If you’re making comedy, or funny theatre, what’s the last thing you should include in your show? For years – for most of entertainment history, in fact – the answer would have been: backstage strife. No one wants to see that show about how you’re drifting apart as a double act, how touring live comedy just doesn’t pay the bills, or how your company is in the advanced stages of collapse. Remember that Morecambe and Wise show about the tensions in their off-stage relationship? Of course you don’t. It didn’t happen. It would not have brought you sunshine.
But times change. In the era of autofiction, reality TV and trauma-comedy, the lines between fact and fantasy, onstage and off, blur. For a long time, the duo Max and Ivan were grateful that their chosen artistic niche, narrative sketch comedy, gave them characters and fictions to hide behind. “So many standups feel compelled to mine their inner lives for material,” says one half of the twosome, Max Olesker. “Or they live their lives with half an eye on ‘how does this turn into comedy?’ That can be unhealthy; you can lose sight of the [difference] between you the performer and you the actual person. So I’ve always smugly thought, ‘we’re lucky, we don’t have to exist in that unhealthy space’. Until now, when suddenly we’re trawling through emails, putting personal photos onstage and excavating our lives in more detail than we’ve ever done before.”
