Meet the Edinburgh Fringe comedians who are also carers: 'Making light in dark moments is important'
Among an estimated 5.4 million carers in the UK, some are also comedians. Jay Richardson speaks to several performers bringing shows to the Fringe shaped by their experience of looking after sick or disabled family members
James Gardner can recall a frustrating meeting with BBC Scotland. The Glaswegian stand-up and disability rights advocate was pitching a travelogue that would feature him performing his 2023 Edinburgh Fringe show, Born in a Wheelchair, at accessible venues around the country. Discussing caring for his brother, Alexander, who has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and is non-verbal, Gardner would eschew comedy club basements and rooms above pubs, chatting to audience members along the way.
“That seems like an able-bodied person talking for a disabled person,” he was told. Gardner can't hide his despair. “Being able-bodied doesn't mean you're not disabled,” he points out. “And why should me talking about disability take away an opportunity from a disabled person? That's tokenism.”
Fate could make any of us carers. Yet carers are rarely given a platform. The government estimates that 5.4 million people, or around 8% of the UK population, currently provide unpaid care for family members or friends. The Carer magazine has found that 44% of carers receive no government support for respite, which can essentially confine them indoors and limit their opportunities. Sharing responsibility for Alexander with his parents and younger sister, Gardner “had no access to the arts, particularly as a child”. With his father and mother working, he says, “it wasn't possible for me to be taken to clubs or after-school initiatives.”
“I didn't leave Glasgow until I was 27. Quite simply, my parents couldn't have afforded or been able to cope without me. I shared a room with my brother, helped put him to bed, washed and dressed him… the complex and demanding nature of his needs most likely meant my own ADHD was missed for decades, only coming to light when I came to lead a more independent life.”
Caring, observers stand-up Ben Pope, is “invisible, tied to how disability is treated in this country in general”. Pope looked after his late father and says the message was that “if you're even minorly inconvenient and we can sweep you under the carpet, we will.”
Gigging while also running an independent bookshop five days a week, the former Cambridge Footlight recalls coping with his father's Parkinson's Disease as “very draining”, even with his mother as primary care giver. Yet “difficult and frustrating” as it was, he says, “it also felt very intimate. Most people my age don't spend a lot of time with their parents. I was dressing him and we developed a very tactile relationship because he lost his voice. Doing things with him became more meaningful.”
“I once thought of humour as a coping mechanism being a bit of a cliché. But no more,” says Pope, whose show relates how gardening became a fondly shared pastime, even if he was ultimately forced to withhold the power tools. “There were some close calls. Helping my dad chop firewood, I was essentially operating him while he operated the chainsaw. If you've seen the movie Ghost, it was as ridiculous as that.
“I had reservations talking about him and his condition on stage. He didn't choose that and I can't protect my other family from hearing random audiences laugh at things they consider quite personal. [But] I process things through writing material. It would seem a wildly large omission and in some sense dishonest to myself and an audience not to talk about it. It cements my memories of him, makes them something living and breathing that I'm interacting with.”
Mary Bourke had no idea how many comedians were carers until she made her Radio 4 series Who Cares? earlier this year. The show featured fellow acts Josephine Lacey, Al Barrie and Imran Yusuf, plus professional carer and comic Pope Lonergan and doctor-comedian Michael Akadiri.
“It's like anything,” she reflects. “All of a sudden, you're hyper-aware of it because it affects you in a selfish, narcissistic way.” Bourke cares for her husband, retired stand-up Simon Clayton, who suffered a stroke in the 2020 lockdown. Sharing the couple's circumstances on stage, “a lot of comedians would talk to me afterwards about their situation, punters would talk to me afterwards. And I thought 'oh, we should get this out to more people'. It's good for me to talk about it and get things off my chest. But it's also a lovely way for carers to feel seen because no-one ever talks about them.”
Caroline McEvoy's first Edinburgh hour is about her relationship with her profoundly autistic younger brother, Jonathan. Almost 30, he still lives with their parents. “With the climate around benefits and government support gradually being taken away, responsibility inevitably falls back on families,” she argues. “But at least there's discourse about the parents of disabled children. What about the siblings who likely end up as the carer?”
Like many performers, McEvoy wrestled with when to make her Fringe debut. But she figured, “if not now, when? Because I don't necessarily know what the next 10 to 15 years is going to look like. I'm in my early thirties, my partner and I are talking about maybe having a family. Right now, I'm operating without responsibilities. But those responsibilities are coming my way.”
Another debutant, Aaron Wood, has helped care for his mother since he was nine and she was diagnosed with the ultra-rare condition Medium-Chain Acyl-CoA Dehydrogenase Deficiency, which can lead to dangerously low blood sugar levels. He became her full-time, paid carer three years ago.
He's happy to joke about his father leaving before he was born, his autism and ADHD. But looking after his mother, he says, “isn't something I've ever tried to explore for material. “I don't love the fact that my mum was ill and I didn't get exactly what I wanted out of my upbringing. Stand-up is something I adore so much and I don't want to blur its lines with something I don't like. I don't think I can make it funny enough to justify. And I'm never trying to be the comic who gives the crowd all my issues as well as their own.”
Even so, despite his grapples with the organisation involved, he finds that comedy and caring support each other.
“My mum can get bogged down and depressed about things, so constantly being there to make her laugh is an upside. Stand-up means you look at things a little differently, try to explore multiple points of view. It makes me more compassionate.”
It works the other way too. Alexander employs a communication aid to point at with his eyes, which requires his carer to interpret icons, creating a dialogue through yes and no answers. Gardner believes his “comic style has been greatly influenced” by this, articulating in “Alexander's adopted persona … as has my habit of talking so often!”
There's clearly an intersection between the two vocations, Pope agrees. “Making light in dark moments, finding funny silver linings is obviously important for processing trauma and the ongoing indignity and ridiculousness of physical deterioration. And the skin you build from bad gigs helps shrugging off the painful, difficult moments.”
James Gardner: Jockney Rebel, Shanghai at Le Monde, 6.45pm, until 24 August
Ben Pope: The Cut, Assembly George Square, 5.05pm, until 24 August
Caroline McEvoy: Train Man, Assembly Roxy, 1.20pm, until 24 August
Aaron Wood: More to Life, Hoots @ the Apex, 4.50pm, until 25 August
Mary Bourke is performing as part of The Best of Irish Comedy at The Stand Comedy Club 3 & 4 on 19 and 20 August
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