Comic Tim Key takes poetry seriously

Brian Logan writes in The Independent about the unusual career of "deadpan poet" Tim Key. Key has built his stand up comedy around his poetry, recently winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award for his experimental show The Slutcracker, which Logan describes as an "unheard-of mix of suburban haiku, experimental film and playground stunt." The poetry part of his act isn't a stunt; Key takes his poems and their impact to heart, rather than just as vehicles for quick punchlines.

He hopes, though, that narwhale poems can be meaningful too. When I ask Key, at random, whether he'd prefer his books to be sold in the comedy or poetry section, he's appalled to think of himself as – dread word! – a humorist. "I'd much prefer it to be in Poetry," he says. "That's quite significant. I mean, I'm doing my best. If it's filed under Humour, that says that I'm just toying with poetry to make people laugh. But genuinely, I really like these poems." His abiding regret about The Slutcracker, is that "I wanted to write one genuinely poignant, breathtakingly sentimental poem for it, about my dad or something, that just knocked you to the floor. If I was a better writer, I'd have done that. But I've not been able to."

While meaning is important, convention certainly isn't. Just as Key's comedy doesn't fit into any molds, the Poetry section would have a hard time making room for it as well. But for Key, it's that tension itself that produces the humor.

There's nothing conventionally poetic, or indeed comic, about these miniature word-pictures, which cross-fertilise Ivor Cutler with Gary (The Far Side) Larson. "Pat blew a bubble," goes one. "Then he climbed into it. And he floated out of the orphanage." And that's it. Sometimes, as Key admits, the humour is in his apparently taking these wafer-thin odes seriously. At other times, the poems more closely resemble actual jokes – and Key sells them on stage with a knowing twinkle. But often, his "poems" aren't funny, but tender, or odd. "It's always interesting when something happens [in comedy] which isn't funny but is still engaging," he says. "That's the most interesting part."