Last week, as the show announced its series two line-up, I was set free from a summer when not a single LOL passed my lips
I have not laughed all summer. I’m not being dramatic. From the beginning of the school holidays until this week I have not LOLed, ROFLed or LMAOed. Not one haha or hehe has passed my lips. Believe it or not, this isn’t because of a deep depression, in protest, or the penalty for a lost bet. No – my humour ban has been on strict doctor’s orders, in what has felt like a weeks-long episode of Last One Laughing, the TV show in which 10 comedians compete to make each other laugh, where laughing yourself gets you eliminated from the game.
A couple of years ago, I had an unfortunate cycling accident on my way home from work. I won’t bore you too much with the details. Suffice it to say: badly parked van, unsupervised children, high velocity, splat. Thankfully, the kids were unscathed; the left side of my face took the brunt of the fall and I smashed my teeth on the road, which is presumably what caused my upper lip to split clean through.
I was lucky that the accident didn’t result in more than cosmetic damage – but I did have a bit of a nasty scar where they’d stitched my mouth back together, so in July this year I underwent a scar revision surgery by the brilliant maxillofacial team at King’s College Hospital. After a few days recovering at home, I was pretty much back to normal. Except that tiny detail, drummed into me by my surgeon: no laughing, whatever you do.
At first it was easy. I was swollen, sore and feeling mightily sorry for myself, so with an enormous Steri-Strip on my top lip, like a semi-permanent milk moustache, I hunkered down and sipped through straws with the utmost sombreness. I saw only my partner and granted him only my miserable poker-face. I learned to communicate without moving my mouth, mainly “mm-hmm”s and “uh-uh”s. I texted my friends that I was fine, but “I’m not allowed to laugh lol”. The irony was not lost on me.
Once the novelty had worn off, things started to get difficult. You don’t realise quite how many times a day the corners of your mouth twitch, or a great bubble of mirth rises inside you, until it is forbidden. You know those situations when laughing would be the absolute worst thing you could do – wedding ceremonies, church services, school assemblies – and so everything suddenly becomes incomprehensibly hilarious? That’s how life started to feel.
My partner would allude lightly to a running joke and I would find myself desperately clenching my cheeks so my mouth didn’t move, eyes filling with tears. My cat would miaow in a particularly amusing way and my neck would hurt with restraining myself. On a country walk with my parents I had to crouch in the verge, shaking silently, pushing both sides of my face together, when my dad made, well, a dad joke. I watched the women’s Euros final and, when Chloe Kelly scored the winning goal, had to content myself with jumping to my feet and shouting “AAARGH!” with an entirely slack jaw.
All this, in normal situations – I dread to think how it feels for the comedians on Last One Laughing, where some of the funniest people in the country are actively trying to make them crack. But at least they’re all in the same boat – being both a gigantic goody-two-shoes and a people-pleaser, as I started to leave my house I was confronted with the potential catastrophe that everyone would think I was a miserable cow. This had clearly been playing on my mind from the beginning – the first thing I said to the nurses, when I woke up from the anaesthetic, was: “Sorry, I’m not allowed to smile at you.”
I paid a few visits to the hospital for check-ups. Initially I thought my humourless prison would only be enforced for the first week or so – but each visit my instructions remained the same. Vaseline. Patience. No laughing! I ventured further into society, going to the pub to catch up with my best friend. Big mistake. We were hysterical before we’d even said a word to each other – me holding my face together, the laughter gathering somewhere in my nose. Long-booked weekend away with the girls. Difficult, difficult, difficult. “That’s hilarious,” I would say, expressionless, as others shrieked with glee around me. “Ha ha ha.” It became known as my “Botox laugh”.
My third check-up at the hospital was a couple of days before a friend’s wedding. I asked if I would be allowed to smile there – hours of making small-talk over canapés without so much as showing my teeth sounded genuinely impossible. The nurse chuckled (lucky him). He said I thought I should be fine. But “be sensible”, he cautioned. “Not too wide.”
Finally, last week, I had my scheduled four-week follow-up, and I was set free – the same day that the cast for the new series of Last One Laughing was announced (featuring the likes of David Mitchell, Mel Giedroyc, Alan Carr and Bob Mortimer, returning to defend his title). Now, I have celebrated by watching Stath Lets Flats – God, it feels good – and I await Last One Laughing series two, which will launch on Prime in 2026, with both excitement and the greatest empathy. I’ll never take a LOL for granted again.
