Love, loss and laughter
UK-based stand-up comedienne Janine Harouni, who presented her show, Man’oushe, in Bengaluru says comedy functions as a tonic for the awful things that happen
Janine Harouni says, “Funny is my way of coping with life.” The standup comedienne was speaking from her home in London ahead of her trip to India, where she performed in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Titled Ma
n’oushe, her show was nominated for the main Edinburgh Comedy Awards in 2023, and comes to India courtesy the Soho Theatre in the United Kingdom.
Soon enough you realise that is not the usual runofthemill spiel you hear from a comic. “I was selling brownies at an outdoor market in London in the pouring rain at 10 in the morning and I thought, ‘I’m about to turn 30, I haven’t worked as a performer or in a job I enjoy for a year now. No amount of bombing on stage or being heckled could be worse than this,” says Janine.
“I’ve always wanted to do comedy, but I was afraid. I had previously been in a West End Play for a year and a half, but after a full year of complete unemployment I had nothing to lose,” she candidly admits, adding, “So towards the end of 2016, I signed up for my first open mic and a year after that, I started participating in competitions in London.”
Janine says these shows were a lead up to her first hourlong show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, “which is basically when I became a professional comic.”
And with a sense of “perfect timing,” the universe screeched to a standstill due to COVID19. “It’s what every live performer wants just as their careers are taking off for the entire live industry to shut down. It was great,” she says with that selfdeprecatory, conspiratorial tone of voice that wins her allies at shows.
Even so, Janine believes that the break helped her in the long run. “I think because I found success quite quickly. I didn’t really know who I was or what my voice was at the time. A lot of people wait longer than I did to do their first hourlong show; I had been doing standup for only about two years when I took a show to the Fringe.”
“My first show was nominated for Best Newcomer, but I felt I was better at writing than I was at knowing who I was. So having the time off, plus the therapy I had started attending at the time, helped me look inward. Assessing that at an early stage in my career has made me a far more confident performer.”
About Man’oushe
That sense of perspective certainly frames Janine’s persona both on stage and off it.
“The show I’m bringing to India is probably the most personal thing that I’ve written. I talk about the loss of my friend and director of the show who died suddenly at 43. I also talk about a pregnancy loss I suffered. I don’t think I would be able to do that without feeling really sure of who I was before I started.”
“In my life, comedy functions as a tonic for the awful things that happen. The show deals a lot with death and grief, but it’s also funny and cathartic,” says the comedienne, who adds that a lot of people wrote back saying how the show gave them a sense of relief since they had been through something similar.
“It’s not making fun of death or grief, but being able to laugh about it takes the power away from it a bit. It’s being able to laugh together and find light heartedness in the subject.”
“When I started writing the show, it obviously had nothing to do with my friend because he was around and we were working together on it. But then when he died, it felt weird to not talk about him on stage, because it was on my mind all the time. And once I started talking about him, it became clear that he was part of the narrative and it made sense to have him in Man’oushe.”
The comic who has Lebanese, American, Italian and Irish ancestry, and is now based in the United Kingdom says, some aspects of the show mirror her grandmother’s life. “My grandmother was an
Arabic singer from Lebanon, who started performing with Fayrouz, probably one of the most famous singers in the Arab world. But, instead of staying in the Middle East and carrying on with her career, she moved to America to make a better life for her children. So the show talks about her sacrifices and made me reflect on my own life and what it means to be a performer who has to travel the world and who is a mother too.”
Universal subsets
“I happen to have a funny family,” says Janine, adding, “I write about my life and my family. I don’t really do observational comedy. I’ve found there’s universality in the specifics — the more specific I am about my family, husband or parents, the more universal it is because everybody has relationships in their life.”
Janine says she was 10 when she told her mother she wanted to be an actor, so she was enrolled in the local musical theatre. “Even in school, I always played the funny part.”
“Once, a nun who was directing our play said, ‘You’re a comedienne,’ and when I told her I thought of myself as an actress, she looked at my best friend who was very beautiful and an amazing singer, and said, ‘No, she’s an actress. You’re a comedian’. I wanted to prove her wrong.”
“So I ended up auditioning for drama school in the UK and attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. I thought I’d be a serious actor, doing Shakespeare, until I got cast as Julia, the lead in Orwell’s 1984.
That’s when I found out how boring it was and that I actually love being funny and making people laugh.”
“While I was doing that play, two of my best friends would meet me every day in the dressing room and we would write sketches together. We’d film them and put them online and I realised I didn’t want to be an actor anymore. I’d love to write my own stuff and be a be a comedian.”
“Weirdly, it was from comedy I started getting acting roles. I was in the recent Batman movie and a few people came to the show because they’re huge Batman fans,” says Janine, who played Carla Diaz in
The Batman (2022). “That went on for about two weeks in my life,” she laughs.
She has also had roles in series such as The Buffering
(202123) and movies like
The People We Hate at the Wedding (2022) and Collette
(2018). After performing Man’oushe in Mumbai and Bengaluru, Janine will be taking the show to the United States in May.
I write about my life and my family. I don’t really do observational comedy.