GUEST POST: I wrote a comedy show about grief...

Writer and comedian Suchandrika Chakrabarti on the power of humour in loss...

“How’s your mum doing?” It was an innocent, well-meaning question from someone - at my university - who had heard that my dad died. They couldn’t have known that the answer was “she died three years ago.” 

I stuttered out an answer, “as well as you know”, fighting a hysterical laugh that wanted to escape as well. I could have exposed this nice, gentle person to the surprising truth and watch their eyes change with the weight of that knowledge… or I could just vaguely lie, not make them feel horribly awkward and sad. I had chosen the latter. It was funny to me that the lie was the better thing to say in that moment; funny and so, so soul-achingly sad.

Moments like these, in the face of grief or life-changing trauma, are a reminder that emotions rarely exist on their own, but spill into each other and mix like paint on a palette. Normal interactions are rendered absurd by the perpetual presence of the painful thing, which isn’t usually visible to other people unless you tell them about it.

And it’s moments like this that I have spent much of my career pondering and playing with. I’m a comedian and a writer and my latest project is a comedy show about grief. I first wrote I Miss Amy Winehouse in May 2021, and performed it at Brighton Fringe the following month. Since then, I’ve taken it on a tour across the UK, over to Amsterdam and for the full month of the Edinburgh Fringe. It isn’t about recent grief, but about what happens when grief is 10 or 20 years old, and if it’s possible to find a solution to missing someone. The show is, in many ways, my own personal solution. 

Amy Winehouse is the lens through which I look back at my past in this show. I’m a fan, and her death at the age of 27 in July 2011 shocked me; but I didn’t know her personally. It’s a different kind of loss to experiencing the death of someone in your own life, someone you love and who loves you, so through that I also explore the death of my parents. They died in my late teens: my mum in January 2000 when I was 16, and my dad in April 2003, when I was 19. I’m now 39, and I’ve lived with their absences for two decades - the whole of my adult life, and longer. 

The writer’s mum and dad in their youth

What’s funny about that? Well, I do think that any subject can be mined for comedy, it’s how you go about doing it. There’s a kind of humour that will feel familiar to anyone who has grieved, or faced trauma. When interviewed about her groundbreaking BBC show I May Destroy You in July 2020, Michaela Coel said: “I describe the humour in this show and in life as an uninvited guest at a party,” and while her dramedy is about sexual assault rather than grief, this description of laughter bubbling up even in our darkest moments rings true to me.  There’s a humour to the absurdity of the bleakest of situations, and all the strange interactions this painful event pushes you into. 

When I wrote a comedy show about grief and what we do with it, it was because not many 39-year-olds have the experience and opportunity to reflect on 20 years since losing their parents. It’s an unusual life story, but for me, the challenge was to see where I could find the relatability. Comedy is about connection; grief is about isolation. Putting this show together during the pandemic, I felt that sharing my own experience of the absurdity of grief, and how I think it’s a continuation of love, could be helpful to people who had just been newly introduced to this situation. 

In the show, I find the comedy in telling my parents’ stories, and the stories they told me; in trying to get across their senses of humour. That helps the audience understand who they were, to imagine them. Really, I’m writing and performing the obituaries for my parents that I wasn’t able to give at their funerals, being a teenager and so stunned by the immediate aftermath of loss, the pure surrender to the chemicals careening around my bloodstream, the adrenaline and the cortisol and whatever it is that steals your memory from those strange, out-of-body days. 

I didn’t think I could go back to the early years of grieving and find comedy; but, on balance, I would say my childhood was happy, and that my parents were funny people, and good storytellers. I’d rather get that across. For so long, the very few people who’ve brought my parents up, and I myself, have been stuck seeing them through the lens of their deaths, which were sudden and premature and shattered me. I think the same has been true of the public discourse around Amy Winehouse in the first decade after her death - we could barely bring ourselves to talk about the person behind this very sudden and sad loss - but now that tone is shifting slightly. 

I’ve found that on the other side of grief, there can be a lot of joy. You grieve the people you love; grief is the process through which we transform the love that was once between two people into a jewel that is held within just the one person, alone. It’s sad, but it’s so beautiful. The jewel is made up of those meaningful moments, memories and stories. Their humour. The silly situations when you laughed together. There will come a day when you can enjoy these things alone, and when you will jump at the opportunity to share them with others. Humour, Michaela Coel’s “uninvited guest,” can now be welcomed in, and that’s what my show is about. 

I Miss Amy Winehouse is me asking the audience to take the most precious stories of my youth and apply their imaginations to them, to meet my parents and see them for who they were, as well as we can dream them up. I think that’s the best solution for missing someone.

I’m performing the show for the last time this week, then I can let it go and move on. As much as I love telling this story and performing this show, I don’t want it to be the only one I ever tell. As Coel says in that interview: “If you are alive to reflect on a dark time, and keep returning there, it means you’ve survived it and you can keep going there until you’ve got what you need from returning,” and, for now, I’ve got what I need. I hope the show helps the audience get there, too. 

I Miss Amy Winehouse is part of the The Best of Edinburgh Comedy season at The Pleasance Theatre in Islington, London. Get 20% off tickets to the show on Tuesday 8th November with the code LASTAMY

We Miss Amy Winehouse, the limited-series companion podcast to the show, is available on Spotify, with two more episodes still to come.

There were so many lines in this piece I could really relate to. Particularly the idea that Suchandrika’s loss was so great if often overpowered the happy, fun memories of her parents. I love that she gained control by remembering who her parents were and what they taught her. What funny, poignant moments do you remember about the people you have lost? How have you used humour to help you with your grief? Let me know in the comments. And if you’d like to share your story on Crocuses In The Snow please feel free to get in touch…