The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Has anyone else been feeling a bit funny?
rules for a minor claiming to be working on a Telegraph article due in nine years’ time. I learnt that the only way for my pimply teenage self to get past the doorman would be if I was an act performing on the bill. Which is how I found myself trying and failing to amuse tens of people that year in the back room of an Edinburgh pub. I had the misfortune of following a funnier opening act, a largely unheard-of comic called Nish Kumar. Now host of BBC2’s The Mash Report, Kumar is perhaps the country’s most high-profile topical stand-up (if we’re ignoring Russell Howard, which is usually a good idea).
I quit comedy soon afterwards, but I’m glad he didn’t. The 34-year-old’s impassioned (yet knowingly self-sabotaging) political rants have already influenced a new wave of angry young men, most notably Ed Night. But these are outliers: the real trend in comedy this decade has been towards the intimate and introspective, with the proviso that some of the most politically minded comics (Bridget Christie, Liam Williams, Sara Pascoe, Josie Long) have found ways to tackle the political via the personal.
What were the new generation talking about? Much of the time it was their own mental health, and personal experiences of trauma. Even James Acaster, one of this decade’s breakout stars, abandoned his usual surreal whimsy for confessionalism in his latest show, admitting he was on the phone to the Samaritans between Celebrity Bake Off appearances.
I’d argue that the broader push in society towards destigmatising mental illness was partly led by the candour of comedians. Many acts use the comedy club’s you-can-sayanything setting as a space to discuss mental health, though none quite so brilliantly as Maria Bamford, the long-revered
American star who finally made her London debut last year.
Bamford, whose routines often draw on her time “squatting in the psych ward”, suffers from Pure OCD, a disorder defined by intrusive thoughts (obsessively imagining “chopping your parents into chunks”, for example). It’s a condition she shares with the mesmerising Jordan Brookes, who has also struggled with depression: he recently disclosed that he had been
The US comic’s revolting, abusive backstage behaviour was a saddening insight into the comedy world’s unspoken power dynamics. considering ending his life at the end of his Edinburgh Fringe run this August. Then he unexpectedly won the Fringe’s top award, and has since used the prize money to pay for therapy.
Brookes made that confession in a podcast interview, and as a side-note it’s worth marking the huge impact podcasting has had on live comedy: starting a podcast (usually one based on interviews with other comedians) has become one of the fastest ways for an emerging comic to build a fan base. Comedy podcasts have turned into sell-out tours: My Dad Wrote a Porno and No Such Thing as a Fish both filled New York’s Madison Square Gardens.
Sexual assault inspired some of the decade’s most adventurous (and physically taxing) shows. Adrienne Truscott performed Asking for It naked from the waist down; Richard Gadd spent the full 60 minutes of Monkey See, Monkey Do running on a treadmill; Natalie Palamides’s Nate – a cross-dressing clown show about rape – involved fire-breathing, topless wrestling and even motorcycle tricks.
But it was Hannah Gadsby’s far more conventional Nanette that became the decade’s most talked-about hour of stand-up comedy. Tackling sexism, the myth that good art stems from trauma, and her experience of coming out in Tasmania (where homosexuality was illegal until 1997), it launched a thousand thinkpieces.
This was partly due to Nanette’s release on Netflix, now the world’s largest stand-up comedy producer. Since 2014, the site has churned out hundreds of comedy specials (Amazon, late to the party, only started making its own this year). As with theatre and opera, audiences are now increasingly watching “live” stand-up on a screen. What does it mean for the future of those poky pub back-rooms? Ask me in 10 years.
BBC Philharmonic
Netflix is now the world’s largest standup comedy producer, churning out specials