![]() So I just tried to focus on that the entire time. I care about the performance from the comic and the quality of the show. When I watch comedy specials at home, I actually don’t care that much about how the audience are reacting. The people who share a sense of humor with you, whether you’re just doing a show or filming one. You just hope that the right people show up. I think that anything you can do all year round is great. ![]() And while many will watch TV at home for four hours straight, you’re still making a big ask of them with Repertoire. I imagine your audience for each night of filming was there for all of it, but they chose to be there. This team made it ten times easier than it would have been otherwise. With them working behind the scenes, I didn’t have to think about anything else but going on, performing the shows, and having fun while I was performing. On the days we filmed it, I lucked out by getting a really good team who knew how to make shows. I went to comedy festivals everywhere and did those shows, getting them completely cemented into my head. So from January through to September, all I was doing every week was performing those shows and touring around the country. I toured it most of the year beginning in January, then we filmed it in September. Most comics will jump around from venue to venue in a single night, doing shows for just as many hours, but the same routine. You were basically doing a giant show with small breaks. We started filming at like three o’clock in the afternoon and finished at about midnight. Then the next day, we did them all again. It was two days, but we filmed them all twice for safety. If I’m not mistaken, you filmed all of these in a single string of shows on one night, yes? It helped tie them all together completely. While I was doing that, I linked them together more - spotted more points where I could link them together - and then wrote the fourth one as a result of all that work. I needed to relearn them all, figure them all out to get them looking as good as they could be. ![]() The first three, that is, but then I decided it was better to do all of them. I actually was just going to film three of them. Then the more shows I wrote to take to Edinburgh, the more I felt like they belonged together stylistically, and then I decided I was going to film them all at the same time. I was just doing it one show at a time originally. Was there a grand plan for bringing this all together, or were you doing this one show at a time? Repertoire consists of shows you’ve workshopped and performed at Edinburgh and elsewhere for years. Then again, he admits, “however they want to watch it is up to them.” Either way, Acaster explains, it all comes down to the brilliance of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and fan theory videos on YouTube. “If you watched all four straight through in one viewing, then all the things that link the shows together would be a lot more apparent,” he says. Uproxx spoke to Acaster about the trials and tribulations of putting together what amounts to four hours of bingeable stand-up comedy, and whether or not he thinks viewers should watch it all in one go. Acaster spent most of 2017 revising, performing, and perfecting this massive comedy project, which is now available to stream on Netflix as Repertoire. Over time, the “trilogy” of shows he performed across successive festivals - Recognise, Represent, and Reset - were combined into a much larger set piece that included a new fourth show, Recap. “So it won’t surprise you that this first joke is about apricots.” Of course, telling jokes about apricots is not exclusively a British thing, but Acaster managed to wittingly convince Conan‘s mostly American crowd that it was while simultaneously poking fun at himself for doing so.Īcaster is a comedy star over in the U.K., having appeared regularly on popular panel shows like Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats, as well as debuting multiple crowd-pleasing and critically-acclaimed shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the past few years. Wearing a shirt to match his slightly unkempt red hair, the comic embraced his heritage (and thick accent) without a single measure of caution. Last summer, Conan O’Brien introduced his audience to a young British comedian named James Acaster.
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