There’s something about Brian Limond, AKA Limmy – comedian, Scottish vernacularist, Twitter sprite, Vine onanist, inventor of the swearing xylophone app – that makes you feel you have permission to ask him anything. Which is why, soon after we meet for a coffee in Glasgow’s West End, we’re talking about counting the “cunts” in his latest offering: a book of parables and prose called Daft Wee Stories.
If the short story sounds like a rather retro genre for the man whose comedy has always been relentlessly cross-platform, the tales are as absurd, surreal and pitch black as his fans have come to expect. Perhaps that feeling of freedom to ask anything comes because Limond evidently loves to play with boundaries – his own and other people’s. “In my own mind, I can joke about anything,” he says, and I believe him.
Limond has enjoyed mainstream exposure, with his Scottish Bafta award-winning comedy series for the BBC (never shown in England, but available on iPlayer) and his guest spots on Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, but it’s online that he thrives. The former web producer made his name with a series of podcasts – Limmy’s World Of Glasgow – and his website, limmy.com, led to him being signed by the Beeb. Today, his manic Vines, pathos-inducing solo webcam sessions and provocative tweets provide a constant stream of content “for the fans”. Limmy was an internet sensation before the phrase was coined; today he remains one of the most innovative and fearless comedians on the block.
During last year’s passionate and occasionally rabid Scottish independence referendum campaign, Limond would now and again be cited as an example of a “cybernat”, the phrase used to describe a particularly angry cohort of online nationalists. For me, he was just the opposite. Sure, he’s turned non-specific trolling into an art form, and if you’re offended by a blizzard of tweets in your timeline describing your da, trousers round his ankles, wanking on the street, right now, then you know which button to press. But on referendum politics he was sharp and inquisitive, openly “Yes”- supporting but never swept along by groupthink, unless striking a pose on Twitter (“INDEPENDENCE NOW. I NO LONGER WISH TO BE RULED BY EVIL FUCKING LONDON”).
As for his extreme language, well, he does use the word “cunt” a great deal, on and offline, in that specifically west-of-Scotland vernacular sense of “that cunt up the road”, which may well not translate beyond the Glasgow postcodes, let alone across the world.
“With ‘cunt’, I’m used to saying ‘everycunt’, ‘somecunt’, all the time,” he explains cheerfully. “But the people who are reading this… I don’t know where they’re from, even just outside Glasgow maybe, or Scotland. They don’t [use it this way] and I don’t want that being a thing. It starts to get in the way.”
So when he came to read back the draft of Daft Wee Stories, he managed to cut down the number of references to five. “I thought: ‘Five cunts away from getting shot of all of them!’” Limmy’s Show, he reminds me, was similarly cunt-free. “I didn’t want it to look like a wee statement: ‘I’m saying cunt…” he pauses, louche with teen rebellion, “…on the telly.’”
He remembers a producer at the BBC saying something about his accent, some of the language he used, and it “going over people’s heads”, and I do wonder if one of the reasons why his excellent TV series never went national was because, sadly, for many at the Beeb any Scottish voice, sweary or otherwise, is still considered a tad too regional.
Back to “cunt”, though. I’m minded by his reference to US misogyny in one of his stories called The Feminist, in which a well-meaning chap called Paul attempts to correct centuries of valuing women for their looks alone by calling a party-goer “one ugly bastard”. Like the majority of Limmy’s vignettes, it doesn’t end well.
Does he consider himself a feminist? “I think so,” he says. “But I don’t get what that term is. To me it’s like saying I’m an anti-racist; that’s what I think should be the default.”
One of the things I like about Limmy, who admits to checking Twitter every 10 minutes, is his curiosity. Often, folk respond to his tweets as if he’s acting the wind-up merchant when he’s genuinely open to discussion. About a month before we meet, for example, we had a back-and-forth about the cover of the Spectator magazine (yeah, we can get it in Glasgow too, thanks), which that week had depicted the first minister Nicola Sturgeon as the French revolutionary heroine Marianne, in the famous pose with arm aloft and breast exposed.
“You want to talk about things like that [on Twitter] but right away you’re jumped upon by saying ‘What do you think?’” he recalls.
With that magazine cover, he’s concluded it’s a question of the intention and the history behind it, he tells me. “If men and women were equal and no one had the upper hand, and there wasn’t any subjugation happening in the world right now, then that sort of thing would be nae bother. But putting her there looking like her tits are out, it becomes sensitive and you know there are people who think you can make a woman less by showing her semi-naked when she doesn’t want to be. It’s like taking a picture of someone’s maw and sticking it on a porn thing.” If there’s a better and more succinct definition of the way that women are sexualised in the media and why it’s not OK, I’d like to hear it.
Limmy is a fan of Sturgeon, and has no regrets about his pro-independence stance: “Even if everybody voted ‘yes’ and Scotland had become a shithole I do think it would have been the best thing.” Even so, he insists he never got wholly caught up in the “yes movement” (he begins to adopt his Glasgow Art School alumni voice, a silkily patronising tone that he’s been using on a few of his Vines lately).
