How to Be Funny in Hull: A Practical Guide
A Hull comedian built one of British television’s most beloved routines out of something every performer normally dreads: a broken microphone. The genius wasn’t fixing the fault — it was faking one, so convincingly and so consistently that decades later, other comedians were still referencing it as shorthand for pure technical comic skill.
Turn a Technical Failure Into the Entire Act
Norman Collier, born in Hull on Christmas Day in 1925, built his signature routine around a genuinely simple, devastatingly effective premise: performing as though his microphone were cutting in and out, chopping his own voice into broken fragments through pure vocal control while the actual sound equipment worked perfectly the whole time. Wikipedia’s account confirms the routine’s fame directly, noting he was best known for his ‘faulty microphone’ routine and for his chicken impressions. The bit became so culturally embedded that comedians decades younger, including Ricky Gervais, have referenced it directly, and fellow performers like impressionist Jon Culshaw paid tribute to Collier specifically for how consistently, reliably funny the routine remained across an entire career.
The technique is genuinely worth studying closely: Collier didn’t build a joke about a broken microphone — he became the broken microphone, using nothing but timing and vocal control to simulate a technical failure the audience could plainly see wasn’t real, while still finding it uproariously funny every single time. The lesson: taking something an audience would normally find genuinely irritating — a technical glitch, a stumble, an interruption — and performing it deliberately, with total control, transforms audience frustration into audience delight, precisely because they can sense the skill underneath the apparent chaos.
Build a Second, Completely Different Signature Bit
Collier didn’t rely on the microphone routine alone — his other trademark, a fully committed chicken impression involving strutting and clucking across the stage, gave him an entirely separate, physical style of material to fall back on, genuinely distinct in register from the more vocally technical microphone bit. The lesson: having two genuinely different kinds of signature material in your back pocket, rather than one single trick stretched too thin across an entire career, gives a performer real range without ever diluting the impact of either individual piece.
Start Wherever the Gap Actually Is
Collier’s own start in comedy was genuinely accidental: working as a labourer at the time, he stepped in at Hull’s Perth Street West club in 1948 when a booked act simply failed to show up, discovered he felt entirely natural and at ease on stage, and built a full-time career out of that single unplanned opportunity. The lesson, echoed elsewhere in this series: a genuine gap — a no-show act, an empty slot, an unexpected opening — is often a considerably more reliable way into performing than waiting patiently for a formal, planned invitation that may simply never come.
Further Reading
For the broader British comic tradition, see our guide to How to Be Funny in the United Kingdom. For the universal mechanics of joke-writing, start with How to Be Funny. For our coverage of the same comic instincts from the American side, visit our sister publication Bohiney.com.
This guide draws on published sources including Wikipedia’s documented profile of Norman Collier, The Scotsman’s obituary coverage, and HuffPost UK’s retrospective on his best-loved routines. It is maintained as part of Prat.uk’s ongoing “How to Be Funny” series, city by city, closing out our tour of twenty distinct British comic traditions with a routine built entirely on a fault that was never actually there.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!