DIVA spoke to comedy’s rising star about her upcoming tour Forgive Me, Father
BY YASMIN VINCE, IMAGE PROVIDED
Ania Magliano is well on her way to becoming a household name. From smash hit Edinburgh Fringe shows to opening for Ed Gamble, she’s quickly rising the ranks of UK comedy. Even as she sits on a Zoom call, still suffering from a winter cold, it’s easy to see why – she’s effortlessly easy to love.
Everything she does, whether it’s a TikTok vox pop, her live shows or writing jokes about Paul Mescal for Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date, is infused with an upbeat, yet dark comedy. Ania’s comedy is like a cross between Taylor Tomlinson and Daniel Sloss. If you haven’t seen her live yet, fear not! Her latest show, Forgive Me, Father, will be touring the UK from 23 January to 22 March.
Ahead of next year’s run, she sat down with DIVA to talk about queer comedy and keeping the scene a safe space.
What can you tell us about your new show, Forgive Me Father?
So the new show… It’s basically an hour of stand-up, but it’s also kind of got a narrative to it. It’s got a story – it’s got a few stories in it, actually. They’re kind of all part of the same bigger picture. It’s very autobiographical with a lot of true facts about my life. I always try to make my comedy as honest as possible.
When I was coming up with this show, I found it really difficult to live with someone I was in a relationship with. I had never done that before, so when I got through that, I wanted to make a show where if I had seen something like it this time a year and a half ago, I would have related to it and felt understood and seen by it.
Your comedy tends to mix together the funny and the serious. How important is it to you to make that blend?
I like people being able to relate to what I’m talking about and I think often stuff is relatable if you get deep down into what’s going on, which tends to end up being a little bit more serious. I’m interested in what the core bit of a topic is. Why do loads of people find it difficult to live with their partner for the first time?
I also just think that is my sense of humour. It can be a little bit darker. It’s always been like that so I think it can make things funnier. If you just think about it like a seesaw, when the dark end gets pushed, the funny end might come up, but it’s always just me talking about my own life. No one should use that argument to make jokes at other people’s expense.
Your comedy career started at Cambridge, where you started a female and non-binary comedy group, Stockings. Why did you want to champion those voices?
It definitely felt like the comedy scene at Cambridge was very dominated by like cis white men. While I was there, there was a wave of people, like me and those I set up Stockings, calling out the gender bias and then some other people called out the kind of ethnicity bias.
The truth is that when I first started getting into stand-up, I learnt about the Chortle Student Comedy Awards. And that year there were no women in the final. I was really annoyed about it. I hadn’t applied, but I thought, “This is ridiculous! How can there be no women in this final?” And then I used that anger to set up this comedy society that was like a bit of a different space. I’m proud of it.
What’s it like, as a queer woman, to have transitioned from that to professional comedy?
I think it’s funny. I don’t think I could say it’s one specific thing, because it does vary so much. Sometimes I have an experience where I’m performing at a gig in East London and I’m the sixth bisexual woman in a row on the bill. And it’s like, “Oh my God, I’m so boring.”
But then I’ll go to a gig that’s maybe outside of London or for a different audience. I did a gig recently where most of the tickets ended up being bought by a Christmas party for firefighters. There were women in there, but it was very laddy. They were really nice and they loved all my material about bisexuality. But when I’ve done gigs that aren’t to my echo chamber in Hackney, sometimes I do feel a little bit more like the jokes kind of switched between being relatable comedy to, hopefully still funny, but something the audience thinks sounds new.
Because there are a lot of stand-ups, there’s more and more being done by people of demographics different to what it’s historically been. It is quite exciting. But then I remember that most of the household names are men. The progress is far more bottom-up.
With all that progress, how important is it to have safe spaces within comedy?
It’s so important, because if it doesn’t feel safe, then those voices are not going to stay. That’s how you end up having really awful experiences.
I’ve had experiences that set me back. Having to deal with s**t from men, really changed my experience with performing and I had to do a lot of work to get past. I imagine that’s happened to a lot of people. It can be really hard, because comedy is a very small world. If something’s happened to you, it’s not that easy to avoid the person that did it. One year at the Fringe, it was just really easy for me to bump into a guy who’d done something really bad to me. That’s why I think having spaces where you do feel safe. Otherwise, people will just stop performing.
It’s an incredibly brave thing to keep going when something like that happens. And you’ve done some incredible things. What would you love to do in the future?
I know it’s already been filmed but I would’ve loved to be in the second part of Wicked. That’s not going to happen but it’s the first thing that came into my head, so I had to honour that. I’ve basically just got into watching loads of musicals. I can’t sing, I can’t dance, so I don’t know what role I would do, but I’d love to be one of these big, huge budget films.
Ania Magliano is touring with her new show, Forgive Me, Father, across the UK and Ireland from January 2025, for more info and tickets visit www.aniamagliano.com.
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