“It tickles me to have a sneering thought, like walking past and blowing a snotter out my nose,” he says. “I like posing as some sort of character so it isn’t getting pure serious. I’m not too interested in exploring the issues, I like just having a wee laugh and run like fuck.”
Given that Limond devotes so much of his time to tweets, Vines and Vimeo, should we conclude he thinks the age of the TV comedian is over? The answer is unexpected.
“I always wanted to get on the telly,” he insists. “Then see when I did, and there was talk about doing more online, Comedy Labs or iPlayer, I was: ‘Naw, naw, naw, I want to be On The Telly,” – he annunciates deliberately – “that sits in the living room and folk watch it together. To me [online] felt old, because it’s where I came from, making my own stuff and putting it on my site. So then when it was: ‘There’s this new thing, Brian, its called the internet’, I was: ‘Naw, naw, NAW! The TELLY!”
Limond is now a major cult figure throughout the UK. I know this because the proof copy of his book has a quote from the Guardian saying just that. Neither of us can remember when or where it was actually written: he mimes an outraged Guardian editor calling up to say it never was, then makes me say it again for the recorder “then we’ve got an Inception-y sort of loop going on”. (I tracked the phrase down eventually to a TV blog written in 2011.)
“Anything like that, cult or transgressive [another popular description of his work], makes me cringe, cos to agree with it you might as well be saying it yourself: ‘I am a transgressive cult favourite, yuh.” He slips into art-school voice again: “You probably won’t have heard of me.”
Then again, he adds: “I prefer that some people like it, it’s right up their street, it’s what they’ve been looking for, than lots of people mildly like it.”
As for whether his comedy is truly transgressive: “I do like crossing moral boundaries. Taking a picture of myself with my thumb in the way so it looks like I’m wanking... In the days before YouTube and Twitter, I did like to see the reaction because nobody else was doing it. I like saying things that other folk aren’t saying. Things that give them a wee thrill in their head, even if it’s outrage. Hardly anyone’s really outraged these days; it’s only the likes of Louise Mensch.”
Outrage and offence are getting harder to calibrate, he says. Growing up on a fairly grim estate in Carnwadric, south-west of Glasgow city centre, he was used to people carrying knives: “So you just had jokes about people getting stabbed – some folk might think that’s shocking...” On Twitter, he adds, you really need a universally agreed chart to tell you what level of outrage folk are on.
“In my mind, I can joke about anything, terrible, terrible things that could happen to my son or my girlfriend. I can joke about things like that because I can separate joke, humour, fantasy from the real world.”
He likens it to gaming, which he’s also a big fan of: “Like Grand Theft Auto: I really enjoy running about and feeling like I’m chasing and killing somebody, burning them, I really do enjoy that. And I can do that knowing that somewhere else people are getting set on fire and beheaded and that horrifies me, yet I can separate it.
“With rape jokes, paedophile jokes, all the darkest types of humour, in my mind I can see humour in the lot, but do I really want to come out and say something like that? It’s one thing for me to joke about stuff like that and say: ‘I’m all right with it, I can deal with it, I can separate it.’ But it’s another thing when there is someone who is more affected, more recently, it’s still raw, and that’s when I start to think maybe I shouldn’t be saying it. But then there’s a grey area of never saying anything that could really hurt somebody.”
Limond has certainly endured his own share of personal pain. He has spoken incredibly honestly – and practically – about his experience of depression and how taking medication, and later learning meditation, helped him combat the illness. He has also talked about his relationship with alcohol, a drink problem causing him to become teetotal 11 years ago.
“I like being honest,” he says simply. “I talked quite openly about suicidal feelings. Some people would say: ‘That’s really brave of you to say that’, but it isnae brave for me because I’m all right with it. I like yapping. When I took antidepressants I thought: ‘I need to tell people who are in the same sort of boat, here’s what I’m experiencing’, and then coming off them again, telling them how that went.
“I know that feeling that nobody gets you, nobody understands you and there’s no hope – that’s how I felt. Not that I advocate everybody takes pills, but they fucking saved my life.”
He’s clearly excited about his literary foray: he giggles when I first mention one of his stories by its title “because you’re the first person bar the book folk who’s said it” and is looking forward to gigging with them on his forthcoming Daft Wee Tour. It’s his first time in front of a live audience for a while, but he tells me he’s rehearsed it a lot, proclaiming proudly: “I can do it in the shower, do it in the mirror, do it with the lights off…” A stranger walks by our table and Limmy cackles: “That guy’s wondering what I’m talking about…”
Daft Wee Stories by Limmy is out on Thursday 30 July; Limmy appears at Oran Mor, Glasgow, Thursday 30 July to Saturday 1 August; touring the UK to Thursday 13 Aug
