Stuart Goldsmith: '˜This tour is all about finally being happy'

Now a dad and married, Stuart brings his latest stand-up show, Like I Mean It, to Brighton Komedia on Sunday, June 17.

It’s a tour that finds him fresh off the plane after four weeks of honeymoon in New Zealand – not that getting back was complete bliss.

“We are dealing with a jet-lagged baby, and there is no such phrase as ‘as calm as a jet-lagged baby!’ But it was great. I would dearly love to live out there. I am a huge fan of New Zealand. It is the fifth time I have been there for various comedy festivals. I just love those bumpy volcanic hills like the hills out of Postman Pat, and then you drive for an hour in any direction and it is different again and it might be all densely forested.”

He continues: “This tour is all about finally being happy. I have completed the therapy. My therapist emailed and said: ‘I haven’t heard from you for ten months.’ I suppose I had all the required anxiety and depression that a lot of comedians suffer from. It is just one of the challenges along the way, the two-way street. You are anxious and so you become a comedian and then you start writing jokes about anxiety.”

“I suppose it is that constant over-analysing,” Stuart explains. “I have like a constant hovering eyeball second-guessing all my decisions and analysing all my thought patterns. And then I have been able to relax that a bit, having achieved a wife and a baby. It has been such a huge year. The show last year was based on the birth.

“This one is really about how it finally feels to have got all that you wanted – and yet still sometimes find yourself feeling furious!

“I suppose that any comedian will be driven by fear or anger or some kind of crisis all the time, and if you resolve all that, then you might be wondering whether has the comedy gone, but I do feel that my comedy is getting better and better. I feel a new maturity in the comedy as I start to see the world from the point of view of somewhere different in my place in the world. I have recognised that I am no longer a boy or an adolescent and that I can give up a lot of the struggle of my earlier life; that I am no longer wanting to visit every country and go out with every girl.”

Inevitably it all reflects back into the show.

“Each of my shows is my attempt to get through some sort of challenge and you look back and you realise that it also had therapeutic value. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is to be funny!”

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