Is this the world’s most infuriating comedian? He certainly hopes so

Luke McQueen once sold out a theatre in Edinburgh by telling a big lie: he promoted the show as a gig by the hugely popular Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle. When McQueen, who bears no resemblance to Boyle, sidled onto the stage, he was met by stunned silence. “Er, Frankie Boyle’s not coming,” he told the audience. “It’s just me, Luke McQueen. Give me a cheer if you’ve heard of me.”

No one cheered. The only sound was the scraping of chairs as people stood up and headed for the exit. One enraged punter kicked McQueen’s collection bucket across the stage on his way out. “Guys, don’t go. I’m funny,” pleaded the man on stage.

Deliberately upsetting a crowd of Frankie Boyle fans would make most people nervous, but McQueen isn’t one of them. “I thought the whole thing was so exciting,” he says of the 2014 gig. “The thing I love more than anything is committing to an idea.”

The bogus Frankie Boyle show is typical of McQueen’s highly conceptual approach to comedy. His work often starts with a palpable truth – in this case, the fact it’s extremely hard to sell tickets to Edinburgh shows that don’t feature big names – before spinning off into the realms of pure imagination. The McQueen who walked out on stage and told the audience they weren’t going to see Frankie Boyle was a character; his attempt to turn confusion and disappointment into comedy was the performance.

“I was originally going to tell people they were going to see a gig by Ricky Gervais,” admits McQueen when I meet him at a theatre in London’s Soho. “I emailed Ricky and said ‘I’ve had this idea – do you mind if I do it?’ He replied that he thought it was really funny, but he couldn’t say yes because he couldn’t knowingly upset his fans. Which is totally fair. So, I used Frankie Boyle without asking.”

Another example of comedic identity theft from McQueen’s oeuvre is a performance in which he claimed (entirely fictitiously) to be the former stage partner of the English comedian Jack Whitehall. McQueen professed to be so embittered at being usurped by Whitehall’s dad, he’d written an entire show about it. There is video footage of Whitehall walking on stage during a performance of the show in Edinburgh, an incident McQueen insists was not staged.

McQueen says his comedy often plays with notions of likeability. Unlikeability might be a better description. There’s a video of him shaving his head in the middle of a crowded ice rink, an act of atonement designed to win back an ex-girlfriend.

He once poured a can of soup on his head in front of a Van Gogh at London’s National Gallery in a parody of the Just Stop Oil protests and he’s staged a fake reality show called The Luke of Love, offering a group of unsuspecting female contestants the chance to date him. The perplexed women were hooked up to a polygraph machine and asked questions such as: “Do you know where my biological mother is?”

In every case, he insists he was firmly in character. “I couldn’t do this kind of thing as me,” he shrugs. “It would be obnoxious.”

He’s very much in character – albeit a character who happens to be a comedian called Luke McQueen – in the show he’s bringing to next year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It’s called Luke McQueen: Comedian’s Comedian, and it takes some explaining.

The title refers to a popular podcast hosted by an English comedian called Stuart Goldsmith. Since the first episode was recorded in 2012, hundreds of guests – a who’s-who of hilarity ranging from Jimmy Carr and Tim Minchin to Stewart Lee and Katherine Ryan – have discussed the serious business of making people laugh. One person who has never been asked to appear is ... Luke McQueen.

Furious at being ignored, McQueen phones Goldsmith and demands to know why he’s been snubbed. A recording of their toe-curling conversation – which ends with Goldsmith hanging up the phone – is played at the start of the show. McQueen runs the recording through an AI voice generator and clones the podcast host’s voice. Like a malignant ventriloquist, he has acquired the ability to put words in his nemesis’s mouth.

With Goldsmith represented on stage by a shop mannequin topped with a disturbing homemade head, McQueen sets about staging his own edition of Comedian’s Comedian. At first, things go to plan. McQueen, a preening figure in a brown suit, answers a series of fawning questions he’s written himself. “You’re largely regarded as one of the most innovative comedians in the world,” says AI Goldsmith. “How does that make you feel?” “Bored,” sniffs McQueen, running a hand through his lustrous hair.

Halfway through the show, things take a dark turn. The AI – which everyone knows can’t be trusted – malfunctions. The questions go off script; they become hostile and deeply personal. What follows is an unhinged, brutally funny journey into the darkest corners of McQueen’s psyche as he’s eviscerated by his algorithmic interlocutor.

As ever, it’s hard to discern how much of the show is real. Was Goldsmith in on the joke all along? McQueen ponders the question, then replies, “You’ll think this is a lie, but I swear it’s the truth: I simply don’t know.”

Luke McQueen outside the BBC in 2018, protesting against the airing of his show The Luke McQueen Pilots. Credit: PA Images via Getty Images

He’s just as evasive when I ask him what happened when Goldsmith attended a performance of the show in Edinburgh. “I don’t want to ruffle those feathers,” he says. “I’ve got to be careful.”

While McQueen is happy to discuss his comedy, he hands-down refuses to talk about himself. Requests for basic biographical details are met with silence. “I expect I’ll regret this interview because I don’t like being myself in public,” he says at one point. “My personal life is not anyone’s business. The only thing you need to know about me is my work.”

He smiles apologetically. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I don’t mind if you know my age or where I was born. But I also think ’why do I have to tell you?’”

In an age when relentless self-promotion is the norm for entertainers seeking to connect with their audience, this is an unusual stance, to say the least. But McQueen is something of a digital ghost. Wikipedia has yet to discover him, he ditched most of his social media accounts during the pandemic and there are no interviews in which he sheds light on anything relating to his personal life.

Under pressure, he reveals that he studied performing arts at the University of Bedfordshire, where an inspirational tutor encouraged him to see comedy as a gateway to acting. “When I started, I genuinely didn’t know much about comedy,” he says. “Ricky Gervais was probably the most alternative comedian I knew. Obviously, I’m friends with a lot of comedians now and a lot of them are comedy nerds. They love it. But even now I’m not a super fan.”

Luke McQueen says he’s “not a super fan” of comedy.

At times, he admits, comedy has felt like a straitjacket. He’d love to do more acting and directing, but it can be difficult breaking free of the festival circuit and the exhausting demands of writing and performing a new comedy show every couple of years. Producers and commissioners can have a blinkered view of performers and often want facsimiles of successful shows.

“I think repetition is the most disgusting thing in terms of creativity,” he says. “The idea that we need to find something that’s like something that’s come before is pathetic.”

His persona in Luke McQueen: Comedian’s Comedian – a fragile, thin-skinned man who responds to rejection by turning his impotent rage on a podcast host – is not entirely fictitious. “I play with the truth, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any truth in it,” he says. “A lot of the character’s arrogance and bravado is like me screaming at the industry ‘what is your problem?’”

He is, by his own admission, still trying to make it. He’s brimming with ideas for films, TV shows and stage productions, but acknowledges it’s tough standing out from the crowd. “There’s loads more that I want to do in this world, but I don’t know if I ever will,” he says.

As we’re parting ways, he unexpectedly tells me his age. “I’m 40,” he says. It feels like a little gift from comedy’s most private man.

Luke McQueen: Comedian’s Comedian is at ACMI, March 26-April 19, 2026, for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which turns 40 next year; comedyfestival.com.au