Your quintessential American comic in Britain, Reginald D. Hunter might now be part of the furniture on the circuit, but furniture isn’t always comfortable. With that in mind, he’s off on a spring tour whose title is once again profane, if more printable than some of his old efforts, and he waxed philosophical about it to Rhys James.

Talk us through the name of your latest tour, The Man Who Could See Through Shit, and what you set out to do with the show.

Reginald D. Hunter: My mother used to say, “it’s easy to see through shit; the hard part is pretending that you haven’t.” And so my show is about going into rookie-old-man-hood, and the older I get the more I see through shit. And the harder it is to pretend that I haven’t.

Any specific topics that you’re looking forward to seeing through?

Reginald D. Hunter: To be honest, we’ve done half the tour, and we took a long Christmas break. I know that I was hitting on some serious and dangerous topics, but I can’t remember exactly what they were because I haven’t thought about it in a while. And I also know that during this break, I have a lot of other new thoughts and I know that they are dangerous too, and plus when I took a break from this, everything with Israel hadn’t kicked off so I’m probably going to have to say something about that. I have thought about five or six new jokes that I found utterly hilarious. I don’t know if they have anything to do with the current theme with the show, but they’re gonna get heard. When you get some new ones and they make you laugh, you can’t wait to tell them. So I’ll find a way to justify them.

I was listening to a conversation you had with Rob Brydon on his podcast where you were talking about the struggle of repeating the same material over and over while touring. Have you found many ways to keep the shows feel alive and fresh – for the audience and for yourself?

Reginald D. Hunter: It’s not a technique, it’s just you have to let the thing lead. What I mean by that is, the show you start out with is completely different to the show you end up with – but in between that time, you start out with the bare bones of the show, and then a third of the way through it becomes a thing, it becomes its own force. But then, about halfway through, you get bored with what you’re saying even though it’s getting you big laughs every night. And when you get bored for long periods of time, your jokes and your thoughts start to get just a little bit twisted. And then you start putting in the twisted jokes. And then by that time not only do you have a new, completely different show to what you started with, but you have probably the first 20 or 25 minutes of your next new show.

You started doing test shows for this tour at Edinburgh Fringe – what was that process like for you?

Reginald D. Hunter: Oh, man, I was awful. The first three were just totally awful. On the second show, I had done another joke that went over lukewarm. And from the back, I heard this guy – I can tell my old, long-term fans – go, “oh, Reggie”. You should do that in your head, you know? You don’t want your long-term fans going, “oh, Reggie”. I mean, you see your heroes, the personalities you like, you see them stay in the game for too long. But with social media and fans being able to talk to you whenever they want I don’t have to pay nobody to keep me grounded. Lots of people wanting to do that job for free!

I think you’ve never been afraid to push buttons with the names of your shows a little bit, this one included. So how does this tour differ from previous ones you’ve done?

Reginald D. Hunter: Ever since coming out of the first lockdown, I became more dedicated to making the audience laugh. Like all the years before I was wanting to make them laugh, and then think about this; feel or make a point about this. But I thought the world had had enough of its own heaviness without me adding to it. So I went to my COVID sets just trying to keep people laughing. But now I kind of feel like that time has passed. Time to bring the pressure again.

Audiences can sometimes think that touring is this exciting and enjoyable thing you get to do but that’s not always be the case for some. So I was wondering what the worst thing about touring is for you personally?

Reginald D. Hunter: Well, one of the things just tough about touring is that the further north you go in Britain, the harder it is to find a vegetable after 8pm. Another thing, when you come offstage on the road, if you had your greatest gig in the world or you had your worst ever, or you made some grand discovery, you are alone. You don’t have anybody to really share a victory with or to really bitch with. You have to carry that with you. And if you don’t have a technique to get into sleep, that will keep you up all night.

I think the worst thing about touring is, it’s time you don’t get to see your friends. Your friends in real life, but even my friends in the comedy world, because usually they’re touring, too. When I was a comedian working on the circuit, it was kind of like a party every night, because you’re part of the bill, and my graduating comedy class had the Frankie Boyles and Jimmy Carrs, and so we’d see each other every couple of weeks in Glasgow or Leicester or somewhere. But the higher we go in our careers, when you do comedy, you have to do it by yourself, alone.

