Felicity Ward
Felicity Ward is an Australian comedian, actor, and writer who has been performing stand-up since 2008, often with a focus on mental health.
Felicity first opened up about her experiences of depression and anxiety in her 2014 documentary, Felicity’s Mental Mission, and went on to address the subject in two stand-up shows, What If There Is No Toilet (2015), later filmed as a Netflix special, and 50% More Likely to Die (2016). She has continued to talk about mental health in subsequent stand-up shows, interviews, and a BBC radio series called Appisodes.
This interview took place in February 2024 as we developed our Performing Anxiety good practice resource.
Hello Felicity, thank you for doing this.
I will say as we start, just on the mental health thing, someone messaged me, a promoter, about three days ago and asked if I could do a gig tonight. I was like, yeah, I’ve booked it in, and it’s a lovely gig. And they’ve just messaged me this morning and said, ‘the person who pulled out actually got their times wrong, are you free tomorrow night? Sorry about this.’ And I’ve just had to write back and say, ‘I’m not free tomorrow night, I’m counting on this money, I’m a single parent now. And I’m not trying to guilt trip you, but I’m not responsible for other people’s mistakes.’ And I’m just letting you know that I’ve turned my phone off, but my mind is there, the anxiety of being clear with people, which is very misinterpreted in this country, especially in the arts, like advocating for yourself as a business, rather than as someone who should just be grateful for the work. It’s really hard. And Australians have a much more direct style of communication than British people. So it’s often interpreted as rude.
It’s interesting to me that you’re somebody who’s been very open about dealing with anxiety, and that being a very big part of your life, and here is somebody really not taking that into account. Do you find there’s an understanding of people’s mental health needs in the comedy industry?
I’ve had a promoter approach me and say, if there’s anything that you can think of that would be like a good measure to have, as far as mental health, you know, of what we can do as promoters. Someone did approach me about that, which I thought was really cool. Also, the person who I was dealing with (in relation to the gig booking) is so lovely, that is probably his anxiety and his confrontation avoidance, going ‘Felicity will understand’ because he doesn’t want to say to the other person ‘I’ve already booked someone in.’ I’m very sorry, this isn’t my mistake. So it’s hard when the buck stops with you rather than the promoter.
I got postnatal depression after I had my son, and, you know, he was born four months before the pandemic. And so we had a four month old when the pandemic started, and we were in a two bedroom, first floor apartment with a baby. We had a communal garden, thank God, but you know, it was hauling baby and stuff up and down the stairs. But since then my anxiety has really abated. It’s much more been depression, the last five years that I’ve been… I wouldn’t say working against but trying to work with or around. And I think I came out of postnatal quite a while ago, and I was slowly weaned off to the lowest dosage of my medication. And I think that I’ll probably come off it this year.
But it gets really interesting not having anxiety. Like when I wrote What If There Is No Toilet, it was based off a time in my life when I was having panic attacks on stage, when I remember my speech would be interrupted by my anxiety, like I would have this sort of constriction in my throat, because my chest was so tight, and I wasn’t breathing freely. And then it sort of switched to depression. I would still get some anxiety but since I had my baby I haven’t really suffered from anxiety for four or five years.
You started working as a comedian in 2008, and you’ve said in the past that there was a point around 2011 when you were going through a very difficult time and you decided you would just be completely open about what you were experiencing because you felt you had nothing to lose. Was that the point where you became a ‘mental health comedian’?
Yeah, I mean, when it started to happen was like 2010 or 2011, and then that’s sort of when I started to experience it at its worst, maybe. And then years later. One thing I would say to anyone who wants to talk about their mental health is make sure that you have dealt with the crux of it before you start to talk about it on stage. So I don’t talk about anything that I haven’t spoken about in therapy, that I haven’t worked through a good chunk of, that I don’t feel like it will upset me to talk about it again.
I know lots of people have something traumatic happen to them, and then they start writing material about it straight away. For me, that doesn’t make sense for lots of reasons. One, I don’t know how I’m going to react in the future. I don’t know what else there is to come up about it. Emotionally, I mean. I’m a very big advocate of therapy and support groups and have participated in both for nearly 20 years. And so when I get on stage to talk about it, it means that I’m not going to, to use the buzzword, retrigger myself.
