Interview with Graham Norton

Photo credit: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

AE: Another thing that I really enjoy about your humor is that you’re cheeky and your saucy, but you’re never mean. And so often it seems like comedy is built on being mean. Is that a conscious choice that you made at some point in your career, or is that just who Graham Norton is?
GN: Well, let’s be honest, we are mean to people. We are mean to celebrities who aren’t there. We pick our targets and then we’re horrible to them. But in terms of the audience, you can tease an audience, but you don’t want to wreck their night. They’re there, too – they want to have a nice time, and I think even if you’re making the rest of the audience laugh, if you’ve wrecked an audience member’s night, it’s hard to take any pleasure in that as a performer.

As for the guest, well you did invite them on, so I think it’s sort of your duty as the host to make sure they go home having had a nice time, and you do your best for that to happen. As for the celebrity targets who we are really vile to, I think it’s okay so long as they don’t seem like victims. If they’re rich and successful and beautiful, then my policy is why should they worry about what some creature says about them on television.

AE: Do you get stopped on the street by heterosexual Britains as much as you do by gay guys who want to say how much they enjoy the show?
GN: Yeah, I mean I do get stopped a lot. If it’s straight men, normally they’re just going to say your name like they’re amazed to see you, or it will be “My girlfriend loves you,” or “My wife loves you,” or “My kid loves you.” That kind of thing. It’s never them. They don’t like it.

AE: Speaking of straight men, did you do anything special for the poor fellow who let you have his, um, private parts waxed on your show? I’ve never seen anything so excruciating looking in my life.
GN: I really did feel bad about that. It really did look sore. Off camera, she did finish his back. He was just a member of the public, so the deal was he’d get it done and then he comes to the green room and have drinks and things afterward. You know, meet the guests and it’ll all be jolly, but, no – he couldn’t. He just went home. He was in such pain. I don’t know if he had a low pain threshold or was just much sorer than that women said he was going to be.

AE: Low threshold? Oh, no, no. Given what they waxed?
GN: Oh, they didn’t finish waxing that.

AE: I’d be in hospital for a week if I had that waxed.
GN: Yeah, we sent him home patchy.

AE: In your autobiography, when you were writing about growing up gay, you said, “But I was fooling no one. They were like a pack of animals who smelled blood. It made me feel very excluded and lonely,” and you go on from there. I’m curious, do you think a lot of your humor comes from growing up gay in that situation?
GN: When I grew up, there was a sense of being “other” so I think it makes you . . . you observe things in a different way. It kind of turns you into a storyteller. You can either go down the comedy route, or you can go a quite serious route, but I think there is something inherent about, you know, as a youngster, that kind of loneliness, that means you are just looking on from the sidelines and I think you see life, relationships, community in a different way than other people.

The Graham Norton Show airs on BBC America Saturday nights at 10 PM EDT/PDT.