So you miss that community?

Reginald D. Hunter: Yeah, you don’t get to sit off to the side with another comedian getting pissed, watching the other comedian and making fun of him. When he comes off and everybody takes their turn. I miss the camaraderie of the circuit – that’s nobody’s fault, that’s just getting older, life changes. All my rowdy friends have settled down, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, I do miss that.

What would you say is the best thing about touring, then?

Reginald D. Hunter: No matter how hopeful you are, how tired you are, you still think you have yet to write your best joke, to say your best line. And every time, tonight has a chance to be the night. I’ve got a lot of life left – I don’t feel bad if I feel like I haven’t done or said my best. It’s like William Conrad once said at the end of The Fugitive, the TV series, “a phantom that can be seen once can be seen again”.

You’ve been living and working in the UK for nearly three decades now, and with the humour between the States and the UK being quite different, what is it about your work that has worked for UK audiences?

Reginald D. Hunter: I think partly the outside influence. I grew up in America and I love America, but I always grew up feeling like an outsider in my own home. Then I came to London, the international city full of outsiders. I’m in a place that feels kind of natural to me. The whole aspect of feeling like an outsider, unless you are in the 1% of British society. The rest of us have a pretty good idea of what the outsider feeling feels like. It’s something that’s easy for people to relate to.

I happened to come along comedically at a time where white British audiences were getting tired of seeing white middle-class men make jokes: they were just glad to see me. That worked to my advantage. Plus I like to think I’m not a typical American, in that I like things that are understated; nuance. And I’m not loud, like my American brothers and sisters can be. Americans pride themselves on how in your face they are, how direct, whereas British people pride themselves on how much they didn’t say but still managed to get the point across. I think there’s a happy medium between the two.

But sometimes I look at celebrities and politicians and athletes in America, and I just wish they had a little bit of that sort of linguistic restraint. It’s just, I think every country has its stupid people. But I think y’alls stupid people are better than my stupid people.

Do you think that your comedy style has changed over the span of your career?

Reginald D. Hunter: Ah, yes, I mean, it would have happened. It would have had to. I don’t really watch myself – I find doing so excruciating – but I know that many of the things I believed 15 or 10 years ago, I don’t believe anymore. The things that I was furious about 15 years ago I don’t give a fuck about now. I’m angry about different things now.

I also like to believe that I understand a little bit better how the world really works. So much of my youthful bitching was basically, “Well, that’s not fair”. I’m kind of over that part. Kinda.

So in comedy, is there need for space to grow and adapt?

Reginald D. Hunter: I want to remain interesting, and to remain interesting, you have to remain interested. Sometimes it’s hard to want to stay interested, with the world and how things are, but standup comedy requires a sort of awareness of the space that it is in, and the times. It’s one of the reasons why, put up against music and films and art, it doesn’t age well.

It’s the days coming for us that we dread, you know, and one of the things I’ve always dreaded coming is seeing, in an advanced age, things and positions that I publicly held firmly in my youth – or my thirties and forties – and going “oh God, I was wrong.” My father once told me, “A man who is 65 may be different to who he was at 25 but you still have to answer for him”. And so I know that someday I’m going to have to answer for some of the things I said… but I’m hoping that some of the things I said that I got right will cut me a little slack.

I guess that comes with the game as well. Being in comedy, you’ve just gotta roll with the punches of how sometimes things change.

Reginald D. Hunter: Everything is changing, and it seems at a faster rate than ever before. Especially in standup. There’s a shift happening – and most standup comedians, we can’t see the shift. We can feel it, but we can’t quite track it because we’re in the middle of it. And you see all of us trying to fight through all the new narratives, all the new sensibilities, trying to avoid all the traps and still trying to somehow remain funny. We’ll figure it out. And when we do, we’re gonna be a motherfucker when we do.

But right now, we’re still punching in the dark and still testing stuff and just because, you know, all of a sudden, it’s like a video game where like, if you step in the wrong room, you’ll get zapped like, you say the wrong thing and you get zapped!

Reginald D. Hunter, Savoy Theatre, Monmouth, Sat 16 Mar; Glee Club, Cardiff Bay, Sun 17.

Tickets: £24. Info: here

words RHYS JAMES