Pranks have had the teeth taken out of them by YouTubers: comic Simon Brodkin

British comedian Simon Brodkin once delivered a set in a family pizza joint. “You can imagine it wasn’t a top-level show. People are eating their pizzas, and I’m competing against buffalo mozzarella. I had no chance. My manager said to me afterwards: ‘Don’t give up.’ It was one of those great moments where thought: I wasn’t f–ing intending to until you said that.”

It could be an anecdote from any jobbing stand-up’s early days, but what sets this memory apart is unique: the pizza joint gig came long after Brodkin had made himself a staple of the UK comedy world. He’d been a regular on British telly since the early 2000s and by 2009 had his own BBC series. And here he was, trying to draw people’s attention away from their sloppy guiseppe slice at a suburban Pizza Express.

This wasn’t a fall from grace. Some comics have to reinvent themselves after a disaster of their own making, while others simply fail to adapt to the times. Brodkin, conversely, has deliberately reinvented himself on multiple occasions, veering across lanes like a lorry driven by a rabid badger.

It began when he left a respectable career as a doctor to try out character comedy. His heroes were Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge, Ricky Gervais as David Brent, Sacha Baron Cohen doing Ali G and Borat. “Characters were something that just came completely naturally to me,” he says. “If you’d said to me then, ‘Go and be yourself,’ I would’ve been like, ‘Absolutely not.’ I didn’t feel comfortable. I didn’t want it.”

His big hitter was Lee Nelson, an irrepressibly upbeat deadbeat whose popular success earned Brodkin three seasons on the BBC with Lee Nelson’s Well Good Show. Other characters included his dopey soccer player Jason Bent, and with these and others Brodkin became a familiar face for British comedy lovers.

Then he switched tracks. He began pulling high-profile pranks on public figures. Brodkin prefers “stunts”. “Pranks have had the teeth taken out of them by YouTubers, right? ‘Pranks’ is my son whipping my trousers down at a family function.”

Brodkin’s “stunts” included showering money on FIFA president Sepp Blatter while the organisation was being investigated for corruption, delivering swastika-emblazoned golf balls to Donald Trump during the opening of one of his courses, and handing Theresa May her marching orders during a press conference.

“That was just where my comedy mind was at, thinking wouldn’t it be funny if you have these moments in the real world interacting with comedy? With something like the Sepp Blatter thing when I threw all the money, every photograph, every film, none of that’s me. I was the idiot who wasn’t filming it. I was the one who didn’t have any rights to it. I was just, ‘This is going to be a funny moment’.”

You might think these high-stakes moments would have taken more guts than a stand-up gig, but again they were carried out in character. If anything went wrong, it would be the character who had to foot the bill; Simon Brodkin was nowhere in the vicinity.

The one exception was Theresa May. “I thought that if you got close enough to the prime minister of the United Kingdom that you’d get your head blown off or something, or certainly the dots would appear from the sniper rifles, or you’d get tasered at the very least.”

There’s something very English about the scene, though, as a meekly attired government aide (Brodkin) interrupts May to hand her a P45, the notice that informs a UK worker that they’ve lost their job. “I was thinking there may be a rule whereby you touch her, you go down. But I gave it to her and actually, instead of anything happening to me, the security gently lowered me back down.”

From character comic to stunt comedy, Brodkin finally made his biggest leap. A few years ago he began to note something new creeping into his live performances as Lee Nelson. “I was doing a lot of crowd work and I was like, ‘I think that might be me more than Lee.’ There was this itch that I felt I needed to scratch.”

Performing as Simon Brodkin, he says, has been the biggest challenge he’s ever faced. “I thought my medical finals were hard. I had to reset because it was completely alien. How do I even hold the microphone? How do I even talk as myself? What do I sound like? What do I talk about?”

Which is how he found himself at Pizza Express. He’d previously never experienced fear before performing “because I was always hiding behind the character. But equally, when I came off stage I never felt, ‘Yeah!’ I was just like, ‘Done. Move on’,” he explains. “It was only when I started doing stand-up as myself that it was like, ‘Oh, shit, it’s really my balls on the line here.’ People would see me and go, ‘You’re the guy off the telly, right? You must be great.’ And then I would be like an open-mic guy who just didn’t have a clue. Shit, what do I do with the mic cable? Ah!”

Heckling took on a whole new aspect when it was Brodkin in the firing line. “Lee was great at dealing with heckles. Lee was made for giving that guy in the front row some basic kind of abuse. That doesn’t seem to be that funny any more because it’s coming from me. It was really weird to have to rewire myself.”

Brodkin says that his professional journey has mirrored his personal one. “I think most people who get into comedy, there’s got to be something pretty f—ing wrong with them. What am I doing? Literally, the most needy thing in the world,” he says. “It’s not only getting laughter, but it’s getting laughter and then 10 seconds later getting laughter, and then another gig and another gig.”

Performing as himself, he says, is a process of becoming comfortable with himself. “We all put on a front, a face to do this. I’m telling my kids, sometimes struggling and working out how to be with people is totally natural. I’m telling them it took me years and years and years to get to the stage of feeling comfortable and relaxed in my own skin.”

It pays off, too. Videos of Brodkin’s character comedy still hold up, but more recent work like his special Screwed Up sees him diving deeper into the possibilities stand-up can offer. “When you’re really comfortable within yourself and really comfortable with the people around you, whether that’s around the dinner table or in the theatre, you can talk about more and more interesting things.”

Simon Brodkin is at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, on June 26 and The National Theatre, Melbourne, on July 3.