Fringe gala comedy show puts the focus on mental health issues

Programmed by the Mental Health Foundation, the gala is part of the tenth anniversary of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival (SMHAFF), an annual autumn programme which harnesses creativity, discussion and performance to challenge stigma around mental health issues.

The inaugural Gala For Mental Health was held in 2015, a year in which mental health was a defining Fringe theme.

From depression, panic attacks, anxiety and agoraphobia to the disproportionately high male suicide rate, eating disorders, addiction and the turmoil of bereavement, once taboo topics inform even more shows in this year’s programme.

The Mental Health Foundation’s Andrew Eaton-Lewis, who programmed the gala, said: “It’s striking how many more comedians are talking candidly about mental ill health at the Fringe this year. This is something we want to celebrate and encourage. Mental health is something everyone should feel able to talk about openly without shame or fear of discrimination.”

This increase is both a reflection of a growing cultural acceptance and also an objective rise in people experiencing poor mental health. In an article for The Independent in February this year, Natasha Devon, appointed by the Department of Education as the first mental health champion for schools in England, wrote that, despite a tightening of the diagnostic criteria needed to receive NHS treatment in response to austerity cuts, “hospitalisations for eating disorders and self-harm have doubled over the past three years, with unexpected deaths among those receiving mental health treatment increasing by 20 per cent over the same time period.”

Devon, sacked by the DoE days after criticising the government’s testing regime as contributing to anxiety-related illness in schools, described the impact of precarious work on our personal and family lives as “catastrophic for mental wellbeing”.

Creativity has long been seen as both a method and a forum for communication, catharsis and potential healing. And we’re all familiar with the archetype of the sad clown, a figure who copes with personal distress through humour. This was explored by comics Robin Ince and Jo Brand in a 2014 documentary for Radio 4 in the wake of the death of Robin Williams, for whom there is another benefit in aid of SMAFF and mental health charity Mind on Thursday at Assembly George Square Theatre.

In the documentary, Brand, a former psychiatric nurse turned stand-up, said while most comics do not have serious mental health issues, they have often experienced emotional trauma and live lives more “extreme at the edges”.

That same year a study by Oxford University found comedians have personality types associated with “a paradoxical high score on both depressive and impulsive, non-conformist traits” which might help explain why they can form entertaining and humorous connections and ideas, even when dealing with serious issues.

Of course, emotional challenges are not the key inspiration or drive for all comics – Josie Long, for instance, says her comedy career is the result of a “natural, joyful propensity for showing off”. And not all researchers agree comics are any more troubled than you or me. As Peter McGraw, psychology professor and author of The Humour Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny told Time magazine in 2014: “People think comedians have these really dark personalities, but a lot of people have dark personalities and most of them don’t become comedians. You actually have to be pretty well-adjusted to be successful in the world of entertainment because it’s so competitive. Most people have demons. The folks in the audience may be alcoholics, or they’ve been divorced. They just don’t have the spotlight.”

Talking last year, gala compere Felicity Ward, whose current show 50% More Likely To Die follows last year’s What If There Is No Toilet; an account about living with anxiety and IBS, suggested it’s the comedy industry’s spirit of inclusion and openness which offers a forum to raise issues experienced by the general population.

AND though standing in a room of strangers and expecting them to pay attention because you think you’re funny would make mincemeat of anything less than a strong ego, that sense of freedom and generosity is key to comedy’s healing potential for others.

Indeed, Susan Calman’s recent book, Cheer Up Love: Adventures in Depression With The Crab of Hate, described by her publisher “as a survival handbook on how to think positively when you’re the world’s most negative person”, was acclaimed by some readers as being more use than a standard self-help book.

Richard Gadd, the Fife man responsible for the underground hit of 2015, Waiting For Gaddot, has had audience members explain how his work has resonated with their own experiences.

“It’s maybe because people get the moral points here and there, though they’re shrouded in this heightened atmosphere of activity that’s quite cartoonish,” says Gadd, whose first two solo shows — 2013’s Cheese and Crack Whores and 2014’s Breaking Gadd – were respectively conceived during “a break-up that was killing me” and the “most stressful six weeks” of his life.

“A few people have been really touched by it. I remember this one boy – he must have only been about 18, and he had tears in his eyes. It was maybe a recognition of those demons, those neuroses were expunged to some degree in the happy ending of the show. There is a resolution of some sort in my shows. I don’t think comedy should just be laughter. It should be interesting or thought-provoking or have a moral point.”

Returning after the runaway success of last year’s Waiting For Gaddot – which featured scenes of Gadd actually running away from the police – his new effort Monkey See Monkey Do explores contemporary masculinity and the “monkey” he’s tolerated for years.

For Gadd, writing and performing a Fringe show is both a form of self-harm and a path to healing.

“I’m obsessive about my work and put a lot of pressure on myself, and that can be quite depressing in itself,” he says.

“So when you go though a personal upheaval, plus you’re applying pressure on yourself, that can be quite harmful. Though I definitely see it as some kind of catharsis.” Just as comedy may be both an indication of an outlet for emotional distress, Gadd has a conflicted attitude to the Fringe. Though sometimes questioning why he subjects himself to it, he recognises that “nothing in my life has helped me get through tough times like these shows.”

He now wonders if he wrote Waiting For Gaddot — in which he only appeared live for a matter of minutes – in response to a bout of acute performance anxiety.

“I think at least on a subconscious level that was true,” he says. “For a while it really started to bother me. I think I was gigging too much and too often so the adrenalin was never turning off. I was also not in a good place in my personal life and was in a spiral of despair.

“So: ‘What if this goes wrong?’ became: ‘Oh god, it’s all over, I’ll have to get a proper job’, this big catastrophe.”

The success of Gaddot (a show in which he toned down the gorey schlock in an effort, he says, to be “less alienating”) has increased the weight of expectation on Monkey See, Monkey Do.

In addition to that “second album syndrome”, Gadd has had only his “own brain to bounce ideas around in” for this completely solo show. An actor as well as a comic – though he prefers the title “writer-performer” to either – he has a sharp awareness of those traits the Oxford researchers identified and how to make the creative impulse “work the depression”. The result has been described as “psychotic”, “deranged”, “nihilistic” and “utterly batshit”.

Like David Granirer, an American stand-up and counsellor who founded a course teaching stand-up to people with mental health issues, Gadd agrees comedy can be potentially therapeutic.

“There’s something about standing up in a room and saying something like: ‘I feel depressed all the time’ in a way that makes people laugh in agreement,” he says. “Then there’s a certain: ‘Ah right, everybody feels this way’. So often there’s no outlet for release. So if people can do it in a way that makes people laugh, there’s a release and a form of acceptance, a certain trivialising of weighty themes that can be helpful.”

Reminding himself the Fringe is only a month, staying grounded “whatever happens, instead of running away with myself” and taking genuine time out from work will help steer a straight course through the next few weeks.

“Gaddot was such a whirlwind, every part of every single day was about the show and we got very tired and cantankerous. So this year I’m going to try having more down time. I’ve never tried that before.”

Wednesday, August 17, Pleasance Ace Dome (V23),11pm, £10. Tel: 0131 556 6550; bit.ly/ mentalgala