Comedian Laura Smyth is buzzing to be finally ‘doing Edinburgh’ after Covid and cancer

Smyth, 42, thought it wasn’t going to happen after giving up teaching to chase a career in comedy and having a script accepted by the BBC but then in 2021 being diagnosed with stage three cancer.

“I thought I’d left my dream too late. You can’t help but hear the word cancer and think you might die. I’d waited till my late thirties to do the thing I’d wanted to do my whole life and it was the irony of it. I’d got this script commissioned and everything I wanted and it was going well despite the pandemic, and I just couldn’t believe it.

What followed was a mastectomy, further surgery to clear lymph nodes, six months of chemo and three weeks of daily radiotherapy.

“So I had the surgery then thought I’ve got to keep going. I thought if I do die, I want to do all these things, so it was a real kick bollock scramble to do what I wanted to achieve. That’s why through the treatment I still acted and did Live at The Apollo just after finishing it, and kept going. Doing a lot of work was part of my approach to being able to fight it. I also put all the good, healthy things in place to get myself in a good place, and just kept going.”

Smyth will also be fulfilling a dream to ‘do Edinburgh’, when she heads back up to Scotland for the Fringe in August with Living My Best Life, along with her husband, three kids and Maltese Pomeranian Betty.

“I was meant to come in 2020 but it was cancelled because of Covid, then 2021 was a dodgy year and then I got cancer so I didn’t go in 2022. Last year I popped up and hosted a show at The Stand, but that was it. Now I’m doing Edinburgh! So that’s nice, even though it’s only two nights.”

Smyth is looking forward to staying in the city and exploring the Fringe as a spectator, something she got a taste of last year.

“My husband is Northern Irish and his good friend Sandy Grierson, the actor, is from Edinburgh and we’re staying with his mum in Leith. They found each other in East London, two Celts who hate English people, which is nice. Evenings often end with them singing Sunshine on Leith. So we’re all coming up and are going to take in as much as we can. I just love The Fringe. So many comedians put a big investment behind it but when I went last year you can stumble into things that don’t have the hype and attention. I was watching one-man drama or things on the free fringe, street performers, and that’s what the magic is. Seeing seeds of ideas, that might turn into something incredible, like Baby Reindeer. I just love it.”

Smyth appeared in Netflix’s Baby Reindeer herself, as comedy emcee Glenda, and her CV also boasts Live at The Apollo (two weeks after completing her cancer treatment), writing for BBC comedy Bad Education, and multiple stand up gigs. What else is on her wishlist?

“I would love to get a mainstream sitcom off the ground and do a film, but the big thing is expanding my comedy tour into bigger venues. I’m getting into writers’ rooms and I’v got a few things in development but I don’t like to talk about it. If my whole life was just stand up and writing, I’d love it. I think there’s a bit of drama writing in me too, and I’d like to write a book maybe, because then you can be funny without the pressure, but we’ll see.

Fame itself isn’t the lure for Smyth, who lives with her partner and children in East London. For her it’s financial security, family and keeping healthy that are important.

“I just want to be mortgage-less. Me and my husband just wanted to roll the dice and see what comedy can give us, and make sure I’m OK and can take care of my family. I’ve no interest in being famous,” she says, then quips: “I just want to be obscenely rich.”

What can Smyth tells us about Living My Best Life, currently making its way around the UK.

“The title is a mock of people saying that, so I poke fun at everyone on the internet showing off and making fun of what we all project. But as the tour’s progressed I’ve realised I am literally living my best life because it’s so celebratory and my audiences are so fun. I keep joking that they are reformed characters who look half sensible now but that’s not always been the case.

“The show’s about everyday life, having kids, parents that show off about their family and marriages and instagram, that sort of stuff. People talk about kids being on their phones all the time but it’s those of us in our 30s and 40s who are living on there. It’s become normalised to put things on there like scan pictures, and political views, if it’s not online its considered that you don’t have any, rather than believing that things can exist outside of social media. And there’s no nuance. You know what I mean?”

Smyth says You know what I mean? a lot, and the answer is yes, we do, but her gift is to turn it into a funny. Her comedy is all about the everyday - bosses and bitching, men and the menopause, family and failing, all of which gives her a broad appeal.

“I get mothers and daughters coming to see me, all the school run mums, a lot of gay and lesbian couples, even lads, and older people. It’s a really fun mix of people which I’m proud of.”

Why does she think her comedy is so popular?

