Life and Laughing: My Story

by Michael McIntyre

  We were both desperate to start a family, but I was terrified about how to pay for a child. I was sinking deeper underwater financially, drowning.

  ‘What was your bad news?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, forget about that,’ I said, stuffing the letter in my pocket, out of sight.

  I then thrust us into even more debt by buying several pregnancy tests to make sure she was pregnant. There were three different varieties in Boots, all different prices. What’s the difference? Don’t they all do the same thing? Does the cheapest pregnancy test just say, ‘Maybe’ and the most expensive one say, ‘Yes, you are pregnant, it’s a girl and it’s not yours, she’s a slag’?

  They were all positive. She was pregnant; I was going to be a dad. I had nine months to sort my life out. Nine months to take control of the mess that was my life and provide for my family.

  I continued to do the same gigs as before. I had no chance of being spotted at these gigs, but what I could do was improve. I had battled with the dilemma over whether I should improvise onstage or do material. The Times had even spelled it out for me. I wanted to improvise, that’s when I was at my funniest. But the time had come to concentrate on my material. I pulled together all the best bits of improvisation, wrote them up as jokes and learned them. The results were almost instant. I suddenly had an act that was killing everywhere I went. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I was basically improvising and riffing, but this time on my own, in front of my computer. I then fine-tuned and edited my thoughts and then tried them out onstage. I soon had hours of material and started to perform completely different twenty-minute sets every night.

  Kitty’s pregnancy proved to be a fertile source of material, what with her coping with morning sickness by consuming ginger and Coca-Cola and her bizarre craving for the smell of rubber. One of my best jokes was about Kitty becoming pregnant:

  I’m having a baby. It’s not easy to make a baby, my wife and I were trying for fifteen months. I say months because it’s a cyclical process, you have to wait every month for your opportunity to make a baby because of the way that women function. At the end of every month she would say to me, ‘Go to Boots and get the test, get the pregnancy test,’ and I would say, ‘Why? Why don’t we just wait and see if it grows within you, I think that’s the best and the cheapest of our options.’ ‘No, Michael, go to Boots and get the test, I want Clear Blue, because it’s the best, I don’t want any of the other shit.’ It’s £13.99! And I had to get it every month … I could have got broadband, that’s what really pissed me off.

  I became so confident in my material that I could also improvise, knowing that if it didn’t take off I could fall back on my now bulletproof jokes. Then with my wife heavily pregnant, I reached rock bottom. For four years I had been going on first at Jongleurs, every once in a while I would be on second. Progress. But this weekend I was something called Jongleurs’ ‘spare’. This is when you are a sort of substitute in case another comedian can’t make it to one of the London Jongleurs venues in Camden, Battersea or Bow. I had to go to Camden Jongleurs and wait until they either called me to tell me I was to perform at one of these London venues or, more likely, go home. I couldn’t believe it, this was worse than being on first, now I wasn’t even on. I was being paid not to work.

  I hated Jongleurs dressing rooms when I was working, but sitting there as a substitute was far worse. I couldn’t wait for the phone call telling me that I could go home. As the evening went on, however, it appeared that the headliner hadn’t shown up. The venue manager gave me a heads-up: ‘Get ready, Michael, there’s a problem with the headliner, you might have to go on.’

  ‘Finally,’ I thought. ‘I’ll headline this show, blow the roof off and show Jongleurs that I can do it.’

  Then Jongleurs called me. ‘The headliner isn’t going to make it,’ the booker said.

  ‘I’ll headline, no problem,’ I said.

  ‘No, we’re sending another act over from Bow. You’ve never headlined before, we think it’ll be too much for you.’

  Insult to injury. I had given Jongleurs years of my life, performed hundreds of times for them, and here was the result. They thought it would be ‘too much for me’ to headline a show. I left Jongleurs that night feeling dejected and frustrated. It was a stormy night, rain was pouring from the night sky. I felt like such a loser; things couldn’t get much worse. Of course they could. I had a flat tyre. Shit! I had to change the tyre of my Austin Metro Princess while getting soaked through.

