Jack Whitehall and Luke McQueen were an unstoppable partnership: young, hungry and poised to conquer the world of live comedy. At least until Whitehall’s father muscled in and steered his son away to become his own comedy partner. Left out on a limb, McQueen turned his pain into a defiant, messy and very funny show. Double Act finds him raging bitterly against Whitehall’s betrayal and taking stock of his own failures.
That’s the conceit anyway. But nothing is ever what it seems with this 30-year-old comedian. Doubts about the veracity of Double Act were confirmed near the end of its Edinburgh run when Whitehall himself dropped in unannounced. McQueen, standing there in his pants, came clean: “It was originally going to be about Jason Manford,” he admitted to Whitehall. “But he was too likable.”
Even the interview process is liable to be hijacked. When I turn up at the Invisible Dot club in north London, the seating area has been removed to make space for a table laid with cutlery, wineglasses and plates. McQueen, a dead ringer for a young Alfred Molina, draws me to one side and explains the slight change of plan: he needs to combine our interview with an appointment he has with a recruitment agency. “Is that going to be OK?” he asks. “I need the money and I’m hoping they’ll find me some work. I thought you could take it in turns asking me questions with Karsten.” He gestures to a middle-aged Danish man with spiky grey hair and a goatee, who gives a little wave.
As with his comedy, McQueen has cleverly set the rules from the outset: he’s taken control before I’ve even had a chance to sit down. For the next hour, I’m torn between the sensation that I am the solitary audience member in a show staged for my benefit, and that I’m the latest of McQueen’s straight-men in the ongoing comedy routine of his life. This, after all, is the man whose web series #GetSarahBack showed him shaving his head in the middle of a packed ice-rink and peeing himself in front of a crowd of onlookers in Covent Garden, all in the hope of winning over the girlfriend to whom he had been unfaithful. For another series, #FindMyAudience, he filled a 175-capacity venue on the pretext that Frankie Boyle would be performing. He wasn’t, and the show ended soon after when the outraged audience stormed out, kicking over McQueen’s collecting bucket.
To appear to be begging for work in front of a journalist merely continues this shtick. (“You don’t pay cash in hand?” he asks Karsten. “Well, can you just give me some cash then?”) Not that it isn’t amusing. He gently reprimands his interviewer when he tries to pose two successive questions (“Karsten, please, you’ve had your go”). And when Karsten asks what experience McQueen has in hospitality, he gives an answer that would make David Brent cringe: “One time I had to show someone to their room and they said ‘Can I have a coffee?’ and I said ‘There’s actually coffees in the room’ and they said ‘Can I get a cappuccino?’ and I had to sort that out for them.” Silence. He turns to me and flashes his faintly gormless, eager-to-please smile.
After two previous live sets about his own humiliation (including last year’s Now That’s What I Call Luke McQueen, in which he pleaded aggressively with the audience for the love his father never gave him), he says Double Act could be the last time he debases himself on-stage. “The reason I’m still doing it is that I really am struggling. It’s a tough industry. My instinct was to leave the failure stuff behind after last year but you think, ‘Have enough people seen it?’” I ask what it feels like to stand there night after night in his shabby underwear. “Liberating,” he says. “If you’re willing to look stupid, the performance tends to be better.” He used to be part of a sketch group, the Gadabouts, but felt ashamed gunning for cheap laughs. “After that, I said to myself that I wouldn’t do material I was embarrassed about. Ironically I now do really embarrassing things – but I’m proud of them.”
On stage, he can be a fearsome presence; he harangues the audience and seems, in his pink boiler-suit, like a monstrously overgrown baby that has burst free of its play-pen. In his civvies, he is amiable, and much tickled by the uncertainty he creates. “I had friends thinking that #GetSarahBack was real. I’m like, ‘But you know me! You know I haven’t been out with anyone called Sarah…’” (Whether he really has a third nipple, as seen on an episode of Embarrassing Bodies, is anyone’s guess.) As with the case of Joaquin Phoenix faking a two-year nervous breakdown, though, the fun is in the mischief and the ambiguity. Before I leave, McQueen says gently: “Maybe don’t give too much away.” And I haven’t. Rather touchingly, it’s probably the first glimpse of the real Luke McQueen that I’ve had all afternoon.
- Luke McQueen’s Double Act is at the Invisible Dot, London, 19-24 October. Box office: 020-7424 8918.
