7 things that make Harry and Chris laugh

13 July 2018

Each other - most of our material comes out of things that we just find funny. We’ll usually come across a topic (eg. scientists struggling to impregnate pandas), then chat about it for a while and make some jokes and come up with a chorus, then the writing process goes onto WhatsApp, where we make a group dedicated to that new song.

Harry and Chris

Creating WhatsApp groups - we currently have 145 groups in common on WhatsApp, and probably 2/3 of those are various Harry and Chris groups about new songs, tour planning, admin and silliness. Just looking through recent groups an example is ‘Keytar Or Not Keytar’, which is a group dedicated to discussing the important issue of whether or not we should buy a Keytar for the new show.

Keytars - They’re beautiful pieces of kit.

American culture - we find it funny when they take things so seriously. For example we love Robot Wars (it just got cancelled, sad times), and there’s an American equivalent called Battle Bots - the differences between the shows is amazing. Robot Wars would say ‘They built the robot in their garage in their spare time with leftover parts and are happy to be here’ and Battle Bots would go for ‘Having built the world’s largest drone empire, they’ve returned in their quest for victory on the biggest stage of all time. Their robot is sponsored by American Robotics’ or something.

Flight of the Conchords - we saw them last week at the Hammersmith Apollo which was pretty special. They had a big impact on us growing up (we would’ve grown up anyway but they had a big impact on us while we did it), and seeing two guys being silly with words and music and making people smile was a big moment when we were in our early teens. Their new stuff is very good as well. We enjoy good musical comedy in general - Flo and Joan are two of our favourite people and combined are one of our favourite acts.

Things going wrong in shows - we like having a lighthearted, slightly silly approach to shows. When we’ve played the same show for a couple of weeks it can be fun for something to just go wrong in shows. In our first year we were on the free fringe, in the back room of a pub (behind a curtain), and some audience members had ordered burgers just before the show, and they had to be delivered via the stage, so Chris ended up passing them out, and we made a joke of it all. Although people did hear about it and starting coming along thinking burger delivery was part of the show.

Babies.

Harry & Chris perform Harry & Chris Save The World at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe at Just The Tonic, The Mash House from 2nd – 25th August at 2:25pm, ahead of a nationwide tour from 2nd October. More info and tickets are available at www.harryandchris.com/