‘I drove a tank and went to Bratislava with my hairdresser’: How Ian Smith strengthened his position | comedy

WWhat is the opposite of overnight success? Should we call Ian Smith a slow burner, a sleeper? The Yorkshireman’s last two shows, both outstanding, have been nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award, and he has a popular Radio 4 series, Ian Smith is Stressed, and growing television visibility. He is now embarking on a second tour of the UK. But the breakout success was long in coming for the 37-year-old. “I did my first gig when I was 17, which I find terrible. It makes me feel old,” he told me over coffee in London.

What took so long? Could one factor be that Smith is a traditional brand to stand out – where everyone voices their concern – in a culture that values ​​the new and the different? It can’t be like that, he says. “Because I had a lot of tricks! That was a big part of my attitude.” He cites the high-concept shows (comedy in the shower, comedy in bed) that made Tim K’s name. “I loved stand-up a little bit. That was my voice for four shows. I got a review that said, ‘Ian replaces writing jokes with standing on tables and shouting at people.’ Which was fair enough. I went through a real stage of table-standing.

But the world took little notice. “I didn’t have an agent for two years, and I felt like I was in the wilderness. But my offers kept getting better.” Then one day, he says, “I wanted to prove that I could make a funny show without PowerPoint or set pieces or gimmicks. It became my biggest hit.”

Titled Crush, it depicted the nervous state Smith fell into after a relationship breakup. Its follow-up, Foot Spa Half Empty, addresses Smith’s low sperm count, which was discovered when he and his partner began trying for a child. Neither offering is remotely gimmicky. Quite the opposite: Smith attributes their success to actually addressing something meaningful about his experience of the world.

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

By deconstructing his exasperation with comedy, Smith refines his character to stand alongside those angry giants of raucous comedy, Rod Gilbert and Victor Meldrew. “The best comedy comes from negative emotions: stress or anxiety or fear,” he says. “And then you tell people about those emotions, and they realize that they’re also feeling stressed about things they shouldn’t really be worrying about, and that’s all very liberating. That’s where the best stuff comes from.”

Maybe so, but it took a deep breath for Smith to address his fertility struggles on stage. “It was a tough decision, but one I was forced to make by the situation,” he says. “Because if I were writing a show, it would be about things I was nervous about at that moment. I would have struggled to motivate myself to write ‘self-service checkouts are really annoying,’ when I wouldn’t have cared at the time.” Unlike his breakup show, which Smith wrote retrospectively, “Foot Spa Half Empty” was written 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 living coping mechanism,” he says. “What some people might say is unhealthy. Comedians often say to the audience: ‘Don’t worry about me. “I’ve processed this and everything’s fine.” Whereas I had a line in the show – which I eventually dropped – that said: ‘I want to tell you I haven’t processed any of this!’ I’m nervous about this now! I thought that was a bold way to let people know that this is an ongoing thing. But it can take away from the audience being able to laugh at you.’

Laughter, after all, is what Smith is after – on stage, on screen (he has a comedy series in development), or on his popular Northern News radio show with fellow Yorkshireman Amy Gledhill. This is categorically so no A comedian categorizes his fears as trauma or mental health. “It would be easy in this new show to say something sad or profound about how I feel about… [infertility] “But I always feel a duty to be as funny as possible,” he says. Whether I’m nervous about a serious or trivial topic, I just want to make it as stupid and silly as possible.

It’s an approach that has finally gotten him where he wants to be in comedy: a slow burner that has finally caught fire. “I can be full of self-doubt, and you can chart the doubt of my career by the number of times I Googled ‘law conversion courses’ in a year. But I haven’t done that for a long time now,” says Smith.