But also, I’m a safe person to talk about it, the audience won’t be worried for me. And if they are, I can still hold their insecurity, while I feel secure myself. There’s nothing worse than when you think you’re okay with something, and then an audience responds to it in a way that you don’t expect. And then it rattles your foundation. And then the other thing is, about becoming a quote, unquote, ‘mental health comedian’, I didn’t make a choice to go, ‘I think it’s time to talk about my mental health.’ I previously did not have great skill as a writer, in that I couldn’t necessarily make everything funny. I couldn’t go, ‘I want to write jokes about American politics’, and then write jokes about American politics. It was just whatever came up.
And what was coming up at the time was this was a couple of years later, and I’d written other shows, actually, in that time between experiencing the panic attacks on stage and What If There Is No Toilet, there was about four years between that. And the show that I did in 2012 was about a time in my life six years previously where I stopped drinking, left my fiancee and moved back in with my mum. So I like to give things at least three or four years before I talk about it publicly and repeatedly. From a purely comedic point of view, I have better perspective, and I get better jokes. It doesn’t mean that I won’t be writing jokes while they’re happening. But I won’t talk about it until I’ve dealt with the underlying terror or experience of it, if that makes sense.
Is that something you’ve learned from experience? Or have you always been able to keep that distance?
I’ve always managed to keep that distance but not consciously. So that show in 2012, about when I stopped drinking, it actually started from a show called Women of Letters, and it was this amazing show that mates of mine made, and they would invite women from all different industries to write a letter based on a topic. And the topic for our show was that you had to choose a photograph of yourself and write a letter to it. And so it was a picture of me and it was my mum’s 40th (birthday) and I was 13, and I was behind the cocktail bar. And it was about my drinking and what my drinking became. And it sort of felt like there was a lot more to talk about there. And then I thought maybe I could write about that time in my life, you know, it sort of all happened pretty organically, which it often does with my shows. I talk about this a lot. And I should probably stop talking about this a lot. But I think that there is a cynicism, of some people who talk about their trauma, they mine their trauma, intentionally, not because they have a burning desire to, not because they feel like it’s an important topic to talk about. Sometimes it’s for recognition.
Well, this is something I was going to come on to later but now we’re on it, why do you think people do that? What’s led people to think that’s a good idea?
Maybe the popularity of the shows that did it initially, I mean, before me there was Luisa Omielan: What Would Beyonce Do? I never saw that show but I do know that she made lots of jokes about her depression and, I think, suicidal ideation. So I’m certainly not the first person to do it. Ruby Wax did it before us, you know. It was just serendipitous. I think the year that I did What If There Is No Toilet, Le Gateau Chocolat was also doing a cabaret show about it. I think that… what’s her name? Performance artist…
Bryony Kimmings?
That’s who I’m thinking of. Yeah, and we all did a show together (A Gala for Mental Health, a fundraiser for the Mental Health Foundation). There just seemed to be this accidental groundswell of mental health comedy and art being made. And I think that was just coincidence, you know, like when Bridget Christie did A Bic For Her and then there was lots of shows about feminism. So yeah, once there’s sort of like, a success around an idea, I think there are some people that go, ‘Oh, I’ve got that. Does that mean I can do a show?’
Which is great. Of course we want people to be inspired. But I remember the year I did Busting a Nut – which is a stupid name for a show, that still makes me laugh – that was three years later and was just a straight comedy show, that was just stand-up, there was nothing emotional, there was nothing heartfelt. And it seemed that year there was lots and lots of shows about people doing serious matters, so that they would be…… this is very hard to say diplomatically, it just seemed like they were doing it to get more attention for their show. And I don’t know if that’s fair or not, to be perfectly honest. But it just seemed like there was a lot of people talking about traumatic things that maybe didn’t have the skill to talk about traumatic things.
