‘I drove a tank and went to Bratislava with my hairdresser’: how Ian Smith turbocharged his standup | Comedy

WWhat is the opposite of immediate 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 series on Radio 4, Ian Smith is Stressed, and a growing TV profile. He is now embarking on a second UK tour. But success has been 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 think is horrible. It makes me feel old.”

What took him so long? Could one factor be that Smith’s is a traditional stand-up brand – every agitated man expresses his own anxiety – in a culture that values ​​the new and different? This can’t be it, he said. “Because I had so many gimmicks! That was a big part of my stand-up.” He cites the high-profile shows (bathroom comedy; bed comedy) that made Tim Key famous. “I loved stand-up with slightly theatrical settings. That was my voice for four shows. I got a review that said, ‘Ian replaces writing jokes with standing on tables and yelling at people.’ And that was fair enough. I went through a real “standing on tables” phase.

But the world wasn’t really paying attention. “I didn’t have an agent for a few years and I felt like I was in the wilderness. But my shows kept getting better and better.” Then one day he said, “I wanted to prove that I could do a fun show without PowerPoint, without sets or gimmicks. And it became my most successful show.”

Titled Crushing, it depicts the neurotic tizz Smith found himself in 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 to have a child. Neither show is very fancy. Quite the contrary: Smith attributes their success to the fact that they actually address something meaningful about his experience of the world.

“I wasn’t used to having a lot going on in my life,” he says. “I sometimes felt like it was quite boring. So I made a conscious effort to put myself out into the world, to live a more interesting or more stressful life. Maybe I’ve just started TO DO more stuff. This included a visit to Bratislava with his hairdresser, where (as Crushing recounts) he drove a tank over a car to vent his pent-up rage.

By cannibalizing his hustle for comedy, Smith honed a character to stand alongside those brooding 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 talk to people about those feelings, and they realize that they’re also stressed about things they shouldn’t really worry about, and that’s a big release. That’s where the best things come from.”

Maybe — but it still took a deep breath for Smith to address her fertility issues on stage. “It was a tough decision,” he says, “but the situation pushed me into it. Because if I write a series, it’s going to be about things that were stressing me out at the time. I would have had a hard time motivating myself to write ‘self-checkouts are really boring’ when in reality it wouldn’t have bothered me at the time.” Unlike his breakup show, written retrospectively, Smith wrote Foot Spa Half Empty throughout the spring of that year, as the process (the anxiety, the visits to the sperm clinic) unfolded in real time.

“It was like a live coping mechanism,” he says. “What some would say is not healthy. Comedians often say to audiences, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ve dealt with this and everything is fine.’ Whereas I had a line in the show – which I eventually dropped – that said, “I want to let you know that I didn’t deal with any of that!” I’m stressed about this right now! “I thought it was a bold way of telling people that this was an ongoing thing. But it can keep the audience from laughing at you.

Laughter, after all, is what Smith is here for – on stage, on screen (he has sitcoms in development) or on his popular Northern News podcast with fellow Yorkshireman Amy Gledhill. It is categorically not a comic who classifies his anxieties as trauma or mental health. “It would be easy in this new series to say something sad or profound about how I feel about the [infertility] situation,” he says. “But I always feel a duty to be as funny as possible. Whether I’m stressed about a serious or trivial topic, I always want to make it as stupid and silly as possible.

It’s an approach that ultimately got him to where he wants to be in comedy: a slow burner that finally caught fire. “I can doubt myself,” Smith says, “and you could measure my career doubts by how many times I Google ‘law conversion courses’ in a year. But I haven’t done that in a while now.”