Catherine Bohart: ‘It’s easier to slag off Nish Kumar than be a good prime minister’

The Irish stand-up star talks to Isobel Lewis about baring her soul on stage and the importance of inclusivity in contemporary comedy

Catherine Bohart, a self-proclaimed extrovert, struggled with lockdown (Matt Crockett)

When Catherine Bohart dreamt of becoming an actor as a child, she looked to the biggest stars in the industry to see what their futures might hold. As a young girl with red hair living in the Nineties, naturally she assumed she’d one day be Kate Winslet. “I was pretty shocked to find I wasn’t immediately,” the Irish comedian explains, incredibly deadpan. “Still a pretty harrowing realisation on a daily basis, I’ll be honest with you.”

When Bohart uses the word “honest”, she really means it. She moved to London to study to be an actor, but after graduating quickly “fell into stand-up” in 2014 where she found she could say what she wanted. Since then, she’s spoken about her sexuality, religion and mental health on stage. “I’m the bisexual daughter of a Catholic deacon and I have OCD,” she declared in her 2018 debut solo show Immaculate, during which she spoke about being hospitalised for four months because of her mental health problems. If you want to see a comic bare their soul on stage, you go and see Bohart.

This week, Bohart is back on the road with her new show, This Isn’t For You. This comedy hour, Bohart tells me over Zoom, is “very much of lockdown”, inspired by a period of “enforced self-analysis” and a “major break-up” from fellow comic Sarah Keyworth. “It’s about listening to myself for the first time and dealing with heartbreak and confronting myself in lockdown. For me that meant also dealing with my OCD and…” she starts, before catching herself, “Gosh it’s all funnier than it sounds, I promise! It’s less of a breakdown and more of a…” she picks her word carefully, “journey.”

While lockdown was difficult for a self-proclaimed extrovert like Bohart, it also presented new opportunities. She set up the weekly virtual comedy show Gigless, building a loyal fanbase. Zoom gigs, she says “got a lot of bad press” because “comics who hated them really hated them” (in October 2020, Sara Pascoe told me they made her feel “mentally ill”, so I can confirm this). But for Bohart, they were an anchor in a turbulent period and, crucially, “so much better than no gigs”.

Bohart was used to doing the same show every night on tour, whereas weekly shows gave her a returning audience “where I couldn’t say what I’d said before. [It made] me feel like a performer for that whole period and build my own audience which was incredibly loyal. I thought it was really challenging [but] it stretched me as a performer rather than hindered me.” Virtual gigs also made a huge difference in improving accessibility, at a time when gigs have traditionally been expensive, or only in big cities, or in inaccessible old buildings. Or, more often than not, all three. “When you start to charge people three pounds, five pounds or less, you get a whole different audience,” she says.

It’s the idea of inclusion that made Bohart want to get involved in stand-up in the first place. Where acting felt like an impenetrable industry, comedy was simply standing in a room and making people laugh. “All you had to do was rock up and talk for five minutes and be funny. There were no barriers to entry, there was no waiting for a call and I didn’t need an agent to do it. So I just sort of filled my diary that way and then fell in love with it.”

‘[Panel shows] can only make you if you’re ubiquitous on them and it can only break you if you say something that I would literally never say’ (Matt Crockett)

Bohart worked her way up in the industry from open-mics spots to sold-out Edinburgh crowds. Like many comics before her, she was introduced to a more mainstream audience via the panel show circuit, appearing on shows such as Mock the Week and Richard Osman’s House of Games. She remembers sitting backstage before filming her first ever panel show, 8 Out of 10 Cats, feeling “physically ill”. In retrospect, she needn’t have worried.

“You have this idea that there’s something you could say that would make or break you, when really that’s not the goal of panel shows,” Bohart explains. “Really, it can only make you if you’re ubiquitous on them and it can only break you if you say something that I would literally never say.” The point of panel shows, she says, is to get booked on more panel shows – not to say they aren’t enjoyable. “It’s a fun thing and a joyous thing to do but it’s not going to make anybody famous,” she says. Nish Kumar and Katherine Ryan might say different, I expect.

While Bohart is not a political comic, she has dabbled in satire. She wrote for The Now Show, The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 and Frankie Boyle’s New World Order on BBC Two, and would regularly present segments on Kumar’s The Mash Report. In one Sesame Street-inspired sketch, she used puppets to break down the political history of the Irish border (for what it’s worth, Bohart would make a genuinely good kids’ TV presenter). Bohart can’t say enough good things about Kumar – for both “taking a punt on me” when she was a fairly early-career comic but also the environment he fostered on set.

Last year, The Mash Report was cancelled by the BBC amid reports of a perceived “left-wing bias” in its comedy output. Where does Bohart think that perception has come from? “We’ve had a right-wing government for almost 15 years, longer,” she says. “‘Gosh, aren’t the people with all the privilege and the power doing the best job ever’ just isn’t a very funny joke.”

Ultimately, Bohart says, it’s a distraction. “The right-wing narrative finds it more useful to hold comics to account than the government to account,” she says. “It is much easier to distract people with a narrative that comedy has gone too far than it is to make political change. It’s way easier to slag off Nish Kumar than be a good prime minister.” As ever, she’s nothing if not honest.

‘Catherine Bohart: This Isn’t For You’ begins Monday 28 February at Soho Theatre. For more information, visit catherinebohart.com/live