The comedy coven: three Bristol comedians taking the Fringe by storm
Posted on: 19 Jul 2024“When I did a lot of different things, it was hard to work out what was my primary thing, or how to describe myself. I think now I’ve really settled that I am a comedian, and all the other things I do are as a comedian.”
Amy says, with trademark unflinching seriousness. I’m speaking to comedian Amy Mason in the basement of Sidney & Eden. Done up as their ‘Comedy Den’, it’s complete with brick backwall (“they say it’s New York-style. It is just wallpaper though.”). She’s the first of the three female, Bristol-based comedians that I’m talking to ahead of their Edinburgh Fringe shows.
Amy has just performed the 50-minute work-in-progress version of her Fringe debut hour; and it’s looking good. Amy’s comedy is dry, wry – and unflinchingly deadpan. The show ranges in topic – from anecdotes about hedgehog-rescuing, to very genuine questions about how exactly you approach discovering your queerness late in life.
“I guess it’s really about finding somewhere that you fit in, really.” Mason says, when I ask her about what she sees as the show’s themes. “It’s a classic Edinburgh debut show: an introduction to who I am, and a little about my life. It kind of follows the arc of me splitting up with my husband, and trying to find a place where I find comfortable in the world.”
That comfort is hard-earned though – particularly in the comedy space. All of the comedians I’m speaking to are women – and the comedy space is one that’s always been notoriously hostile to anyone who isn’t a white cis man. That can be discouraging: “To be honest, part of the reason I didn’t do comedy until I was quite old, is that I didn’t see many women doing comedy on TV at all when I was young.” Amy explains, matter-of-factly. “ Even until really late, I think it was 2017, or 2019, when they first had two women on Mock the Week at the same time.”
“I’m a realist, I would watch these panel shows and go ‘I’m quite interested in comedy’ – but you’re not wanted. We’re not wanted. I wanna go somewhere I can get a job, you know? But things have changed. I think we’ve got a really strong community of women, and queer people, and non-binary people locally. The scene in Bristol is extremely, extremely strong, and we’ve got a lot of women who run gigs, which is brilliant.”
Asking if she ever feels put in a box as a female comedian, Amy sees it: “I do sometimes feel like I get a slightly harder time. They don’t think they’re going to find you funny. You do sometimes feel it.” That said, she doesn’t seem worried. “Generally, even if no man liked my comedy, there are enough women. There are enough women, there are enough queer people, and people who do find my stuff relatable, and are interested. For me, TikTok has been really useful for that, because it means I’ve reached an audience of women, who might not be people who go to comedy clubs necessarily.”
That online presence has been extremely helpful for Amy – especially as someone who feels that her comedy is aimed at a specific audience. “It’s been an excellent way for me, especially because I’ve got two kids and I can’t just do gigs-gigs-gigs-gigs, it’s been an excellent way to get material out there, and to try things out, and build an audience.”
That audience, however, is still quite weighted toward Bristol. That makes sense: Amy may not have been born in Bristol, but she’s earned her Bristolian status. “Yeah, I love Bristol, I moved here when I was 25 – I’m 42 now. I think we’ve got this really particular character here.” In particular, some of her most popular TikToks are Bristol humour. One, which has 800,000 views on TikTok alone, depicts the “types of school mums you meet in Bristol” with surprising precision. Amy describes it best: “I think a lot of the UK thinks Bristol is just hippies, basically, and I think I’ve got a slightly more nuanced take. I mean it is hippies, but there’s lots of different kinds of hippies!”
It’s not just Amy I’ll be talking to, however – I’m due to speak with comedians Dani Johns & Louise Leigh in a double bill later in the month, and I’m interested to know Amy’s relationship to them: “We often perform together, and I think they’re both brilliant. Dani is a real born-and-bred Bristolian, unlike me, and I think she’s so fantastic, she’s got such an infectious presence on stage. Louise does some really great, relatable parenting material, and she’s just extremely energetic, really clever.”
“Bristol’s a great place to try stuff, because its nights are quite relaxed, and they’re quite happy for you to do longer sets, and play around, so it does allow you to develop as a comedian.”
“I’m feeling excited! This is my home turf, Smoke & Mirrors, I run the comedy nights here, so it feels like a bit of a homecoming / it feels like I’ve gathered all my parents in the living room to perform a dance routine that I’ve learned.”