  Cold and drenched, I took the spare tyre out of the boot. What a sight we were, the spare comedian fitting the spare tyre. The tyre looked more like a rubber ring. It turns out that my spare tyre was only a temporary measure designed to get me to the nearest garage. On the side of the tyre it read: ‘Maximum speed 40 mph’. The tyre was so flimsy that if I drove over 40 mph, it would burst. After a great deal of blasphemy, I attached the rubber ring tyre to my car and raced home at speeds up to 40 mph.

  Kitty was asleep when I opened our front door, passing unopened bills before I climbed the stairs and sat on my interest-free-credit Montana Ice DFS sofa, with my head in my hands, my wet hair dripping on my rented carpet. How was I going to get out of this? I needed a miracle.

  On 29 June 2005, I got one. My son Lucas was born.

  He was born at UCH hospital in central London in the early hours of the morning. Thirty hours earlier Kitty and I had been lying in bed watching the film Ray starring Jamie Foxx when she started to get minor contractions. Our local hospital was the Whittington in Highgate, about ten minutes’ drive away, but we had decided to have the baby in central London at UCH, about half an hour away with no traffic. We opted for UCH because my mother’s wonderful doctor, who had delivered my three little brothers, worked there. However, a few weeks into Kitty’s pregnancy, he retired, and it was too late for us to change hospitals.

  ‘I feel weird, Michael, I don’t know what’s happening,’ Kitty said, clutching at my arm.

  ‘That’s because you never concentrate, darling. It’s quite simple; it’s a biopic about Ray Charles.’

  ‘Ohhhh,’ Kitty groaned in pain.

  ‘We can watch something else if you want,’ I suggested.

  ‘I think I just had a contraction, Michael.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I leapt out of bed. ‘Let’s go, let’s go to the hospital and have a baby!’

  ‘No, Michael, we have to call them, get me the phone.’

  I reached for the DVD controls and paused Ray.

  ‘Don’t pause Ray, fuck Ray, get me the fuck phone!’

  ‘The fuck phone?’

  ‘Ohhhh, ohhhhh, just get me the phone, I’m in labour.’

  ‘Sorry, darling.’

  Kitty spoke to a midwife, who told her to time her contractions and when they were two minutes apart she should come into the hospital. It could be a long while, they said. What followed was about six hours of increasingly painful contractions in our living room. If you haven’t seen a woman in labour, it’s pretty intense, animalistic stuff. Two things shocked me. The shocking pain and the shocking language. Every few minutes she was writhing around the floor in screaming agony: ‘Ohhhhhhh, ahhhhh, fuuuuuuuck.’ Strangely, she was totally fine between contractions and we were able to hold a normal conversation.

  ‘So, I’ve called my mum and she said, ohhhh, ahhhhhhh, ohhhhhhhh, ahhhhhhh, that she’ll wait and hear from you before coming down to the hospital.’

  We had a laugh about these moments of normality between agony, but when I suggested we continue watching Ray between contractions I was subjected to a stream of insults.

  At about five in the morning, the contractions suddenly became far more frequent and severe.

  ‘Do you think it’s time?’ I asked as she screamed on all fours.

  ‘GET ME OHHHHH, AHHHHHH, OHHHHHHHH TO THE FUCKING HOSPITAL!!!!’

  We grabbed our already packed hospital bag and I helped her down the stairs. Halfway down we had to stop for another contraction. ‘W
AIT, OHHHHH, AHHHHHHH, OHHHHHH, WHY HAVEN’T YOU PAID THESE FUCKING BILLS?’ she screamed seeing all the unopened post I had hidden.

  She just about climbed into the back of the car before the onset of the next contraction.

  ‘DRIVE, MICHAEL, DRIVE AS FAST AS YOU CAN!!’

  It was at this point I realized I hadn’t yet changed the rubber ring tyre. I was waiting to be paid before buying a proper one. It was the dead of the night and the roads were clear, but I was restricted to 40 mph.

  ‘OHHHHH, AHHHHHHH, OHHHHH, HURRY UP, WHY ARE YOU DRIVING SO FUCKING SLOWLY? PUT YOUR FOOT DOWN!’

  ‘I can’t drive at more than 40 mph, darling, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I’M IN LABOUR AND YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT THE HIGHWAY CODE!’ Kitty venomously yelled on all fours in the back of the car.

  ‘I’ve got a temporary tyre. Remember, I told you, darling, and if I drive over forty, it might burst.’

