‘It turned out I had a brain tumour …’ Six standup comics on what spurred them to get on stage

When it comes to origin stories, comedians have some of the strangest – from performing for a £5 bet to getting back at their boss to making an unlikely pact with a friend

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ot all standup comedians wake up one day and decide to be funny for a living. That wasn’t the case for John Bishop, anyway. He took up comedy to avoid paying a bar’s cover charge and to escape his failing marriage – a story that inspired Bradley Cooper’s new film, Is This Thing On? And Bishop is not the only comic with an unusual origin story. From impressing girlfriends to losing their voices, brain tumours to bad bosses – or not wanting to lose a £5 bet – British comics told us the reasons they became standup comedians and the lengths to which they went to get on stage for the first time.

The first time I had an inkling I wanted to be a standup was at 14, in the school canteen, when my friend Tom and I were talking about what we thought we’d be when we grew up. Entirely out of the blue, he said: “You would make a good standup comedian.” It stuck with me.

After I graduated from drama school in 2020, I formed a disabled-led theatre company called FlawBored with Sam Brewer and Chloe Palmer. We wrote and performed our debut theatre show, It’s a Motherf**king Pleasure, a multi-award-winning, scathing satire on the monetisation of identity politics. The show was a hit: in 2023, it won the Untapped award at the Edinburgh fringe and went on to tour the UK and internationally.