The victims of comedy

If you've ever avoided the front row of a comedy gig for fear of becoming an unwilling participant in the show, then you'll have some sympathy for the partners and families of comedians, whose lives regularly feature in standup gigs.

Comedy in which audiences are assured that what they're hearing is a "true story" has the potential to be memorable and unique. But the lengths comics will go to—the sheer willingness to compromise their personal lives for the sake of the audience's enjoyment—is fascinating. But what are the consequences when they step off stage?

The case of American comic Sunda Croonquist is a cautionary tale to all who are treading this fine line. She made the news last year when, after years of mother-in-law jokes, the woman in question finally snapped – and sued her.

Think of it as a spectrum of how much people are willing to reveal: at one end there are comedians who use nothing personal; at the other are those that take episodes straight from real life and bring them directly to the stage. The space in the middle is occupied by those who draw on real life but blur the edges a bit, either to soften the blow to the victims of comedy or to accentuate the funny in a particular incident.

Seattle-based comic Dave Fulton plans to bring a show to next year’s Fringe with the working title, “Based on a True Story”. He claims that some comics have such an appetite for anecdotes that they find themselves engineering real life in search of situations that can be used onstage. “It's not like I look for weird stuff to happen to me but I've got friends that actually seek out weird things they can talk about on stage. Doug Stanhope's like that. And then there’s the people that pass off an invented episode as an anecdote. “People so often go ‘True story! True story!’ and it never is,” complains Fulton.

For many comics, the process of turning real-life incidents into a comedic narrative seems to serve as a way to distance themselves from the upsetting reality of a situation. Fulton recalls a recent set he performed after his sister was violently attacked by her boyfriend. “I talked about the fact that this piece of shit did that and he got sent to prison, but because he was arrested and I never could get at him, I decided to get his address in prison and set him up with catalogues that advertised children's underwear products. The prison wouldn't let it go through cause it was considered offensive material. Children's underwear! She was in the audience when I performed that and she loved it.”

Kai Humphries and Jason Cook are two comedians who often find the temptation to turn a domestic argument into a joke too great to resist. And even though Cook’s wife tries to get him not to perform material about their private lives, she seems resigned to the fact that he will continue nonetheless.

“We did have words once,” Cook recollects. “Because I wrote a bit and thought ‘I'll do it when she's not there’ – then one night I forgot she was there. It was something deeply sexual. It was about boobs. It was about how some people don't have boobs that are exactly the same size. And because she was sitting with everyone that knew her at the club, as soon as I started talking about her boobs, everyone turned around and started looking at her. The audience plus the comics and the promoter were all turning round, looking at her boobs and going: "Ah... symmetrical!"

Cook’s fellow Geordie Kai Humphries says his girlfriend Kylie has a similar attitude to stories in which she plays a starring role. “I do one joke about her coming into the bathroom while I'm having a bath and she just sits down and starts having a wee as if nothing's the matter. The minute it happened I said ‘I'm going to use this.’” Kylie told him it wouldn’t work, but with a little enhancement by way of a punchline, it came to form part of his set.

“In my joke I gave it a twist – that when you're in a warm bath, feeling relaxed and someone's weeing in front of you, you can't help but join in.”

The (surprisingly tolerant) Kylie tells me: “It's OK in venues where people don't know who I am but it's hard when he does it in his own venue where obviously a lot of the crowd know who I am and will glance over.”

Despite these grey areas, there is a definite line Humphreys is not allowed to cross.

“We've got an understanding that if there was anything that I really, definitely didn't want in, he won't put it in. Because I have seen things in the past where it wouldn't have been right to put them in because they were too personal. And he has refrained from embarrassing us and putting them in. The lines still have to remain separate a bit, haven't they?”

All the comics I spoke to seemed to have some respect for the line Kylie describes. Little has happened to Dave Fulton that he has declined to expose to an audience for laughs, but even he admits to feeling “a little apprehensive and self-conscious” when he turns to some episodes of his former life, where his exploits included dealing cocaine in Idaho, filling it with a US baby laxative and selling it to the local neo-Nazi compound. “My parents never found out about that.”

Des Bishop tells me about how it feels when, mid-routine, he finds himself approaching certain aspects of his private life. “All of a sudden I'll realise that, just for a short space of time, I'm being flippant about something that's not as flippant as it seems. When you realise – ‘My god, this is bordering on me feeling I'm just not able to do this.’”

One such topic—Bishop’s terminally-ill father—has subsequently become the main subject of his 2010 Fringe show. His decision to construct an entire set around his dad’s lung cancer seems to take personal comedy to a new level. He describes sailing close to the wind with intensely personal material as an almost cathartic experience. “I prefer it when comedy can affect me in more ways than just making me laugh,” he says. “This is the last thing we'll do together. That’s the opposite of sad, it's kind of a wonderful thing, even though it's emotional."

And his family understand why Bishop goes for such intimate material. “Personal jokes about serious matters are something that doesn't really bother us as a family. The whole process started back when I was talking about my own illness [with testicular cancer] so talking about my dad's was a natural enough progression.”

And far from finding fault in his son's comedic interpretation of his life, Bishop says his father is simply “delighted that his story was interesting enough to make a show”

“He doesn't actually know it yet, but I've put him down as a co-writer on the poster. Because he is.”