Vittorio Angelone

I hear you are a comedian and a musician?

I was a musician, yes. I wouldn't dare claim it now.

Were you interested in music, prior to comedy?

I think of it more like music was just something that I did when I was younger. Like we did a little test in primary school when I was like seven of musical aptitude, and the people who did well on the test were offered music lessons. So I started playing the violin.

Oh so it was less that you were passionate about music, but more circumstantial?

Well my older brother played the violin and we were both somewhat musical. My parents don't really play instruments, but I'd say they're both musical. When I was looking at universities, I was like reasonably good academically, so my friend was like, “Oh, you should go to music college. You're good at percussion and it's all just based on the audition so you don't need any grades.” So I went and did that. About halfway through, I started doing stand up, and it was all gotten a bit out of hand.

That is really interesting, feels like the world was pushing you to music, but once you found comedy, you become obsessed?

Not obsessed, but I loved stand up when I was a teenager. I wasn't going to see music gigs, especially not orchestral ones, which is the type of stuff that I was playing. I was going to watch stand up.

Whilst at school did you see comedy as a career?

I just enjoyed it and then thought I would give it a go. For the first year, I was just hosting shows at the students’ union at my university. I would go to the local open mic, and then people I thought were good, I would invite them to come perform at the university. After a year of hosting my own shows, then I started doing open mics. I would say it was at that point, just after I started doing open mics myself, I thought I could have a bit of a go with this. Naivety and ignorance is a complete superpower with any creative pursuit in particular.

True, sometimes it is good not to know the rules. How did you balance your music work and this fledgling comedic endeavour?

I was performing orchestral gigs. A lot of people will do like peripatetic teaching during the day. So you like teach one on one lessons or group lessons on your instrument, and then in the evenings you'll do your music gigs. I would then start to do unpaid open mic comedy in the evening. Gradually I’d drop a day of teaching here and there. I wanted to give it a go because it interested me.

What made you decide to move completely into comedy?

Do want the honest but arrogant answer?

Definitely. I would prefer that one.

There was a point where I went, I think I can be one of the best in the world at this.

That's very cool [laughs] As we mentioned earlier, there needs to be that compete confidence to do a job like yours.

And you know what? I never had that with percussion. Do you ever hear stories of people who played sport to a certain level?

Yeah?

So I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, like it's a crazy good music college. I was meeting people who were just ridiculous. I could have been a professional percussionist, but I was never going to be one of the best at it.

Seems like all the signs were pointing you in one direction.

It’s easy to say in hindsight, but things went very well for me quite quickly. I was very lucky in that sense. And look, I worked very hard, but I managed to build social media following and have a social media following that, bought tickets to see me, which is like a different thing. I started posting videos and doing stand up five, or six times a week. It was my whole life, I was really sort of blinkered, and my girlfriend finally asked me how long I thought it'll take to sort of work out.

Like a deadline?

It truly wasn't a deadline. She's always been super supportive because we got together basically when I started doing stuff, and she was coming to the worst open mics in the world. Oh my god, there are shows where you have to bring an audience member to get stage time, and she was that audience member.

That's so funny. I've never heard of that.

I remember there was one particular night, where after the show, these two open mic comedians were having an argument about who had the worst relationship with their dad, and who was on more mental health medication. My girlfriend grabbed me by the arm and went, “I'm going to need you to get good at this. I don't want to be here anymore.”

Fair enough!

That was a good motivating factor. I was very lucky in that like probably two years after that, I managed to go full time at comedy. It’s really sort of spiralled upwards since then, and there's still a lot of hard work going on.

How do you how do you translate comedy between stage and online?

I write this stuff for the stage and that's it. It's that thing where musicians really want to play their new stuff when they're on tour, but the audience want to hear the old stuff. However with comedians, it's the exact opposite.

That's a good point. You've already heard it, so you know the punchline.

It just doesn't work. I'm currently touring a show, so none of that stuff will be online. I will post online topical stuff that's specific to now. I also self-produced and filmed two specials, and so have two hours of material that I can like chop up and put out there. The rest is that sort of crowd work stuff, podcast clips and all the classics.

"Naivety and ignorance is a complete superpower."

Even on tour, are you always writing to keep things moving?

I'm sort of always writing. it's just like a shitty little note in my phone, like example every fucking billboard in LA is for a lawyer.

[laughs] That is true.

It’s weird as fuck.

I always wondered if Americans drive by and see a picture of a boxing lawyer, and honestly think that is the guy for my legal needs.

