Back to comedy

I was on BBC Radio 4 comedy last week. It was amazing and triggered an existential crisis

Would it be a midlife crisis to rejoin my teenage improv comedy group? Maybe. But I’m going to do it anyway.

I was on BBC Radio 4 comedy last week, with a teeny tiny little cameo at the end of my amazing friend Andrew Hunter Murray’s show, The Naked Week. Waiting backstage before I went on to the stage in front of the live audience in Brighton I felt like it was 2005, and I was about to go on stage at the Wheatsheaf, the pub in Oxford where I performed weekly with my improv group as an undergraduate. The excitement was just as fresh; the energy just as palpable as ever. Except this time I was backstage with real professional comedians who did this for a living. One of them, Andy, I’ve been fortunate enough to know since we were little 19 year olds together, performing weekly at the Wheatsheaf and in summers at the Edinburgh festival. Except in the meantime he has written three novels and become one of the deservedly-recognised famously-funny people of my generation.

I had an amazing time. And then I went home and had a 3am meltdown. Why hadn’t I kept up comedy? The Edinburgh festivals had been the highlight of my undergraduate years. But then, I’d run away from Oxford and England as soon as I graduated (that prehistoric novel I wrote may explain why…); admittedly to McGill in Montreal, another epicentre of comedy, but I never kept it up. At some point, members of my improv cohort began to bubble up into national recognition and I was so delighted for them, but never took it as a sign that maybe I could have kept comedy in my life.

Keeping ‘half a foot’ in academia was maybe the reason: by graduate school, I felt all the things I enjoyed (making macarons at the local patisserie; writing fiction; caring for children) seemed to be held up as signs I ‘wasn’t a real academic’. Then there was the actual ‘comedy’ piece I wrote for Salon, in 2012, ‘How to screw up in Arabic’, which later got cited, er, in a end-of-decade-crescendo involving this little document and how it all went a little bit awry. Back in Oxford for my doctorate, I’d walk past the Wheatsheaf pub on the high street and think — whoever is there now, I hope it brings them as much happy as it once brought me.

But why not me? This might be the cliche of ‘turning 40 and no longer caring what anyone thinks’, but I think the solution to this yearning is just to, well, resume it. There’s no law stopping me (when I think back to why I stopped comedy I do also recall — I did spend a lot of my 20s in authoritarian countries where taking the piss out of the powerful got you into pretty sketchy situations). It is, thankfully, too late for me to bring something to Edinburgh this year so a room of two and a half American tourists yawning through my standup will have to wait one more week. But in the meantime I’ll be back at my old haunt from autumn, doing one of the things that has made me happiest.