The thing with me is, I always have to make my shows funnier than they are any other emotion. And I remember working on the show about me stopping drinking, it was called The Hedgehog Dilemma, and someone was a script editor for me. And he said, it’s okay to have an emotional moment at the end but you have to earn it. You have to make sure there’s jokes all the way through the show. You have to lay the foundation. If you want an emotional moment at the end, you have to get the story right, you have to get the structure right, and you have to make sure it’s so funny all the way through that by the time you get to this one moment that, even if it’s a surprise, it’s well earned and it fits the show. I’ve seen lots of shows where they do 40 minutes of incredible club comedy. Just laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, nothing to do with what they’re about to hit you with at the 45 minute mark. And then they drop something about, you know, a mental health disorder or an eating disorder. You’re like f***ing hell, man. Like, just leave it out. Why are you trying to make the show important? It’s funny, just do a funny show. It’s fine to do a funny show. So yeah, I have opinions on that.
The other side of that is people potentially making themselves quite vulnerable on stage, and not having the distance from it that you were talking about.
Yes. And look, maybe I’m being too harsh, and, rather than being frustrated by it, I should be more compassionate, more caring. And you know, the people that I’m actually talking about are not those same people. The people who aren’t ready to talk about their mental health on stage, and are (doing it), that could very well just be an accident very easily. And when you do see other people doing something that you would like to do, it can give you the confidence to do it. So that’s like a huge compliment. From a safety perspective, I think that it’s really important that you get professional mental health support before you start talking about it on stage. I think it’s great to write about it while you’re in it. Because for me, I have such a terrible memory, the specificity of the experience, and the intensity of the experience, always manages to bust out gems that I couldn’t remember. You know, especially with having a baby, there were things that happened that I wish I wrote everything down, because you forget everything. And your baby changes so quickly. And you change mentally, so quickly, along with your baby, that you forget how you used to think, let alone what they used to look like, but how you used to think. And my friend, again, who was the script editor, said, comedy is about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. And so the intensity of a mental health episode gives me an insight that I know that I probably won’t have in a couple of months’ time. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that is the time to talk about it. It’s the time to write about it, if that makes sense.
Have you done comedy about postnatal depression?
So the next show that I’m doing that I’ll tour in the UK is a two hour show. Initially, it was three hours, it was an hour on pregnancy, an hour on birth, and then an hour on newborn. And I’ve sort of stuck all three of them together. So it’s a two hour show, with a break in the middle and I discuss postnatal then as well, and going on antidepressants.
I’d never been on antidepressants before. A therapist said the worst thing. I’ve seen lots of therapists, and I was in Australia. our boy was ten weeks old, I was so postnatal, I was filming a TV show. I’d gone back to work when Frankie was nine weeks old, in Australia. Chris (Savva, Felicity’s husband) had quit his job, we flew out there, for four months of work. And it was all just piling up on me. And I went to this psychologist, and she said, ‘What’s going on for you?’ And I just listed the horrors that were happening at the time because it was so bad. My ex fiance died, a close family member got cancer, like it was you just couldn’t write it. It was so much. And I gave her the list. And she looked compassionately worried. And she goes ‘Felicity, oh, my goodness, that’s so much. And, you know, I felt relief from that. And then she just sort of looked at me worried and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know bitch, that’s why I’m here.’
So, yes, I’ve made some jokes about that. But again, that was 2020. That was four years ago. So I feel like I talk about it and I don’t feel shame. I don’t feel sad, all those micro feelings that come with processing a very difficult mental health period. They’re not coming up on stage for me. I’m not re traumatising myself.
Can we talk about the mental health documentary you made in 2014, Felicity’s Mental Mission, in which you talked to various comedians about their mental health? How did that come about?
Do you know what, I had completely forgotten about this, but this is the exact reason why I wrote What If There Is No Toilet. So the script editor I was talking about, Declan Fey, ended up working as the writer on this documentary. The directors wanted stand-up about mental health or mental illness; they wanted four or five breakouts, as they called them, and it would be documentary, documentary documentary, then cutting back to me doing stand-up, and the overarching theme was I’m making this documentary while I doing the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and Sydney Comedy Festival and Brisbane. I mean, it was a stupid idea to do mentally, to be perfectly honest.
Were you already doing stand-up material about mental health?
Not really. In 2013 I had a one or two minute bit about anxiety. That was it. I didn’t know how to expand on the idea, so to speak.
Why were you seen as the right person to present the documentary?