“I think I say what other people are thinking. It’s about being honest about our shortcomings. I talk about trying to keep the sex going in a relationship after a long time, wanting to kill your kids, being menopausal and just being honest about it. Also my eldest is 21 so there’s stuff about having a fledgling adult in the house, being patronised by someone that can’t make their own hairdressing appointments, and I talk about the body positivity movement where everything is positive reinforcement even if people are making poor lifestyle choices.”

Smyth has always been funny, coming from a working class East London family who liked a laugh, and employed humour in the classroom when she worked as an English teacher.

“It’s just how I am. I can’t not see the funny in things and that’s what led me to doing comedy. I thought if that’s all I ever want to do, I’ve got to do it. Roisin Conaty [GameFace, After Life, Taskmaster] said to me stand up comedy is not a career choice, it’s a diagnosis.

“I don’t get when someone’s humourless, because that’s what you do. Find the funny. All my family are funny and take the mick out of each other. Everything's about being funny. In the worst situations. We lost our dad when we were young, we’ve lost a sibling, but it’s always just ‘be funny’.

“I always used humour in the classroom. There’s a natural tension in everything and in a classroom there’s expectation on kids, and humour is a way of saying this is a safe place.”

When we talk Smyth is recovering from a bad reaction to one of her six monthly blood transfusions, which has seen her laid low. Despite this she has carried on with the UK tour, which continues into the autumn, the previous night playing Southend.

“Because I was feeling rough my husband drove me and the kids came and played on the pier and had fish and chips while I did the gig. I said thanks guys and they said you’re welcome, we’ve just had a summer holiday for the last two hours.

“I just had to do it. I didn’t want to cancel anything,” she says. “Working keeps you going and I always just trust that the adrenaline will kick in for that hour I’m on stage.”

According to Smyth, cancer brought her a new-found interest in health and wellbeing and turned her middle class.

“Yeah, you can roll your eyes at things about wellness and wholeness but you start doing them and you realise the importance. I think there’s a working class thing of ‘oh, I’ll walk it off, it’ll be all right’, especially workwise. To me it’s kind of binary; you work or get fired and there’s nothing in between, but advocating for yourself and taking care of yourself, doing restorative yoga and going on a plant based diet is always good.”

In person Smyth laughs a lot and her timing and delivery make her funny, but what does she think is at the heart of making people laugh?

“A lot of the time it’s just the cadence of words that’s funny. I used to have a joke about a kid from school seeing me out on the street and going ‘allo miss, I didn’t know you ‘ad a coat’. Now I’ve started saying ‘allo miss, I didn’t know you had a jacket’ and it’s even funnier, I don’t know why. I think that’s the Victoria Woods school of comedy, some things are just funny. You test it in real life.”

Real life situations such as workplace bitching feature in Smyth’s routines and she skewers the way it develops, from tentative bitchy feelers to full on character assassination.

“I hear it all the time.” she says. “The other night at a show I was outside and two tech guys were having a roll up and were going ‘look, he’s a really nice kid, no-one’s saying he’s not a really nice kid, but I think he needs to know that he’s a bit over-confident.’ Three minutes later they were saying ‘yeah, he’s a f***ing pisstaker!’ That resonated, that is how we bitch.”

Smyth is a proponent of the ‘show don’t tell’ style, with the jokes coming thick and fast.

“I don’t ever want to be ‘here’s my opinion’. No-one should be learning anything. You should know where I’m at in the world just from my stories. If you meet someone at a party and they’re going ‘well I think this and I work for such and such’, you’re drifting off to the vol au vents quickly but the minute you go ‘oh I like your dress’ and they go, ‘oh fanks, I don’t usually wear red cos I feel like my teeth are too yellow’, you want to talk to them. You know who that person is.

“I want people helpless, I want laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. Yeah, the joke is enough and I stack them in. I think there was an element of wanting to have a bigger theme or say something but it soon went away. I just want to be funny.

With Scotland in her sights, Smyth is looking forward to rendering a Scottish audience helpless and reckons there’s a commonality between Cockneys and Celts in enjoying the darker side of life.

“With East Londoners, there’s this little bit of we want a sob story - my team’s West Ham and our song [I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles] is about dreams fading and dying and I think the Scots have that too. Another of my friends is from a Scottish family and says his dad and uncle get together for a night of one downmanship. It’s the stoicism, like when someone’s told you the world’s most awful story, you have one that’s worse.

“And the further north you go the funner people get, so you’ve just got to be funnier than them!”

Laura Smyth: Living My Best Life, Thursday, 27 June, 2024, 8.30pm, The Stand Comedy Club, Glasgow and 22 and 23 August, Pleasance Courtyard, Pleasance One, Edinburgh, 10.30pm 14+ (Guideline).