Adam Hills has had a lot of jobs in his life. At one point, he was doing standup comedy in the evenings, writing jokes for radio at night, anchoring a breakfast television show in the morning and fitting in some tennis instruction before his 3-hour nap. He’s managed to whittle it down a bit as host of Channel 4’s The Last Leg but he’s about to add another line to his CV: published author. Adam joined Dave Fanning to talk about his book, Best Foot Forward, life advice from Billy Connolly and why you should never perform at stag parties.
Adam did his first standup gig on his 19th birthday and you could say, there were ups and downs.
“I took a whole bunch of mates with me and they sat at the front table and they laughed at all the right spots and I had so little clue about standup comedy that I just did a bunch of R-rated jokes that I had no right to do. I was an 18-year-old that still lived at home with my parents. And as I left the stage, the MC said, ‘Isn’t it funny the guys that talk about sex the most do it the least?’“
Adam had overheard the MC say that he wondered how Adam would do when his friends weren’t there to hold him up. He went back a few months later without his cohort, trying some jokes that were about his life, rather than “what I thought comedians should be talking about”. It wasn’t an easy road at first. As he tried to break into comedy, he worked 6-day weeks and survived on about 3 hours sleep a night.
“I think there’s a story in the book about me driving home from the TV station one afternoon and literally falling asleep in the car because I’d been up since, I think, 3 o’clock the afternoon before.”
Adam took Dave back to his time living in Dublin, his “second comedy home”. The Laughter Lounge had just opened for business and he fell in with some little-known Irish comedians: Des Bishop, Dara O’Briain, Deirdre O’Kane and David O’Doherty.
“A whole bunch of us would just hang out and kind of spur each other on…There’s a real kind of comedy family there.“
Speaking of comedy family, Adam told Dave that he has an unorthodox mentor who he credits with being there with comedy advice just when he needs it the most. One Billy Connolly.
“He keeps popping up in my career like a hairy godmother, every 2 or 3 years, just pointing me in the right direction.“
One issue Adam needed some direction on was whether to address his disability in his material. Adam was born missing part of his right foot. He remembers an older comic taking him aside when he was first starting out.
“He said, ‘right now, you’re just making jokes about it because you can. Wait ‘til you get good. Wait ’til you find a reason to talk about it. Then it’ll really be impactful’. And so, I didn’t talk about it for 13 years of doing standup.”
Advice from an early manager matched up to what he had been told.
“If you start talking about your foot from the get-go, you’ll only ever be known as the one-legged comedian. So, make sure you’ve got something else to talk about.”
Adam found his reason to talk about his disability after going through security checks in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
“I would go through airport metal detectors and my foot would set off the metal detector but the security guards would let me go through because they were too scared to offend me…That’s when I decided to start talking about my prosthetic. Because there was a point to it.“
Sports seem to be a running thread through Adam’s life. He played tennis competitively from the age of 10 but “was never going to go professional”. As an adult, the weekly show he hosts, The Last Leg, is notable for its heavy coverage of the Paralympics. Adam told Dave that his relationship with the event goes back further than you might think.
“I was asked to trial for the Paralympics when I was 12 and I remember thinking, ‘No. Because I’m not disabled. I’m not going to’...Somehow through doing comedy and discovering the Paralympics, I’ve come to accept my disability and as you say, realise that it’s not a thing that holds me back, that it’s actually a thing that makes me stand out.”
Dave couldn’t let Adam go without addressing the “worst show” he’s ever done. And it happened in Cork. Adam explained that he had been hired to perform for an English stag party. He showed up to do his 40-minute set, only to find that the men were under the impression he would be spending the entire weekend with them.
“My voice had gone I was so stressed about doing the show. The microphone kept popping in and out. And after about two minutes of my best material getting absolutely no laughs, one of the stags just went, ‘Mate, listen. It’s not going well, is it?’, which is the most lovely heckle ever.”
The stag party had an ultimatum for him – down a pint faster than the groom-to-be and he’d get his money. Down it slower and he was on the hook to come out on the town with them. He lost to the groom and tried an evasive manoeuvre. He told them he would go back to his hotel to change out of his suit and meet them later.
“He went, ‘Yeah, but don’t stay there because we know what room you're in. You're in room 12’. And luckily, I was in room 16.“
Listen back to the whole interview on The Ryan Tubridy Show here.
(Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage via Getty Images.)