Later that month, I’m in Denmark Street’s Smoke & Mirrors – a hidden ‘theatre pub’ that specialises in comedy & magic. I’m speaking with Dani Johns, who is characteristically buzzing with energy ahead of her WIP show tonight. Unlike Amy, Johns isn’t committing to her Fringe debut just yet: “Next year I’m hoping to debut with the big hour, but I’ve got a bit of a jazzy format I’ve just made up, so I very much need to do a WIP run, to make sure it makes sense.”
“It’s quite interactive and crowd work based.”, she explains. “It’s a major list of very embarrassing things I’ve done, or seen, or witnessed. Then, to make sure I wasn’t the only crazy person doing these stupid things, I’ve conducted a survey. It sounds very nerdy and boring, but it is quite funny.” She’s right: the show is definitely the most unique of the three, and her irrepressible, amiable energy shines out on stage even more than it does in-person. Dani’s crowd patter is second-to-none – a useful skill in a show where she repeatedly drags embarrassing anecdotes out of the audience.
Dani, who has acted as something of a ringleader in this process, has previously pitched the three to me as a slice of Bristol’s rich female comedic talent – so I’m interested in her experiences as a woman comedian. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to worry her much: “In general, I have a brilliant time. I think individual women’s experiences are all so different.” She isn’t completely untouched by sexism on stage, though: “I have had a couple of bad experiences. I was just outside Bristol, it wasn’t even very far away. I did a random gig, and I stepped on stage, didn’t even get to the microphone, and this whole table of lads went “BOO! A WOMAN! EURGH!” and banged on the table. I, you’ll be pleased to know, absolutely annihilated them. I won’t tell you what I said, because it’s absolutely not going to be printable.” she says with cheeky pride.
Equally, she doesn’t feel particularly boxed-in as a female comedian. “I think that is a thing that exists in general. I don’t feel it so much about me...because I’m great!” she laughs. “I definitely have heard some male comedians backstage grumbling, I’ve seen a lot of grumbling on Facebook groups, and that. There’s absolutely a thing that’s like ‘oh, well you’re going to get it, you’re a girl.’ ”.
Once again, however, Dani is unfazed. “I think the majority of female comedians who are on the circuit are just brilliant in their own right, and actually when those people perform with you, they see you smash a gig and they’re like ‘oh, fair play.’ They’ve got this weird generalisation, but when they actually see someone, you can be like: ‘I proved you wrong, dickhead.’ ”
“I definitely remember meeting Louise.” says Dani, when asked about the others. “Louise used to run a monthly comedy night, which was associated with an organisation called ‘Funny Women’. It was called ‘Funny Women: Time of the Month.’ Classic. She gave me my first spot, and we’ve been quite good mates ever since, which is lovely. Similar with Amy. I can’t quite remember when I first met her, but we’ve gigged together loads, and she’s brilliant, she’s so funny.”
She breaks down the differences in their styles with classic enthusiasm. “I think we’re all absolutely different. Completely different. I do a lot of crowd work, I’m very chatty. I always say I’m a doughnut. I’m just silly. It’s daft, it’s light-hearted. I don’t go major into politics – but I will talk about my dog for way too long. That’s my thing.
Amy is, in some ways, quite surreal. Quite dry. Very quirky. I don’t know how to describe her. You’ve just got to see her, to go “oh that’s her.” She’s just got a really great, unique voice.
Louise is completely different, she’s got loads of material about her family – again, she’s quite a quirky personality, but she’s got some really great physical comedy as well, which is cool.”
Louise is performing after Dani tonight, and I’ll be speaking to her too. They were meant to perform together the week before but, as Dani explains, that didn’t quite go to plan: “I won’t name & shame them, but we were supposed to be previewing at another venue in the South-West. We were the same day as the football semi, so they wanted to boot us off. Because they would make a hell of a lot more money with hundreds of people in their main event space, watching the football, than they would with us in the little studio.”
“Louise was like ‘I’m not letting it go. Let’s go to my house, and I’ll gather some friends.’ she gathered like 15 people, and put her curtains up against the window, she had a speaker, and a microphone, she pointed the lamps at us! One for the memoir."
