"He took up comedy to avoid paying a bar's cover charge and to escape his failing marriage a story that inspired Bradley Cooper's new film, Is This Thing On? And Bishop is not the only comic with an unusual origin story. From impressing girlfriends to losing their voices, brain tumours to bad bosses or not wanting to lose a 5 bet British comics told us the reasons they became standup comedians."
"After I graduated from drama school in 2020, I formed a disabled-led theatre company called FlawBored with Sam Brewer and Chloe Palmer. We wrote and performed our debut theatre show, It's a Motherf**king Pleasure, a multi-award-winning, scathing satire on the monetisation of identity politics. The show was a hit: in 2023, it won the Untapped award at the Edinburgh fringe and went on to tour the UK and internationally."
"Then, in 2024, my life completely changed. At the start of the year, we took our show to New York for a three-week off-Broadway run. Four days after we got back, I became very ill. I was bed-bound, throwing up three or four times a day. Long story short, it turned out I had brain cancer. The doctors said the tumour was 8cm and there was a very high chance I wouldn't survive."
John Bishop began performing standup to avoid a bar's cover charge and to escape a failing marriage. British comedians reported varied and unusual origin stories, from impressing partners to coping with bad bosses and medical crises. Aarian Mehrabani recalled an early inkling of wanting to be a standup at 14 and later co-founded a disabled-led theatre company called FlawBored. The company's debut show, It's a Motherf**king Pleasure, won the Untapped award at Edinburgh in 2023 and toured internationally. After a 2024 off-Broadway run, Mehrabani received an 8cm brain tumour diagnosis that carried a high risk of not surviving.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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