list.co.uk/festival Dark Comedy | FESTIVAL COMEDY
SERIOUSLY FUNNY Colin Leggo
Felicity Ward
‘MY ANXIETY
WAS AN OVERNIGHT SUCCESS’
P H O T O © S T E V E N U L L A T H O R N E
Amid all the knockabout fun of the Fringe, some comedians are tackling bigger, often darker personal subjects. Kirstyn Smith fi nds that cancer, mental illness, adoption and amputation can still be a laughing matter
W e’re agreed. Nobody needs to hear this question again: do you have to be mad to be a comedian? ‘It’s a very original question that sits alongside “are women funny?” and “who are your inl uences in comedy?”’ On the subject of mental illness and its related wreckages, Felicity Ward is candid, referring to herself as a ‘psychopath’, which may be less far from the truth than imagined.
‘It was a bit of a no-brainer,’ she continues. ‘I’d done all the research before I started writing the show. I’m better at writing on a topic if I know a lot about it. I’ve been diagnosed for i ve years, ofi cially, but I’ve had it for a lot longer than that.’
In a study, The British Journal of Psychiatry found that comedians are likely to have psychotic tendencies, a report which led to Ward’s involvement in a documentary about mental health. All this brought up more material than she could conceivably use in the programme, so this year’s Fringe show, What If There Is No Toilet?, was born. Of course, you don’t have to be unstable to be funny, but according to the comedy lineup at this year’s Fringe, there’s nothing more amusing than personal tragedy. Alongside Ward’s show about mental health issues and irritable bowel syndrome (the latter delicate issue is also being
tackled by Laura Lexx), other topics to be addressed in comedy shows are amputation (Colin Leggo), euthanasia (Mel Moon), the death of a parent (John-Luke Roberts), a spouse with cancer (Alistair Barrie) and having cancer yourself (Beth Vyse). It’s shaping up to be a heavy month. ‘You have to be quite careful with the subject matter because a lot of people have been through absolute hell with it.’ It’s been i ve years since Beth Vyse had breast cancer and she i nally got the all-clear at the end of last year (‘they said to me, “you’re the same as everyone else now”, but you never will be the same as everyone else’), and her show relives the experience. As Funny as Cancer also deals with her childhood and later life experiences – she met Nelson Mandela when she was young and was engaged to Michael Jackson (no, not that one) – with Vyse neither sugar-coating nor going for gross-out. ‘My stuff has always been a bit surreal, but there’s this underlying thing that I want to get out: people go on stage and talk about things that happen to them because that’s funny. That’s the reason I’m doing this show, because it’s always on my mind. I’m telling it in quite a surreal way, so I suppose my style of humour comes through in that.’
Mark Steel’s Who Do I Think I Am? is the comic’s incredible tale of
6–13 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 33