“I always say my career’s been like a well-fitting bra, in that it has a constant, gentle sense of uplift. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a bit of va-va-voom, sometimes?”
says Louise Leigh, speaking to me in a strange half-space between the stage and backstage. She's in good spirits: “Bristol audiences are the best in the country, I think. They’re just brilliant. They’re so up for it, and open to all sorts of different ideas, and going to see someone that they’ve never heard of.”
I agree with Dani when she describes Louise's show as the “perfect Fringe show”. It’s funny and sharp, but with a relaxed, mutable feel to it – and packs a cathartic, poignant punch by the end.
Unlike Amy & Dani, this is Louise’s second Edinburgh show. “In a way, that’s more difficult than doing your first one – because you get years to develop the first show, and you can ultimately put things in that you know really work. Whereas, with your second show, I’ve only had two years to develop it.” When I suggest there might be a certain freedom in a second show, Louise’s answer is thoughtful and nuanced – which seems to be characteristic of her.
“That’s the joy of the Edinburgh hour – it’s your time. It’s very expensive to be there. So you do what you want to do, otherwise you’re wasting your time. You’re going to be standing up there saying something you think is boring now, or it doesn’t represent who you are. So, you don’t have to do all your great stuff, but you always have it to fall back on. But yes, it’s been really deliciously free to make a second hour. It’s more like the flying trapeze, without the same level of safety net.”
Asking Louise about giving Dani her start, she reflects fondly: “I’m not going to say I gave them all their first gigs, but there was a lovely community. All of these great women comics coming out of Bristol all happened to be around at that time, and we made a really nice little community. Because it is difficult to meet other women when you’re doing comedy, because you don’t get booked alongside each other very often.”
Like the others, she thinks Bristol is somewhat better in that regard: “Bristol really makes an effort – and understands the nature of the problem, is what I would say. There are enough reasons that anybody would leave comedy; there are probably slightly more reasons that women would leave. So you need to be getting double, or at least 50% more women in, on the grassroots to account for that level of attrition. But, it’s probably 1:10.”
“There’s all sorts of cultural and structural reasons why that is, and it’s just about trying to deal with the ones that you have any power over. Because I don’t have any power over the fact that most women are expected to be the parent that stays at home, or all the other things. But, I can get up and do it.”
As we’re speaking, Louise is suddenly, violently sidetracked by a realisastion: “Oh! I’ve missed a whole chunk of the show out. Ooh, that’s so interesting.” This is where I get my most vital insight into Louise. Her tone isn’t that of an embarassed performer – it’s that of an engineer whose machine has done something unexpected. She’s excited – it seems as though she sees this as an opportunity to pick apart and tinker with her craft. “I’m sad that I didn’t get to say it, but structurally it hung together, and there’s a couple of callbacks that I still managed to make.”
It’s a final comment that ties my understanding of Louise together: “Rather pretentiously, there’s a medieval French word: lacets, which means ‘all the laces tied together at the end.’ I think of it as that; have I got all the threads of the story back in?”
Returning to our previous topic, Louise has something else on her mind: “It’s sort of quite boring to me ‘what’s it like being a woman in comedy?’ I’m more interested in ‘what’s it like being a middle-aged?’ Or the combination of both, and who we allow to be public figures, for example.”
Louise thinks that the way we treat older women has got better – but has a way to go. “There’s Zoe Balls and Sara Coxes on the radio – and Davina. All of these people have been allowed to grow old in a particular way in the public eye. We’ve allowed the really thin pretty white girls to age in public. When will they allow us to have wrinkles and saggy bits, and beards and middle-aged spread?”
Ultimately though, much like Amy & Dani, Louise isn’t fazed by the barriers that her age or gender might throw up for her in the comedy world. I think she speaks for all three of the brilliant comedians as we end our conversation:
“I like doing it, and I’m not going stop. I feel like it would take some kind of steamroller to stop me.”
You can find Amy here, Dani here and Louise here. All three will be performing their shows throughout Edinburgh Fringe this August: Amy Mason: Free Mason, Dani Johns: CRINGE!, and Louise Leigh: Distracted.
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Patrick is a filmmaker with so much Bristol in his blood the white blood cells are graffiti'd. Educated at the Northern Film School in Leeds, he’s returned home to be a Videographer and Reviewer for 365Bristol and BARBI. When he’s not messing about with cameras, he enjoys playing guitar, spending far too much time on tabletop RPGs, and being an awful snob about cider. Have a look at his work here, or get in touch at patrickb@365bristol.com.
