{COMEDY} Daniel Sloss
‘I HAVE JUSTIN BIEBER’S HAIR? WELL NO, HE HAS MY HAIR.’
L A V I T S E F
Back in the good old days you used to do that. Now, I imagine that this place is like this because someone fell off a thing and some shit mother said: ‘It’s not a safe place for kids, he came home with a bruise.’ Well I’m sorry, does your six-year-old have a bruised knee? Who’d thought that could happen when you’re a kid? I can understand if a death puts a stop to things, but nowadays it’s because of a grazed knee.
EAST WEMYSS PRIMARY SCHOOL
My brother Matthew is ten, and Jack has turned eight. Matthew was the horrible one for years, from when he was two. I hated his guts and not in a brotherly kind of ‘oh, I hate him’. No, I just fucking hated him, there was no love underneath the hate, but in the last few months he’s become so nice and just calmed down, and plays Xbox. You can’t play bulldog or football or tig or any running sports on the playgrounds because it’s concrete and they might fall over. Of course they’ll fall over, that’s what kids do. If he knocks his teeth out, that’s a story that he’ll tell when he’s older. When I was at primary I had a bowl cut and then at high school I had it short and quiffed, and then grew it for ages and one of my female friends said, ‘You look like a dick,’ and cut it to the length it is now when I was 15 or 16. I had it at this length when Justin
26 THE LIST 4–11 Aug 2011
Bieber was a foetus; if anyone tells me I have Justin Bieber’s hair, well no, he has my hair.
SKATE PARK LEVEN
We’d get the bus to come out here to high school, took about an hour. It was where I made most of my friends, because you had an hour of practising conversation before you got to school, whereas I had mates who lived across the road and they’d go in half-awake and be fucked. Up until fifth year I was a bit of a nerd, didn’t go out and concentrated on my exams but in sixth year I started to panic – but then thought, you know what, life will work itself out.
Something teachers don’t tell you is that even if you pass those exams, you may not get from life what you wanted. I just stopped worrying and caring about it and started swearing at teachers a lot. ‘Stop swearing.’ ‘Really? But we both know it doesn’t upset you and it will take extra effort from me not to swear, so if you really want me to concentrate on this essay, let me call it a dick.’ I don’t skate, we just came here to watch other people do it. I think I tried to go down a ramp on a skateboard once and split my head open. There was literally nothing to do in Leven, which is why we hung out here and moaned about being bored together.
ADAM SMITH THEATRE KIRKCALDY
So, this is where I started acting, at the age of ten. Here I learned that stand-up was what I wanted to do. My first part was in The Pajama Game; I was an extra because I can’t sing, but I did a bunch of summer groups and weekly ones for about seven years. So eventually me and my mate were given the main parts; we were never that good, just confident and we’d always just fuck it up and never learn the lines properly and make each other laugh. The audience loved it but the teacher hated it – but I realised that it was the attention I liked. We used to run a comedy club here, started two years ago and ran for about eight months; this was before my first Edinburgh Festival so I could learn how to talk to audiences, but we had to stop it because even though I never went in it to make money, eventually I was having to pay the comics so that was that. The first show had Kevin Bridges on two days before he did McIntyre. Laughter is the most addictive drug in the world – if I don’t gig for two weeks, I get really snippy and bitchy.
Daniel Sloss: The Joker, Assembly George Square, 623 3030, 6–29 Aug (not 16), 7.35pm, £11.50–£13.50 (£10–£11).