The last time I saw Janine Harouni perform she was eight months pregnant and delivering a show about imminent parenthood. It may not surprise you to learn that her first show since is about actual parenthood, of a now 18-month-old boy, with help from her visiting Lebanese- and Irish-American parents. Childrearing may not take a village in This Is What You Waited For, but it takes an extended family – which prompts reflection from our host on how she was mothered, and what kind of mother she can be.
Not for the first time with Harouni, I found the smoothness and control of her hour on that theme almost too neat. A proponent of “gentle parenting”, she practises gentle and measured comedy too. The jokes are very deftly sprung as we’re led through her experience of raising an uncommonly large baby boy, with detours via her relationships with her husband, dad and mom. One fine wisecrack skewers her sports-fan father’s opposition to they/them pronouns. There’s another on how unqualified new mothers are for childcare, and a choice gag about the similarities between the new arrival in her family and a colonialist Brit.
If Harouni’s observations on new parenthood are fairly commonplace, idiosyncrasy is supplied by a visit her folks make from her native Brooklyn, to help with childcare. (Grand)mother and daughter wind one another up – partly because Janine worries she can’t measure up to her own mother’s parenting. Harouni’s account of these concerns arrives at just the point in a show when standups like to give us their heart-on-sleeve moment, along with the credulity-stretching claim that Harouni had never seen her mother as a person, rather than a parent, until now.
All of which ties a heartfelt bow around the show’s closing moments – but isn’t as much fun as the less wholesome story that precedes it, of the time Janine pretended to have cancer while on a date. There’s something ill-fitting and delinquent about that tale that offsets the precision engineering elsewhere. Control is all well and good, but occasionally – as with parenting – something messier happens, and that’s equally worth celebrating.
At Soho theatre, London, until 1 November. Then touring