  ‘WHY DIDN’T YOU GET IT CHANGED? YOU KNEW WE MIGHT HAVE TO RACE TO THE HOSPITAL AT ANY TIME. YOU FUCKING OHHHHH, AHHHHHHH, OHHHHH!’

  I was saved from further abuse by her latest contraction. I could see a green light in the distance and drove towards it at a steady 40 mph, knowing that unless I sped up it would be red before I reached it. I had messed up; this was my first baby. I hadn’t considered the rushing to the hospital bit. The lights went red, and I stopped the car as Kitty finished her latest contraction and I waited for the abuse that I was due.

  ‘… STUPID FUCK, I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU. HAVE WE EVEN GOT ENOUGH PETROL?’

  A cold chill came over me. The petrol gauge was broken, the milometer was broken, and I couldn’t remember the last time I put petrol in the car.

  ‘I … think so.’

  ‘YOU ARE A TOTAL C— OHHHH, AHHHHH, OHHHHHH!’

  She was screaming in such pain, wiggling her bottom against the window in the back seat. I thought she was going to give birth in the back of our Metro with me driving at 40 mph exactly. I put my foot down; I had to risk it. I reached 50 mph, 60 mph. I could hear the temporary tyre screaming just as loud as Kitty. One of them was about to burst.

  They both held on.

  The car screeched to a halt outside the hospital, and I helped her inside through the smell of burning rubber. This spared me from further abuse as she had been craving that smell throughout her pregnancy. She lay on a bed with her contractions coming thick and fast. A midwife then came in, lubricated her middle finger, and did something to my wife within two minutes of meeting her that it had taken me two years to achieve.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you’re only one centimetre dilated, you’ve got quite a long time to go yet.’

  She was right. Kitty endured another fifteen hours of contractions. She was determined to have a natural childbirth but was exhausted and eventually asked for an epidural. An epidural is an anaesthetic that, when it works, numbs the pain. It worked. The last couple of hours, Kitty was calm and in relative comfort. She pushed and pushed and eased our little messy baby boy out into the world.

  Welcome.

  ‘How the fuck am I supposed to pay for this?’

  I cradled him in my arms in the hospital. I gazed into his little eyes (already bigger than mine) and held his new hand in mine. I looked at him with all the love I have ever felt. He looked back at me in a way that seemed to say:

  ‘Can you afford this?’

  In that instant in the hospital, I knew I had to take control of my life. I couldn’t take control of my life for myself, but I could do it for him. My son. Everything had to change.

  I immediately started to look for an alternative, more conventional style of management. I had stuck with Duddridge for four years, and it just hadn’t worked out. He tried hard to make me understand his philosophies on how to find success, but I now had my own philosophy. I wanted to work every night of the week, I wanted to be as good as I could be through hard work, not mantras and proverbs, and I wanted to get out of Jongleurs.

  I asked around and researched the biggest agents in the business and one name came up, over and over again, Off The Kerb. What was so attractive about Off The Kerb was that they represented not only comedy legends, like Lee Evans and Jack Dee, but were creating new stars seemingly every year: Sean Lock three years previously, Dara Ó Briain the year before and that year Alan Carr was emerging. It was obvious to me that they were the best in the business, and I set my heart on them representing me. Oh, and if I needed any more convincing, they also represented Jonathan Ross, the then darling of the BBC.

  I got their phone number and spent the day trying to pluck up the courage to call them. Off The Kerb have their finger on the pulse of live comedy; not only have they been representing comics of all statures for twenty years, but they also run their own clubs all over the country. So it reflected my low standing that when I called up, although they had heard of me, nobody at the office had seen me perform. I spoke with Danny Julian, who put me at ease within moments. I was a nobody, calling him out of the blue, but he agreed to watch me perform.

  It was his job to find the stars of tomorrow, it was his job to take all calls seriously, and he was good at his job. He said he would book me in for a gig and come to see me with his boss, Joe Norris. It was as easy as that. I was elated when I put the phone down. Elated because I had taken that first step and elated because I knew I couldn’t fail. I may have spent years in the wilderness, years of making no impact whatsoever, but I had also spent years developing a twenty-minute set that was now near perfect.

  I was so confident that Off The Kerb would take me on that I called Duddridge and we separated amicably. I owed him money for the two Edinburgh Festivals. None of the major banks would lend me the money, so I went to the only people who might, DFS. I found out the bank they used and sure enough they gave me the money. (HFC, by the way, in case you need a loan; the rate of interest was about a million per cent.)

