Shazia Mirza on Kim Noble: he smashes every rule of comedy

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/mar/25/shazia-mirza-kim-noble-comedy-heroes

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Once you’ve seen a Kim Noble show, you’ve seen it. You can’t pretend you didn’t. Memories of that show will be etched in your mind for ever. You will think about Kim while doing the dishes, cleaning the floor and paying your bills.

I first came across him in 2001 at the Edinburgh festival. I’d gone to the box office to buy a ticket to see Ross Noble. The woman gave me a ticket for Noble & Silver, Kim’s double act with Stuart Silver. It must have been fate.

Related: Kim Noble: ‘I haven’t killed anyone, honest’

The show consisted of video footage and wasn’t like the comedy I’d seen before. There was laughter and discomfort, and people were dumbfounded. It was unique: a combination of comedy, visual art and commentary.

I saw him on TV in 2002 in his own series on E4 called Get Off Me – there was more video footage, some showing people who didn’t want to be filmed.

In 2009, I was working with the producer Gary Reich on a sitcom. One night he took us to Soho theatre to watch a new show he had produced and directed: Kim Noble Will Die. It was about Kim’s mental illness and his suicidal thoughts. It was funny. When I laughed, I really, really laughed. It was also disturbing, shocking, frightening, unethical, strange, unorthodox and grotesque. Video footage showed him masturbating, self-harming and giving out his ex-girlfriend’s phone number to the audience to send her abusive messages.

On the last night of the Edinburgh festival in 2014, I went on my own to see You’re Not Alone, Noble’s latest show. As I walked to my seat, he was standing in the aisle naked, wrapped in gaffer tape, with some cheesy 80s music playing. It was a show about loneliness, depression, insanity, his longing to make a connection with people, his relationship with his elderly father, his sexual perversities and his job at B&Q that even B&Q don’t know about. The video footage of him meeting a stranger in a hotel room who he’d met online is shockingly funny.

There are parts that are disgustingly awkward. He excretes inside a church. Why? Let me tell you, if I did that inside a mosque, filmed it and put it in a comedy show, I would not be writing this now.

Noble once said: “When you go a bit loopy, you don’t give a shit.” I’ll never forget the faces of the audience walking out of that show. No one was talking and everyone looked numb.

It is fashionable in our times to self-expose. There’s a compulsion to record and exhibit every minute detail of your life for the entertainment and voyeurism of others. Self-obsessed narcissistic people are 10 a penny, but they are rarely interesting and seldom have anything to say or do.

People have a preconceived idea of what funny is, and because things are labelled “comedy”, they have to be a certain way. Noble smashes all those rules. He makes me ask: What is too much? What is too far? What is comedy for? Are you offended? Do I care?

I have boundaries. I am reserved and repressed. I even care about what people I don’t even know think of me. I admire Kim Noble because he has no boundaries. When you have no boundaries, you are free. And when you are free, you are yourself and you can be great. I hope to reach a point one day when I am as free as he is.

• Shazia Mirza will be performing at the We Love Immigration benefit at Bloomsbury theatre, London. Box office: 020-3108 1000. She is also on tour.