“I love The Simpsons? Does it get better?” | Meet Piers Black

The Simpsons. People watching. Terrible puns. We caught up with I’m Not Being Funny writer Piers Black to chat inspirations for the play, writing processes, and “being very serious about being silly.”

I’m Not Being Funny is a new play about hope, endings and how to survive if a knock knock joke hits you in the gut. The play follows Billie and Peter, a couple practising their ‘tight 5’ in the living room. As they delve through their past for material, some jokes hit a little too close to home, and questions about their future are forced to the surface in the process.

When asked about how the play came to be, Piers said:

“Jerome Yates (actor in the play) and I were working together on another project and we started dropping bad jokes in front of people to try and make each other laugh. We’d sit in the awkward silence and finish with an ‘Is this thing on?’ mic tap. Every day I’d write these terrible puns on the tube on the way to work – the line between bad humour, good humour and good bad humour is a delicious sweet spot that this play is very interested in. Originally I think it was a one person show which was just an hour of terrible stand up. Someone smarter than me pushed for that to be two people and the couple formed and the form formed.”

Photo by Rich Lakos.

A play that’s very funny in it’s own right – but a play that’s also about a couple trying their hand at stand-up comedy – when chatting about his inspirations, Piers shared that “I love stand up – Rose Matafeo, Zac Zucher, Sarah Pasco, Andy Samberg and Eddie Izzard have all come up when thinking about this show. I’m also a big fan of TV shows that put comedy at the front but bring the emotion with them. I love The Simpsons? Does it get better? It’s so good at shifting between ages and tones, funny and sad, and ultimately committing to being very serious about being silly.”

Photo by Rich Lakos.

But comedy isn’t Piers’ only love. When asked about the first play he read that had a lasting impact, Piers said:

“I saw The Birthday Party by Pinter when I was 18 and it blew my mind. It was scary and unlike anything I’d ever seen – all the rules were different! My experience of theatre at that point was pretty much Shakespeare and pantomime so this felt like a hurricane. It also made me excited about the liveness of theatre – the atmosphere was so dense and people were laughing but also on edge. Someone once told me that the heartbeats of a theatre audience will eventually all sync up and beat in time if the play is working – this magic was very present in the production I saw.”

Photo by Rich Lakos.

Piers is a writer and director, and Artistic Director of award-winning Ransack Theatre (one of his proudest achievements). His play My Dad Hunts Bears was a finalist for the Papatango Prize and developed on attachment at the National Theatre Studio. His show Catching Comets was nominated for a Fringe First, won an OffComm Award, and toured nationally following its Edinburgh Fringe premiere. He won the BBC Alfred Bradley Bursary Award with his radio play Human Resources, later broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as Drama of the Week.

When it comes to writing, at the moment Piers is really interested in joy and offering the audience a space to feel something big and real in a small and conditioned environment. “After much development the play is now about what fires this need to laugh and also how we can find humour in the big and the small, the light and the dark. I was also influenced by wanting to write work that had illness and messy, complicated situations but wasn’t afraid to give them life and hope. It is a celebration – last dance at a wedding energy.”

Photo by Rich Lakos.

Photo by Rich Lakos.