Interview: Stuart Laws

Some of the most satisfying comedy is made by clever people who feel like outsiders. Whether their sense of otherness stems from their sexuality, gender identity, race, socio-economic status or something else, it often leads to them becoming astute students of human behaviour.

One stand-up, Stuart Laws, is a classic example. After decades of trying to make sense of his own behaviours – and working hard to try and mask them, not that he knew that’s what he was doing – he was last year diagnosed with autism. Right in the middle of the Fringe.

Laws, who’s adored and admired by comedy aficionados and practitioners, and deserves to be much better known than he is, is used to neurotypical people sounding surprised by this new information.

“Sometimes friends say, ‘You have too much empathy, you can make eye contact, I’ve never seen you have a meltdown.’ Those are all things I’ve learnt to control,” he says, adding that as a teenager he read countless books on body language, micro-expressions and psychology in an attempt to work out what he was supposed to be doing and how he could read people.

“It’s a common perception of autism and there’s a joke in there about people saying, ‘You don’t seem autistic,’ which people don’t realise is an insult and what they’re really saying is, ‘Oh, you don’t seem like a fucking whack job,’” he smiles.

He expressed it well in a recent social media post that read: “Would be incredible if just once a person was described as kind, generous and funny and maybe someone piped up ‘maybe they’re autistic?’ rather than a psychopathically rude person being the prompt.”  

His new show, Stuart Laws Has to be Joking? focuses on relationships in light of his diagnosis. “It’s about my relationship with myself as someone who didn’t realise that he was masking for 25 years, finding that out and how that has affected relationships with other people, romantically, and the audience and my comedy,” he says.

In typically inventive fashion, he’s structured the show to mimic the course of a relationship – with the audience as a whole playing the potential love interest – beginning with small talk, going into how we present ourselves and interact, then building towards deciding whether the two parties can be right for each other.

“The key line for me is that being in a relationship when you know who you are means that they can also know who you are,” saws Laws, who started seeing American comic Chloe Radcliffe around the time of his diagnosis, and seems grateful to have the chance to revel in the love with full disclosure.

Artistic explorations of neurodivergence in recent years have played an important role in educating audiences about how different minds work. “It feels like it’s not just a stereotypically autistic nerd looking at their shoes and standing on stage talking about hyperfixations anymore,” he says. “It feels like a broader thing because there is more comfort in being able to express these things and being able to talk about difficulties in areas like relationships.” 

His last show, the excellent Stuart Laws? Is that Guy Still Going?, was about long grief, though the subject matter was so subtly woven into the high laugh-count silliness that audiences almost didn’t realise the emotional weight of what he’d been communicating until afterwards. That’ll be out on special, possibly next year, directed by Nish Kumar, and if the new show is as masterfully crafted and performed as that one was, it’ll be unmissable.