So they wanted to make a documentary about mental illness in comedy. They had seen me talk about it a little bit and I’m not trying to imply that I’m a trailblazer but I don’t remember anyone else at the time talking about mental illness in any capacity. So I suppose I seemed like a sitting duck. And they pitched the idea and I thought, ‘Oh, we won’t hear back from them for ages.’ I had moved to London ten months before and they’re like, ‘you’ve got the green light, and they want to start filming in seven weeks’ time back in Australia and I’m like, shit, okay, cool. So we filmed the show when I was at Melbourne. But when I went back to London is when we filmed the breakouts, so to speak. And I remember in between those two – this year was insane – I was in South Africa for a month. And I remember saying to Declan (Fey) ‘I have so much material here.’ Like, it’s too big for these four, three minute breakouts or whatever they are. There’s too much fertile ground just t o do a documentary. And I said to him, I thought a really funny show title would be What If There Is No Toilet, if I did a show about anxiety. And so I was in a hotel room in Cape Town, talking to Declan who was in Melbourne, about a show I was going to start in London.
Was making the documentary a positive experience in the end? It sounds quite stressful.
Yeah, it was, it was very stressful to make. And I remember having a panic attack while we were filming, because they asked two comedians to perform outside a venue, musical comedians, and the director wanted me to hand out pamphlets to people passing by. And I’d already been very specific and said, I don’t want to impose on the general public, I don’t like pranks, I don’t like approaching people that aren’t prepared for it. Like, I have an anxiety disorder. So number one, it makes me anxious. And then it makes me anxious at the idea that I would make anyone else anxious. It puts me up for public rejection, which makes me more anxious. Anyway, they said, oh just hand them out, just stand next to them. And I felt so awkward. And then I started having a panic attack. And I said, I’ve got to stop. And then they said – which is fair – can you take the camera to the bathroom with you? So I took the camera to the bathroom and had a panic attack to the camera in the bathroom.
And that ended up in the documentary, didn’t it?
Yeah, I think so. There was another one where I had a really awful day, so they gave me a camera to keep with me to make a little video diary on when I was travelling that they would go back and watch. It’s kind of what people do on Tiktok now. And there’s lots of good stuff on Tiktok, I’m not putting down people sharing their panic attacks on social media. It’s really, really helpful for lots of people. You know, people that haven’t been through therapy, people that can’t afford therapy, people that have no support.
I remember when I was postnatal and I was so angry all the time, I was just f***ing furious. I felt like everyone wanted me to do these things that wouldn’t help. I thought everyone wanted me to go to therapy. And they did. I thought everyone wanted me to be on antidepressants. And they did. And I was like, this isn’t gonna work. I’m doing all of this for you people. And I was so angry. And I remember talking about it on Instagram, and I was doing Instagram stories about it. And I had people contact me going, ‘Oh, my God, you’re so brave. And thank you so much.’ And it actually felt like the most cowardly thing to do.
It’s so easy to talk to no one. It’s a one way exchange. It’s like stand up. When people talk about me being brave, talking about mental illness on stage. I’m like, ‘no, for me, it’s such a controlled environment where I get to talk, you have to listen, you don’t control what I say, I can’t see into your eyes.’ It’s so much braver to look in a friend’s eyes and say, I am not suicidal, per se, but I don’t know what other options I have. It’s so much harder to say, ‘I feel so sad, and my life is fine, and I don’t know why.’
One thing I was going to ask is, what if you go on stage, you talk about mental health, and people don’t laugh? That’s a very exposing situation. Perhaps that’s not an anxiety you have, because you’re so experienced at it. But what are your thoughts on that?
Well, I did two stand up new material nights last night. Neither of them were about mental illness. And the first one, I ate shit in a way that I haven’t eaten shit in two years. I had almost ten minutes of silence. A bad gig is a bad gig, you know what I mean? Whatever you’re talking about. And that’s the thing about being ready to talk about it. I’ll feel bad if no one laughs because I’m a comedian. But if I’ve already got professional help for what I’m about to talk about if it’s vulnerable, and I’m far enough away from it, and I’ve done enough processing, then the vulnerability will be that I haven’t written a joke that’s funny enough.
Right. So that’s another reason for waiting, isn’t it? Because if you put your trauma on stage, and you’re not ready to do it, and people don’t laugh, then you could end up taking that very personally.
