All about my mother: the Edinburgh Fringe comedians paying tribute to their mums


Eddie Izzard once suggested to Bono that their respective mothers dying when they were young pushed them towards performing. Audiences were "a surrogate affection organism” the comedian reasoned. Yet their love was “conditional. My desperation to deliver is to get this love out of an audience. That is what kept, and keeps pushing me.”
Sam Lake can relate. His Spanish mother, Estefania, passed away from breast cancer when he was 18. He describes her as fun-loving, progressive and with comedic tastes ranging from Victoria Wood to Sarah Silverman. “She was quite the woman and I have vivid memories of all the people whose lives she touched,” the Edinburgh-based stand-up recalls.
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Hide AdWith her last words, he felt she was “trying to set me up for the rest of my life, knowing she wasn't going to be part of it. I ask myself, 'If this hadn't happened, would I have become a comedian?' I might have given it a go. But something needed to happen, putting me outside my comfort zone, to start exploring the world for myself. Maybe the reason that so many performers lost a parent young, particularly a mum, and risked going into the arts, is that the safety blanket was removed.”
Esméralda gets its title from the name he'd have had if he'd been born a girl. He frames his mother's loss less negatively though, focusing on the “life lessons” she actively bestowed on him. Belatedly sharing his love for Fani in his third show, the gay comic held back till he was skilled enough to “not simply make people sad".
“Psychologically, it felt so obviously formative too that I thought I'd keep it to myself. But this year, I had a gut feeling. Something made me want to see if it works.”
Alfie Packham's debut, My Gift To You, likewise introduces the things given to him by his late mother, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2014 but lived for eight more years. Literal and metaphorical, they include musical instruments he can't play, a skydiving session and her example of seizing the day. Jenny Packham had a fear of flying but that didn't stop her jumping out of a plane.
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Hide AdNot one for overt sentimentality, comic and journalist Packham remains “mostly passive” himself. "I've always worked a lot to distract myself. And something as engrossing as stand-up is a really good distraction."
He describes those eight additional years as a “gift”. “I find us a funny contrast,” he says. “My thoughts were preoccupied with her dying throughout my twenties but it's about our lives more than her death. She was a big comedy fan, maybe, in another life, she might have done it herself”. She never got to see her son on stage but her appreciation of his videos, he says, “definitely spurred me on”.
Packham tried performing stand-up about her illness while she was alive but, he says, “I failed utterly at bringing audiences with me.” Realising the need for some light-heartedness – “I'm no Richard Gadd when it comes to delving into trauma” – he hit on the gift premise, inspired by last year's work-in-progress version of the show being free.
“You don't want to come across as flippant because jokes can be used to evade serious matters,” he acknowledges. Still, it’s “fertile ground, because if you're making people tense, when the laughs arrive, they're bigger.”
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Hide AdHe's wary of apparently gender-swapping the “Dead Dad” trope that has proved so successful in UK stand-up over the last two decades. "I'm not disparaging some of those great one-person shows, but I'm not doing a serious monologue at the 45-minute mark. And there's absolutely no twist. She's dead the whole time.”
He's mindful of a “uniquely comedian tragedy”, whereby real memories get overwritten in a stand-up's brain by the embellished version they're recounting night after night. “Whittling away the details in order to make people laugh,” Packham observes. “I've definitely kept some things back for myself. And some of my memories, I'm not good enough to make them funny. All the same, it's nice talking about her.”
Milanka Brooks might have written a Dead Dad show. The only child of Harry Brooks Jr, a handsome, playfully intelligent actor and writer with troubled origins, and Lela, a striking, confident Serbian-Bosnian model, her financially precarious childhood was “tumultuous” and her mother's late onset epilepsy led to her becoming, at nine years old, her father's “confidant” and money “advisor”, and, “to a degree, my mum's doctor.”
“My parents' parent,” she shrugs.


From boarding school she made long phone calls to her father. “But I didn't really experience my mum that much from when I was 12 to 18.”
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Hide AdHaving become “very English” to fit in, Brooks says she was “losing touch with my Eastern European heritage”. However, when the comic actor, who specialises in playing Eastern European types in shows such as Black Mirror and Benidorm – lost her father in 2008, she grew “much closer to my mum ... like sisters from different misters, truly best friends.”
Her Fringe debut, Mum And I Don't Talk Anymore, reflects how her father's death and visiting her extended family in Belgrade with her mother when she was 16 changed her perspective. "I started to develop a lot of myself through the eyes of her," she says.
Harry was entertaining, gregarious and had “intellectual energy”. But Lela's “heart energy” took “guts and no filter ... she was incredibly expressive and a sharer of all of our secrets, loved talking about sex, and would happily have a blazing row in public. I prided myself on us sharing everything, to the point that she would go too far in telling me about her boyfriend. She spoke in a way that we're not used to in this country, but with an integrity and authenticity that meant it was always received with a wry smile and understood.”
Portraying her mother for more than half of her show has been “weirdly easy”, if “slightly insulting”, as audiences have demanded “more Lela. All the real entertainment and colour comes from her”.
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Hide AdAs the Romanian gold-digger Ionela in Benidorm, Brooks embraced a comic, cod-Balkan accent. But playing her “flamboyant, very free” mother actually meant toning her down. “I'm not trying to caricature – her pronunciation was really left field – but it's truthful to who she was. My priority is that people meet my mum.”
Sam Lake, Esméralda, Monkey Barrel Comedy, 1.30pm, until 25 August; Alfie Packham: My Gift To You, Underbelly Bristo Square, 2.45pm, until 26 August; Mum and I Don't Talk Anymore by Milanka Brooks, Assembly George Square, 2.50pm, until 25 August
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