Vine language with Limmy
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Limmy has always found pleasure in mining laughs from the darker side of life.
Over his years, the award-winning Glasgow comedy sensation (real name Brian Limond) has cast his observational eye over every day happenings, transmogrifying them into often surreal, occasionally horrifying, and always hilarious vignettes.
Across his Scottish BAFTA-winning sketch show Limmy’s Show, his two books and his series of Vines, he’s brought characters like recovering heroin addict Jacqueline McCafferty, the permanently-stoned Dee Dee, and the TV phone-in competition host Falconhoof to life, and wrung every ounce of pathos and comedy out of them.
“I find a lot of kind of terrible things funny,” he explained, “But that’s what I grew up with. Folk sort of falling by the wayside, and folk in trouble – including me – and things going bad in their life.
“We would just sort of joke about it, and people would laugh at other things that happened in other people, and pretty bad things would happen. Like when I was growing up you’d hear about somebody round the corner getting stabbed, and you would just make a joke about it.
“Simple as that, you’d just have a laugh about it – you wouldn’t go, ‘oh god that’s terrible, isn’t it? That’s terrible they got stabbed.’ You’d just be making jokes about anything – you couldn’t care less in a way.”
After the third series of Limmy’s Show wrapped in 2013, that dark humour found its perfect outlet in his series of mini-skits he posted on the now-defunct site Vine – which allowed people to upload looping six-second video clips.
“I think it was the summer of 2013, and I know that because 2013’s when I went on anti-depressants,” Limmy explained. “I was on Citalopram and so a lot of it was when I was on that.
“And you know, people say, ‘the antidepressants, do they not affect your creativity?’ and things like that, you know – ‘Do you not just sort of flatline?’ And I suppose that’s maybe the case for some other medication or something, but for me I was having the time of my life!
“When I was going out, it was nice and summery and I was feeling good for the first time in ages. And I was just going out, making Vines, and...aw, it was cracking!”
Over the two years he posted clips to the website, he racked up more than an hour of content – and more than 600 Vines.
And on Sunday night, he’ll be screening every single one of them at Eden Court, Inverness, as part of his Limmy’s Vines tour – the result of a successful screening down at London Short Film Festival. “I’d showed the whole lot solid, back-to-back, down in London, but it does your head in watching it like that,” he said. “So I split it into two halves – it still does your nut in, but not as much as a full hour.
“You’re used to watching the Vines just one at a time, you watch one and it loops a few times and then you switch the thing off and go do something else. But back to back it’s like, to begin with I was just enjoying the kind of horrific side of things, the kind of nightmarish sort of look. And then later on, it gets more into kind of trying to be funny.”
And there’s a huge variety on offer over the hour. There’s observations on what’s been happening on the telly, surreal nightmarish little moments, a huge amount of masturbatory jokes – and possibly most infamously the clip of a spider crawling out of his mouth.
“I love hearing people’s reaction to the spider Vine,” Limmy said. “I love the scream that goes through the whole place. And after that, I’ve got a Vine where I reverse that video, so it’s crawling into my mouth, and what a reaction – it’s brilliant!”
There’s no way that a clip like that wouldn’t warrant a strong reaction – and Limmy wouldn’t have it any other way. “I love just doing that sort of shocking stuff or obscene stuff or things like that either shock people or get people kind of excited or some kind of reaction.
“I’ve always been like that, I’ve always enjoyed whether I’m telling jokes or whether I’m with pals when I was younger or stuff like that, I’d always enjoy saying out of order stuff – you know, I really like that thing where people go, ‘Aw, for ****’s sake...’ I love that – love that reaction.”
If anything sums up his comedy, it’s that. “Well, it’s quite dark – quite a dark sense of humour, and my son’s got quite a dark sense of humour and all, by the sorts of things he draws.”
Things like what? “The other day my girlfriend was out with a pal of her’s. They’re out, and my girlfriend’s pal said to my son, ‘Why don’t you draw a nice picture?’
“And my son drew a picture, it was a picture of a cliff, and my girlfriend’s pal getting hanged off the cliff by the neck. And there’s me and him, wee stick figures up the top of the cliff like we’ve done it, and-”
He’s suddenly lost in a burst of unstoppable laughter before adding, “He drew us smiley faces!”
Like father, like son then, although with horror, as with comedy, context is everything. Limmy sat down with his son to discuss why people might find it offensive or nasty – “But I’m never going to say to him, ‘You really shouldn’t draw things like that,’ because they’ve got to get all that stuff out.
“He doesn’t do it all the time, he’s actually a really nice boy, a lot nicer than I was when I was wee, but he’s into stuff like that now and again.
“But then he’ll go and make something with flowers or something like that and give it to my girlfriend, so it’s not like he’s some wee boy pulling the heads off of dolls and torturing animals, nothing like that.”
Limmy pauses before adding, “But it’s a cracker that picture, I should put it in a frame.” He chuckles. “A budding horror writer.”
And it’s that sort of approach that defines Limmy as well as his son – it’s funny, it’s dark, but it’s still a joke in the end. “See my sense of humour – I feel like I have to kind of justify it to myself – I see it kind of like horror films or like Grand Theft Auto or something like that.
“Like with Grand Theft Auto, I don’t want to get in a motor and run people down and then like knock the motor, get out and start shooting and chucking petrol bombs at people and blowing up things like that. You might want to in a certain way, in your mind, but if it actually happened right in front of you it’d be horrific, you wouldn’t want it to really happen.
“Yet the games have made the most money out of any entertainment thing at all including books, films, anything. And look what’s in it! And yet we’re not all going on about killing each other, most of us can differentiate between what’s real and what’s not.
“It’s like that dark side, that funny, dark sort of side to us, but it’s not actually reality what you’d not apply to real life.”
Limmy’s Vines comes to Eden Court, Inverness on Sunday night. For tickets: www.eden-court.co.uk
