Navigating anorexia, self-harm and heroin through comedy on tour
It touches on anorexia, bipolar disorder, self-harm, borderline personality disorder and heroin abuse, but it’s absolutely not heavy.
In fact, it’s silly. Very, very silly. And that’s why Rich Hardisty’s debut national tour is called Silly Boy. It plays Brighton’s Komedia on April 2.
“They are quite serious issues but that's the thing about my life and that's why the show's called Silly Boy because no matter how dark my life has got, no matter how chaotic or traumatic it's got, the thing that's always been consistent is that I've been a very silly boy. I'm an idiot.” And has that been his salvation? “Yes, I'm a plonker. It doesn't matter how dark it gets that's the thing you realise about human beings – no matter what we do, we're idiots! I had a mental collapse in 2017-2019 with another depressive episode, the downside of bipolar and I was stuck in the house for two years, and a friend, who's a big comedian, said ‘Rich, if you ever get out of this, then you've got to start doing stand-up comedy.’ I've been writing comedy and I knew about being funny and about the structures of comedy but I hadn’t really done any, maybe one or two gigs about ten years ago. It was something I'd wanted to do but I'd never actually done anything about it and I thought maybe I should. I just thought why not so I started putting on a show in my flat. I got a microphone and people would sit on my bed and I just talked about things and what had happened and people were laughing so I started talking about all my problems, the anorexia, the bipolar and I started actually selling out my flat so I went along to the Camden Comedy Club.”
And things developed from there. He was picked up by comedy promoter Mick Perrin: “He said ‘This show isn't a work in progress. It's brilliant! Can I take you to Edinburgh?’ and so I did Edinburgh Festival and at the end of one of the shows, a guy in the crowd was crying and I just wanted to give him a hug. He wasn’t crying because he was sad. He was crying because it was all so uplifting. And a few days later I had a message on Twitter saying he had had issues with eating and drugs and so on and he just said ‘I want to pay for you to go on tour.’ He said ‘Never stop what you are doing. What you are doing is so important.’
Yes, Rich talks about the tough stuff: “But I talk about it all in a very silly way. I'm a silly boy. Obviously it's all an ongoing process but I'm better now or I'm doing a lot better. And I just think it's really important to realise that you can't really change the way you are. You are the way you are because of the way you're wired and it would take years of therapy to change something like that. But I think it's important that you realise that you don't have control of what you believe and how you are. I think once you accept that that is how your brain is wired then you can be kind to yourself about the thoughts that arise. And I think the really important thing is that once you learn to treat yourself gently then it makes everything so much easier to deal with.”