Their jazz-comedy show was a sell-out at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, and earlier this year transferred to London’s West End. It is one of the highlights of this year’s Kilkenny Cat Laughs Festival.

A revolving cast of comics join the jazz quintet on stage and “conduct” them so that the music melds with their material. For example, one of their guests, Jimmy Carr, rapped out 10 one-liners to 10 different jazz beats. Harry Hill and Tim Minchin have also taken part.

“I’m a jazz musician in that I have achieved Grade 3 on the French horn,” says Horne. “Essentially that means I am able to play the theme music to Dallas. Bringing a jazz quintet – and these are real professional jazz musicians – to a comedy festival and seeing what happened just seemed to be a very good idea at the time. We never really wanted to sell a lot of tickets to the show, because we only wanted to invite comedians we liked – but somehow it’s just grown and grown.”

To describe The Horne Section as a night of jazz music with big-name comedy guests doesn’t do it justice. On the night I saw it the musicians did a Morris dancing version of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) as the singer Will Young watched on intently (he was there to ask if he could be a future guest, I found out later), Harry Hill did some very strange material indeed, and I think there was a raffle at one stage. There was definitely a man juggling about 50 plates.

Other shows have seen the mass eating of chips and impromptu Bon Jovi singalongs. “It’s all very improvised,” says Horne. “The real work is trying to discover the comics whose material will work well with jazz music. So far we’ve found that music-based comics such as Tim Minchin and David O’Doherty have shown the most empathy with what we’re trying to do. It also depends on who’s around at any given gig. Bringing the show to Kilkenny will be a real blast, as we will have loads of quality people to chose from.”

BEFORE KILKENNY there was the Melbourne Comedy Festival to negotiate, followed by an appearance at a real jazz festival – the annual Cheltenham bash this month. “Where this will go, I don’t know,” he says. “It wasn’t designed to last this long, but there are still so many possibilities.”

The 33-year-old Horne is one of the most engaging, versatile and unpredictable performers at work today. He also does relatively orthodox stand-up, but usually prefers ideas that are somewhere between daft and inspired. One of his most enduring quests is to get a new word into the dictionary. This is the basis of his book Wordwatching: Breaking into the Dictionary – It's His Word Against Theirs.

"The very idea of achieving lexical immortality makes me a bit giddy, and the Oxford English Dictionaryis the gold standard of dictionaries," he says.

“It’s one thing looking up your own book in a library, but imagine being able to look up your own word in the dictionary. But the word has to be in wide use across many different media to even stand a chance to get past the gatekeepers of the OED. I was inspired by Bootylicious being able to scale the dictionary walls thanks to just one individual, Beyoncé. But Beyoncé has the world’s ears, so what I had to do was to work my word – which is ‘honk’, as slang for money, really really hard.”

“I used it on countless stages across the world, I’ve written it in guestbooks at guesthouses, I’ve put it on banners at major sporting events and dropped it into conversation while being interviewed by local radio. I’ve got friends to help me out, so even if one of them is writing a letter to their parish newsletter they’ll make sure to use it. And I even managed to use it on Countdown when I was a contestant. What you have to do is to collect all evidence of uses of the word and then present it to the linguistic bouncers of the OED. I see it as being an honourable pursuit.”

THERE’S ALSO his invention “TKDay”. “Your TKDay is your 10,000 day birthday. That just struck me when someone asked me how many days I had been alive, and at the time it was something like 9,845 days, so I thought celebrating your TKDay should mean something.”

Best not to go into his death-defying attempt to become the oldest man in the world just now, but you can see all the details at longlivealex.com.

As for his next show, it’s relatively straightforward. “You know you read all those statistics about how during the average life you spend eight years sleeping, three years in queues etc. Well I’m doing all that in proportion in my next one-hour show – so the hours will change to minutes. I’m very excited and a bit perplexed by it.”

Thehornesection.com. The Cat Laughs Comedy Festival runs over the June bank holiday weekend, from Thursday 2nd to Monday 6th

On the night I saw it the musicians did a Morris dancing version of Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’, Harry Hill did some very strange material indeed, and I think there was a raffle at one stage

Funny five: acts to plan for at Kilkenny

AbandomanAn Irish hip-hop comedy duo who are creating a buzz in the UK with their irreverent and refreshing take on the hip-hop lifestyle. Doesn't sound good on paper, admittedly, but it's brilliant live.

Bo BurnhamThe atypical American comic, still only 21, became a YouTube sensation while still in his teens, getting more than 70 million hits for his short video routines. Walks the line between wholesome and disturbing to devastating comic effect. Do not miss.

Tim VineBrother of Newsnight's Jeremy Vine. Specialises in intricate wordplay and has some of the best one-liners in the business.

Greg DaviesThe Rik Mayall looky-likey started out with the sketch group We Are Klang but is now solo. He is doing some arresting and thoughtful material. Recently nominated for Act Most Likely to Make a Million Quid award.

Josie LongThe Londoner, a writer for the TV series Skins, is one of the brightest new talents around. She mines new seams of comedy and has an engaging on-stage persona.