"Trying to remain curious" - Isy Suttie Interview

Isy Suttie’s new show, Jackpot, is her first stand-up tour in ten years, and having been busy with her other creative interests (acting, writing – scripts, a memoir and a novel – and podcasting), she’s fallen back in love with live comedy. During her chat with The Skinny, her fresh enthusiasm for stand-up is palpable, as she talks excitedly about trying out material at previews. The show sees Suttie “celebrating the more risky side of life”; looking to cherish the sense of adventure and curiosity that gets pushed out as we get older and life becomes more routine. 

The germ of the idea came out of Suttie’s memories of doing Ouija boards as a teenager. That sense of a risk-filled adolescence is also evoked in her novel, Jane is Trying, where the heroine’s return to her hometown involves the regeneration of an old ramshackle house, the site of teenager high jinks. The new show captures some of Suttie’s more eye-catching recent adventures: an illicit trip to a nuclear power station, for example, and trips to a spooky house in the woods with her children during lockdown, but, as she says, “it’s less about what I do and more about how I do it – trying to remain curious about things and find the corners of joy and celebration in the everyday things that I have to do now my life is more routine.” 

While delighted by the comparisons with other comedians ‘doing’ motherhood and identity (Jessica Fostekew, Ali Wong etc), Suttie is clear that she doesn’t feel much kinship with the idea of motherhood as a genre or an identity. Instead, “it just happens to be a stage in my life when I happen to have kids.” It’s a useful emphasis and draws attention to the way motherhood as a generic concept can cancel out the specifics of an individual’s life. Having children does inevitably cause change, but Suttie tries to integrate her children into her professional life as much as possible, taking her seven-year-old daughter to gigs, for example. It does mean, however, that she has to be more careful about swearing and “can’t do the bit about Father Christmas.” The picture Suttie paints of a circuit where children can be happily accommodated is really heartening – and she mentions both Josie Long and Katherine Ryan bringing their toddlers along to shows. 

Despite a supportive community where women are increasingly shaping the parameters, there’s no denying that stand-up is in itself a risky undertaking, and for all the satisfactions of her other roles, Suttie says that it’s “the purest, scariest and most exhilarating thing that I do.” It’s stand-up that particularly foregrounds the connection between risk and well-being for Suttie, and she sees it as “very very good for your brain. I’m more fulfilled creatively when I’m doing it,” she says, and relishes the immediacy of it: “there’s nothing comparable to having an idea and trying it out that night. Although it’s scary trying out new stuff, you’re so in control, it’s so simple, you think of it and you say it.” Perhaps perversely, given the show is the most personal she’s done to date, she’s “approached it far more forensically this time,” relishing the technical examination of what works and what doesn’t: “comedy never fails to surprise me – you can be so sure something will work and then it doesn’t and it’ll be because you’ve done two words in the wrong order.” 

Suttie is often pegged as a musical comedian, and she’s been playing the guitar and writing songs since she was 12, but this show is her first not to feature music. “It’s been such a big part of my life, but it’s a bit like needing a break with stand-up – sometimes you just need to step back.” It wasn’t planned, she explains, but when she started gigging again, “I just didn’t want to pick up a guitar.” It can feel like a crutch, or an intermediary, whereas now “I want to stand up on stage with a mic and see what happens.”

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Isy Suttie: Jackpot, The Stand, Edinburgh, 21 Sep and The Stand, Glasgow, 12 Oct