Life according to... comedian Ed Night

After a sell-out run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, we caught up with Ed Night as he brings his show The Plunge back to the capital and Glasgow next month.

How pleased were you with the response to your Edinburgh show, The Plunge?

I was delighted because I hadn’t done the Fringe for a long time. I’d fallen out of the habit of writing a new show every year. I was worried it was going to be very different from what I remembered, I was going to be out of practise and basically feel like a bit of a spare part.

If anything, getting out of the rhythm of having to churn out a new show every year kind of reset my expectations and excitement. You get your show every day, you get to gig a load of times and hang out with your pals. Unfortunately, you just have to pay like a million pounds for the privilege.

How excited are you to tour it?

I love travelling and being on the road and it feels cool to do my own show on tour. I’m excited to see what the show still has left for me to discover.

I’m more settled down now so touring is more difficult. I have more responsibilities. I’ve been stuck in Norway before when I was about 22 after a gig. At the time it was like water off a duck’s back. Now if that happened to me, it would ruin my life.

As well as Edinburgh, you’re playing Glasgow too?

It’s an amazing city. Growing up I had family living there so I’d been many times before I did my first gig there.

The comedy scene in Glasgow is really great – it’s probably one of the only places in the UK I could move at the moment and feel like I wasn’t losing a step comedy wise.

London’s massive and the most well-connected place but the gigs up in Scotland are really great, and good fun.

You talk about your OCD in the show?

A lot of time you’re catastrophic thinking and constantly all day you’re replaying social interactions or having intrusive thoughts, convincing yourself that you’ve killed someone by sneezing on the Tube, mad stuff like that.

When I’m on stage, it’s the most that I’m really in the moment. I’m not second guessing everything. I feel I’m in control of my environment but there’s also a kind of giving up of control.

I’ve tried to think about it a lot and analyse it. I can’t really pathologise it in a satisfying way, but I’m not in my own head when I’m on stage. It’s not why I got into it and why I love doing it but if I’m in a slump, doing gigs makes me feel better.

I talk about it in the show but don’t soapbox. I don’t really have a point to make. If I can say something true, real and insightful in getting to a punchline, then that’s two birds, one stone.

Your sketches online have gone viral, has that brought more people to your shows?

There’s no doubt I wouldn’t be touring at the scale I am if it wasn’t for social media. It’s all still quite alien to me. Comics starting now know that’s something they have to do in tandem. I’ve had to learn it a bit. It was exciting when the first video started to go viral but you’re also a bit like ‘how do I keep this rolling?’

I’ve found the pressure of coming up with something as funny, every week, forever extremely daunting. You’re learning on the fly to be a social media manager, what video resolutions are popular, what time of day is the best to post. Suddenly, how funny it is is fourth down on your list.

Is there pressure with those extra metrics of likes and shares?

The way I think, that’s a nightmare to me. They give you so much stuff, the illusion of having some kind of awareness or control over what’s happening. I can see everything, the demographic breakdown of my followers, the length of videos that get the most uptake, how many link clicks correspond to a single ticket sale.

There’s so much data thrown at you, you think there must be some way that I can use that to exert some kind of control over the output. That’s just not the case. You just have to keep making stuff and hoping that people like it.

Ed Night is at Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel on May 9 and Glasgow’s The Stand on May 10. Visit linktr.ee/ednightshows