Happy returns

If Roisin Conaty ever doubts that comedy is her true vocation, one recent event would be well worth remembering. Not her Best Newcomer award at last year's Fringe, which was clearly a major career boost, but a more dramatic stand-off in a Parisian park a few weeks back. Conaty was part of a hen party buying fags near the Moulin Rouge when a group of local youths became a bit overfamiliar.

“One guy kind of cornered me, quite young. He was speaking French and laughing, and I’m saying ‘I don’t know what you’re saying! You’re scaring me!’ And he started cracking up and saying ‘You’re scarring me! You’re scarring me!’ So we got away alive. He might have been after my wallet, but he ended up just laughing at me instead.”

Exactly what tickles us remains a curiosity for Conaty. The Camden-born comic spent several years searching for that elusive "voice" before her debut hour-long show Hero, Warrior, Fireman, Liar won the aforementioned award “despite no buzz at all”. Such life-changing events are now the subject of her follow-up show, Destiny’s Dickhead, which considers “how much fate has a say and whether it's possible to shape your life exactly how you want it.”

She hasn’t shaped how to explain the show properly yet, mind you, and she stumbles on for a good minute before conceding that “it’s boring stuff like that really, but with jokes.”

You can’t help but warm to Conaty’s honesty, onstage and off. Last year’s show was a feast of gleeful self-deprecation about her lack of life success, and while things have gone rather better since then, there have been a few more knocks along the way.

Several months of gigging in Australia was enjoyable, even if it proved slightly sobering on the material front. Her memorable routine about turning creepy around potential new partners "didn’t work as well” in the Outback, and generally she "found it quite tough at times".

"They couldn’t understand me sometimes which was hilarious, considering that when I went to the States they thought I was Australian."  

Conaty had a more rewarding reaction to her most high-profile TV gig so far, the nice long standup showcase on BBC3 favourite Russell Howard’s Good News. “I got hundreds of emails after that, young kids, 12-year-old girls saying that they didn’t know that girls were allowed to do standup.”

Conaty hadn’t considered a standup career either, until one fateful afternoon in a North London pizza restaurant in the mid-noughties, when a good long moan about her life led her lunch companion to suggest comedy.

“It felt a bit like someone saying ‘you should be a pop star’ – well that’s just ridiculous. But there was Downstairs at the Kings Head across the road and she put my name down. Then I got a call four months later—‘just confirming your gig on Thursday’—and I went on and did five minutes of rambling.”

That went well, but “like a lot of comics, [I found] the second gig kicks you in the face. After the first gig you come off thinking ‘Well, I imagine I’ll be doing the Store next week!’ But it’s so addictive, that feeling of being able to say what you think – even after the worst gig, when you think ‘I hate comedy, I’m never doing it again, I’m going to go and get a farm'.”

Things improved after more friendly interventions knocked her current style into shape. “My sister used to not be able to watch me. She’d say, ‘because you have your “And now I’m onstage!” voice.’ And all my friends were frustrated with me – ‘it’s funnier the way you say it.’ For me it’s also pronunciation; if I try to watch my Ps and Qs it affects my timing. So speak the way you speak, and say it the way it comes in your head, because that’s what made people think you could be a comic in the first place.”

Conaty is happily ignoring advice about one aspect of her work though: the presence of an erratic poet character called Jackie Hump, who opened last year’s show. “I know she got mixed reviews,” she says, “but I enjoy performing her. The people who love her really love her and the people who don’t, don’t. But you can’t write a show for reviewers.”