Did you hear the one about the comedian doing Edinburgh while 8½ months pregnant?
Performing six nights a week is tough enough without being a couple of weeks from giving birth. As she approaches full-term, New York stand-up Janine Harouni tells Sarah Crompton about why she took on the challenge – and the sadness behind her humour
Comedian Janine Harouni is eight-and-a-half months pregnant – and performing six times a week at the Edinburgh Fringe. A look of bafflement passes across her face as she states these bald facts. “That’s too pregnant. Too pregnant for the Fringe,” she tells me, with a deadpan sigh. “If I’d had a kid before and knew what the later stage of pregnancy was like, I wouldn’t have done this. But I was ignorant. People are saying things like, ‘Good for you. More power to you.’ And I’m like, it’s just foolishness really. I’m doing this because I am insane.”
She grins. We’re talking on Zoom; Harouni, in a white room in a rented house near Murrayfield, semi-reclines on the sofa. She is looking not exactly radiant, but pretty impressive for someone who is doing an hour of stand-up every night in high heels. In a stripey top and with her hair pulled back, she looks pale but lively. Seeing her on stage a few nights later, she is transformed, wearing a polkadot dress and slingbacks, her lips red and long brown hair perfectly groomed. She owns the space, one hand holding the microphone, the other resting protectively on what is a fairly large bump. “I’ve been mostly feeling good,” she says. “I mean, I have to have a reality check. My job is one hour an evening, and I’ve met women who worked eight-hour days up until the day they gave birth. I consider myself pretty lucky.”
This is the 35-year-old New Yorker’s second Fringe, and her show is selling out. Her problem as a stand-up is not in fact the standing – “Though by the end of the day my ankles are so swollen I can barely get my shoes off” – but the walking. Edinburgh is a hilly city for someone who has a large bump to disturb their gravity. “I’ve learnt that if I wear a backpack that’s almost as heavy as my belly, that sort of balances me out. When my sister-in-law came to stay, it was great because I’d be struggling up a hill and would just feel a hand on my lower back, and she was pushing me up.”
All of this is said with a comic zing. But Man’oushe, the show she is performing at Pleasance Courtyard, has a semi-serious theme. “I never really considered myself a feminist until I became pregnant and saw real injustice between the genders,” she says. “The show talks about how unfair it is that we do all the work for nine months, and then my husband gets exactly the same reward that I do. He gets a kid at the end of it.” In her routine, she likens it to doing a science project where she does the work, and he brings a pencil.
There is sadness behind the humour, though. Harouni and her husband Andrew Nolan, a filmmaker and comedian whom she met at drama school, were on their honeymoon in Thailand in 2021 when she looked into his eyes and thought what a good father he would be. “I thought, there is nobody I want to go on this journey with other than [him], and that was the impetus to start trying for a baby.”
It took a while. “I thought it would be easy,” she says, with a laugh. “When you’re young, everybody is always saying you are going to get pregnant if someone just looks at you. But it’s hard. I would definitely have had much more fun in my twenties if I’d known that.” But then, when the couple succeeded in conceiving, they lost their first baby.
“It was a silent miscarriage. We only found out at the 12-week scan that the baby didn’t have a heartbeat. When we’d been for an eight-week scan, everything had been great, it was a healthy foetus and developing well. And you think when you make it to 12 weeks, that you’ve done it, that there’s no more danger. But of course, there’s always a chance, you know.”
That loss profoundly affected Harouni – and set her on the trajectory that led to Edinburgh. “I realised how much I actually wanted to be a mom,” she says. She found out she was pregnant again just as she had to decide whether to go ahead and book a slot on the Fringe. “I thought, well, I’ll regret not going if I have another miscarriage. I don’t want to stop my life. And if I don’t have another miscarriage, I’ll be happily pregnant and just push through with the Fringe. So,” she says rolling her eyes, “that got me into this mess.”
The story of her miscarriage, and her sorrow around it, also forms part of the show. “I am an ice-cold sarcastic New Yorker who became a comedian because I don’t know how to process my feelings,” she says, taking a sip from her coffee and smiling again. “I’d rather make a joke than deal with it. So, to make a show that was this vulnerable was absolutely terrifying to me. But audiences have been so lovely. The number of men and women who’ve sent me messages saying they have been through similar experiences, and it was nice to have the catharsis of seeing some comedy around it.
