Despite being born in Haverfordwest I consider Carmarthen my home town. It’s where I spent my formative teenage years, it gave me the accent I still have and Carmarthenshire is where my parents and extended family are all from. Unlike Haverfordwest, the Carmarthenshire of my youth was majority Welsh-speaking, and the language of our family gatherings has always been entirely Welsh.
This occasionally surprises people from more anglicised parts of Wales, but it was, and still is, as natural as wrapping sandwiches in tinfoil or lying to your dentist about how often you floss.
One of my favourite things about Wales is the extreme pride people have in the towns and villages they grew up in. On an away trip to watch Wales play football in Moldova, I asked a fellow fan where he was from. “Cilfynydd,” the man replied (population 2,855), before adding: “Centre of the fucking universe.” In fact, “Where are you from?” is the default ice-breaker when Welsh people meet, especially abroad. Like most Welsh people, I have a mental Rolodex of things to say about each town and village I come across, facts I can feel in my bones and which I blurt out involuntarily. “Aaaah, Treforest,” I’ll nod. “I know it. It’s where Tom Jones was born and it’s got a massive Tesco.” It’s therefore predictable that I absolutely love Carmarthen (known simply as “Town” to its residents), and I can get quite chippy if anyone from elsewhere criticises it.
Town can justifiably claim to be Wales’s oldest town, and has one of only two surviving Roman amphitheatres in Wales. The amphitheatre serves almost as many purposes today as it would have done in the second century, attracting both history buffs and teenagers who like snogging and drinking cans. As a history undergraduate, I always thought a Carmarthenshire upbringing was perfect preparation for the aspiring Welsh historian, with its historic mix of heavy industry and agriculture, rural villages and urban towns. I now think Carmarthen provides the perfect upbringing for comedy, as it’s small enough for everyone to know each other but big enough to sustain plenty of “characters”.
Carmarthen is resolutely unpretentious, which I think affected the kind of comedy I write, as in the early years I’d try to give my ideas “the Carmarthen test” – would the people I’d known growing up laugh at this? In 1999, at the age of 18, I entered a standup competition and won £150. News of my winnings spread around town like wildfire, and a few days after the competition a curious townie who I vaguely knew approached me outside the Angel Vaults pub with an inquiring look on his face. “Noodle told me that you won £150 for getting your knob out on stage in a comedy competition,” he said, the sophistication of my performance having been lost slightly in Carmarthen’s bush telegraph. “Is that true?”
“Well,” I responded, “I was actually doing standup, so in fact there was an awful lot of craft in what …”
“Because I’d get my knob out for free,” he added, before dropping his trousers in Nott Square. He then stood there, satisfied that he had his penis out in the street for creative reasons rather than piffling financial concerns, as I sipped my pint and wondered if anything like this had ever happened to Monty Python after their first gigs.
I’d been doing standup for 10 years before I wrote a show in my first language. I talked a bit about Wales in my English set, and some of your references don’t always land when you’ve been to a Welsh-medium school. There was definitely something missing, a part of my personality I was unable to express satisfactorily in English. So writing a standup show in Welsh for the first time was an uplifting experience. Rather than simply translate my English material, I decided to deliberately concentrate on the parts of Welsh culture and my upbringing that didn’t translate into English, knowing they would chime with a Welsh-speaking audience.
I went to a Welsh-language school, a Welsh-language Sunday school (only until I was about 14 – I was actually pretty cool), and did all of the normal things a boy growing up in a small town does. I played a lot of football and collected stickers and watched too much telly, but it was the cultural differences that set Carmarthen apart that I tried to find humour in, because I wanted to write jokes that a Welsh-language audience would find unique to them.
I talked about how impossibly hard the questions on my chapel’s annual treasure hunt were, and the minefield of having to go to Welsh Language Society gigs to meet girls. The complexities of interpreting the subtle facial cues and signals of the opposite sex is difficult enough when you’re 15, but was this pretty girl from Crymych flirting or did she actually want to discuss the 1993 Welsh Language Act? Surely no one does? Don’t you just pretend you do, because you don’t want to look too predatory and we were all given a leaflet about it on the way in?
It was fun to comedically explore some of the things I had thought as a teenager (girls from Aberystwyth are glamorous, everyone from Llanelli has a hard brother), and as someone who grew up as a townie, to discuss the phenomenon of the “hambon” (it would be “joscyn” in north Wales) – the term for Welsh-speaking farmers who live in rural west Wales.
A tricky first gig in Welsh knocked my confidence, so the euphoria I felt when I eventually started getting laughs from this new material was unlike anything I’d ever known in my career. It really clicked for the first time at a show in Swansea, and I drove home, banging the dashboard of my car with delight.
It’s a profound experience, finally getting to make jokes about your life in the language those things happened in, to an audience who have shared similar cultural experiences. I still love performing in English. But now I don’t have this nagging feeling that I’m only able to tell part of my story. A story that thanks to an upbringing in Carmarthen needs to be told in two languages.
• Elis James is a standup comedian. You can hear him on the Elis James and John Robins show on BBC Radio 5 Live, every Friday, 1-3pm. He is going on a Welsh-language standup tour in the autumn (elisjames.co)
• The caption on this article was amended on 6 September 2019 because Holly Walsh had been misidentified
