Ania Magliano: ‘I have quite a lot of jokes about men being violent. There’s a dark undercurrent’

I’m with the comedian Ania Magliano for the afternoon. First, a cup of chai latte (“I’ve quit coffee to help with anxiety levels”), followed by a visit to Fightzone, an east London gym where she attends regular boxing classes for their anti-anxiety benefits. “In my body, when I’m anxious or angry, I store it in my arms. I want to punch things,” Magliano says. “There’s a bit of a stereotype of, ‘Do you imagine hitting someone when you’re boxing?’. And, yeah, sometimes I do.”

Audiences for the 25-year-old’s latest set, I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This, will hear all about her forays into boxing, woven into a complex tale of personal reconstruction. Nominated for best show at the Edinburgh comedy awards, it’s deceptively lighthearted. There’s silly stuff about a terrible haircut, dating, volunteering gone awry and a threesome. These jokes provide cover for more sensitive subjects: breast reduction surgery, the urge to stay safe and, at the root of it all, trauma.

All of the stories are true, though Magliano laughs that she’s worse at boxing than the show implies. She first tried it before the pandemic. “I was going through a difficult point in my life. This was genuinely the thought process: I like hot weather and I’ve done two boxercise classes. So I Googled ‘box camp Thailand’.” She quit her job, left London knowing she would have to move in with her mum when she returned, and spent a month at a Thai boxing retreat. “No one does something that extreme if they haven’t got something extreme to get over.”

That extreme thing was a sexual assault. The way an experience like that ripples out into your life is at the heart of Magliano’s new show.

There are cliches about “trauma” shows in comedy: jokes giving way to solemnity at the 40-minute mark to get the audience weeping. When a performer gets it wrong, it can feel raw, unresolved, uncomfortable. Magliano spent months, overnearly 40 previews trying to find the balance. Rather than focus on the experience itself – the show had to be funny, plus she didn’t want to bring up unwanted memories for anyone watching – Magliano carefully and deliberately talks about its impact. Why did she want to feel physically strong? Why was she avoiding romantic connection? Why did the botched haircut make her feel so powerless?

“It went through varying degrees of exploring the parallels between having a bad haircut and more traumatic stuff,” she says. “I was wrestling with getting a difficult topic to work on stage in a way that didn’t leave people feeling like complete shit. That was what pushed it in quite a different direction.”

In 2016, just before she headed to the University of Cambridge to study English, Magliano got a job at the Edinburgh festival fringe, intending to improve her theatre knowledge. Once there, colleagues recommended comedy shows. She recalls a Desiree Burch routine about oral sex: “It was the first time I’d seen comedy that was empowering and made me feel good about myself. It was a revelation. I was like: this is so what I want to do.”

Five days after the fringe, she tried standup herself. It didn’t go well: “There’s something liberating about your first gig going badly. I remember walking off stage thinking: if that’s the worst that can happen, I can handle it. If that’s dying on your arse, it’s kind of a rush.”

She was determined to make comedy her university hobby, and gravitated towards the famous Footlights group. She found a strict hierarchy, dominated by men. Taking part in the society’s tour show, she “had negative experiences in all the different ways possible”. As one of two female performers, she found the men reluctant to give them funny parts.

So Magliano and two friends set up Stockings, a comedy society for women and non-binary people. There would be no auditions, just a supportive space to develop ideas and perform. At Edinburgh this year, a former member approached her on the street. “She said: ‘I would never have done comedy if it wasn’t for that.’”

Post-Cambridge, she moved to the capital, got a job at a startup, and began performing comedy in the evenings, eating “a sad tub of Huel” for dinner. But living back home after the Thailand escape, the pandemic began. With no live shows, Magliano began putting videos on TikTok. “You get addicted to the likes and views, but you don’t get the reward of hearing people laugh.”

As live gigs returned, she “wiped the slate clean” and focused on new material. “I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder that I would get criticised for not having enough jokes,” she says. Her debut show, Absolutely No Worries If Not, arrived at the 2022 Edinburgh fringe packed with punchlines. In some ways it was a classic introductory hour, with jokes about Magliano’s family (Polish mum, Italian dad and their divorce), quarter-life crisis, and bisexuality – but also surreal detours about “horse girls” and Jacqueline Wilson. She initially wrote it as a coming-out story, but guided by her director, Edinburgh Comedy Award-winner Jordan Brookes, realised that “coming out wasn’t a massive story in my life; that then became the joke”.

That desire to go beyond the obvious is perfected in Magliano’s latest show, as she plants seeds with each joke that pay off as the hour unfolds. She says: “I wanted to make a show where every part needed to be in it. I wanted to feel like there was a reason for it to exist.”

She had never considered talking about her breast reduction surgery on stage, but a conversation with the comedian Sarah Keyworth helped her see it was “the perfect amount of vulnerable and silly. And unusual – audiences are like: ‘I’m listening!’ I’m glad I talk about it now, it’s very freeing. But this is quite personal. The surgery was a big decision and I didn’t tell everyone in my life. I thought people might judge me.”

As she brought in other elements, a theme emerged. “A few people were like: ‘You have quite a lot of jokes about men being violent, what’s going on?’ There’s a dark undercurrent.”

She delved deeper into that. In any show that touches on personal trauma, the performer must decide how much to reveal. “Sometimes people don’t realise that it’s a vulnerable thing to do,” Magliano says. “Especially if you seem comfortable talking about it on stage.” The subtle approach she settled on allows her to be truthful without compromising her own wellbeing when performing night after night. “There was a version of the show that was a lot harder to do. I would come away from previews feeling completely rinsed out.”

She originally talked about the legal complexities surrounding sexual assault. Many people can’t speak publicly about being assaulted after receiving legal threats or action. It’s something Magliano has personally experienced. But attempts to incorporate those details into the show were “changing the mood irreparably” among audiences, forcing her to drop them.

Magliano still plays with moments of tension – one particular joke about sexual assault that she kept in the show usually provokes gasps. “That’s truthful to how I am,” she says. “A lot of my friends who’ve had similar experiences, we do make jokes to each other and talk candidly. The real way it is spoken about is not something I’d seen people do in a show.”

That realness connected with people. “The most meaningful compliments I got were from people who could relate to it very much. The way they spoke to me was so incredible, but also implicitly sad; I wish you couldn’t relate to this.” Fortunately, there was light with the dark – many people showed her photos of their own bad haircuts, too.

Sexual misconduct is still an unresolved issue in the arts. Magliano’s Edinburgh run came before the publication of allegations against Russell Brand and she wonders if audiences would have reacted differently “if everyone in the world had been thinking about how comedians are sexual predators”.

But she feels it’s a sign of progress that audiences now actively embrace a young woman performing a show of this nature. “It’s come far enough that I can talk about this on stage and people are open to it.”

Now, the feelings that Magliano explores in the show, that drove her to that Thai boxing camp, aren’t as urgent. But the hobby still has its place, she tells me beside the boxing ring. “I don’t know how much I’ve learned here would help me in a fight,” she says. “But it means you’ve got a little secret in your back pocket.”

Magliano tours I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This, 12 January to 28 March; tour starts Belfast.

Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from Rape Crisis on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html