There’s also the risk that you’re not ready to hear people laugh at your trauma. That they laugh in a nasty way, that you say something that isn’t the joke, and that’s what people laugh at. Yeah, you need to be ready. Like with anything, laughs might come from a number of different places. I’m actually not talking about anyone else but me. Anyone can do whatever they like, it’s stand up, you can do it however you want. But for me, I don’t want people to be laughing at something that is traumatic, if I haven’t already looked at it very clearly and I’m ready for people to laugh at it.
And so, in 2015, you end up performing What If There Is No Toilet, a show about anxiety, at the Edinburgh Fringe, with the serendipity of a lot of other people also making shows about mental health. What are your memories of that time?
I only sort of realised it towards the end of the festival, because you know, at the beginning of the festival you’re just trying to keep your head above water. I will say that before the festival, there was a mix up, I said to my promoter at the time that I wanted a room that was maybe 100 seats. And by the time he got back to the venue that room was gone, and they only had 150 seats. So I panicked. I was like, is there a curtain that we can put in because I can’t do a show about mental illness to an empty room. I’m gonna have a f***ing panic attack every night.
And then I remember, funnily enough, talking to (fellow comedian) Sara Pascoe, who can make the most emotional thing so pragmatically simple, such a simple equation. And she goes, oh, that’s okay, it just means that you have to make a show that should be played to 150 people. Just because she said it with such confidence, I was like, yeah, that’s all I’ve got to do. Fine.
What I do remember about that month is the number of emails I got from people. And this is what I never set out to do – and I think this is the difference between me and the people who want to do something important, quote, unquote. I had lots of people emailing me saying, I haven’t left the house in months, I came and saw your show last night, I’m writing this from the doctor’s surgery, I’m going to get a diagnosis. I had three or four people write from the doctor’s surgery. Then I had, you know, I don’t know how many emails, people saying, ‘I’ve never heard anyone talk about that. I have exactly the same thing. And my joke was that I just saw more and more people with cardigans and purple hair and small backpacks coming to the show. And it felt accidentally like I’d created a little tree house club for people with mental illness. And everyone else was welcome, but it was our club.
And so it felt like yeah, it felt like a secret club that we have allowed other people into, rather than we were standing there exposing our stuff to strangers to judge. It felt like I’d created something that was actually ours, that we had the control, and I think that’s what often mental illness was. It was people who didn’t have it, talking about it, very earnestly, very middle class. There’s a Ken Loach quote which is ‘pity is a right wing construct’, which nearly took the chair out of under me when I first heard it. With me I wasn’t making jokes outside of the circle about the people in the circle. I was in the circle, making jokes for us and other people were allowed to watch.
There’s a quote from you from around that time when you said something like, ‘I don’t really care about creating awareness of mental illness, I’d rather people donated money to mental health charities and gained awareness. What the show creates is a place that people can come for an hour and not feel like they’re a freak.’
I think about it now and it’s funny hearing the word freak because I don’t really use that word anymore. And not because I think it’s a bad word or anything, but I think about that time when I was having those panic attacks on stage, I did feel like a freak. And sadly a really good friend of mine, Cal Wilson, died in November. She’s a comedian and she was the first person that I spoke to that said she also had anxiety. We were backstage at a gig and I had maybe just been diagnosed and because I can’t shut the f*** up – I tell everyone everything about myself – I told her that I’ve just been diagnosed with a generalised anxiety disorder. And she goes, ‘Oh, I’ve got anxiety.’ And it was such a relief. And then there was another comic who said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve got anxiety too.’
And I felt, and maybe this was part of me subconsciously while I was writing about it, because I felt so lonely, I did feel like a freak when that was happening. It would have been such a relief to know that there are other comics going through it, you know, let alone other people in the world. People who were literally in our industry, who are having the same thing as me. I was like, Oh, my God, my head’s really bleeding. So that was something that Cal and I really bonded on. And that would have been probably 2011.
And then the year after What If There Is No Toilet you came back with another mental health themed show, 50% More Likely To Die. Was it quite a conscious decision at that point to make another show on the same theme?
