Rachel Fairburn: ‘We’re funny when we’re annoyed’
Hailed as “very much the rock ‘n’ roll star of British comedy” by Rolling Stone UK, no less, Mancunian comic Rachel Fairburn will be bringing her Showgirl tour to Cambridge in October.
In the show, Rachel, a finalist in several prestigious competitions including Funny Women, City Life Comedian of the Year, the NATYS (New Acts of The Year Showcase) and English Comedian of the Year, will be casting her acerbic eye over everything from your children to her pretentious new alcohol-free life (accurate at the time of writing).
“I’m not one of these very heavily thematic comedians,” says Rachel, speaking to the Cambridge Independent via Zoom from her home in London. “Some people are like, ‘Oh, I’ve written a show, it’s about this...’
“Basically, it came about pretty much by accident – really I called it Showgirl because I just wanted to wear a showgirl outfit on the poster.
“I hired one and tried it on and I thought, ‘Well, I like this’. So I had my picture done in it, and I was thinking, ‘I’ll call it Showgirl because that’s generic enough’, and it actually became more about how I got into comedy.
“I realised that I got asked the question ‘How did you get into stand-up?’ a lot, but I get asked it by all different kinds of people, and people ask me in different ways.
“They want to know why, for different reasons, so I sort of explore that a little bit. And I talk about how I suffered from shyness as a child – I still do now, I’m still shy.
“More or less the show is about me being irritated by pretty much everything in life, and that’s everything from air fryers to people’s children. We’re at our funniest when we’re annoyed, I think.”
Rachel, who also co-hosts the smash hit podcast All Killa No Filla alongside Kiri Pritchard-McLean (it boasts more than 250,000 regular listeners), notes that there are no “heavy themes or tragedy” in Showgirl – “it’s just a fun show.”
As amazing as she looks in her showgirl outfit, Rachel won’t be wearing it on stage in Cambridge. “They’re very lovely to look at but they’re too heavy to wear,” she says.
“The photoshoot was done in Blackpool in March. I’d hired the costume and it was raining, it was high winds, there was feathers going everywhere and I thought, ‘I’m going to lose the deposit on this’.
“I wore it for the photoshoot and it was a nice thing to wear for the day but I will never ever wear one ever again – too heavy, I can’t do anything in it. I don’t know how the showgirls in Las Vegas manage!”
On TV, Rachel, whose favourite stand-ups include Frank Skinner, Steve Coogan, Caroline Aherne, Victoria Wood, Micky Flanagan, Josh Pugh and Scott Bennett, has appeared on programmes including BBC Presents: Stand Up for Live Comedy, Funny Festival Live, Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, and The Russell Howard Hour.
A staple of the Edinburgh Fringe since 2014, she has performed six critically-acclaimed solo shows and featured in The Times’ ‘Best Jokes of the Fringe’ in 2022 and The Daily Telegraph’s ‘40 Jokes of the Fringe’ in 2018.
At what point did the very likeable entertainer decide to try and follow a career in stand-up? “I did a comedy course in Manchester when I was about 24,” she recalls, “and I did my first gig before the end of the course – and once I started gigging I thought, ‘I’ve had rubbish jobs, I’ve always worked for people, I think this is the thing for me’.”
Rachel’s various jobs, pre-comedy, included working in a department store, a shoe shop, a tourist information centre and a rare books library for about eight years.
“It was a really nice job,” she says of the latter. But she likes this one more.
Rachel Fairburn brings Showgirl to Cambridge Junction (J2) on Tuesday, October 17, as part of her biggest UK tour yet, running till November.
Tickets, priced £16-£18.50, are available at junction.co.uk. For more on Rachel, go to rachelfairburn.com.
