Why Stand Up?

That’s what everyone’s been asking. Why on earth do you want to do stand-up? For most people, getting up in front of a roomful of potentially hostile hecklers, alone, just you and the mic, is their idea of hell. Even for me, for whom performing in front of live audiences is not unknown, it’s a challenge. I make most of my money dressing up and pretending to be someone else, which takes away a lot of the feeling of vulnerability; but standing up there and just being myself is a whole different kettle of fish.

It all started just less than a year ago. I’d been going on and on and on to my poor husband that my old mate Simon Pegg made the best zombie movie ever and that he had to see it. (If you haven’t yet seen Shaun of the Dead stop reading this blog now, go to your nearest decent video store and rent it immediately.) So we sat and watched it and although my husband agreed that it was, indeed, a very good zombie movie, I felt faintly depressed having watched it again. Not that the movie wasn’t great – it is. It’s just that watching Pegg made me realize that I’ve spent the last 15 years since university (where me and Simon met) waiting for acting jobs to fall out of the sky. Simon started doing stand-up immediately after graduation, wrote his excellent sitcom Spaced (in which Jessica Stevenson’s part is based on me), went on to write his own movies and is now super-famous. Saying it was a little bit of a wake-up call is like saying Facebook is a little bit addictive.

Of course I didn’t get off my lazy arse and start booking open mic gigs – I just lay around in a slough of despond wondering why I’d wasted so much time and how sad it was that I wasn’t going to realize my dream of winning an Oscar before I was 40. Then, thank God, Daniela suggested we take Dawn Whitwell’s stand-up class at Second City. She got onto it right away and I’ve been playing catch-up with her ever since. I booked myself onto Dawn’s course in July (Daniela had already done one round and joined me for her second), did my first gig in September and have been doing open mics ever since.

Where will this lead? Who knows. My dream is to have my own television series and to do more movies, but for now I’m enjoying writing and being in front of a live audience again