When Ivo Graham was an 18-year-old aspiring stand-up at Oxford University, he carved himself out a niche: the posh one who went to Eton. It got him big laughs. He wasn’t exactly in the minority at Oxford, but the student comedy scene, he tells me, was a safe space “to experiment with your privilege on stage” – plus, it fit in among his material about drinking games and the varsity ski trip.
He kept that USP for a while, though gradually it dropped off, the private school jokes saved for special occasions: like when he went on Live at the Apollo back in 2019, and dropped the Eton bomb “just in case anyone in the crowd was liking me too much”. By then, he had developed more strings to his bow than simply being the posh one.
Whether he’s on stage or on TV – in 2023 he came last on the wacky Channel 4 gameshow Taskmaster – Graham is a high-energy, soul-baring performer. His sets are lexically dense, not only with tightly written gags but the kind of intriguing words you doubt anyone really says out loud anymore, all delivered in his clipped RP accent. Nobody chucks around “snafu” or launches into a story about going to Peppa Pig World on the comedown from a beach acid trip with such ease; during the latter story, he describes how he became convinced in his hallucinatory state that the tide wasn’t actually coming in, and accused his friend of “sucking on the sweet teat of ‘big tide’”. These poetic embellishments to his observational material make mini works of art of his foibles and failures.
In his new stand-up special, though, Graham returns to his school days. Live from the Bloomsbury Theatre, his first post-pandemic show, sees him reflecting on a lockdown spent at his parents’ house in Wiltshire, with his newly ex-partner and their newborn daughter, “in what certain members of our extended family referred to with delicious British understatement as ‘not ideal timing’”.
Back at his childhood home, Graham discovered his “feelings box”, which contained his old exercise books. He reads them on stage in the special: a short story about a boy who wanted to see his “mummy and daddy”, another who “missed his family”. Some of them were written when he was first sent to boarding school aged eight, and “ooh, the insecurities of a homesick eight-year-old boy just absolutely jump off the page”, he tells me.
Graham remembers his parents informing him that he was going to boarding school, and “thinking that it was clearly a very difficult decision for them as well”. He laughs, the idea now ridiculous to him. Graham’s first day at boarding school happened to coincide with his eighth birthday. His overwhelming memory is being shown a double bill of Mr Bean episodes to “soften the landing”. “I thought, ‘This place is brilliant – two in a row?’” He chuckles. “I was easily swayed.”
The special goes heavy on the nostalgia. “The past? Good. The future? Bad. The present? Fine. Main attribute? Proximity to the past,” he jokes. But that doesn’t mean Graham has fully worked through all his feelings about his childhood. He respects comedians who are able to say: “This thing happened and this is what I may have done or felt at the time, and this is where I am with it now”, but that’s not his style. “I have resigned myself to being able to offer little more than just, ‘These things happened and they’re still happening,’” he says.
Parenthood hasn’t shaken that messy energy, nor has being a “greying adult man”. At every stage, his comedy, and his life, has felt like “a blathering diary of a complicated adulthood”. It makes for good comedy, though he “would, of course, happily swap” it all for a bit of stability.
In conversation, Graham is as upbeat and thoughtful as he is in his comedy, with a self-admitted tendency to waffle a bit. Above all, he is unfailingly polite. He’s speaking to me backstage from the Norwich Playhouse (“How thrilling!”) ahead of his second consecutive night (“I don’t think you can call two nights a residency?”) at the venue.
“Do you know Norwich well?” he asks. I can’t say I do. He tells me excitedly about the staff of the local record shop he befriended a few hours ago. They’re all now coming to his show tonight. “I’m looking forward to it all the more with these prestigious guests from my big morning,” he says, beaming.
Frankly, I’m impressed by Graham’s energy levels. Just days ago, he was pounding the streets of the capital running in the London Marathon, to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis Society and Up – The Adult Cerebral Palsy Movement. It wasn’t his first marathon, but it was the first time he’d done it while pushing fellow comic and “national treasure” Rosie Jones in a chair.
Graham knows full well that runners can be “tedious evangelists” about the sport. “I’m no tub-thumping patriot but it’s an incredible way to experience the city you live in,” he says. “It’s so loud and Rosie is very loud, contributing hugely to the volume of the experience… It was transcendent – the ultimate version of the basic lesson that whenever the internet is getting you down, log off and leave the house.”
Running a cool 26.2 miles and then getting back on stage four days later while most people are still icing their feet feels impressive and foolish in equal measure. But Graham has a habit of overstretching himself. He’s performing two separate shows for the full length of the Edinburgh Fringe this summer (plus his comedy club night Comedian DJ Battles, which I can confirm is a belter of a night out). Grand Designs is his classic stand-up show playing at the expansive Pleasance Grand. Yet it’s Carousel, in a much smaller space, that intrigues me most.
Graham won’t reveal too much about the project, but from what I can gather it’s a semi-theatrical experience putting a fourth wall between him and the audience for the first time. It’s a show about looking back, with a musical soundtrack – “which I’ve hardly invented as an idea,” he clarifies – for Graham to hit his beats along. As a man “addicted to a kind of futile nostalgia”, Graham can look back at his memories “without the pressure to make them funny” in Carousel, and he’s found the experience thrilling.
On paper, it sounds like Graham is one of the busiest performers at this year’s Fringe. But even the most booked and busy comics are struggling; last month, Jason Manford tweeted that he wanted to come to the Fringe but accommodation costs meant he would lose money even if every show sold out.
I ask Graham if it’s something he thinks about, and sense him growing nervous about speaking out of turn. He’s got a sweet ongoing temporary accommodation deal at the festival, he says, then admits he’s stalling “because I am undeniably not feeling that pinch as much as lots of other people”.
Is the future of Fringe something he and his comedy friends discuss, then? “Yes. I think it’s something that people are very concerned about and would like to see more done about.” Many of his peers are now doing shorter runs, “often for very legitimate reasons”, but “that weakens it further”, he says. “Last year’s Fringe was possibly my favourite I’ve done, but it’s all being diluted a bit.”
But even as the industry changes, and as fatherhood changes Graham, he can’t keep away from the summer camp mentality that comedy encourages. “I spent a lot of my twenties thinking, ‘Right, this will be different when I get myself in order,’” he says. “Now it feels a bit more like, ‘No, it’s disorder now. That’s what everyone’s working with.’”
‘Ivo Graham – Live from the Bloomsbury Theatre’ is streaming now on 800 Pound Gorilla. ‘Carousel’ is at the Park Theatre, London from 4 to 7 June and the Edinburgh Fringe from 31 July to 25 August
