Comedian John Robins on the split that made his career
John Robins’s show about a painful split won him the 2017 Edinburgh Comedy Award. Now about to go on tour, he talks to Thom Farmer
We’ve been entranced by the tears of clowns for at least 500 years – since Pedrolino wept on stage in the Commedia dell’arte. We love the incongruity of it – the elaborately cheerful comic make-up and the pain in the character’s heart. In John Robins’s Edinburgh Comedy Awardwinning stand-up show – which starts a UK tour later this month – however, even the pretence of a cheerful smile is gone. His heartbreak isn’t just the subplot – it’s all of the show.
The back story is that 35-year-old Robins dated fellow comic Sara Pascoe for four years before their relationship imploded on Christmas Day 2016. Comedians being comedians, both prepared shows about the split to take to the Edinburgh Festival. They were scheduled at roughly the same time so, as if dealing with two friends at the start of their divorce, festivalgoers had to choose where their loyalties lay. It’s fair to say Pascoe handled the split better – her show, Ladsladslads, focuses on her attempts to move on, while his is called The Darkness of Robins and is about his grief.
“After the relationship ended, I think my brain was so desperate to find a positive somewhere that I started writing about it. Fellow comedians would joke about it giving me an Edinburgh show, but when I was left alone, all I had were my thoughts and they either drive you insane or you write them down. The first things were just for the rage and sadness. Then I’d find myself giggling at something I’d written and then you think, OK, here we go…” he pauses and gives a slightly weary sigh. “It starts again.”
We’re sitting in the foyer café of Radio X – the indie station where Robins and fellow comic Elis James present the Saturday afternoon show. What started as a quirky few hours of friendly banter in 2014 picked up such a following that, in the week we meet, the duo are filling in on the station’s drive-time show. “You do have to be a bit more of a DJ,” he confesses.
Dressed down as ever in jeans and a T-shirt, he looks slightly more cheerful than the gaunt, hollowed-eyed figure who appeared on stage in Edinburgh. In the show, he matches self-lacerating confession with unconvincing optimism. Listing the pros and cons of his newly enforced single status, for instance, he says that, on one hand, there’s the loss of all feelings of hope and possibility – but on the other, at least he knows where the iphone cable is. Every now and then, the jokes fall away and he says, very simply, how much he misses her. Told by a friend that he can sleep with anyone he wants now, he points out that excludes the one person he wants to sleep with.
“Quite early on, I went through a phase of really missing the annoying things,” he explains. “I missed being annoyed. It’s really a show about men’s mental health, but the way into it is with stuff that anyone who’s been through a break-up can recognise. I had to earn the right to say those things with 10-15 minutes of good gags at the top, so people feel safe. If I came on stage and just said ‘I miss her so much’, it would be like, ‘come on mate, sort yourself out before you get here’.” He’s suffered from depression for much of his life – indeed, the show’s name comes from discussions about mental health that have formed a theme to James’s and Robins’s radio show. “We never set out to have it as a theme,” Robins explains. “I don’t like referring to my issues as ‘depression’, which is why Elis coined the phrase ‘the darkness’. I think that’s what connects with people – we’re not delivering a worthy discussion about mental health. We’re just talking about being sad some of the time – and happy some of the time, too. It doesn’t need to be turned into some kind of big deal. I think people appreciate hearing it referred to as offhand, just as if I got stuck in traffic.”
What’s noticeable about all of this is how Robins is more protective of Pascoe than of himself. When he was handed the award back in August, he told the crowd that she’d been the first person to congratulate him and he castigated journalists who pitted the two against each other when covering the awards shortlist; Pascoe, to many’s surprise, wasn’t nominated. “I think that story took precedence over some of the amazing things Sara is doing at the minute,” he says now.
They knew they’d both be covering the split – although they haven’t seen each other’s shows. Did he ever worry his material would upset her? “It’s about me reacting to the split, not an unpicking of the split or the relationship or of Sara,” he explains. “I wanted to make sure that I could stand by anything that I said out loud – that it was about me not her.”
Preparing for the tour made for a curious 2017 emotionally. In writing and performing the show, Robins effectively forced himself to stay with the pain and avoid moving on to ensure that it retained the required rawness. Despite the acclaim he has received, doing the tour means he still can’t leave that depressive state of mind behind.
“I wonder to what extent trying to keep myself in a certain place mentally may not be particularly healthy,” he says, grinning wryly. “But on the other hand, I don’t really want to stop missing her – it’s the last connection between us.
“There’s a heartbreaking speech in King John where the queen is mourning her son and says – ‘grief wears the clothes that he wore. It sleeps in his bed… So I have reason to be fond of grief.’ You find yourself in this comforting rut and think, I could not drink tonight and I could do something productive, but just one more night of hating myself and being sad…”
Bristol-born Robins flinches slightly when asked about his family – his mum is a counsellor, his sister is a nurse and his dad is “retired”. He won’t be drawn further, dismissing a 2012 tweet of his – “Happy Father’s Day Dad, wherever you are” – as “a joke”. Educated at a comprehensive, he studied English at Oxford and laces his conversation with references to poetry and literature – “I would say Philip Larkin is as much an inspiration to me as any comic,” he says at one point. “It’s that mixture of the highfalutin and the day-to-day which is such a great area for comedy.”
It was a post-oxford slump of despair that propelled him into comedy. “I was working in a bookshop and having a bit of a crisis,” he explains. “I was drinking
‘I wonder to what extent trying to keep myself in a certain place mentally may not be particularly healthy’
a lot and feeling that loss of university life. I was going out as much as I could and not really dealing with it very well. I decided to do an Open Mic spot and immediately became very attached to it as a thing to do. I had always written things then suddenly there was a reason to write and perform.”
He worked the Bristol scene, becoming friends and flatmates with local stand-ups Russell Howard, Jon Richardson and Mark Olver. It’s there he met Elis James. “I met Elis at my second gig and for the first couple of years our paths would cross biweekly,” he explains. “I was quite in awe of him. Then he moved to London and I was filled with an all-encompassing envy and jealously. But we would have quite long chats and when I signed with his agent, I said that all I want is to do Edinburgh and have a radio show with Elis. God bless him, within a year we’d done a pilot for XFM.”
Their radio show plays heavily on their contrast – Robins’s intellectual melancholy cushioned by James’s cheerful Welsh good humour. At the end of Robins’s tour, the duo are planning a big joint gig at the Hammersmith Apollo. “I thought it would be fitting to end on an upbeat event,” he smiles. “It’ll mark the moment I can finally move on.”