‘There is no greater sorrow,” as Dante had it, “than to recall happiness in times of misery.” If the converse is true, then John Robins is cooking up some divine comedy. Robins – best known now as one half of an all-conquering talk-radio twosome with Elis James – has a new touring show, the first since the pre-pandemic Hot Shame. Like its predecessor, and like much of the pair’s podcast work, it addresses mental health – specifically, Robins’ lifelong battle against high anxiety. But this time there’s a twist.
“One half of the show was written last year,” says Robins, “in quite a catastrophic phase, mentally. And the second half is being written now, when as you can tell,” he smiles, only a little ironically, “I’m very serene and peaceful.” This year has seen the 41-year-old turn a corner with his wellbeing. A man whose standup routines mainline disastrous failure at basic life management – whether that’s a breakup in his award-winning The Darkness of Robins, or simply buying a humidifier in Hot Shame – has now quit alcohol, taken up meditation and is learning to be less “in-self”. Things couldn’t be better for John Robins. But where does that leave his comedy?
With an interesting challenge, says Robins, who now has a bifurcated show to take on the road. “I have to open with a routine I wrote when I wasn’t well,” he says, “and that I don’t agree with any more. But it’s really funny.” The question, he says, is “am I able to commit to it, even though, in terms of the philosophy behind it, I’m no longer quite there? And am I willing to return to it later in the show, with my new head and new eyes, and relieve people of that moment where they recoiled and went, ‘Oh, why’s he saying these things?’ Can I sit on it for an hour before I come back and go, ‘You know that guy in the first half? He wasn’t particularly well.’”
That’s the creative challenge – to pretend, in Act One, to be someone he no longer is. It must help, mind you, that it’s someone he was, and for a long time. “It’s in the territory,” admits Robins, “of my last few shows, which all asked: how far can I take a story about someone really on the edge?” So how on edge was he? How bad was it – in that “catastrophic phase” – to be John Robins? “It was hell,” says the Radio 5 Live man now. “I was a control freak of my own existence. Back then, a good day was a day where everything went according to plan. There’s a million individual moments in the day where something can go wrong. If they go wrong, I’ve fucked up, and I go apeshit at myself. And I lived like that for years – and used alcohol to try and switch it off.
“But then the next day is worse, because you were drunk the night before. So you feel even more anxious, with more dread that things will go wrong. Until eventually” – and this is what happened earlier this year – “the booze stops working. And that was hell. That made the anxiety worse. So you end up in this ludicrous situation where you need to drink in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, and exactly the right things, because drinking is now just another thing that has to go exactly according to plan.”
It sounds (and was) exhausting, and unsustainable. So Robins called time on the drinking in November of last year. Looking back now, he says, “after a few months’ sobriety” (and having fixed a thyroid problem that made the anxiety worse), “trying to address that damage through comedy is a challenge. Because what I describe to you doesn’t sound very funny.” He guffaws. “And it wasn’t. I can feel myself getting emotional now, because I’ve not talked to many strangers about it.”
Don’t doubt that he can make it funny, though. This is the comic who absolutely laid himself bare in 2017’s The Darkness of Robins, splaying across the stage the self-loathing and recrimination that attended his breakup from fellow comic Sara Pascoe. It felt incredibly rare to see a man be so publicly, pathetically vulnerable – but it was blisteringly funny too, winning for Robins a joint share of that year’s Edinburgh comedy award with a show you may have heard of, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. If you’re making comedy in this terrain of personal pain, says Robins, “the joke has to be good enough. That’s the test.” Remembering the breathtaking final sequence of his breakup show, a montage of his four-year relationship masquerading as a building society commercial, “the release of laughter has to be equal to the tension you’ve caused. And when it is, it’s great. I love it.”
The surprise to hear Robins talk about his recent difficulties is that this is a man who, alongside his wingman Elis James, is celebrated by legions of grateful fans for his articulacy around male mental health. The duo’s podcast How Do You Cope? discusses wellbeing with celebrity guests; there’s a book in the pipeline too. Given all this expertise, didn’t he spot the red flags in his own behaviour? “No,” says Robins. Because “when you’re anxious you don’t really think it’s anxiety. It’s impossible to step out of yourself and go: this is all in your head.” Perhaps this realisation – that fluency in modern mental health thinking only takes you so far – informs another feature of Robins’ new show, its scepticism towards the wellness industry. “Sometimes the language it uses,” he says, “is not always helpful and can be quite isolating.”
“A lot of wellness is about mental health, it’s not about mental illness – which is an important distinction. We’re all much more understanding about low-level mental health issues, like anxiety and stress. But where does schizophrenia figure in the ‘pamper yourself, go for a walk, talk to someone’ narrative? There are an awful lot of people not just talking but screaming for help, and not getting it. It’s interesting to look at the meme-ification of wellbeing in that context.”
“It is,” he concludes, “a net Good Thing for people to be more aware and open. But it’s more complicated than the messaging makes out.” In which context, it’s striking that Robins has chosen the standup stage, rather than any of his many audio platforms, as the place to explore it. Why? Won’t all this complexity overpower the humour? “But making it funny is the discipline,” says Robins. OK, so his life has been taken over by podcasting (“they just keep fucking coming!”), but standup – comedy that reflects who he is, and what he cares about – is what he’s best at.
“I long ago gave up trying to write what I thought people wanted to hear,” he says. “Or to be what I thought a comedian was. What you then end up with is an inauthentic performance.” For Robins, “if I see you as a comic, I want to know who you are. That doesn’t mean it has to be really personal stuff. But I do need to get a feel for you. I just want that moment, that one line, where I’m like” – he clicks his fingers – “that. That’s something only you could say, and it’s resonated with me.’ And that’s what I want my comedy to be for audiences.”
It’s a modest enough ambition, but it’s taken Robins years – and tears – to get there. “I’ve let go of so many resentments about the comedy industry,” he says. “I struggled for so long with the fact that in comedy, so much of what happens or doesn’t happen is completely out of your control.” What he used to cling to was that “the anxiety stops the minute I step on stage.” For now, happily, it doesn’t resume when he steps off – and Robins can look forward to his new tour with, well, serenity and peacefulness. “Audiences don’t have to think it’s the best thing they’ve ever seen,” he says. “They just have to come away thinking ‘that was John Robins, what I just saw, and I really like hearing him talk about things. I really laughed, and it made me think.’ I don’t need anything other than that.”
John Robins’ Howl is at Just the Tonic Nucleus, Edinburgh, until 27 August and then tours from 14 September
In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978
