Milo Edwards on the why losing a parent is a necessary topic for comedy

Much to everyone’s surprise, and presumably his, he died five days into the Fringe. We knew in the morning that he was on the way out and I managed to get back to London in time to see him, by no small effort from my PR at the time, Angela Johnson, who managed to cancel two days’ worth of shows and spots at short notice.

I say two days’ worth because I only spent one full day at home before returning to Edinburgh two days later and performing. My mum, sisters and I all agreed that it was best for me to continue the show – and we could fairly say it was what dad would have wanted, a man who started selling fabric out of a suitcase in the West End of London at 15 and I don’t believe had ever taken a sick day in his life.

That first show back was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. Every comedian I knew in town came to watch, along with a good many I didn’t know. At the end I put on a John Denver song and I have a video of it taken from the back of the room. It’s about three minutes of people filing out, coming up to the stage and hugging me – people I know and people you might also recognise. But what sticks out is the people at the back, people I don’t know the names of, hugging each other.

That day was my first experience of what you might call the transformative power of suffering. It feels trite to say in the era of tragedy-laden Fringe shows, and those really aren’t the kinds of shows I write, but there are certain experiences that are universal, even to those who haven’t experienced them. So when you have been through them, as an artist of any kind, you’re presented with an opportunity to tell a story that resonates with people on a deeper level, and it felt wasteful to me not to do so. My sisters brought our mum to see the show a week or two later, it was the only time she had ever seen me perform an hour of stand-up as a professional.

With comedy taking a hiatus during the Covid pandemic of 2020/2021, I had a long time to write a show for the Fringe in 2022, which ended up being called Voicemail in honour of my late father’s penchant for leaving unnecessarily dramatic answering machine messages. During that time I was living with my mum, who took his death harder than any of us. She had truly, without the slightest hint of platitude, lost her best friend. There is a not-particularly popular Richard Curtis film called About Time about a young man losing his dad, in which his mother says, “I am so uninterested in a life without your father” – and so it was in this case.

Mum was diagnosed with cancer in April 2022. She died less than a week before the Fringe, on 28 July. The last words she said to me were “I love you, don’t cry” – and I added them to the end of the show and joked, “What an unreasonable request.”

The type of comedy I do has always been acerbic and I refuse to put in things which I don’t think are funny for the sake of getting an emotional reaction. That reaction has to come from the jokes and the broader story they tell. It is, after all, a comedy show. 

Voicemail was perhaps the most unrepentantly acerbic show I have written – and some people baulked at routines about terminal cancer and funerals. But the problem is: those things are genuinely funny, especially to those who have experienced them. I spoke to so many people who had lost parents that Fringe who said it resonated with them and I found that, invariably, the few people who complained that “you can’t joke about that” were people with no first-hand experience of it.

One reviewer that year said that my treatment of my parents’ deaths was “unsentimental”, so in 2023 I wrote a show called Sentimental, about what I think sentimentality really is. It was a show about the restorative power of gallows humour, especially in commemorating my parents, who were great practitioners of it until the end. There is an expectation, I think created largely by American media, that sentimentality requires saccharine grandeur – and I wrote a show about how true sentimentality, things that move us, are found in everyday moments: the kindness of the staff at a branch of Kwik Fit or when a doctor was a bit unkind to my mum and I overheard a tough old Essex nurse say, “I’ll f***ing have that bastard.”

That show in particular was one that seemed to strike a chord with people, and so many people who’d lost parents came and spoke to me about it afterwards. Being an orphan is like being in some sort of strange club with extremely scant membership benefits. In fact I spoke to one person at this current Fringe who said they were really moved by Sentimental at the time and had since lost their own father, which brought the show back to mind. And that’s the thing about dead parent shows I suppose – if you don’t get it now, you will eventually. But all of that aside, what I really set out to do was write a show to commemorate my mum – and I’m sure she’d be pleased to learn she got two five-star reviews. 

This year’s show isn’t about that. It’s about my relationship with my (miraculously still alive) 96-year-old grandmother, Peg, and being the over-educated child of cockney Essex geezers. My parents and being an orphan still inflect my work a great deal, but I think one show per deceased parent is sufficient and I’ve got a new bugbear this year: people who think I’m posh.

Milo Edwards: How Revolting! Sorry To Offend, Monkey Barrel 2 @ 5:45pm, until 25 August

We're offering 40% off an annual digital subscription to The Scotsman, so you can enjoy a summer of amazing content for less. Checkout using promo code SUMMER40. Subscribe here.