Andrew Pipe on what drives a reasonable person into stand-up

‘Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious’ – Peter Ustinov

To mark the 30th anniversary of my first full-length Edinburgh Fringe show, Mind Candy, in 1996, I've written a second.

It has taken me 30 years to write - not because it took 30 years to think of some jokes but because it took 30 years to understand the person who was eventually going to tell them.

As soon as I started writing it,  a searching question began to gnaw away at me: ‘What is it that drives an individual to become a comedian?’ What is it that makes a person crave a hug of approval from a group of complete strangers – typically ones that have usually had a few alcoholic drinks by the time their respective paths cross?

Taking your comedy stylings from being the lowly pub mimic to an established comedy club where people have paid and you're going to get a cut of the money takes a giant leap of Armstrong-like stature and isn't without pain. A comedian has to ‘die’ multiple times before they become any good, accepting the Billy Connolly premise that if you're practising in front of the mirror then you're looking the wrong way. 

The Andrew Pipe who first walked on stage at the Wedgewood Rooms Comedy Club in Portsmouth feels like somebody I once met rather than somebody I still am. The advantage of having so much emotional distance between me now and me then is that patterns begin to emerge. I can now plot an almost perfectly linear path from my adoption as a one-day-old baby to my first appearance behind a microphone but, unfortunately, the dots only joined together in retrospect,

As a 21-year-old man I suffered panic attacks and my GP prescribed beta blockers. When I started doing stand-up. the panic attacks disappeared. I'm not claiming that doing a few open spots cured my anxiety. Human psychology is, of course, much more complicated than that. But it has left me wondering whether I had finally found the one place where I no longer had to pretend to be somebody else.

The irony being that stand-up is, on the face of it at least, is a full-blown performance.

Chris Rock once remarked, ‘When you meet somebody for the first time, you're not meeting them. You're meeting their representative.’

And Frankie Howerd said: ‘The most important thing in showbusiness is you've got to be authentic. And if you can fake that, you've got it made.’

In the 1980s, when I first started obsessing about stand-up, I listened endlessly to those Ben Elton live albums on cassette. I can't remember which one, but he definitely tells his audience; ‘I'm a comedian. The only truth is I tell lies.’

Every comedian appeared to be walking the same tightrope. Performance requires authenticity which wins approval. Psychologists have a useful distinction. Laughter says: that joke worked. Applause says: we agree. Just like a hug of approval from a room full of strangers.

When I was adopted, I was one day old. Someone else decided who I was and gifted me the appropriate surname before I had opened my eyes. According to a reliable eyewitness testimony, my birth mother handed me to my adoptive one with the beautifully heartwarming: ‘He’s all yours.’ I'm not moaning (much).

My adoptive parents gave me the stability of a family unit then failed to tell me I was adopted until I was 38 years old – a full five years after I'd retired from comedy. Then stuff that I hadn't considered in years became relevant; no one ever went to parents' evening, presumably to avoid any of those awkward ownership questions, hugs were like currency and they both kept forgetting my name. 

Comedy became the place where I could manufacture affiliation.

Hannah Gadsby made one of the most significant interventions in stand-up for a generation because it forced comedians to ask, ‘What is this doing to me?’

Laughing along with the office wag is perhaps the oldest way we have of saying, ‘you’re all right’, and perhaps every comedian, consciously or otherwise, walks on stage each night hoping to hear and then feel exactly that.

Steve Martin wrote in Born Standing Up that, because so much time had passed, writing about his younger self felt less like autobiography than biography. He was writing about somebody he barely recognised. In the writing of this show I know exactly what he means.

There's a quote that is often attributed to Mark Twain, Carol Burnett, and Steve Allen. The earliest recorded print match dates back to a 1957 Cosmopolitan article featuring Steve Allen that assures us mere mortals that an abstract called ‘time’ allows people to heal, lower their guard, and view heavy situations with a new perspective, or put more simply: Tragedy + Time = Comedy.

If I wasn't into my ninth year of a monastic abstention from anyand all things alcoholic, I'd happily drink to that. 

• Andrew Pipe: Real Sociopath is on at PBH’s Free Fringe at Canons’ Gait at 12:45 on August 17 and 2pm on August 18.

Published: 16 Aug 2026