There are so many! One hates to take inspiration from Woody Allen at the best of times, but apparently what he did when he was writing a film, as he wouldn't try and write a film, he would make little notes and think like, “Oh that would be an interesting scene.” Or that'd be an interesting moment on little scraps of paper, and then he'd go to this drawer, and then he would take the drawer out and empty it on his desk. He’d just have all these moments to make this into a show. I think I'm the same. I like to write with absolutely no intention on what the overall show is going to be about, because my shows are quite themed and narrative.

That makes sense for me, as my brain has always got many things going on. I think that's the best way for my brain to work is to catch the things when they're there, and then sort it out later.

Yeah, and I think some people assume that because my shows are sort of themed, that I sit down and write a show about like what it is to be Irish in England. It's just more about what do I happen to be sort of unconsciously interested with. There's no way I would have sat down two years ago and thought my next show is going to be about Palestine and The Troubles. If I thought that, that's what I was aiming towards that like, yeah, there's no way I would have ended up where I'm at.

What do you think about Americans being quite obsessed by Irishness?

We're very trendy at the minute.

You are very on trend. Do you ever get annoyed by there being such a focus on you being Irish?

What's funny is like in Ireland, I'm the Italian person. I'm very averse to anything defining me entirely, but like living in London, it's so exciting to feel tapped into sort of an Irish creative explosion. I'm hanging out with actors, writers and musicians and it's cool. We're part of a broader wave and feeling the context within and which there's a bit in my new show about that comedy isn’t often viewed as an art form, but I think it really, really is. I'm sort of like trying to wave the flag for Irish comedy amongst all these articles about like Irish actors and Irish musicians.

Yeah they are a pretty good bunch. Now you are on tour, do you have to change your comedy for every audience?

In New York, there's just some stuff that needs like contextualised. I had an interesting thing happen recently where I've slightly fallen out with an Irish journalist who wrote about me like this.

Oh, really?

I think she was really trying to compliment me, and thought she was writing a really nice article about my show. I found it very frustrating because she was saying Vittorio doesn't care if you don't get the references. I was like, well, that's really frustrating that it’s in a big newspaper in Ireland because it could stop people from buying tickets. So I did a post on Instagram, sort of making fun of the idea that you couldn't possibly understand my show if you weren't from West Belfast. And I'm not even from West Belfast.

Did she feel it was in-joke-y?

I guess there's specific Belfast stuff. I wrote the show in London and I previewed it all around the UK and did it at the Edinburgh Fringe. There's points where I sort of break out and over explained to a Belfast audience to make sure that if anybody in the room isn't from Belfast, they're being looped in. She was frustrated by me making fun of her article and she thinks I'm like a dickhead, which is like, fine. The number of comedians that I've watched from America perform in London and be like, “Dum de dum de dum de dum de dum Arby’s." And I don't know what that is, but from context I under the overall culture.

I guess she was giving you a backhanded compliment?

She was saying people are sending me angry messages. And I'm like, “Well you wrote about me?”

For better, or for worse, I feel like sometimes people forget that everything online is public, and if you say something, you will get a response. Some seem quite surprised by the result.

I just get what she was trying to say. I appreciate what she was trying to say, but I just don't think it came across perfectly.

The thing is it’s like Joyce… wait am I about to quote Joyce in an interview? So sick. I think James Joyce said that like the relatable is in the specific. So where you might not understand what I'm saying or the feeling of growing up after a war in your country and how I'm trying to define myself, or how my generation is trying to define myself after a war, you'll understand the struggle for your own identity and figuring out who you are. I can talk broadly about like, what's hard to figure out who you are, but the best way to do that, and the way that I find resonates the deepest is if I am very specific to my experience, then people can sort of apply their own experience on top of it.

I think that's why comedy is so good is because you can make things that are bad, relatable, and connectable. People feel a bit less alone.

I’ve forgotten who this quote is, but it's a good quote. Somebody asked someone a historian in the 2000s, do you think the French Civil War was positive or negative for France, and he said it's too soon to tell. I'm sort of applying that to everything I do.

Well with your current experience, do you think you will break into the US market? Do they get you?

What's interesting is we are losing that idea of having to leave your own country and then you go to try and break America. But like, I have more Instagram followers in the US than I do in the UK. They might be more spread out and it's a much bigger country, but sort of statistically I've got more.

I do think your comedy would work very well here.

I think it's stylistic. I can sell more tickets in London than I can in LA, by like 30 times or whatever. It's not square one, I think like probably 15, 20 years ago, you could be the biggest person in like London, Dublin or Belfast, but then you would go to New York and be doing open mics. As much as Instagram following is probably bad for comedy, the one thing people do say about the LA comedy scene is if you have a lot of Instagram followers, promoters will be like, cool, come do our show. So that's like helpful. So I do feel like you sort of start a rung up.

