Alison Spittle on her Fringe show Wet

On her own birthday, Alison Spittle is in her room, on Zoom, very generously giving us her time. It’s the same room she lived in throughout lockdown, only with more in it. “I’m just sort of surrounded by gravestones of hobbies that I thought I could do,” she says. This year, with things looking more optimistic, her mind is on the Fringe. “Edinburgh suddenly feels very real now. The whole process of writing the show and promoting the show.” 

But she’s set on not losing out on the joyousness of the Fringe: “I don’t see the point in just not going mad this year. Because we get told constantly, you know, there’s war, there’s going to be a cost of living crisis, everything is bad. But just to have fun will be great. Shit happens but essentially we’re going to be at the biggest arts festival in the world. I’m scared of the financial aspect of it of course, but I recommend it to everyone: Just have a great summer this year. Because if you have a bad summer this year, it’s not going to help you in the winter.”

Spittle’s finding the promotional aspect particularly difficult though. “It’s very surreal, trying to promote your comedy show without giving too much away.” Part of the issue is people expect her to always be in joke-machine mode; the one she enters when writing for TV shows like Have I Got News For You.

“I did [a talk show] yesterday in Ireland. Everything is supposed to be funny but… there’s a bit in my new show [Wet] about contraception and how a contraceptive had destroyed my mental health at one point. And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, tell us more about the coil!’ And in my head I’m like, no, but this is live, I can’t tell people [that stuff when] there’s a man cooking a stir-fry...nearby.”

And the preconception doesn’t just follow her onto television. “I went to a funeral once and a close relative of mine was like, ‘No fucking jokes today, Alison!’ and I was like, ‘No, I am a human, I’m capable of knowing what’s appropriate and what’s not.’”

Perhaps her BBC Sounds podcast Wheel of Misfortune, replete with countless stories of defecation that she and Fern Brady (and now a guest co-host) gleefully read out, has contributed to this occasional perception of Spittle as ‘puerile’, as the Daily Mail put it. (“I love that [they] called us [that]. I was like, yeah you’re correct.”) She’s even picked up her own IRL poo anecdote. “I’ve had an audience member shit themselves at a Fringe show,” she says with only minor prompting. “A reviewer had come in… [I got] three stars and d’you know what? Fair.”

She leans into a self-deprecating caricature throughout the conversation. “Essentially I’m just a clown,” Spittle says at one point. But anyone who has heard her on The Guilty Feminist podcast knows that she’s more than just a jester. The show has a die-hard listenership that she praises for taking real-life action against the topics discussed on the show, such as the UK Police and Crime Bill; a series of controversial changes to the way protests are policed that would come into effect this April.

“The policing bill [discussed in episode 247] was something that really interested me,” she says, “because it’s an actual attack on free speech, essentially, and comedians go on about free speech all the time. It drives me mad that I think some people equate freedom of speech with slurs that they could say years ago and they’re not able to say now. And it’s like, there’s actual curtailing of freedom of speech happening now and the government are involved and [they] don’t seem to care about that.”

The contrast between current affairs and crass has laid the path for her new show. “I was originally going to make it fun,” she says, “but now it’s also about violence and other stuff.”’ As Spittle says though, “There’s a distrust of people who find lots of stuff funny all the time. [It’s why] context is so [important]. I love doing stand-up at The Pleasance and I love doing it in a room but like, if I did it on a bus I’d get sectioned.”

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Alison Spittle: Wet, 3-28 Aug, 4.45pm, Pleasance Courtyard

Follow Spittle on Twitter @AlisonSpittle, Instagram @alisonspittle, and listen to both Wheel of Misfortune and The Guilty Feminist wherever you get your podcasts