Life and times

Author and presenter Ruby Wax

BOTH MY DAUGHTERS have decided to become comedians. They call their double act Siblings and they play characters, like very early French and Saunders. I’ve never been able to watch either of my daughters on stage: I get too nervous.

Once, when they were in nursery school, one of them got a very small part in the Christmas show playing a ‘donkey handler’ and I found myself shouting out, ‘Come forward!’ They banned me from all performances after that.

Still, after much begging, they allowed me to watch a Siblings rehearsal before they took their show to the Edinburgh Fringe last year. They’re very funny but I could only focus on what I would have done differently.

Someone working backstage actually filmed me watching and showed me the footage. My face was contorted like I was having an excruciating birth; twitching and gurning. I was banned again from all shows. They continue to do their act but sadly I never know what it is they’re doing.

ABOUT TWENTY YEARS ago, I interviewed Donald Trump for one of my BBC shows – something I have often been asked about while doing press for my current book and show, How to Be Human: The Manual. I found him fiercely hostile, and when I’m scared I become passive-aggressive, which made him hate me even more than he no doubt already did on sight.

The interview took place on his private jet, and the first thing he told me was that he wanted to run for president of the United States. I thought it was a joke, so I laughed. Wrong move. He immediately demanded that the pilot land the plane; he said, ‘I’ve had enough of her – she’s obnoxious.’ So there we were – my crew and I – stuck in Arkansas, which we’d had no plans to visit.

The rest of my show was spent looking for Donald. Somewhere in Mississippi we encountered the Ku Klux Klan, who wanted to take advantage of the camera crew to put their point across, so allowed us to film them. In the end, they offered me the role of wizard. I said quietly into the camera that this might be the first time someone Jewish was offered that position. Luckily, they didn’t hear me.

We did eventually find Donald, judging a beauty contest in Nebraska. I have to admire the man – he went into great depth finding the winner.

LAST NOVEMBER I recorded my audio show, No-brainer. There were 12 parts and 12 topics, including longevity, nature/nurture, pathology, anxiety, death, and teens’ and children’s brains. For the one about pain, a medical-research team scanned my brain to see which areas activate when pain is inflicted.

Once I was squeezed into the MRI coffin, they applied a liquid form of chilli pepper on my leg and told me to grade the sensation from one to 10. I kept shtum for some insane reason – I didn’t want them to think I was a wimp – but you can’t hide your feelings when your brain’s being filmed because everyone can see your pain. Eventually I began to admit to war crimes, so they removed the gel.

For their next experiment, they told me to imagine the pain. It turned out that the same areas in my brain lit up whether it was real or imagined. Emotional pain registers in the same area as actual physical pain. I wish I hadn’t had to be tortured to find that out.

How to Be Human: The Manual, by Ruby Wax, is out now in paperback (£8.99, Penguin Life)

When he told me he wanted to run for president, I laughed. Wrong move