Returning to the Edinburgh Fringe with a new stand-up hour, Bella Hull joins Pepper&Salt for a chat about her show ‘Piggie’, the Internet and its impact on us and comedy.
How would you summarise your show?
Piggie is a show about appetites, self-control, about bonding with other people who have little self-control and the things that we can learn from that. It’s an exploration into like lot of the things I’ve always been a little bit embarrassed about and a lot of the habits I’ve been quite embarrassed about that are not bad enough to be cool. It’s not like a drug addiction or whatever, they’re just like all of these problems that I have that are genuine problems in my life, but Bob Dylan doesn’t have a song about them. The show is just trying to talk and do material about all of them and hopefully make other people feel better as a result.
How did you achieve this level of self-confidence where you can comfortably speak about these personal matters onstage?
It was quite a long process. I definitely wasn’t born with confidence built-in; it’s been something that I’ve just earned eventually. I had such crazy performance anxiety when I first started doing stand-up and I really wanted to be able to be confident onstage, so I kept gigging and gigging and gigging. I guess the confidence to talk about these things that I’m talking about now, stuff about food and whatever is because I feel like I’ve got some distance and understanding from it. I think when you get distance from an issue you no longer feel kind of ashamed about it, you feel able to do a post-mortem. So, I think time is probably one of the factors that’s contributed to that as well.
If you had to place the Internet on an alignment chart, where would you place it?
I think the Internet is so broad now that it is like, if that alignment chart was a waffle, then the Internet is just syrup that’s been poured over every single thing. There are so many online communities that are really sweet and really innocent and everyone on them means really well, and then there are some communities that are evil and the source of everything that’s wrong with the world, so it depends where you go. It depends on the website probably.
I mean, I grew up with the Internet and I remember watching my first YouTube video in like 2006 when I was like 8 years old, and the only thing that was being put on the Internet, on YouTube at that point was like singing pets and cats; it was just cat videos and really early-level memes, and stuff like that. And that was a slightly innocent thing, but now so many areas of the Internet are just like this hellish cesspit of like drudgery and it’s not ideal. But I’m a chronically online person, so it’s hard to make these distinctions, I guess.
It’s really hard to not be one in this day and age.
It’s really hard, and it’s where all the good stuff is. I also think our brains– my brain at least – have been so perma-fried by the dopamine, whatever the Internet has given me, I’m just addicted to it. My Tik Tok usage is absolutely shameful, it’s so bad. I’ve had so many times where I’ve just had to cut it out for a couple of months. It’s scary; they have control and they’re taking over the world, and it’s too late. You see these adverts every now and again, don’t you about like our attention is the one currency that everyone wants, and they’re harvesting our attention in order to control us, and it all sounds very conspiracy theory in the way that you think it’s rubbish. My attention span personally has been deeply affected by Tik Tok, so having an awareness of the fact that it can do that to you is a good thing.
What was the writing process for this show like?
It’s quite boring really, I just sit down at a laptop and do it. I mean, sometimes it doesn’t really come to me and sometimes a lot of thoughts come to me when I’m on walks. I go on lots of walks, and I think that’s the main way I come up with stuff. But then a lot of the stuff that I write down on my laptop is really bad and the only way I can get it better is by taking it to a gig. I would love so much to be able to not gig and just stay at home and write and write and write and write and drink tea and be with my cats and not go outside into the world until the show is finished, but with stand-up comedy, you just can’t do that. You have to go out and do the gigs and you have to do the painful saying something and knowing it’s not right and then hearing the audience agree with you, and then taking that away and rethinking it and reframing it and re-writing it. It’s kind of a mixture of things but the main realisations I make about my writing, and the main punchlines I write are onstage. My best punchlines ever have occurred to me literally a millisecond before I say them. I don’t think there’s any replicate for the adrenaline that being onstage gives you, like it does something to your brain, and being in that fight or flight produces the funny lines.
How much of an impact has the Internet had on comedy?
I think the Internet has had the most significant impact on comedy. I think it absolutely can’t be understated. If you just look at even the last 5 or 6 years – and I know that it’s kind of related to the cost-of-living crisis – but so many TV shows have been decommissioned, new things aren’t really being made anymore. When I was growing up, everybody watched TV and everybody watched the same TV shows, and I would come into school and everybody would’ve watched the X Factor, everybody knew who was on it, everybody knew the finalists, everybody had opinions, and there was this homogeny of like culture, and everybody was consuming the same thing. The Internet has disrupted that and now there is very little homogeny. Everybody knows who the Kardashians are or these huge celebrities, but in terms of everyone’s algorithm is feeding them slightly different things, and so it’s not the case where you can go on TV and everybody in the country is watching that TV show and then everybody knows who you are. You really have to build your audience in reverse now. I think before it was like you went on a massive TV show, you were shown to everyone, and then the people that liked you stuck with you, whereas now you’re shown to nobody and you have to find those people, so it’s sort of a totally opposite direction if that makes sense. And in terms of comedy, it just means in a way that there’s so much more room now for loads of different styles of comedy, different genres, types, tones and styles. There are so many more comedians now that everybody can find somebody that they like. In a way the consumers are having a better time finding stuff that they like but maybe the comedian is having a worse time because it’s not like you can just like go on a TV show and then buy a house. It’s a much more uphill battle now, but it’s kind of worth it in a way because every gig or every viral video you find more people that you can connect with and you’re building it slowly from there.
In Shakespeare, the role of the fool and the king are very distinct, with the idea that a fool can’t be a king and a king can’t be a fool. How do you think this applies to the modern context?
I think those lines are definitely more blurred now. I think that can be a good thing or a bad thing because before there were very distinct power structures and now there is more of an instinct for people to deconstruct those power structures. So, I think the people that are like the ‘fools’ or whatever have more confidence speaking truth to power and that’s kind of what the Fool is looking to do. You have a lot of comedians that will be doing comedy and it’s very funny, but there’s also some kind of commentary there underneath and I think that was something that has previously been quite suppressed in a lot of ways, at least if you look back to Shakespeare. The Fool was a hired person to come and entertain people in power and then leave, whereas now, the comedian has power and big comedians are kind of like kings. It’s all changing, and I still think that it’s really important to have those boundaries. There are lots of comedians that advertise comedy shows and then the whole thing is they’re not the fool in any way and they’re punching down or everybody else is the fool apart from them. And there’s definitely room for that as comedy, but I think my favourite comedy is when people are idiots and acknowledge their idiocy and that’s the comedy that I like watching the most. I don’t like watching comedy where I feel told off. Those lines are definitely blurred now, but what that means is the King has less power and can kind of only be a good thing. Power is a much more transferable thing now.
By Katerina Partolina Schwartz
Photo Credit: The Other Richard
Pepper & Salt 
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