Target Practice

Within 90 minutes of pulling into Waverley station, I'd played 40-a-side volleyball, kicked a pint into my bag and been hustled through Cowgate by a man in French knickers. It was the year before last, in the Adam Riches / Dr Brown interregnum, and participatory comedy was still “having a moment”.

Ben Target, the man in the pants, entered the fray with a boisterous yet dreamlike experience so meticulously packed with props and set pieces, it could hardly have been conceived overnight. This year, though, with August imminent, not only is his show half-written – he's going to leave it at that.

It’s all about freedom to experiment, he explains, to shake off expectations (he made the Best Newcomer shortlist last time) and get closer to playing himself. Target (pronounced, continentally, Tar-jay) is by his own admission a “head in the clouds” sort of guy. He speaks gently and thoughtfully – a distant cousin to the lord of misrule who once rushed whole audiences outside to find, and then beat him with “the humiliation stick”.

Of his recent work, Target says: “It’s closer to the surface of me. Discover Ben Target felt like a bit of a mask. I had engineered set pieces that I knew the outcome of, whereas the new show is a celebration of having fun on stage.”

For him, that's worth celebrating, having rescued his love of performing from the notion that he had to outdo his last show. He says: “I stopped enjoying comedy because of that pressure I put myself under.”

So he opted out of Edinburgh last year, filming quirky shorts with comic Joe Parham and playing music festivals instead. There he came up against a new kind of crowd: addled, distracted, disengaged. But Target wasn’t fazed: “It made me start to drop my my material and go out almost with nothing other than an improviser’s mindset.”

That gamble heralded a period of intense trial and error for Target, who says he’s had other comedians ask him to stop playing standup clubs because he’s so warped the mood in the room. He adds: “Some of my previews have just been me putting on a dance tape and working out for an hour – and a lot of people have left, because that’s not comedy.”

In a way, his time with non-Fringe crowds has made him more typically “Fringe”: experimental, inclusive, spontaneous. This August the event he calls "summer camp for comedians" will see him shift from showing off the ways in which he can toy with the audience, to exploring what they can achieve together. As for what form that will take, he paints an intriguing picture: “It’s similar to primary school where the day is broken down into a series of activities that engage most of our senses, from painting to singing a song communally to drinking milk together.”

And the centrepiece? “We’re all baking a cake together.” Whether that’s literal or imaginary, the severe, “benevolent dictator” of 2012 did not seem the baking type. But, as Target explains, it’s time for a new persona: “I figured out fairly recently that I’m maybe not this alpha male that we’re all taught we’re supposed to be. I’m just a fairly nice guy. Like I’d be a good uncle. Like a fucking… silly man.”

With that in mind, he’s taken a different tack from his contemporaries. Whereas Nick Helm “bullies his audience”, Adam Riches rides the force of his macho parodies and Dr Brown hones a nervy balance of “quiet and enticing”, Target has a new weapon: niceness.

“In terms of coercing people to do things, maybe it’s a lot easier to shout at them,” he says. “But there are other ways of doing it: care and love.”

“Can these get people to do things?” he wonders. It’s going to take most of a month, and your co-operation, for Target to find that out.