“It just means everything because I think it’s still such a shameful thing for people to talk about,” she continues. “It’s such a private grief process. About 80 per cent of miscarriages happen in the first trimester, when we’re told not to tell anyone that you are pregnant. Why? Miscarriage is horrible and there should be people who know that you’re dealing with that.”
Harouni is also an actor, and was filming the second series of the ITV sitcom Buffering when she lost the baby. She had told the producer and other cast members that she was pregnant. “Everyone was so supportive. They were so helpful through the whole thing. I am glad that they knew; that’s all that I can say. I think if you feel comfortable, you should tell people,” she says. “I say in the show that miscarriage is a death that you mourn in secret; it felt like a death to me. Even the word miscarriage is so euphemised – it sounds like a little slip up. Whoopsie, I just didn’t carry that right. But actually it’s a loss.”
Harouni’s ascent through the comedy circuit has been rapid. She began life as an actor, training at LAMDA in London and then almost immediately landing the leading role of Julia in Robert Icke’s stage adaptation of 1984. “I thought I was going to work every day for the rest of my life. But after the West End run and the tour finished, I was out of work for a year. I’d run out of money. I was selling brownies in a market in the pouring rain. And I just thought, there’s nothing that could be worse than this. If I did stand-up at least I’d be indoors. So I signed up for an open mic.”
She’d always wanted to be a comedian. “But I was way too scared to try. It took me being a failed actor in order to hit rock bottom. I say for every comedian you have to start at rock bottom, because there’s no other way you can imagine getting on stage and doing a five-minute set to an audience who will either be heckling you – or be indifferent to you, which is worse.”
I was way too scared to try comedy. It took me being a failed actor in order to hit rock bottom
The change of direction worked. In 2021, she was selected as a comedian to watch. She won a best newcomer nomination at Edinburgh and her touring show, Stand Up with Janine Harouni (Please Remain Seated), was filmed as an hour-long special for Prime Video.
Ironically, stand-up also got her noticed as an actor. The co-creator of Buffering, Steve Bugeja, booked her to star as a sarcastic American called Thalia after they shared a stand-up bill. She also caught the eye of the producers of The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, in which she played a small part. “They needed someone with an authentic New York accent and I impersonate my mother quite a lot on stage. Little did I know the character was a prostitute. My mom loves it. She says, ‘You’re basically playing me when you’re playing a sex worker.’”
As her career was taking off, I wonder if Harouni hesitated about starting a family in the first place. That topic, too, feeds into her Edinburgh show, in which talks about her Arab roots and her grandmother, who gave up the chance of stardom as an Arabic classical singer for the sake of her children. There is no doubt that combining work and family life raises questions for so many mothers. “There’s so much secrecy about all of women’s reproduction,” Harouni says. “I think women have been conditioned not to complain and I understand that. Have you ever known a woman in the workplace to say, ‘I’m not feeling well today, I’m on my period’? Of course not.
“I don’t agree with the amount of shame and secrecy that makes us hide things from men and other women. We don’t want to be seen as the weaker sex. Instead, what we have to do is be the stronger sex, because we are dealing with things that are happening to our body on a day-to-day basis, and are expected to do just as much as the men are doing.”
She knows the baby she is having is a boy. In her rental, she’s surrounded with baby paraphernalia, just in case he arrives early and is born in Edinburgh. “But do you know, the only time I don’t feel pregnant is when I’m doing the show. I think the adrenaline kicks in. I feel as light as a feather, and then the moment I come off stage, I’m having Braxton Hicks contractions or something.
“I think we’re going to have to record the sound of audience laughter and applause because whenever I’m performing, the baby is quiet. The ambient noise just lulls him to sleep. What am I raising here? Is he just going to go to the theatre and pass out?”
She laughs again. It’s clear the experience of being pregnant at the Edinburgh Festival has been a joy as well as a worry. “It’s definitely helped me keep things in perspective, because if I get too stressed, I’m worried about how it will impact on the baby. So I let my husband worry about ticket sales, and flyering in the rain and all that. I’m able to let things just roll off me.”
Man’oushe is at Pleasance Courtyard until 25 August; then at Soho Theatre, London, from 5-9 December.
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