At first glance, a jaunt in the army isn’t the most obvious prerequisite to a career in comedy. A witty retort seems more likely to land you in the stockade than The Comedy Store, yet this is precisely the trajectory that Darby has followed after leaving school and finding himself trained as a signaller in the New Zealand Army. His soldiering days have left him in good stead, and when the inevitable monster apocalypse rolls around, he feels fairly confident.
“I reckon I’d do pretty well. I’ve got the survival skills from my military training, I can do Morse code, I’m a father so I know what it’s like to nurture and how to protect people. I’m physically fit, and I can act so I can get behind enemy lines, I can blend in with the zombies or become some 50-foot robot. I might struggle with the height, but then I’m a good mime artist. I was the last of the Morse coders in my army, and I really think they should bring it back. I’ve always said that even if you’re crushed under rubble, if you can at least tap you can communicate.”
Darby’s formative days as a soldier and then journalism student have provided ample material for his stand-up career, and both were instrumental in determining that comedy was to be the unlikely path he would try to pursue. It is easy to imagine Darby as the large, humorously-shaped fish in a small bowl given the paucity of opportunities for fledgling comics in New Zealand then.
“I was in the army for about four years before realising it wasn’t what I should be doing. I went to university, and found myself on stage as part of a comedy club that got together once a week to write sketches. In New Zealand there really wasn’t any stand-up happening at that time. One comedy club had opened in Auckland, with maybe three or four stand-ups. It really wasn’t a career, but then I found myself in a right-place-right-time moment. I started a duo with my friend Grant, we were called Rhysently Granted, which we thought was pretty funny. We did musical stuff, wanky sketches, that kind of thing. It was always just more of a hobby, and then gradually it turned into a proper job. Back in those days you only had that one comedy club and maybe a couple of bars that would do something once a month, and I was just performing pretty much in front of the same people. They’d come along on a Thursday and say, ‘Oi mate, I saw you say that on Tuesday’, I hit the ceiling there pretty quickly.”
As seems the staple of most Australasian performers, the allure of international success saw Darby relocate abroad in order to hone his craft in an environment that had long been a source of inspiration. Having already begun developing the style of performance that would characterise his comedy – highly physical, story-based humour – a move to the UK to follow in the footsteps of his idols made perfect sense.
“There are so many different levels and aspects and genres of stand-up. For me, I was very obsessed with British sketch comedy, in particular Monty Python. I imagined myself in their shoes, or wanting to be like them when I grew up. From the start that silly, surreal aspect of humour, the ridiculousness, I brought into my act. I really wanted to be in a sketch troupe, but didn’t really have anyone else so I just ended up playing all of the roles. My stand-up became kind of sketch-pieces, where I’d just play all of these different characters, so that’s where the physicality came into it, that’s how my stand-up was created. I didn’t start out saying, ‘Right! I’m going to be a physical comedian!’ I really just ended up moving around the stage quite a bit because I wanted to be all of these different people at once.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
