48 NOVEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
Nostalg ia
I
wanted to be a comedian
when I grew up. I wanted to
be Lily Tomlin and Jane
Wagner rolled into one with
a bit of Bea Lillie and
Elaine May thrown in. This
was when I was in my late teens,
living opposite my mum on the same
North London street where I’d been
raised. (I’m still there actually, which
is weird.) I was 20 and a student at
Cambridge University when I wrote
my first monologue as a member of
the Footlights troupe. We’d travel to perform at events
like the Philips Small Appliances Campaign Dinner
outside Birmingham.
I remember standing in the wings waiting for a stripper
to finish demonstrating the new Philips Ladyshave on
legs already so efficiently depilated I thought she was
going to bleed. Then I went on dressed in an ankle-length
PVC raincoat and a massive tam-o’-shanter cap to sing
a comic Scottish song. It did not go down well. But
dying a comedic death in front of drunken businessmen
wondering out loud why I wasn’t naked was easy
compared with stand-up.
Back then, in the early ’80s, the world of stand-up was
almost completely male. Women were viewed with
suspicion and often treated with casual contempt. The
audiences were no better—as soon as you walked onstage
you could feel expectations lowering. Gathering our
confidence for comedy has been one of the most exciting
steps forward in the last 30 years: Now you can hear
fabulous female stand-ups anytime you like. Back then, itfelt like people didn’t want women
to be funny and were surprised
and sometimes even offended
when they were. This is ironic
because without humor, women
could never have survived men.
Stand-up. It’s an innocuous
enough term. You stand up. You say things. People laugh.
You go home with some money in your pocket. But for
me it meant the essence of jaw-grinding, dribbling fear,
prequel to the sort of failure that I can only liken to
sudden-death syndrome.
Whenever I think of doing stand-up, I see a vision of
myself onstage with a microphone and the cartoon
mouse Jerry below sawing through the stage around me.
The mouse saws and saws and only stops if I get a
laugh. If I get a laugh, the world changes. I get to live.
At first I only ever did stand-up at political benefits
in London—there were plenty of them in the ’80s.
I performed for organizations like theHav ing aLaughLong before she became
an Oscar-winning
actor and screenw riter,
Emma Thompson took a
plunge into London’s
stand-up comedy scene.