Janine Harouni arrives at her local east London pub with a little white dog, her “fur-born son” Charles Barkley, in tow. It’s a frosty day and, in an idyllic winter scene, we find seats by an open fire. Charles looks for strokes from me but growls at a passing man.
“He doesn’t like men as much as women,” says the US comedian and actor, “he’s trying to protect us.” Charles has been much more protective recently, even standing guard by the front door, because three months ago Harouni gave birth to her son.
What does maternity leave look like for a standup comedian? “It looks a lot like not taking maternity leave,” says Staten Island native Harouni. “A week after the baby was born, I was doing a voiceover. I’ve been in Manchester and Oxford, filming. You can’t say no to work.”
That hasn’t been a total negative. “A lot of people say you lose your identity. But really, it’s changing, and it’s a hard adjustment to make,” she says. “To go back to work, which is something I love, feels like I haven’t lost that part of myself.”
Harouni is preparing to take her latest show, the Edinburgh comedy award-nominated Man’oushe, on the road. A year ago, it began as a show about preparing for parenthood. But as 2023 unfolded, and she experienced a miscarriage, then the death of her friend and collaborator Adam Brace, “it became a show about the worst year of my life and trying to pull whatever meaning I could from that”.
When she committed to doing last year’s Edinburgh festival, it was soon after the miscarriage and she’d just discovered she was pregnant again. Harouni didn’t know what would happen in the coming months, so she signed up. She wanted to talk about her miscarriage: “I thought I knew what miscarriage was, but then I went through one. It is so much more painful than I could imagine.”
There was secrecy and shame. “Part of my shame was: well, this wasn’t a real baby, so why would I be this sad?” she says. “I’m very pro-abortion, but it was a baby that was wanted. My brain was sending me mixed signals. In our culture, there’s no funeral, you don’t name the baby, it’s like it didn’t really happen. But actually, it felt like my baby had died.”
Harouni’s miscarriage occurred between her eight- and 12-week scans, a time at which we’re told to keep pregnancies secret. “You absolutely should tell everyone,” Harouni says. “Because if you experience a miscarriage, you need a support network.”
Her instinct to probe difficult personal experiences on stage was developed, not innate. Most people think standup is always a solo endeavour; Harouni worked with Brace, a writer and director who, behind the scenes, shaped hits such as Alex Edelman’s acclaimed standup and Liz Kingsman’s Olivier-nominated One Woman Show. Brace helped expand her idea of what standup could be and encouraged Harouni to allow moments of quiet amid the punchlines. “It is so unnatural to me to be vulnerable,” she says. “It’s uncomfortable to be serious.”
In Stand Up With Janine Harouni (Please Remain Seated), Harouni’s 2019 debut, which earned her a best newcomer nomination at Edinburgh, she explored the complex relationship with her dad, the Trump-supporting son of Lebanese immigrants. She also recounted one of the most difficult periods of her life, when her parents nursed her back to health following a car accident that left her unable to walk. Brace urged her to include the car crash story: “I was really resistant. But he pushed me, and that show was so much funnier because that piece is in it.”
Harouni started standup later than most, in her late 20s. It wasn’t her first taste of performance, though – when a seven-year-old Harouni saw Annie on Broadway, “I turned to my mom and was like: ‘I want to do that.’” She took part in a Staten Island kids’ theatre group until the age of 18. Eventually, a place at London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) brought her to the UK. “I thought I was going to be doing Shakespeare plays at the Globe,” she says. After graduating, she was cast as Julia in the West End production of 1984. When that finished, “I was unemployed for close to a year and thought: OK, this is what being an actor is. I would say it’s auditioning, but you’re even lucky to get an audition.”
She got a taste for comedy when she and two Lamda friends, Meg Salter and Sally O’Leary, started writing sketches together as Muriel. Over lockdown, She’s Asking for It – satirising the victim-blaming line often directed at women who’ve been assaulted – gained 125m views.
Standup felt like a chance to wrest back control of her career after her acting dry spell. Jokes about Trump and her impressions of her New Yorker parents did well and she was soon placing in competition finals. Awards elicit mixed feelings among comedians, but “it helps you get paid”, says Harouni. “I have a voice in my head that’s constantly telling me I’m not good. Having external validation helps.”
At the Edinburgh fringe last year, she performed Man’oushe six nights a week while eight months pregnant, edging ever closer to her due date. “As women we don’t take up a lot of space in the world and we’re not exactly encouraged to. When you’re pregnant, you’re fucking massive. It felt really powerful to be that big,” she says.
It also gave her miscarriage material an edge of hope – the audience could see that it wasn’t the end of the story. Harouni was thrilled, of course, that her pregnancy continued but was also struck by the inequality – it meant having hundreds of injections and tablets. “And all my husband had to do was cum!”
On stage, Harouni also finds comedy in the most extreme pregnancy side-effects, and how blissfully unprepared she’d been for them: “I was one of the most miserable pregnant women. I complained about everything.” Each night, she asks an audience member to chip in with their own weirdest side-effects. “People think of it as a women’s issue, but it’s so important to talk about it, especially in front of men,” she says.
It felt right to start talking about Brace in the show, too – it chimed with everything he’d taught her about the value of vulnerability. “If anything, it felt weird to get on stage and not talk about the grieving process.”
She learned of Brace’s death at just 43, from complications of a stroke, while travelling to perform a preview of her show last April. Grieving, especially in the UK, Harouni says, can feel very private. While that’s right for some, “to me, I like when people bring him up, I like talking about him, because he’s on my mind all the time anyway,” she says. “Talking about him while grieving him was incredibly cathartic. The amount of people who came up to me after the show who’ve suffered a similar loss made me feel less alone.”
Harouni shaped the pain into a show about love, loss and parenthood. She reflects on her Lebanese heritage – her grandma, whom she’s named after, was a successful singer in Lebanon working with the Arabic music great Fairuz, but sacrificed her career to move to the US, “and give her kids the opportunities that came with not living in a wartorn country”, Harouni says. “We’re both immigrants. We’re both performers. I wanted to mirror her experience.”
Brace was a parent in his own way, Harouni says on stage: he shaped so many comedy careers, so many peerless shows. “It was so nice being at the fringe and seeing the echoes of Adam,” Harouni’s voice catches. “It felt like he was still alive because what he taught us all was still in practice. He was the best.”
Jokes, and joy, cut through the adversity. “Comedy and tragedy go hand in hand. Even though I talk about losing a friend and losing a baby, I try to end the show with hopefulness and love,” she says.
Now that her son is here, Harouni has added new jokes about him and his arrival via caesarean section. He’s reached the age where he’s smiling and giggling – it’s easy to find hopefulness in that. “I like making people laugh,” Harouni says. “But I love making him laugh.”
Janine Harouni tours 14 January to 26 February; tour starts Manchester.
