Harriet Kemsley is funny from the moment we begin speaking. She’s video calling from a family holiday in Greece – “that’s why there’s sunlight and things” – following a recent trip to Australia for the Sydney Comedy Festival. “I didn’t bring [my daughter] Mabel to Sydney, so it’s been really nice to have this time,” she says. “We’re sharing a bed, and we both sleep like, 10 hours a night… I’m literally sleeping like a baby.”
It’s not surprising that Kemsley, the 37-year-old British comedian, might need some R&R. This year she has been catapulted to new levels of fame after her appearance on Prime Video’s reality comedy show Last One Laughing UK, as well as the second series of her podcast, Single Ladies in your Area. Co-hosted by fellow comedian Amy Gledhill, the show chronicles the pair’s dating exploits after both leaving long-term relationships.
Kemsley started the podcast following her divorce from three-year-old Mabel’s dad, Canadian comedian Bobby Mair. “Season one was very raw. It felt so scary joining the apps, having to learn this new language, and – at least for me – finding out who I was after a marriage that I thought would be for ever,” she muses. “So [with season two] I feel like I’ve taken a bit of the pressure off myself,” she continues. “Now me and Amy are having a bit of fun.”
That fun is palpable, delightfully underpinned by the duo’s black humour. As such, Single Ladies fans will be delighted to hear that – as well as decompressing – Kemsley is gearing up to perform her new show, Everything Always Works Out for Me, at Leicester Square Theatre on 12 June. “It’s about this crazy year that I had after the divorce,” she explains. “And I called it [that] because me and my friends heard it and we were trying to think positively, but [that meant] we kept thinking positively as everything just went to shit.”
Kemsley is warm and generous in her answers — and just as quick to laugh as her besotted audiences. The mix of raw, confessional material and deadpan irreverence that makes Kemsley’s humour so irresistible to fans is cathartic for her, too. “I did a show in 2018 called Slutty Joan that was about sexual assault… I had a lot of therapy around it as well, but it was definitely very helpful, owning the trauma and saying it out loud,” she recalls. “As strange as this might sound, to be able to laugh… takes away some of the horror and the pain. It gives you a kind of strength and power, I think, to laugh at bad things.”
No doubt, humour is a potent painkiller – understandable that it might be a desirable trait in a life partner, too. “I definitely want someone who makes me laugh and who finds me funny as well,” she says. “Traditionally, it’s thought that women doing stand-up is off-putting to men, but what I realised is it’s just off-putting to insecure men,” she laughs. “If men are very confident, then they’re happy for you.”
Having a child has further clarified Kemsley’s priorities when it comes to dating. “It’s definitely raised my bar – now [prospective partners] don’t just have to be good enough for me, they have to be good enough for my daughter,” she says. “It’s very hard to give up an evening for somebody who I don’t know, when it could just be a waste of time [and] I could be with [Mabel instead].”
I ask Kemsley about her time on Last One Laughing, where she did her best to keep a straight face alongside industry titans including Bob Mortimer, Lou Sanders and Richard Ayoade. Kemsley more than held her own, making it to the final episode only to be undone by a challenge where the contestants had to sing Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You”.
“Singing is my absolute worst nightmare, and I just couldn’t believe it was going to happen – that I was going to have to sing on TV,” Kemsley says. “You can see the panic rising in my face… and then I’m just gone.” Were there any other near misses? “Lou is a really good friend of mine, and she’s the absolute funniest. And so any time she’d come near me, I’d have to say, Lou, I just can’t – you can see us walking away from each other at different points.” She laughs.
Ayoade, too, “was just so on the front foot. He was not vulnerable in any way – he was always in attack mode. So that was incredibly stressful. Quite a few of [the other contestants] I was meeting for the first time. It felt,” she says, “incredibly surreal that I was in this place with these people who I admire so much, and then I’m not supposed to laugh. I mean, give me a break; that was crazy.”
A personal highlight — and I suspect I’m not alone — was Kemsley’s “joker” routine, where she performed the world’s most ungainly strip tease before firing ping-pong balls from between her legs. Apparently, it’s been a long time in the making: “I’d done a version of it in my 2018 show, with the strip and all the different pants, and then it just kind of built from there,” Kemsley explains. “I was just thinking of what would be the least sexy strip — that’s where the compression bandages and plasters came from.”
While Last One Laughing demanded improvisation and silliness, her comedy has historically offset that levity with darker, personal subject matter. Unfettered emotional access is expected of female creatives – writers, artists and actresses as well as comics – much more than their male counterparts. Baring all can be empowering – but does it ever feel too much?
Kemsley’s response is thoughtful. “The thing with stand-up is you can’t pick your style,” she muses. “I can’t help oversharing. I was very shy when I was younger, and stand-up has really helped me connect with people,” she says. “Most of the things I read are written by women, and I think that’s because so much still hasn’t been said,” she continues. “I would never want anyone to do it because they feel like they have to – but definitely something that I really am drawn to is women speaking their truth.”
With female voices rising to the fore more than ever since #MeToo, recent years have shown that those truths are often bleak – counterintuitively, mining trauma for material can make for some of the brightest comedy around. Think of Grace Campbell’s On Heat, or Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 masterpiece Nanette.
What’s more, stand-up offers good practice for dating itself: “I feel lucky in a way that, having done stand-up, I’m very used to rejection,” Kemsley says with a laugh. “I’ve died on stage in front of hundreds of people across the country, and so getting rejected by an individual man isn’t even really on my radar.”
Wry to the last, Kemsley is a subversive star. Having mastered the disarming art of laughing at herself, spinning gold from shit, she wields a power that women have used for millennia – mistake her vulnerability for weakness at your own peril.
‘Everything Always Works Out for Me’ is at Leicester Square Theatre, London on 12 June (leicestersquaretheatre.com). ‘Single Ladies in Your Area’ podcast is available to stream wherever you get your podcasts
