Mother courage

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for material...

Recent festivals have seen hugely popular “Dead Dad” shows from the likes of Russell Kane, Des Bishop and Jason Cook, with the comics recalling their fathers’ passing in poignant episodes that resonated powerfully with audiences. This year, though, Fringe comedy is aiming for the emotional motherlode, alongside the occasional reference to miscarriage, the Holocaust or the Columbine High School massacre. And you thought your mum was difficult.

Standups in particular tend to project an ambivalent view of parenting, acknowledging the enormous wealth of material children generate—the “drunk midgets” of Dylan Moran’s perception—while understanding that the topic instantly divides a room into the have-babysitters and the have-nots.

Pregnant at her first Fringe in 2001, Wendy Wason is eight months gone this time round and enjoys the bond that motherhood fosters with a crowd.

“People come up and say ‘that happened to my son!’ when I tell them about mine getting an erection as a baby and how it freaked me out,” she reveals.

On the other hand, Meryl O’Rourke, who had difficulties conceiving, says: “I used to hate hearing people talking about having kids, so when I went back on the circuit after having my daughter I was very aware that there were people in the audience who didn’t want to hear it.”

She remembers how, bizarrely, she would hear mutterings of "Oh, she’s not really had a kid, she’s just making it up for material!"

Confounding preconceptions will undoubtedly be a challenge for Scott Capurro, whose reflections on parenting used to be restricted to Madeleine McCann gags. Sharing his grief for his late mother and his nascent nesting urges, the controversial gay comic has written arguably his most shocking Fringe show yet.

Who Are The Jocks? takes its title from the last words the Columbine killers uttered before they opened fire, bleak inspiration even for the San Franciscan. And yet, it’s reflective of his residual anger at the macho homophobia that started in school and continued through to a recent assault in a Cardiff comedy club.

However, in discussing the death of his “only authority figure” and the exemplar for his abrasive wit, who sold him cocaine at 18, outed him to the world and whom he describes the “funniest person I’ve ever known”, Capurro risks having audiences empathise with him.

“I’ve never looked for common ground – it embarrasses me,” he shudders. “This is the first show I’ve written where I think there’s going to be familiarity with my feelings. And I’ve never wanted that, an audience relating to me.”

“The only way I could deal with my mom’s passing was to do so creatively,” he says. But can he keep empathy at arm’s length and do her irreverent humour justice? Resolving this dilemma ought to be cathartic, if not oddly Oedipal.

“Mothers do date their gay sons. They treat us like boyfriends,” he laments. 

“Apparently women feel safer watching me now than ever before. I know that’s supposed to make me feel good, but it doesn’t. I think ‘Oh how can I fuck you up, how can I torture you?’ Then my director reminds me that’s not the point this time.”

In Bad Mother, O’Rourke reflects upon the psychological influence of her Holocaust escapee mother, whose approach to parenting combined social inhibition with a celebrity worship that bordered on stalking, often with young Meryl in tow.

The standup’s catalogue of inherited traits—“My oddness, my inability to do housework, my inability to get off the internet and have a proper life, my difficulty in being a normal, non-slutty person”—has manifested itself in incidents such as her arrival at a superhero-themed kid’s party in a PVC catsuit, scandalising the other mums.

Because of the sanctity of motherhood, admitting you’re a bad mother or even a “wobbly one” in O’Rourke’s self-estimation, can still shock. Echoing her unabashed material about being a slut, she muses that “they’re both difficult things to come out and admit to, both taboos for women".

“There’s a strange kind of female machismo with mums, in that we all claim to each other that we’re tired and that we’re worried we’re doing it wrong – but you can’t ever mean it. Saying you never clean the house or cook them nutritious meals is fine as a joke, yet woe betide you if anyone comes to your house and sees that.”

So pregnant is the disparity between society’s idealisation of motherhood and the frequently grim, mundane and frightening reality that it’s a wonder more comedians haven’t written plays about it – as Emily Watson Howes has done.

Touching on relationship tensions, infertility and miscarriage, The Baby Diary is a tenderly funny combination of live performance and filmed inserts that’s outgrown the BBC Comedy website. Mother-of-one Watson Howes stars as a mother-to-be in a Christian couple, relating their experiences to camera for awkward posterity.

“Motherhood is such a universal experience, so intense, so bleak, so funny and joyful, it’s all the things good comic writing should be,” she reflects. “Infertility, especially, is an area that’s not very much explored and all the slightly nervy jokes running through the script reference the fear you face if you’re going to try to create new life.

“Some people obsess about babies, but I found it one of the biggest and bleakest areas of being a woman. ‘How nice to have all these lovely cuddles with a tiny squidgy thing’. Really? I found it horrific for the first year. I could see a vista of centuries of oppression for women, of being this milked monster whose own personality and life were temporarily eradicated."

And yet, she adds: “Sacrificing yourself for someone else is probably one of the most extraordinary things you can do”. Especially when that sacrifice precludes exploiting your offspring for laughs.

“My social worker friend asked me if I’ve thought about when my daughter is 11 or 12 and her friends look me up on YouTube,” says O’Rourke. “And it’s good to have that perspective. A lot of comedians have said to me ‘sod it, it’s just jokes’, but it’s actually important to me that my daughter won’t have to deal with my shit. I suppose that’s what my show is about really, that I have a lot of shit and I’m trying to compartmentalise it, to keep it to the evenings.”

In contrast, Wason believes “It’s as important to share my point of view as it is my son’s. An open relationship at home, where I talk about everything with them, is more important than what I talk about at work. I really don’t think it’s a question of respecting their privacy."

She mock-admonishes: "I can do that shit when you’re under my roof, everything is public property!"

Both Watson Howes and O’Rourke wrestled with the notion of using their baby photos in their shows but admit to having doubts.

“It depends on the context,” says Watson Howes. “It can be quite harsh if standups talk specifically about their children or put them into a public forum, like on a DVD – especially if they’re laughing at them. But I don’t think it’s as invasive as some of these awful documentaries. The further you can get away from reality and push it into character and art form, the better.”

“If I’m doing a show about whether I’m going to fuck her up or not,” observes O’Rourke dryly, “having a great big photo of her, saying ‘this is her name and address’, would probably answer that question.”