He's really rather odd and he's a member of The Pod. Which isn't much for you to go on, perhaps, but we believe you should read about him, for he may well make you laugh some day.
Julian Barratt

Hmm. What to make of it all? "Coming at you like a fridge, comin' at you like a muffin, comin' at you like a twig, like a bean!" Julian Barratt certainly is the Man Most Likely to claim the Wibbly Wobbly Oddness crown, but it's hard to describe his act. It's hard for him to describe his act.

"I don't really write gags very well", he explains. "I prefer to write rambly bits, keep everything loose within the jokes so that each time I do it it's slightly different.

"I change things gradually over a period of months. That's my jazz mentality - being able to muck about within a framework. I like not knowing what I'm going to say, so it's blind stand-up panic."

Perhaps because what they do for a living is talk, it's rare for stand-up comics to be shy when it comes to talking about what they do for a living. But Julian is. "I don't like to analyse things too much," he mutters. And then he goes on to analyse things. Such as, for instance, what it's like to experience a degree of what you might call 'fame'.

"Obviously there's a part of me that's a rank, raging egomaniac that wants the adoration of a faceless multitude every night of the week," he muses, "but then you come home and realise that's so ephemeral and unfulfilling somehow.

"You get into the comedy circuit and it's like concentric circles. You do gigs, then you get closer to the 'centre' and it's like levels of Dante's inferno; then you realise that as you get to the centre, logically it's just you on your own in a room, saying: 'That's it, I've made it, I'm here, me!' That's why I want to make stand-up more peripheral to my vision do that comedy doesn't engulf me, so I don't get all this crap about reaching this, erm…'pure ecstasy of communication and information!"

He opens his eyes wide, twitches his head and looks hunted. He does this a lot.

What do audiences make of the massive jumble of words he throws at them?

"I never used to talk to the audience much at all. I'm just in my own little opaque world. I had real trouble to begin with, because I didn't used to set it up properly, so after ten minutes of random, narrative-less mess, people would get really bored. I'd even bore myself and it'd go all wrong!"

How is he dealing with that now?

"I put in a structure, even if it's just funny words; it's a net to hang things on. I'm really into words.

"I like to create a mood, doing the kind of thing you come up with when you're with your mates, but in order to get that across you can't re-transcribe it, you have to recreate the context in which that joke was allowed…so I have to establish a weird, sort of 'free' persona straight away so that people will see that it's not just gags. I'm trying to convey abstract humour."

Do you want to be really famous?

"I want to make another cup of tea and have people film it!" Julian looks around wildly and filches yet another fag. "I want to do other things. If you do just stand-up, then you go mad on stage. It's just you and your demons. If it goes well, then you feel like some sort of god. If it goes badly, then you feel like shit. It's all mood swings. It's quite a therapeutic way of getting rid of all the rubbish in my head, though."

Julian is also involved in The Pod - a truly awesome parody of a techno dance-trance electronic-music-meets-pseudo-hippy-philosophy musical experience that has achieved some notoriety in recent months.

So how did that come about?

"Me and Tim did a gig and liked each other's ideas, and decided to do something. Originally it was going to be more like radio stuff, scripts and stuff, and then we started writing tunes and began to do it live and it seemed to go quite well.

"But that's just one aspect of The Pod: it's meant to be a big collective. The Pod doesn't stand for anything, but backwards and with an 'e' on the end it spells 'Dope'."

Is there a message in that? Julian tips his head to the side and looks cute.

"Yeasty" he says in a dedicated way. "If something's good, but slightly dark, then it's yeasty."

Nikki Bayley