What’s the opposite of an overnight success? Should we call Ian Smith a slow burner, a sleeper hit? The Yorkshireman’s last two shows, both fantastic, were nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, he has a popular Radio 4 series, Ian Smith is Stressed, and growing TV visibility. Now he’s embarking on a second UK tour. But breakout success was a long time coming for the 37-year-old. “I did my first gig when I was 17,” he tells me over coffee in London, “which I find horrific. It makes me feel old.”
What took him so long? Might one factor be that Smith’s is a traditional brand of standup – fretful everyman sends up his own anxiety – in a culture that prizes the new and different? That can’t be it, he says. “Because I had so many gimmicks! That was a big part of my standup.” He cites the high-concept shows (comedy in a bath; comedy on a bed) that made Tim Key’s name. “I loved standup with slightly theatrical set-pieces. That was my voice for four shows. I got a review that said, ‘Ian substitutes writing jokes with standing on tables and shouting at people.’ And it was fair enough. I went through a real standing-on-tables phase.”
I didn’t have loads going on in my life. I sometimes felt it was quite boring
But the world wasn’t taking much notice. “I didn’t have an agent for a couple of years, and I did feel in the wilderness. But my shows kept getting better.” Then one day, he says, “I wanted to prove I could do a funny show without PowerPoint, set-pieces or gimmicks. And that became my most successful show.”
Entitled Crushing, it depicted the neurotic tizz Smith got himself into after a relationship breakup. Its follow-up, Foot Spa Half Empty, addresses Smith’s low sperm count, discovered when he and his partner began trying for a child. Neither show is remotely gimmicky. Quite the opposite: Smith ascribes their success to their actually addressing something meaningful about his experience of the world.
‘I only ever want to make it as stupid and silly as I can’ … Smith. Photograph: Matt Stronge
“I didn’t used to have loads going on in my life,” he says. “I would sometimes feel it was quite boring. So I made a conscious effort to put myself out in the world, to live a more interesting or stressful life. Maybe I just started doing more stuff.” This included visiting Bratislava with his hairdresser, where (as recounted in Crushing) he drove a tank over a car to vent his pent-up rage.
By cannibalising his fretfulness for comedy, Smith refined a persona to stand alongside those peevish titans of mouse-that-roared comedy Rhod Gilbert and Victor Meldrew. “The best comedy,” he says, “comes from negative feelings: stress or anxiety or fear. Then you tell people about those feelings, and they realise they also get stressed about things they shouldn’t really worry about, and it’s all a big release. That’s where the best stuff comes from.”
Maybe so – but it still took a deep breath for Smith to address his fertility struggles on stage. “It was a hard decision,” he says, “but I was strong-armed into it by the situation. Because if I’m writing a show, it’s going to be about things I’m stressed about in that moment. I would have struggled to motivate myself to write ‘self-service checkouts are really annoying’ when, really, I wouldn’t have cared about that at the time.” Unlike with his breakup show, written in retrospect, Smith wrote Foot Spa Half Empty throughout the spring of this year, while the process (the anxiety, the trips to the sperm clinic) was unfolding in real time.
“It was like a live coping mechanism,” he says. “Which some people would say is not healthy. Comedians often tell audiences, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ve processed this and everything’s OK.’ Whereas I had a line in the show – which I eventually dropped – that went, ‘I want to let you know I haven’t processed any of this! I’m stressed about it right now!’ I thought that was a bold way to tell people this is an ongoing thing. But it can take audiences away from being able to laugh at you.”
Laughter, after all, is what Smith is in it for – on stage, on screen (he has sitcoms in development), or on his popular Northern News podcast with Yorkshire compatriot Amy Gledhill. This is emphatically not a comic who classifies his anxieties as trauma or mental health. “It would be easy in this new show to say something sad or profound about how I feel about the [infertility] situation,” he says. “But I always feel the obligation to be as funny as possible. Whether I’m stressed about a serious subject or a trivial one, I only ever want to make it as stupid and silly as I can.”
It’s an approach that has got him, finally, where he wants to be in comedy: a slow burner who has finally caught fire. “I can be full of self-doubt,” says Smith, “and you could chart my career doubt by how many times I would Google ‘law conversion courses’ in a year. But I haven’t done that in a while now.”
Ian Smith: Foot Spa Half empty is at Soho theatre, London, 25-29 November. Then tours in the new year.
