The first and maybe only rule of comedy is that it has to be funny. But how do standups manage to wring laughter from life’s darkest moments? Rich Hardisty’s new show, Silly Boy, tackles his experience of mental illness, self-harm and anorexia. “Who wants to sit and hear a guy talk about that?” he asks. “But if I can tell you something funny, and drip those bits in, you’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, good point!’ You’re more open when you’re laughing.”
Without those laughs, he says, his show would be “an ordeal”. Instead, Silly Boy is an absorbing hour in which Hardisty approaches psychosis and bipolar disorder with a surprising lightness. “I wanted to do a show where I got people to feel what it felt like. I want to show how we’re all just a series of events that shape who we are. We’re not as in control of our brains as we think.” Silly Boy explores how difficult childhood experiences led Hardisty to harbour a “compulsive” urge to hurt himself, escalating from biting the inside of his mouth until it bled to cutting himself so badly he was hospitalised. His mental pain eventually drove him to try heroin, although he avoided becoming addicted.
Harriet Dyer is also no stranger to confessional comedy: she runs Barking Tales, a night dedicated to mental illness. Her show Trigger Warning and her autobiography Bipolar Comedian explore the sexual abuse she suffered as a child and her subsequent addiction and mental health issues. “You have to make it funny,” she says, “otherwise it’s just a witness statement. You’ve got to remember that it’s a show.”
And comedians do sometimes forget, says Lulu Popplewell. “They’ll joke, ‘This is basically therapy now!’ And sometimes I’m like, ‘Yeah – stop it!’ That’s not comedy and that’s not fair on the audience.” Popplewell first saw standup as a teenager but it took her many years to try it, partly out of fear but also because of her addictions to alcohol and cocaine. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do it until I was at least one year clean and sober. There’s a rule in 12 Step where you mustn’t date in your first year. I ignored that. But I kept it for starting standup because I felt that was more vulnerable.”
Now Popplewell is working on her debut comedy hour, Actually Actually. It’s about letting go of what other people think of you, a lesson learned in rehab and revisited when a critical comment she made about Love Actually (in which she had a role as a child actor) was picked up by the tabloids, leading to an onslaught of trolling and insults from members of the public. And that’s all interwoven with her knowledge of addiction, which she hopes to show is actually quite relatable.
Popplewell explains that addiction isn’t just about drink and drugs. It also covers things such as OCD, self-harm and eating disorders. “A lot of things we do are addictive,” agrees Hardisty, who uses Silly Boy to analyse his desire to self-harm which he says “goes against logic. We all learn ways of coping – and I learned bad ways.”
Dyer “was always using drink and drugs to numb stuff out”, she says. The comedian was diagnosed as an alcoholic while at university, and discovered that it’s difficult to avoid booze on the standup circuit. “With comedy, you’re gigging in bars. You’d do the gig, then go out drinking afterwards. There’d be so many people I’d be gigging with and thinking, ‘I wonder if they know they’ve got a problem?’”
When Popplewell started standup in 2016, she was open about being in recovery, and colleagues have respected that. “There are dysfunctional people everywhere,” she says. “It’s just that comedians are telling you about it. In Edinburgh, there’s a recovery WhatsApp group where everyone is checking in on each other. You realise there are so many of us.”
Comedy has filled the space her destructive habits once occupied. It is the same with Dyer. “I don’t drink or anything any more,” she says, “but I am quite obsessive and comedy is now the obsession. I’ve phased out drink and drugs, and phased comedy in. I probably still have an addiction but it’s a positive one now.”
Popplewell also finds watching comedy a good form of escapism. “Have you ever come out of a show having completely forgotten the way you felt before you went in?” she says. “Comedy has become my drug. It’s really saved me.”
Although Hardisty has done TV presenting and made comedy shorts, he only tried standup recently, after mental illness confined him in his house for two years. “Something in me is pulling me up there,” he says. “Laughter is the most healing thing.” It’s a skill to find humour in these topics. Audiences can get uncomfortable – especially, these comics all say, when it comes to mental illness. People want to pay lip service: they don’t want to deal with the messy reality. At one corporate gig about mental health, Dyer was cut off when the host decided her personal story was too dark.
Hardisty did remove some “visceral” descriptions of self-harm that made crowds clam up. In the finished show, he simply tells audiences it’s OK to laugh. “You don’t need to feel sorry for me. Now I’ve got some distance, I find it hilarious that my brain could have thought to do that. No matter how dark it’s been, it’s always been very silly.”
Dyer has a slightly different attitude towards audiences: “I do feel a bit like, ‘Get a grip – you haven’t gone through it.’ I did take out a bit that was more graphic, but I’m saying what I need to, then housing it in jokes. That’s reassuring. And I think it’s very clear that I’m fine.” She says the title, Trigger Warning, gives audiences the context they need.
The imperative to make jokes, plus the briefness of comedy shows, leads Popplewell to worry about underplaying how serious all these things can be. “I don’t think addiction is a silly thing,” she says. “It’s just that elements of it are surreal and funny. People laugh in group therapy all the time because it’s relatable.”
Pope Lonergan started the Pope’s Addiction Clinic comedy night as a way to emulate the Narcotics Anonymous meetings he has been attending since 2017. He asks comedians to perform “anecdotes or opinions that aren’t rehearsed. It’s a way for them to divest themselves of artifice.” Since starting the clinic, his perspective on confessional comedy has shifted. Once he viewed it as cathartic, now he’s not sure.
“I made this mistake when I tried to kill myself,” he says. “A week later, I spoke about it to an audience. That prevented me from really processing it. It’s a cardinal sin for any comedian to say this, but I don’t think it’s healthy to constantly puncture gravitas and milk everything for laughs. Sometimes you need to sit with a situation.” Popplewell agrees. “I don’t want to undermine my own experience. Comedy is a way of growing, but it’s also a defence mechanism that puts distance between you and the thing.”
Nevertheless, comedy can be a “little counselling conveyor belt”, says Dyer, as it helps you to file things away. After years of her abuse being ignored, having people listen to her story feels validating. However, cautions Popplewell, telling it is never straightforward. “It’s sort of like the tide: you’re gathering it up and saying, ‘I control this.’ But then it goes back out again and you’re opening yourself up to renewed judgment. Ultimately, the way you control your story is by learning when to care what people think.”
For Hardisty, standup crystallises all of his challenging experiences. “My friend saw the show and afterwards he was like, ‘You’ve solved the Rubik’s Cube of your own life. You’ve managed to take all the bad things and make them into the thing that’s going to change your life.’”
Lulu Popplewell is at Vault festival, London, on 11 March and at Pleasance London on 24 March. Rich Hardisty is on tour from 2 April. Harriet Dyer is at Soho theatre, London, on 11 April.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
