Over the Hump

"You're going to have to talk slowly, sweetheart, I'm deaf," says comedian Lynn Ruth Miller over the phone. It's also a very bad line. "Are you already in Edinburgh?" I ask. "I'm in Edinburgh but I'm from San Francisco," she says in the voice of one correcting a misunderstanding. Clearly interviewing 81-year-olds comes with its own unique challenges.

Miller is one of a rotating line-up of performers in Old Folks Telling Jokes – a showcase for the older standup. She is a former academic who, at the age of 70, took a comedy course in order to write about it for a newspaper ("I didn't believe you could teach people to be funny"). Eleven years on she has established a highly successful career as a standup.

In Lewis Carroll's immortal comic poem, 'You are old Father William', a dumbfounded youth repeatedly questions Father William as to the origins of his unquenchable goose-crunching, back-somersaulting, head-standing energy. I know how the youth feels. Me: "You're doing five shows, you're 81! Aren't you going to be exhausted?" Miller [reprovingly]: "Honey, I don't party, I don't go out on dates, I don't cook dinner for anybody, I get up in the morning and my life is my performance. I get 8 hours of sleep. I eat three meals a day. I am not anorexic."

Cor, what a woman! I bet Miller wears purple, with a red hat that doesn't go – that is when she's wearing anything at all. Stripping is a speciality. She doesn't get down to her panties she hastens to reassure me (just in case I'm prudish) but she does wear some "very strip-y chemises." Wait a moment, she's just remembered, she does begin one of her songs completely starkers (it's the sort of thing which can slip your mind) – but she is behind a screen. I ask the obvious question, why, why does she do it? Isn't there something almost masochistic about exposing her ageing body, a body already abused through her years of extreme eating disorders (Miller used to suffer from bulimia) and asking the audience to laugh at it?

It was happenstance initially. Miller needed a song for her act and the only one she could remember the words to was Johnny Mercer's 'Strip Polka', "I'd learnt that song when I was a little girl. I had no idea what the woman was doing. I knew she was taking off something, but I didn't know what." She took her clothes off to be funny, "But then I do everything to be funny." Audiences liked it and it "built up". Before she started stripping, she shrouded herself in turtle necks and long skirts, and the most people saw of her body was her head and feet. Now she says she has far more body-confidence. "It's changed the way I dress, it's changed the way I think about things. Women are far too hung up on what they look like, every woman hates the way they look. I want them to see my body, it's terrible, it's 81 years old, it sags all over the place, bulges where it shouldn't and I'm a very happy woman."

I suspect the stripping was also a useful tool for breaking into the comedy circuit. Miller is quite clear that as a woman, and a very elderly one, she faced a double whammy of discrimination: "Bookers thought it was just a whim, and as a pensioner I had no right to be taking away paying work from younger comedians."

It's one of the reasons comedy producer Geoff Rowe set up Old Folks Telling Jokes in the first place, to give older comedians a chance, to convince the public that stand up is not the preserve of the young – that wit, like wisdom, may increase alongside crow's feet. He's delighted by the recent success of the Pythons' reunion, noting that there was scarcely a newspaper account which did not mention the sum total of their ages. "In terms of audience response there do seem to be a huge number of older people who want to go and see older comedians." I suggest that this is an attractive prospect to a producer; everyone's after the well-off baby boomer market. He doesn't deny it. True, the audience of the show I attend is older than the usual Fringe comedy crowd, just not that much more mature.

Lewis Schaffer, another comedian in the line up, is more sceptical. "Shows with pre-modifiers, be that gay comedians, Jewish comedians or old ones, tend to be shit," he says and tells me he's only allowing himself to be ghettoised for the money. I'm not sure how far he is joking. But then, perhaps, he's right to be peeved – he's only 57, and if that makes him old, I'm middle-aged and Lynn Ruth Miller is anti-diluvian. "I'm old, I'm dealing with it, I'm learning how to handle it," says Schaffer when I put this to him, "I'd only be middle-aged if I was going to live to over 100, which I'm not." But as he says, "I'm not just on this show because I'm old, but that's a part of it, I'm on this show because I'm a unique voice in British comedy today...Could you just pretend I didn't say that?"

The mitigating factor of this show-with-a-modifier, Schaffer tells me, is that all "the comedians are funny. I've seen a list and you'd have them on any show. These are not just old people, they are funny. It's unfortunate that it's called Old Folks Telling Jokes. It's not going to be jokes about being old or for old people, it's going to be jokes that anybody could enjoy, and will enjoy."

So has being "old" (his word, not mine) affected his comedy in anyway? "I think a 30-year-old in trouble is sadder than a 57-year-old in trouble. Maybe that's what makes what I do funny, because I'm so old, people know that I'm in trouble but I've survived so the chances are good that I'm going to survive tomorrow, that makes it more entertaining."

Miller has a different take on how her age has affected her comedy. It gives her a longer term perspective on life and its absurdities. In her day, she tells me, "A pot was something you cooked in. Now it's marijuana. And pornography has set a whole new standard for sex. You have to be an Olympic athlete to do all that stuff."

And yes, perhaps that's closer to the truth of the show itself. While Rowe might maintain that not all the humour is about, "bus passes, going to the post office and watching Countdown" – that sort-of thing, plus Viagra and antacids, undeniably accounts for a lot of the laughs. This does not mean the jokes are stale, or cosy. They may be jokes about being old, told by oldish folks, but the jokes themselves aren't old.

One more thing does occur to me: everyone knows that the old are more vulnerable to illness. Does this pose any practical difficulties? Does Rowe need to find, not to put too fine a point on it, a bigger reserve list? Is this standup done sitting down? Rowe laughs, "There was some joking over filling in the risk assessment form, but so far there have been no problems. We haven't had to build a ramp to help get the performers on stage."