Mike Wozniak has no complaints. Speaking to him over video call from his desk at his home in Exeter, where he lives with his family and vizsla dog, Pam – a view that diehard listeners of his extremely funny podcast, Three Bean Salad, will know well – I am struck by his resounding contentment. Whether it’s his stand-up tour schedule (“I really don’t work that hard, don’t worry”), his work on the sitcom Man Down (“happiness on a stick”), the producers of Taskmaster (“masterful”) or the podcast (“my favourite bit of the week”), there is, it seems, nothing with which Wozniak is less than pretty chuffed.
And why shouldn’t he be? Wozniak, who next week will take his tour show, The Bench, to the Edinburgh Fringe, has enjoyed a long and eclectic career, which it’s fair to say has allowed him to divert from comedy’s straight-and-narrow and “find my tribe”. “I’ve tried observational stand-up many times. I was hopeless at it,” he says. “People who are really good at it make it look easy – it’s not. Someone like [Michael] MacIntyre has come under fire in the past for being mundane, but it’s not. It’s bloody amazing what he and his ilk do.”
Wozniak has instead leaned into something more spontaneous and meandering. On Three Bean Salad and on panel-show appearances, as well as in his stand-up, Wozniak is mild-mannered and charming, yet quick-witted and game for anything. His current show sounds like a similar blend of these attributes. Drawing on his love of crime fiction and status as a self-professed “provincial dad”, The Bench is a choose-your-own-adventure whodunnit story in which, in the first half, Wozniak lays out a local mystery “about an outrage, an act of vandalism that’s happened in my little corner of Exeter”, before allowing the audience to investigate it in the second.