I guess because everything's international now.

There's places I can sell fuck all tickets, like my LA show sold out, it's pretty intimate venue, but that's still exciting that it's sold out. And then my New York show is sold out and it's a small theatre, which is fucking crazy, but like Nashville sold fuck all. But am I excited to go play Nashville to like 40 people? That rocks. I know comedians who live in London, but like the majority of their Instagram following is in India. Nightmare, because to go sell a maximum number of tickets, you have to go halfway across the world. I think doing more stuff in America is a focus at the minute, but I feel like I've started.

Do you have to change your sets for the size of the audience?

No, maybe the pacing a little bit, and then I think to 3500 people, there's certain jokes where you can't paint yourself as as much of an underdog. My friend was talking about billionaires and how everybody complains about billionaires. Mind you he's a very, very successful comedian. I saw him do a work in progress version of this show, and we were doing like little notes afterwards. He was saying that if you have over like 10 million, you should have to have it in cash in your house. Like that amount. It was like this very funny routine, but I sort of said to him after the show, “You do know what people will think that you have that, right?”

100%

And he was like, “Fuck yeah… I didn’t think of that!” And tweaked it a little. People think I'm a millionaire.

People have this idea that the more they see you, the more money you have. If I was a multi-millionaire, you would never see me again.

I think I've got a nice thing where because it's mostly online, I’m in their algorithm. Whereas now that I'm doing a little bit of TV stuff, I'm very aware that once you start doing TV stuff, you're pumped into people's living rooms and you're on shows that they like without you on it. If they hate you on that, then it's the difference between having a following and being famous. If you have a following, everybody knows who you are. If you're famous, a lot of people know who you are, and fucking hate you.

And they'll tell you that.

I was on the worst seat on the plane yesterday for a ten hour flight, and the guy next to me was like, “Are you a comedian?” I was like, “Yeah?” and he then said, “Why are you sitting here?” And I'm like, “Because it's cheaper?” [laughs]

Facts. So, that reminds me, from seeing your stand-up you do seem to like to banter with the audience? Is that difficult?

I do really like it. A big difference between like the UK and Ireland with America in comedy, is in America, they don't really have an interval. So in the UK and Ireland, they'll be like a break.

For a drink and stuff?

Yeah, so normally what happens is a comedian will have a support act. They'll do like 20 minutes and then there's a break, and then the comedian will do their show, which is like 60-ish. In America, I think it'll be like a bit blurrier at the start. Also some venues really want you to have a support act. I think for a couple of them I will, but on the tour in the UK and Ireland, I have like a band, who do the pre-show music. The band plays traditional Irish music.

"I'm very averse to anything defining me entirely."

Is it an Irish band from America?

It is just three musicians who know each other. They can all play together, but what's mad is the guitarist who's playing in LA is from one of my favourite bands.

What band?

The Ollam, and the fiddle player is the fiddle player for Shaboozey. Fucking crazy.

That’s cool! So what are your plans after the tour?

I'm trying to do very, very little. Horizontal as much as possible and maybe go on a little holiday hang out. And then July I'm filming a sitcom for the BBC.

Did you write it?

No. I'm just acting.

You were hiding the lead here in this interview.

It's a short film that we made last year. And then it's been made into a series this year, so we're filming.

What's the premise of it?

It’s about care work for adults with like additional needs. It's really funny, with bags and bags of heart. A lot of the cast have additional needs, like autism or down syndrome. And then I am on tour for the rest of the year. In 2027 I'm going to try and do like no stand up.

No stand up?

That's my current plan. I've done too much. The Ireland tour was like dense 25 shows in 28 days. So it was like full on, with loads travel in between. I say loads of travel, but your Australian and you live in LA.

Correct, UK travel is a hard sell for complaints.

I mean, the longest drive is probably like six hours.

Oh ok, that is is pretty long. Back to feeling bad for you [laughs]

That was pretty like full on and that takes it out of you a bit. I think I'm still learning how to manage that. My body has good, like internal mechanisms to stop me absolutely fucking myself.

Do you think it is possible for you to completely stop something? Or it is it bad for you to stop whilst you are on a roll?

I know how to do stand up at this point. Like there's comedians here, that if you take time off, you'll get rusty, but then I'll just pick it back up again. Also in London, if I ever want to go do a set.

Does it scare you to take time off?

No, not really. I also think like one of the more tiring things for me on the tour is social battery. Whether on stage, you have to give this sort of like social energy. I got diagnosed with autism this year, and I don't know what that means really, but that's a nice excuse for myself to be you need to take time off meeting new people and just fucking be in your house. Wouldn't that be so nice? No offence. We've just met.

[laughs] I’m not offended at all.