Yes, this is the only time I’ve ever tried to be cynical. When I’m judging those other people (who make mental health themed shows), I’m judging myself too. I had these grand ideas that I was going to write a show purely around mental health statistics. I’m like, I’ve got the writing chops to do this now, I can do it, no one’s ever done this before. And this is what happens when I try and write something from my ego rather than from my intuition. What ended up happening was five days before my first work in progress show, under this title, about statistics, I reckon I had six minutes of mental health materal. I had f***ing nothing. And I had some other material, but I wouldn’t have had more than 20 minutes, right.
And this is why I know now to write from whatever comes up. I get shown what I’m supposed to write about. So five days before the work in progress, I have a gig in Liverpool, and I have a little bag with me. I’ve got to go to Liverpool, do the gig that night, go back to London the next day, film a TV thing, then go back on the train to Liverpool that night. And I remember getting the bus and sitting down and I left my little bag in the in the bag area. And I sat somewhere else because it was really busy. And then I got off the bus. And then I got on the train. And I realised I’d left my bag on the bus. And then the next 24 hours – I think that you saw the show – but the number of coincidences that happened was my show. And then I just worked the other 20 minutes that I already had into it.
But that is how I write my shows. If I sit down and go (adopts serious voice), ‘okay, what am I going to…?’ You know what I mean? When I was writing the show that I’m going to do (this year) I couldn’t just write an hour on being pregnant, on birth, on being a mum and having a newborn, an hour isn’t enough. There’s too much. So then I was like, ‘well, what if I did three shows?’ And it felt like a natural thing to do. It wasn’t like, you know, what will blow people’s minds? What will impress people? It felt a logical thing to do.
I was talking to another comedian, Dave Chawner, who began doing mental health themed comedy around the same time as you and has since combined it with activism. One of the things he said was that there’s been a bit of a backlash because comedy always moves on to the next thing, and there are now comedians who openly mock the idea of doing a mental health themed show. What’s your take on that?
I think that people get sick of buzzwords. Like, you know how everyone’s got ADHD now. That’s an easy thing to make fun of like, ‘oh, hasn’t everyone got ADHD now’, I’m pretty sure they didn’t have an adult diagnosis until 2017, so that’s why everyone’s got ADHD now. They only had symptoms to diagnose boys, they didn’t have symptoms to diagnose girls. This also happened in the late 1990s, where there was the rise of ADHD and medication and it created this fear about overmedicated children. But the fear is never about under diagnosing children, and the strain that puts on them as a person. And there are also new studies that have come out that have said that if you treat the ADHD, you can then treat anxiety and depression. And that’s a very recent discovery. So, you know, on one hand, I’m not precious about it. By the way, I’ve been to the doctor twice to get a referral to get tested for ADHD. And I’ve lost both referrals. So I think that’s the test. I also, when I was 19, worked in a cafe, and the boss used to be a nurse. And a week in – this is in 1999 – she said, can you please take my son’s Ritalin, you have ADHD. And I never did anything about that. So I don’t take it personally, I think it’s a really easy thing to get. It’s just giving people what they want.
If you can make an audience feel like they’ve got a slightly transgressive thought, or anti establishment thought, if you can tap into that, then you can make them laugh. It’s like, you know how people used to laugh at racism, they thought it was edgy, and then people stopped laughing, you know? So this is another wave of people. Years ago, I think it was an Australian journalist who went on a talk show and was making fun of people with mental illness using colouring books, and I just felt like calling up and going. ‘Yeah, I actually think there’s probably lots of veterans that are using colouring books that are probably pretty embarrassed about it.’ The veterans that you argue that you care about, come Memorial Day, you know. I don’t know, it’s all cynical, isn’t it? It’s all people trying to get attention.
I suppose there was a wave of comedy shows about mental health, and perhaps that’s less the case now, but mental health is not necessarily something you move on from yourself. As someone who continues to live with depression, how do you feel about a backlash against mental health themed comedy?
I don’t care. Yeah. I truly don’t care. Like, as I said before, if I start to pick what I think I’m gonna write comedy about, there will be a backlash on me. I will suffer. No one else will suffer. You know what I mean? So I’ve never cared what the trend is in comedy. I care about progress. I care about, you know, people’s ideas are changing and evolving. But I don’t care if there’s a backlash. ‘Oh, no, there’s a comedian that says that mental illness is lame!’ Ok, go and write comedy about it. It will have no impact on me.
