Interview: Carl Donnelly

Double Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee Carl Donnelly brings his tenth solo show to the Wardrobe Theatre on Monday, July 9, sharing a double bill with Sean McLoughlin as part of Chuckle Busters’ Edinburgh previews season at the theatre.

Donnelly’s 2018 show Strictly Carl Donnelly celebrates a decade’s worth of critically acclaimed stand-up. Yes, ten years has passed since Carl first performed solo at the Fringe, and Strictly… is a retrospective glance at the last decade of his life, comparing the vegan meditating hippy of a man he is now to the person he used to be when he was a lot more foolhardy and naïve…and had a lot more hair.

Carl will also be performing Carl Donnelly Speaks To The Dead for a limited run at the festival where he’ll be joined by guest comedians to (hopefully) contact the ‘other side’ in a séance with the help of the audience at the Blunda Bus at midnight.

So, Carl, a decade’s worth of shows. How does it feel looking back on that decade – its highs and lows – both onstage…
The comedy highs have all been live moments.
Being invited to play Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival and the Melbourne Comedy Festival are both pretty high up there. They’re the two most prestigious international comedy festivals in the world so to be able to go and do what I do there was amazing.
It sounds like some self-help-style nonsense but I can’t think of many professional lows. Apart from the rare bad gigs where it just doesn’t click. A few years back I had such a death onstage in Halifax that it was almost funny. The way they reacted to me walking onstage was like I’d murdered all of their families pre-show. No matter what I tried, I just couldn’t even muster a smile out of them. It was unreal.

Carl Donnelly appears at the Wardrobe in an Edinburgh previews double bill with Sean McLoughlin

… and in your life generally?
My personal life has been way more tumultuous than comedy. There have been loads of highs and as many lows in those ten years. Luckily things are all rosy at the moment so I’m feeling good. I recently got married, and that has been the biggest high. The lowest point was probably during the breakdown of my first marriage when  my mental state was a car crash. There was a couple of years where it all feels like a blur as I was such a mess. Luckily through hard work, some medical help, a bit of therapy and changing circumstances, things turned out nice again.

“comparing the vegan meditating hippy of a man he is now to the person he used to be when he was a lot more foolhardy and naïve…and had a lot more hair. ” Tell us a little more about you then, and you now.
I was very much a ‘lad’ when I first got into comedy. I grew up in a working-class Irish family in a flat in South London, so that’s all I really knew. Starting comedy gave me a new sense of direction and the opportunity to travel, so I think it opened my eyes to a whole new world. My early years in comedy were crazy. Because of the social side of it, I treated the post-gig hours as one big party. It was fun – but not sustainable.
Now, I couldn’t be more different. I think I’ve become gentrified (a lot like the area I grew up in). I turned vegan five years ago after a weird spiritual awakening (I can’t imagine myself saying that sentence ten years ago). That coincided with me developing a new outlook on life and using meditation to keep my mind and moods in check. I still have the odd big night out but they’re few and far between. It took me a while to learn, but I am much happier when I’m not out partying every night.

And how do you hope you might be looking back on your career / life in another decade’s time?
One thing I’ve learned in the last ten years is not to put too much pressure on the future, and to try and live in the present as much as possible. I know that sounds like some boring self-help shit (that the old me would want to punch me for): but it works, and has helped me iron out some old anxieties. Because of that, I can’t predict what is to come in the next ten years but I’ve got a lot of confidence it will be more chilled than the last ten.

Over the past decade, has the live stand-up got… easier? More or less nerve-wracking / rewarding?
It gets easier in terms of just feeling more comfortable onstage. That being said, it never becomes totally nerve free because there’s a lot of pressure. When you go onstage, the mood of that room becomes your responsibility. That is where the pressure comes from. I tend to get nervous for the final two minutes before walking onstage. I don’t feel any nerves in the run-up to the gig but for that final two minutes I become convinced that I’ve made a terrible life decision and can’t believe my own arrogance to presume these people should listen to me. Then I walk onstage and that disappears and 99% of the time I have loads of fun with the crowd.

Has your onstage persona changed much, do you think? Are you as different sort of comic now?
Weirdly, I think I’m more immature onstage now than I was ten years ago. I think my material used to be more immature in terms of the topics I covered but I actually was trying to be quite mature onstage. Nowadays I prefer to flip it around. I now find it much funnier to discuss serious topics (over the last few years I’ve discussed mental health issues, divorce, drugs…) in a very silly way. There’s something liberating in being silly about troubling things.

“He’ll be joined by guest comedians to (hopefully) contact the ‘other side’ in a séance with the help of the audience”. Intriguing. How did this come into being, and what are you expecting to happen each night?
This is a silly idea that I mentioned to Bob Slayer who runs ‘Heroes of the Fringe’ and is the owner of the Blundabus. I played the bus last year and it’s the most fun room to do comedy in (it’s the top deck of a bus that has been converted into a 45-seater theatre) so I wanted to do something again there this year. The windows are painted in weird hallucinogenic colours so I thought it would good to do a trippy late show where the comedians and audience are all in it together. What better weird late-night group activity is there than a drunken séance? Bob is one of those people that you mention a silly idea like this to and he just goes with it. I don’t really know how it’ll all work out yet, but I’m certain it’ll be fun.

Carl Donnelly plays the Wardrobe Theatre on July 9 in a double bill with Sean McLoughlin, as part of Chuckle Busters’ Edinburgh previews season. For more info and to book tickets, visit http://thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/carl-donnelly-sean-mcloughlin/