'My comedy is harder than it looks'

Michael McIntyre has defended himself against his critics – saying his brand of observational comedy is harder than it looks.

Although he says people disliking his work doesn’t bother him, he does admit to getting upset by bad reviews.

And he goes on the defensive when his stand-up is dismissed as ‘just noticing stuff’.

In an interview with GQ magazine, he said: ‘What I’d like to say to these people is, if it’s so easy, then why don’t you do it? Because I’m sorted. I have a great life. It’s going really well for me. The house is looking great. We go on really nice holidays. You can have some of that. If it’s so fucking easy... doing impressions of what my jokes are... saying, “Oh, I’m making toast!” or whatever they do. “You know when the tea is hot...” Then do that and see [how far you get].

‘So it obviously is hard, because I struggle to do it. It’s not an easy comedy. If it’s just noticing stuff.

‘I saw someone once set up a Twitter thing pretending to be me with my “shit observations”... [Stops, then laughs] To be honest, some of their ideas, I thought there was something in them.’

He added: ‘People in the business do tend to be more prickly, more bitchy.

‘I want to make people happy. I get upset by a bad review because [to me, that’s] one person who came to my show and didn’t like it. And I don’t want that. I want them to like it.’

But although he seems to take criticism to heart, McIntyre said; ‘The people who don’t like me are completely irrelevant to me, just as I’m irrelevant to them.

‘It’s only that the tickets that I sell and the ratings I get... what does it matter that there’s an equal number of people who don’t find me funny? Why should the people who don’t like you have any bearing on anything whatsoever? Why do the people not interested matter?’

McIntyre’s interview with Danny Wallace appears in the April ‘comedy edition’ of GQ, which is out on Thursday.

Published: 27 Feb 2012