Tom Ward’s family inspired his clean comedy: ‘I had to find a way of having fun without upsetting dad’-Ashley Davies-Entertainment – Metro

Tom Ward learned how to straddle being a comedian without being unkind (Picture: Matt Crockett)

If you were to set a trainee stand-up a task to help them sharpen their comedy skills, you could do worse than challenge them to spend a few years being funny without being mean about anyone. And in a way, that’s what Tom Ward experienced up until his early teens.

His dad was a born-again Christian with set ideas about what kind of entertainment the family should enjoy, and that rigid morality extended to young Tom’s interior life.

‘There were periods when I couldn’t listen to music in the house, and couldn’t watch certain television shows or films,’ recalls the man who had the most distinctive haircut in comedy until Maisie Adams said, ‘Hold my beer.’

‘I couldn’t swear and I couldn’t even think an unkind thought, so trying to be funny and take the piss out of stuff while not being cruel or having a horrible thought was really tricky.’

He adored comedy, though (thanks to free DVDs and CDs that came free with newspapers), and remembers seeing the trailer for Airplane. ‘I almost burst into tears knowing how much I knew that film was for me but knowing I wasn’t allowed to watch it because it had adult humour, swearing and blasphemy in it,’ he says. ‘I had to find a way of having fun without upsetting my dad.’

Fast forward a few years and Tom has won Best Newcomer at the 2017 Chortle Awards (the comedy industry’s bible) and supported the likes of Joe Lycett, Jack Whitehall, Jason Manford and Sindhu Vee on tour, as well as Ricky Gervais at London’s Leicester Square Theatre.

Tom won a ‘best newcomer’ award while climbing up the comedy ranks (Picture: Matt Crockett)

He got a standing ovation for his set on Live At The Apollo, and you’ll soon see him fronting his own show on a major television channel. But first, he’s embarking upon his first tour, with an airing of Anthem, the show that earned him enthusiastic reviews at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

It covers a lot of ground, including identity, class, being in love and how we’re guilty of being selective about who we care about.

Tom pokes fun at the way ‘a lot of personal identity issues have become weaponised’. As he puts it: ‘People are quite competitive about their mental health, and how everything seems to gravitate back to their specialness complex. I find it quite funny that people always end up turning it into a statement of who they are, what they’re about and what their personal brand is.’

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He does find himself getting annoyed by those who, for example, like to call themselves ‘queer’ when they’re really just ‘dabbling’.

‘It’s disrespectful to people who are LGBTQ+, and those who are actually suffering for something they have no control over in a society that really gears itself to straight people at every turn. It’s disrespectful to people whose whole identity is shaped by going against the grain and how difficult it is.’

This show also features some songs, including one about what it’s like when you and your partner have different tastes in music. It’s inspired by the fact that his girlfriend, who’s younger than he is, isn’t quite as into 1980s and 1990s indie as he is.

Comedy should spark the ‘feeling that we’re all in this together,’ Tom says (Picture: Matt Crockett)

Before going into comedy, he fronted a band called Church Of The Drive-Through Elvis, and, while that didn’t work out as planned, it gave him a real taste for how good it feels when things go right on stage.

After his first open-mic slot (at the Cavendish Arms’ Comedy Virgins night in London’s Stockwell), it took Tom a year or two to find his comedy voice. He admits to trying too hard to be edgy at the beginning, but remembers the exact moment when it all started coming together.

He had a great joke about how motivated he felt to change his life for the better when leaving the cinema, and the steps he took to be able to act on it before the buzz wore off. The punchline is a beautifully bathetic illustration of how success is often slightly out of reach due to the way we mishandle inspiration or opportunities. (Spoiler: he starts living next door to the cinema.)

‘And that’s what I think comedy should be: philosophy and pain and regret, but in a way that doesn’t make people go, “Oh yeah, life is shit, isn’t it?” With comedy there should be a feeling in the room that we’re all with you, we’re all in this together, but it’s (mostly) not earnest. That feeling of joy within the pain is essential, isn’t it?’

Tom Ward is performing tomorrow at Komedia, Brighton, and is touring until March 29, 2023, tomwardvoice.com

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