You can absolutely do both, says comic Marc Burrows

The English author and satirist GK Chesterton once wrote a lengthy defence of the humour in his work, arguing that ‘funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else’ and that ‘so far as a thing is universal it is full of comic things’. Chesterton (who was a raging antisemite, by the way, but we’re going to have to put that to one side here, like we’ve been doing with Roald Dahl for years) had been accused of ‘flippancy’ in his writing about spiritual matters and had come out fighting for his right to be funny in the midst of the serious.

Later, Terry Pratchett (no problems here, FYI) took up this theme when defending his own work. ‘The opposite of funny isn't serious,’ he said while accepting the Carnegie Medal in 2001 for his book The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents, ‘the opposite of funny is not funny’.

Pratchett faced the same issue as Chesterton, only from the other side – because his work was overtly, intentionally and famously comic, full of jokes that were by turns silly, laboured, clever, astonishing and joyously stupid, he found he was rarely taken seriously. His books were also profound, thought-provoking and deeply incisive about the human condition, but that was often missed by critics who couldn't see past the wizards and the daft puns.

A hundred years on from Chesterton's comments and 25 years on from Pratchett's, our post-post-modern, genre-blending, multi-screened pop culture world seems to have loosened its definitions of genre. The Barbie movie could have both the satisfyingly stupid I'm Just Ken song and America Ferrera's astonishing speech about the expectations placed on women. Succession can be simultaneously the funniest and most powerful thing on TV. We're beginning to accept that comedies can have something to say, and thought-provoking art can have great jokes.

For the last year or so, I've been performing a show I wrote about Pratchett's life, The Magic Of Terry Pratchett, partly based on the biography I wrote of the same name. It has, by anyone's standards, done well – across two Fringe runs and a year of touring theatres we've sold over 10,000 tickets and garnered some lovely reviews.

I tried to write the show in the spirit of Terry himself, and that meant being both funny and serious. Both are appropriate – Pratchett was a brilliant comic writer, but he was also powered by a seething pit of fury; someone who couldn't bear to stand aside for injustice and bullying. The end of his life was horribly tragic as he succumbed to Alzheimer's disease, even while continuing to write another eight novels, raise awareness around his condition and campaign for legalised assisted dying. His final novel contains both the incredibly moving death of a major character and a bit with cross-dressing lumberjacks. Serious and funny.

My background is stand-up and I've been a comic for more than 15 years now. The Magic of Terry Pratchett is my fifth solo show, and I always knew it had to be funny. I wanted to write a comedy show, first and foremost. It had to have jokes. Good jokes. It had to be funny from the first thirty seconds. If I wanted people to trust me enough to make them cry, I was going to have to make them laugh first.

I mapped the show out in terms of punchlines, and I previewed it within an inch of its life ahead of Edinburgh. I found the moments when I needed a joke to dissolve the tension, and the moments where I could let the emotion breathe. The show regularly gets huge laughs, and I think it’s at its best when it connects on the level of comedy show – it makes the poignant moments more powerful. It wasn’t written to be sat through in reverential silence.

It's not unusual for shows in the comedy section of the Fringe guide to play with serious ideas. Jessie Cave's latest show, An Ecstatic Display was listed in the stand-up section and had some great jokes, but it was also consistently awkward from beginning to end. I came out of Elf Lyons's astonishingly joyful and silly Horses genuinely weeping for my lost childhood, and left Marjolene Robertson's wonderful O brimming with anger.

I've not seen anyone argue that these shows shouldn't be in the comedy section of the Fringe guide. They absolutely should. Occasionally my Terry Pratchett show gets described as ‘a talk’, usually when it's part of the programme at a convention, and I totally get where people are coming from – I am, basically, doing a talk about Terry Pratchett. But to me, it's not a ‘talk’. It's a show. A stand-up show. It has a story. And a beginning, middle and end. It has jokes all the way through, placed strategically. It has a rhythm, and it's the rhythm of a comic's Edinburgh hour.

And yet we're still debating what comedy actually is. The Bear gets nominated for an Emmy in the comedy section for little more reason than the fact it's less than half an hour long. Ted Lasso starts as a fairly standard sitcom and devolves into a serious drama within three seasons. How do we even classify Baby Reindeer?

Having spent a year on stage trying to be serious and funny, as audiences trust me enough to cry at the sad bits because I've held their hand through the process and sweetened the medicine with jokes, I've become increasingly sure of one thing – I wrote a comedy show. Terry wrote comedy books. You can be funny and you can be serious at the same time, because life is funny. Life is serious.

There's an old saying, ‘you've got to laugh or you'd cry’. It's wrong. You can absolutely do both. That's the beauty of what we do. We can break your heart. Shatter it into a million pieces. And it's okay, because there'll be another joke along in a minute.

• The Magic of Terry Pratchett is on tour through England and Wales through 2024 and into 2025. More info here

Published: 27 Aug 2024