Edward Aczel, Funny Farm, Farm Tavern, Hove, January 12 (From The Argus)

Edward Aczel, Funny Farm, Farm Tavern, Hove, January 12

11:59am Friday 9th January 2009 in Search By Duncan Hall

Critical acclaim doesn’t always put bread on the table.

A case in point is Aylesbury-based stand-up Edward Aczel, who is still dreaming of giving up his day job as a project manager in neighbouring Tring, so he can concentrate on his comedy.

It doesn’t seem to matter that his Edinburgh Fringe show Do I Have To Communicate With You? won the 2008 Malcolm Hardee Award, or that author Zadie Smith included a glowing piece on him in an article for The New Yorker. After all, The New Yorker piece only resulted in him selling four desktop calendars from his website. He printed up 100.

Talking to The Guide from the office car park on his lunch break, 41-year-old Aczel admits he didn’t have much material when he first walked out on stage back in 2005.

“When I started out, the first challenge was to go up there and say something,” he says. “I was just making it up as I went along, and my style developed from that. I wanted to make people laugh.”

What some have called an anti-comedy style revolves around his deadpan and seemingly shambolic delivery. In the early days, his opening gambit was to read out a set list he had scrawled on the back of his hand, before painfully returning back to each subject on the list and trying to make jokes out of them, from The Cold War to climate change and Sir Eric Clapton.

“I thought it would be funny to explain what I was doing,” he says. “When I started out I was trying to make the audience laugh every time I got up on stage. Initially, it was almost by accident. I would think: ‘If I make the audience laugh with anything at all then I’m winning’.

“The great thing about the early days was a lot of it was fear-based.”

He was reading from the back of his hand for his third gig: the auditions for Jimmy Carr’s Comedy Idol competition, which can be seen in the special features on Carr’s Stand Up DVD.

Seeing his two-minute audition performance, which included halting comments about the new Pope, Tom Cruise and the Devil, Carr confessed, with tears of laughter in his eyes: “I genuinely don’t know if you’re mental or brilliant.”

In the three years since those performances, Aczel has developed his style. His latest Edinburgh show was augmented with a flip-chart and a series of graphs documenting not only how well the current gig was going, but also how it compared to previous nights.

“This is the way we spend our adult lives, communicating ideas to people," he says. “In our normal lives we all sit there and click on our Powerpoint slides. Whether anything changes because you’ve done that is a different matter. Often, it is speaking for speaking’s sake.”

His shows are so different from the standard comedy gig that they can go down like a lead balloon, but that is something Aczel says drives him on.

“If you can make them laugh once during 20 minutes or an hour you know you’re winning,” he says.

“I like a tougher gig. It makes you work harder.”

Also at The Funny Farm tonight are Nick Helm, James Acaster, Joel Dommett and Josh Widdicombe – all introduced by MC Joey Page.

• 8pm, £5/£4, 01273 325902