By Edinburgh Fringe comedian Jennifer Jane

I walked into a dimly lit ICU room to see my serial cheating ex-boyfriend fighting for his life after being horrendously injured – surprisingly, not by me, but by an electric bear.  I know that makes no sense, but that’s what happened, I explain it all in my show. 

I chose to stay and became his unlikely caregiver for years. Later, a feature-length documentary was made about our relationship and his survival journey. My show Happy Tea is about that same journey, but through a comedic lens.

Most of my life has been full of comedy and raucous laughter, growing up, dinner time would get especially ridiculous… my mum would make these incredible home-cooked meals, we would sit down as a family for dinner, and my dad would announce some random fact he had been reading and he would just start riffing on it to the point that my mum, brother and I would just be spitting out our food and drinks, almost unable to function as we were laughing so much. 

One time my mum just burst out laughing with a mouth full of juice and spat over the whole table and all the food in the middle, which of course, made it even more funny and just absolute chaos in a good way. Then suddenly we are all eating roast potatoes with a glaze of mum’s spit juice, and it was just wonderful.

But my show Happy Tea was born out of a time of very little comedy. A time of dealing with being cheated on, dealing with someone I still cared about being majorly injured, living in an ICU, and learning to be a care-giver, a period that, for a while, felt decidedly unfunny. My world was turned upside-down and his even more so.

It was such a strange reality to be faced with, and for the first time, my natural dopamine was seriously depleting… laughter was suddenly not part of my everyday. In order to get my natural dopamine going I forced myself to exercise, dance, and, of course, watch A LOT of stand-up comedy. 

I just decided that if we were to get through this, as friends, for him to recover, and for my self-esteem to not totally evaporate from all the cheating, I needed to actively work on getting dopamine in my brain.

So, between all of his surgeries, the wound care, rehabilitation, and the stress of the unknown, in ICU, my ex-boyfriend and I would watch some of the greats of stand-up, be taken into their worlds, and just forget our world for a moment, and just laugh. It was a really bonding experience, and surreal in a way, two people in an ICU room, surrounded by objective hell, and us just laughing for a moment, just transported by a person with a microphone. Truly, amazing.

A few years later when my ex was almost fully recovered, I had a lot more time, and I decided to try stand-up comedy. I wrote a five-minute storytelling style set and went up at an open mic. It was nerve-racking, but I loved it. And, importantly, the audience laughed a lot, so I figured I should do it again.

I started to write more storytelling stand-up and considering I had been living this bizarre life of being a caregiver to my ex for years the storytelling and comedy naturally flowed into that.

A while later I did a somewhat thrown-together 45-minute stand up storytelling show, it was kind of just for me, to share my journey, to process. It felt good to share. Then something interesting happened… after the show loads of people wanted to chat to me about the weird things that had happened to them. Strangers sharing so many stories, some ridiculous, some harrowing, in a sense their own version of an 'electric bear’.

That was the first time I realised that comedy is about laughs but also connection, about stepping on stage, baring your inner thoughts, and making people laugh through brutal honesty, and in turn giving people an opportunity to laugh at themselves and the things that have happened to them.

After that, I realised that I needed to take my ‘thrown together’ show and work on an actual show. So I started to write out anything and everything I found funny about the whole experience… how my ex cheated on me so much that I was actually impressed with his scheduling skills. How he cheated on me with all those women but not one of them turned up to help. How a nurse told me I could not handle sleeping in a chair, and how I proved a point by sleeping next to him in a chair for six weeks. I am not sure who won there, either way sleeping in economy on international flights is very easy now. How when living with him in the ICU my nipple hair maintenance plummeted and I grew nipple whiskers.

In a sense, it’s just me doing what my dad did at the dinner table, taking something objectively not funny and finding the funny, I do hope at my show some people spit out their drinks.

All of these random little things that happened over years just started to connect up into one big uplifting story. I think the uplifting side of it is important to me, and another reason I wanted to share the show. I feel a lot of people let setbacks define them and this is about working through and making things better. It is not a bash at men, not even a bash at my cheating ex, it is not a joke about injury. It is a comedy show about me navigating being cheated on, navigating being a caregiver and ultimately navigating re-finding myself when we got out the other side.

It is about finding the joy amongst the craziness. Accepting life is not clean cut, it’s about loving someone when they needed to be loved despite a difficult past relationship, it’s about looking after yourself when things are falling apart and finding comedy in the small things, it’s about doing everything you can to make a potentially bad outcome as good as it can be. It’s about me failing forward.

Happy Tea is a bit full-circle in a way… watching ridiculous amounts of stand-up comedy in the ICU and then turning that whole experience into comedy. Bringing it to Edinburgh Fringe is particularly poignant as the comedians we watched to help get us through are Fringe royalty, so in a sense, it is closing a loop.

• Jennifer Jane: Happy Tea is on at Just The Tonic at The Mash House at 19:15

Published: 21 Jul 2026