Oh boy, he was a smart brat

Danny Bhoy. Picture / Greg Bowker

Danny Bhoy might be the biggest act at the Comedy Festival but his parents "don't give a shit", he says. "I could be carried into the living-room on the back of geese with people fanning me with palm leaves, and they'd be like, "Make the tea, Danny'."

Harsh words, but that's how this comedy superstar stays grounded. And you can expect to hear more of Bhoy's family insights and tales of childhood when he performs his witty, observational stand-up this year.

Bhoy has fond memories of growing up in a village in southwest Scotland but it wasn't always an easy existence. The son of an Indian father and a Scottish mother, the Bhoy clan were the odd ones out.

At school, Bhoy resorted to humour.

"You had to. It would have been easy to get worked up otherwise. A lot of it wasn't the kids actually, it was more the parents. They're very, very insular."

Despite a short attention span that led to him spending an entire term in after-school detention, Bhoy went on to university where he studied for a history degree, thinking he'd go into teaching. But then he realised he didn't have the patience - presumably to deal with brats like himself - and took six months off to think about his future.

When his brother announced he was marrying his pregnant girlfriend of three weeks, Bhoy's unlikely calling came. His best man speech, however, did not go down well.

"It was very difficult because our side of the family didn't know their side. I couldn't say, 'Remember the time when Sammy was eight', and I couldn't talk about her. So I did observational stuff, like, 'Have you ever noticed how the shopping trolley ... ? and I was putting down heckles here and there. I barely mentioned them in the whole speech."

Some of the guests still won't talk to him, he says, but it was the reaction of the younger crowd that encouraged him to give stand-up a shot.

After a successful few gigs in the comedy central of Edinburgh, he moved to London, taking on "shitty jobs" so he could do stand-up at night.

"I went through about six bar jobs because every time I got gig I'd just not turn up to work. It's madness because you don't get paid to do comedy for the first two, three years. But rather than make the money on the bar, I'd do the gig."

His breakthrough came when he won an open mike competition in 1999. Within a year he'd moved into the big league, performing at comedy festivals around the world - Singapore, Paris, Belgium. He was the hottest-selling act at last year's New Zealand comedy festival, with a sellout season and extra performances to meet demand.

These days you can barely pick up a newspaper article about Bhoy without reading "heart-throb" or "pin-up" in the first sentence. The festival publicist says that's probably why nearly all of today's interviews are by female journalists.

Bhoy says he'd much rather be known as a comedian, pure and simple. But his good looks haven't hindered his chances to take his talent elsewhere, specifically television.

"I have had quite a lot of offers but I don't like television as a medium. It's very hard to do what I do on TV. I'm quite happy to do this for the rest of my life, touring around. There's nothing better than live comedy."

The royal family might beg to differ. Take Bhoy's opening line at last year's Royal Variety Show, a day after headlines questioning Prince Charles' sexuality made the papers: "I'm looking forward to the line-up at the end when we get to meet Prince Charles. I might go for the handshake. I probably won't bother with a bow."

Not surprisingly, the rest of the gig was a struggle, he laughs. It wouldn't be his last bomb, he says, recalling an incident when he picked on a man in the crowd wearing shades. "I started going, 'Oh look at you inside with your sunglasses. Are you Italian or something? You big fancy man with your slicked-back hair.' Everyone was laughing but him. I went, 'What's wrong?' And he went, 'I'm blind but I'm wishing I was deaf."'

Boom boom.