Interview with Haiste and Lawrence

In a shadowy comedy club somewhere in Islington, I was feeling very low…. It was very dark in there and, as usual, all I had eaten was a packet of crisps washed down with a large dry white…Thankfully, I happened upon this very talented pair of jokers and I soon chirped up!

Haiste and Lawrence have exploded onto the comedy circuit following their very successful run at Edinburgh last year with their show “How to Make it Huge”. Off the back of that, they have since picked up management with the excellent PBJ  (PBJ represent only the best in comedy acts – The Mighty Boosh, Eddie Izzard, Richard Ayoade to name but a few) and when you see their act, you can see why.

Well I liked them so much I decided to pester them for an interview. They were kind enough to oblige so I caught up with them after a downright hilarious night at The Wilmington Arms where they were performing alongside Pat Cahill, Spencer Jones, Caroline May-Jones, Thomas Nelstrop, James Allnut and Joe Davis.

FF: For our readers that haven’t seen your show, tell us a bit about your act..

It’s proper brill! We’re a boy/girl double act and we do character comedy, some based on famous folk, some not. Tonight, for example, we did a riff on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Willies and Cake. We enjoy character relationships so, famous or not, that’s what we hope people recognize and have a giggle with us about – but our act is mainly and MOST IMPORTANTLY all about finding out who is the best out of the two of us, Greg or Marie…

FF: How did you guys meets and what made you start performing together?

Greg: Marie made me start performing with her against my will. I still don’t like her, but frankly she’s very scary and I’m frightened she might kill my pets if I don’t carry on trying to be funny near her.
Marie: Who is Greg Haiste?

(We met devising a comic play for a theatre company that toured in 2009/10 and really enjoyed creating the characters and generally flouncing about together in a professional guise. Devising is ace.
Trying out ideas on the spot, some working some really not, keeping the funny bits but enjoying the god-awful bits for all the wrong reasons! We found ourselves laughing at the same things a lot and bounced ideas off each other like a pinball wizard on a spacehopper, so we thought Yeah! let’s create some funny stuff and fool people into giving us their time, laughter and money. So far it’s working, and we’ve managed to invest in a kebab, small chips and a Rubicon mangodrink. Each!

FF: You debuted as jolly good larks at last years Edinburgh Fringe with your show ‘How to Make it Huge’. How did you find the fringe experience?

The scariest bit was realising about a month before we went up that there were 900 other comedy shows, we’d only done our first ever gigtogether as a double act in June 2011 and even WE hadn’t heard of us, haha!
But the experience was great – we worked our knick knackers off pre and during the festival so it was a huge buzz to find the show worked.
One of the best things was to see audience members returning the next day with their pals. Up until our (reaaaaaally late July previews), it was just the two of us laughing at each other and hoping that the audience would chuckle at least twice during the hour-long show. Our aim was to cheer people up and the word-of-mouth thing really kicked in. That and we threatened to kidnap relatives if the audience didn’t trumpet our talents from the rooftops. We’ve still got two grumpy Yorkshiremen captive under the sink. They say they can’t play the trumpet, but that’s no excuse.

FF:  have you been up to since the fringe?

We were delighted to be picked up by lovely Janie Jenkins at PBJ Management – loooads of our heroes are on PBJ’s books so we did a right good electric boogaloo at that news. Once over the Fringe exhaustion/dehydration/malnutrition we did the show again in London and toured it to some lucky, lucky folk that weren’t in Edinburgh – we’re thoughtful like that. Other than that we’ve been getting out and up at gigs as much as possible, trying out new characters, recording YouTube titbits, and biggies and besties we got to be the homepage video of choice on the FiniteFunnies website #thatswhatwe’retalkingabout

FF:  What’s next for Haiste and Lawrence?

Stevie Jobs he did said – ‘the only way to do great work is to love what you do’. So our plan is to continue laughing as much as possible. We’ve not yet been going a year, so we got a whole heap of gigging to do, writing, auditioning, making funny stuff and then falling out acrimoniously and throwing kebab leftovers at each other.

You can read lots of lovely things and find out where you can catch Haiste and Lawrence by visiting their website here

Go on Follow them on twitter! @jollygoodlarks

Watch some hilarious stuff on their youtube