This brings up another thing I was going to ask. As someone who talks about mental health on stage, do you feel a sense of responsibility to get it right?
Yeah. I think that I’m very clear when I have got the information from a professional source and when I’m just giving anecdotal information, and what my experience is. I saw a comic last night, and they made some jokes about Israel and Palestine, and there was a couple from Israel in the front row. And it’s just comedy, absolutely, but at the same time he was really sweating because he had made some jokes that were flippant, that felt like they were trying to be dark and edgy for dark and edgy’s sake. And there is nothing that I say on stage that I don’t have complete conviction about. If I’m making a statement about something, if I’m talking about something, my anxiety was so intense, there is no way I would talk about something that I couldn’t justify off stage looking into someone’s eyes. I need to be able to withstand an audience going ‘ooooh’ And go, no, no, I know exactly where this is coming from. And I will talk to anyone in this room. Because I’ve done that before in the past, where I haven’t written a joke from the right place, it’s upset someone and I felt bad rather than going, ‘look, I understand why you feel bad, but I stand by this, this is how I feel.’
That sort of brings me to my final question. I remember you saying in the past that your mental health sort of makes you good at your job – your hyper vigilance, for example, which means you pay a lot of attention to audiences’ responses.
Yeah. I have this new bit that I was trying this week. And when you hang out with comedians all the time, your threshold for what is offensive or upsetting rather than funny is very different from civilians, so to speak. So there is a bunch of guys on YouTube that help the homeless, or they surprise people and do like positive pranks for people on low incomes, who are shopping in low income thrift shops and stuff. And I think a lot of them are doing actually very good work. But lots of them have – and this is a phrase that I thought was very funny – the voice of a cartoon paedophile. Now, I have done that (joke) three times this week, and no one has found that phrase as funny as I have. I’m like, okay, there is maybe a moral conflict of people worried about the people who are receiving the money, that there is a some kind of predatory element to it, and there isn’t, but I haven’t made that clear enough in the setup. So that’s the surprises now, it’s not my political ideas, or my mental illness is upsetting to people. Actually, it doesn’t even cross my mind that someone would be compassionate towards me for talking about mental illness on stage. I talk about it so frequently. It doesn’t cross my mind that it’s even a vulnerable thing to talk about. And in fact, I talk about it in such a camp flamboyant way, it feels almost like I’m acting like I’m better than them in that I just have a throwaway line. When I’m being very chaotic, which happens, I get distracted, I’ll stop and go ‘Yes, of course, I’m on a mild antidepressant’ and then just get back to it. And people really laugh at that. Or I will say ‘here a surprising fact that you might not know, I am not on cocaine,’ and then I’ll just get back to it. And having more and more confidence about it makes it such a wonderful source to be able to talk about. I don’t know if I’m describing it properly….
I guess what I’m driving at is that, as hard as depression and anxiety can be to live with from day to day, are there positive aspects of it in terms of your work as a comedian? I remember, years ago, when Stephen Fry made a documentary about being bipolar, he said he couldn’t imagine what he would be like as a writer or performer or as a creative person if he wasn’t bipolar.
If I could get rid of my depression with a button, I f***ing would. I don’t know how depression helps me apart from being really good at making me rest. I would say – and again, I haven’t been diagnosed – there are things that are consistent with ADHD that I find magical. And really, I would love if I treat the ADHD, then the anxiety and depression would be treated too. Because look, I find living with depression hard. I find living in the UK really hard. I’m just sadder in this country. And as someone whose natural disposition is happy and joyful, that’s a depressing thought. I would happily live without depression. If I’m being brutally honest, I am grateful for what it has given me in that there is positives in hardship, it gives you a resilience, it gives you a compassion and an empathy for people that I might not have had otherwise. And I’m not just talking about people with mental illness, I just mean people in general. I find that I advocate for people who struggle very easily. And I mean, it’s made me radidly left wing! Because if I find this world hard, and this country hard, and I’m doing okay, on paper, how are poor people getting through this? How are poor people with mental illness getting through this? And when you’re not getting your Maslow’s hierarchy of needs met, it is very hard to not succumb to the environmental pressures that can create mental illness as well.
Performing Anxiety
A resource for people who want to make audience-facing or participatory arts projects about mental health.