  Off The Kerb booked me into their toughest gig at Canary Wharf. I met Danny Julian and chatted with him beforehand. We hit it off immediately. He had just had a baby too, and we compared notes on sleepless nights. What I didn’t tell him was that most of my sleepless nights were because I was worrying about my financial situation. I wasn’t nervous. I knew my jokes inside out, as long as I told them the right way round, I’d be fine. For about six months, every audience I had encountered had enjoyed them. What could go wrong?

  Nothing did. The gig was tough, but I did enough. The next day I was asked to come into the office for a meeting with Danny and Joe. They asked me what I wanted, and I told them I wanted to work every single night, play the Comedy Store and stop doing Jongleurs as soon as it was financially viable.

  ‘That’s easy. No problem, we book hundreds of gigs. You can headline them all,’ Danny said.

  ‘You’ll have too many, Michael, you’ll regret asking to work so much,’ Joe added.

  ‘I’ve got a lot of catching up to do,’ I said.

  Danny explained to me how things worked at the agency. ‘I’ll look after you on a day-to-day basis. I’d be your agent. But if you get some television work, that’s when Addison will step in. He’s incredible at all that.’

  Addison is the infamous Addison Cresswell, the cigar-smoking, fast-talking, most powerful agent in the business, who brokered Jonathan Ross’s mega-deal at the BBC. Everybody has a story about Addison Cresswell, he’s one of life’s characters and I knew he held the key to my future.

  ‘Is Addison going to come and see me?’ I asked.

  ‘Not for a while, mate, let’s get you up and running first,’ said Danny.

  I left the meeting feeling reborn as a comedian. I couldn’t wait to get started. I also had something to aim for: impressing Addison Cresswell. Even though I had never met him, I had a feeling that if Addison got behind me, my debts would be history.

  The transformation in my life was instant. Two days later, I had a tryout at the Comedy Store. It was the first time I had been back in six years. I had t
he gig that I had dreamed of having and was immediately booked in for weekends. Compared to a weekend at Jongleurs, a weekend at the Comedy Store is paradise. You have a gig on Thursday, then two on Friday and Saturday as there is an early show and a late show. Plus you get paid about a grand in cash. The club was such a pleasure to play that even with my debts, I would have done it for nothing.

  Danny was true to his word, and I started gigging every night of the week, developing material and chipping away at my debt. It was like a whole new world. Rather than playing to pissed partygoers, I was performing in arts centres and small theatres to people who were there primarily for the comedy. I also started to gig abroad, going to Dubai, Tokyo and Hong Kong. I kept staring at my diary in disbelief. I was booked to appear on the Comedy Store TV series broadcast on the cable channel Paramount. The gig went so well they gave me a Comedy Store Special, a half-hour of my own. The turnaround was so satisfying. Gigging so much had exactly the effect I hoped it would; my material, inspired by my life, was getting sharper. I was getting better:

  My baby was overdue. People kept telling us the best ways to induce labour. Apparently it’s to have sex and eat curry. There are no prizes for guessing who may have come up with that theory. Men are sitting in pubs saying, ‘I can’t believe we got away with that! I’ve had sex and curry all week, last night I had a curry on her back whilst we were having sex.’ Of course we tried it, until we were thrown out of the Raj King in Muswell Hill.

  My mad drive to succeed took its toll on my young family. Home life was difficult, squashed into our one-bedroom flat. Kitty was totally exhausted as Lucas wasn’t sleeping, and I wasn’t there to help. It’s amazing how you create life, and then immediately hope it goes back to sleep. I had wasted so much time over the last few years that I had to seize this opportunity for our future. Although it was difficult, there were signs almost every day that things were moving in the right direction.

  The plan, of course, was to go back to the Edinburgh Festival.

  Off The Kerb booked me in for the Edinburgh Festival at an eighty-seater venue at the Pleasance. Kitty and Lucas went to France to stay with my mum, and I went to Edinburgh alone. This would be the longest time I had been away from Kitty, let alone Lucas. It was a massive sacrifice. But as I have explained, there are huge opportunities for stand-up in Edinburgh, and Off The Kerb could get them for me. It was up to me to take them.