Ross Noble
Ross Markham Noble[1] (born 6 June 1976) is an English stand-up comedian and actor. Noble rose to mainstream popularity through making appearances on British television, particularly interviews and on panel shows such as Have I Got News for You.[2] He has also released DVDs of several of his tours.
Ross Noble
Ross Markham Noble
6 June 1976
Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Stand-up, television
- Improvisational comedy
- Surreal humour
- Physical comedy
- Observational comedy
Fran Noble
- Unrealtime
- Sonic Waffle
- Randomist
- Fizzy Logic
- Noodlemeister
- Nobleism
- Things
In 2007 he was voted the 10th-greatest stand-up comic on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups[3] and again in the updated 2010 list as the 11th-greatest stand-up comic.
In 2012, Noble made his film debut in the fantasy comedy horror movie Stitches. In 2015 he made his musical theatre debut in The Producers and in 2018 was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for his performance in Young Frankenstein in the West End.
Early life[edit]
Noble was born in 1976 in Newcastle upon Tyne[4] and brought up in Cramlington, Northumberland. Both of his parents were teachers.
He was taught at Cramlington Learning Village between 1987 and 1991.
Stand-up performance[edit]
Noble's stand-up routine is a largely improvised and surreal performance with a stream of consciousness delivery. He is often referred to as a randomist. Often, a large percentage of his set becomes based around heckles and conversations with members of the audience.[2][5] Although he does often have a few set topics which he performs throughout a tour, he describes the planning for the entire show as "about four words on a piece of scrap paper".[6]
Noble often mimes actions on-stage to help the audience visualise his surreal ideas, for example, telling the audience to never put a blanket over an owl, and exactly what an owl neck detection device is ("just a stick with a pointy bit on it") or showing the audience how to serve double header ice creams properly after considering his own made-up plot of 24 in which Jack Bauer escapes a cell using a greasy goose.[7]
Noble's style is recognised as spontaneous, due to his unpredictable performance style, interruptions from hecklers or because he has drifted off into another surreal tangent. During his shows he is known to dabble onto one topic, ask a member of the audience something about him or herself and use that as material, and carry on with that, and later on seems to forget about the routine, digressing into another topic. Thus the audience pesters Noble to tell the ending of his unfinished stories, which are usually eventually concluded at the end of his shows. His most famous example is in his Randomist tour, where he started to tell a story about him being interviewed after Live 8 near the beginning of a show in Newcastle, which he did not finish until the end of the performance, around two hours later.[8] This relates to an earlier comment he made in his Regent's Park show, saying that his mind "Tends to wander off [the point] slightly", and later added that "[he] can open up too many tangents at once... it's a never-ending expanding spiral of possibilities."[9]
Career[edit]
Early years[edit]
Noble is originally from Cramlington, Northumberland, England. "The ultimate place to live" helped him with his career—he found little to do in his hometown so he became particularly imaginative.[10] At the age of 11, it was discovered that he was dyslexic. Because of this, Noble decided to work within a career which did not rely on academic skills. He had a brief stint as a street juggler with a friend, and aspired to join a circus. He joined a clown troupe and sold balloons as a stilt-walker, before deciding to become a comedian after winning tickets to a comedy show.[11] As a teenager, Ross was a member of the youth theatre at the People's Theatre in Heaton, Newcastle. In 1997, he was doing warm-ups at the BBC for Friday Night Armistice.
Noble has been performing stand-up since the dyslexia diagnosis, and appeared in his local comedy club at the age of 15, despite licensing laws that prohibited him working there and forced him to leave through the kitchen.[5] Noble studied performing arts at Newcastle College, after he told his careers adviser at school he wanted to be a comedian. He later stated that this had no effect on his stand-up ability, as he believes that the information taught is not important in being a good performer.[12]
Stand-up career[edit]
Since starting as a stand-up comedian, Noble has won many awards, including a Time Out award winner in 2000 for his Edinburgh Fringe Festival show Chickenmaster, and a Perrier Award nomination in 1999 for another Edinburgh show Laser Boy. He has since achieved great popularity in both the UK and Australia, where he has toured extensively every year since 2001. Noble's 2003 show Unrealtime was the best-selling show at the Edinburgh Fringe,[13] before transferring to London's West End for a monthlong season at the Garrick Theatre where it played to packed houses. A recording of this tour was shown on BBC Two in 2004, and a double-DVD set was released later that year.
During 2004, Noble performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and other venues with his show Noodlemeister. His 2005 UK tour, Randomist, ran from September to December, of which he continued in Australia during 2006. In April 2006, Noble was involved in a motorbike accident, and both fractured and dislocated his collarbone. Conveniently, he crashed right outside a hospital. Noble performed his shows over the following weeks with his arm in a sling.[14] During his 'Things' tour, in Bristol on 1 March 2009, he claimed that before the ambulance officers would help him, he was forced to do his Stephen Hawking impression.
While performing in Edinburgh in September 2006 for his Fizzy Logic tour, a fight broke out during the gig, caused by a drunken member of the audience arguing with another. Also, in his Edinburgh gig, some one gave him a basket of mini-muffins with faces printed on them; this is related to a sketch from Noble's DVD Sonic Waffle, in which he mentions his hobby of finding faces in muffins.[15] At another gig, he found someone filming the show on their mobile phone and confiscated the phone. He then recorded a video on it himself.[16] After finding that several people recorded his finale skit, "The falling owl stunt", Noble encouraged the entire audience to record the stunt simultaneously and post them on YouTube, in an attempt to achieve, "The largest number of videos showing exactly the same thing."[17] He then took his tour to Australia in February 2007, during which he filmed a documentary about his travels around the country.[18]
In 2007 Noble finished his Nobleism tour in the UK[19] with a show in Liverpool on 21 October 2007 which was screened live to 43 Vue cinemas. If the event had sold out, he would have played to over 10,000 people.[20] Upon walking offstage, Noble enquired if the broadcast had succeeded and was informed by a technician that "it worked perfectly... but we lost Aberdeen". To this day, Noble maintains that this is the "coolest thing anyone has ever said" to him.[21]
Noble likes to have spontaneous material related to each specific show, and therefore encourages heckling and has increasingly indulged in the audience giving him gifts during shows. At a gig at the Edinburgh Playhouse during Noble's 2005 Randomist tour, a member of the audience put his feet up on the stage, and later removed his shoes and put them on the stage instead. It is now traditional for the entire front row of an Edinburgh audience to place their shoes upon the stage during the interval, which causes Noble much amusement when he returns.[22]
Noble performed at the 2008 Latitude Festival and rounded off his set by leading everyone in the tent in a huge conga line (which quickly turned into a stampede) to a vegan food stand so they could all ask for pies and sausage rolls.[23][24]
The DVD of his show Nobleism was released in November 2009.