Comedian Grace Campbell: ‘I treated my need for male validation as an addiction’

Consider intercourse: sex; penetration; rumpy-pumpy; making love. There is a case to be made – which the comedian Grace Campbell (28) has made throughout her career, whether that be at the Edinburgh Fringe or promoting vibrators on her Instagram – that it needn’t be a private act at all. That every intimate, foul, nebulous and absurd detail of the act should be discussed. At length and, preferably, in front of your parents.

The daughter of Alistair Campbell and Fiona Millar, the former press secretary and adviser to Tony and Cherie Blair respectively, Campbell has taken a culminating riff on the childhood that preceded her and now makes a living trading stories about casual sex, the indignities and stresses of fancying heterosexual men and poking fun at the shackles that used to bind her; the Tory Party, the House of Commons and not at all knowing what lip filler was.

The comic, whose daffy, raunchy and caustic humour debuted under the radar back in 2018 with Channel 4′s Riot Girls, a show that used pranks to address gender issues such as periods, pubic hair and the pay gap, Campbell’s humour blends of stand-up routines, on-the-street-interviews and satirical takes on the middle class, British politics and the woman experience. Previous work includes appearances on Politics Live (BBC) and Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled (Dave), as well as her 2019 sold-out Edinburgh run of her show Why I’m Never Going into Politics and the woman and LGBTQ+ stand-up night The Disgraceful Club –––not to mention her 2020 memoir Amazing Disgrace: A Book About ‘Shame’ in 2020 (“my dad thought it was so ridiculous I was writing a memoir at 25”), hailed as a “high-octane adventure” by the Evening Standard.

It’s clear her breakout is near, yet her serenity is palpable. She worries not of the pedestal-adjacent panic woman comics have been subjected to before her––that of duality; whose fans demand role models as well as artistry––instead leaning into her rawness, while too dredging the wreckage of her younger self. “You meet comedians who are just always on, even when not on stage, because they’re terrified something will meet them and say they’re not funny,” Campbell says. “And I understand that. But I’m also like – I will happily meet you in a terrible mood and not worry about it either.”

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It’s Valentine’s Day morning when we speak (she forgot) and she’s just back from a walk on Hampstead Heath with her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy Eddie (named after Jennifer Saunders’s character Edina Monsoon from Absolutely Fabulous.) He sits on her lap unbothered and in silence, even during her loudest laughs, one of which unfurls as we discuss why, when Googling “Grace Campbell partner”, the first image that comes up is her and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, and the other about her 2015 Guardian piece with The Weakest Link’s Anne Robinson, where Campbell requested Robinson to join her in watching pornography. “She’s so iconic, and also kind of rude, which I love.”

Dressed in a brown velour tracksuit zipped to her chin, Campbell is jovial, radical, intelligent and refreshingly self-critical (“I’m sorry, I literally haven’t shut up in minutes,” she says in reply to a question). Her time is now for a number of reasons, but mainly that she’s no longer simply Alastair’s daughter. It’s a title she’s held for life –– when meeting names like Boris Johnson for the first time “in the nepotism box of a Miley Cyrus concert” or Vladimir Putin “unbelievably small”––that finally seems to be fading. “I finally feel like I’ve done something with my standup that is 100 per cent me, and that I’m actually so proud of,” she laughs, noting how rarely we get to feel good about ourselves without guilt.

“Edinburgh [Fringe Festival] is amazing, but a lot of the people there were my friends so you do have those doubts. And obviously, with my dad being who he is, I’ve always been connected to him in some way, so for something I’ve done myself to be doing well on its own… I’m just so grateful.”

People get so weird about nepotism. I just feel like it’s gaslighting. Like I absolutely know that being Alistair’s daughter has got me places… that doesn’t mean I’m not talented and I don’t work hard

In A Show About Me(n), Campbell’s subject matter, like her family make-up, has evolved and shifted. Much of the 90-minute special (the Edinburgh Fringe iteration was an hour, but a lot of “Andrew Tate-ness has happened since then”) is devoted to itemising the ravages that X-chromosomes, woman conditioning and misogyny inflict on the woman-presenting body and psych, in ways that are intended to provoke discomfort and recognition. Campbell opens on a staple of male stand-up comedy – penetration ––interweaving tales of piss-poor relationships with examples of control and manipulation throughout, eventually turning into an extended peroration of the transformation a heterosexual woman withstands in her early 20s. She treated her need for validation as an addiction, she tells me, texting exes for comfort while swapping one cruel man for another ultimately unfaithful one, in a manner she now deems, as a happily single woman, “so unhealthy”.

But what was the alternative? She argues. Until very recently, and even still at times, women are told that a heteronormative relationship would or will save them. (The 2004 film Cinderella Story is mentioned––where lead character Samantha “Sam” Montgomery (Hilary Duff) simply gets over the grief for her father, who died in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, by getting a boyfriend.) Comedy with a message is nothing new, and oftentimes teeters into a smug territory or even didacticism, but Campbell’s manner feels built to withstand pressure, even as it extends its reach into real-life tragedies, the gender pay gap or abortion rights. This, this writer thinks, is all down to the fascinatingly grotty and privileged pedestal from which Campbell speaks, meaning she can poke fun at the tragic, vain single women such conditioning creates as much as the systemic toxicity that surrounds them.

In this way, she tackles nepotism, as the nepo-baby calling from inside the house. The third child and only daughter of Blair’s architectural sidekick, her father features in a lot of her internet sketches, oftentimes laughing alongside her. “People get so weird about nepotism,” she laughs. “I just feel like it’s gaslighting. Like I absolutely know that being Alistair’s daughter has got me places… that doesn’t mean I’m not talented and I don’t work hard. But we all know how this works. Like, obviously it’s going to be easier for Johnny Depp’s daughter to get the job over someone else – I just don’t like how people won’t admit that.”

In a similar vein, she targets the exhibitory nature of women’s bodies, none of which have to be on a stage to be on display. Dressed in clothes one might have deemed subservient, overtly feminine and lacking in seriousness in a previous life, Campbell’s pairing of fishnet-patched dresses with bubblegum-pink marabou trim––the kind of outfit a woman might wear to sumptuously bask in oneself than that of male attention––one gets the feeling of gratification for her; that she has finally afforded herself the luxury of playing with her own sexuality, in lieu of male gratification to the highest bidder.

It has, however, come at a cost. In 2022, five days into her sold-out Edinburgh run, an article Campbell penned for the Guardian three weeks earlier revealed the details of her rape, which caused her to question her role as the sex-positive performer on which she made her name, rear-ending the learned shame that is victim-blaming one only can when wearing a short skirt on a night out. It chronicled her move to Los Angeles 10 months prior, a subsequent trip to Las Vegas, and a man from Colorado who had engaged in non-consensual anal sex as Campbell slept. “It came out and originally felt really amazing because I had thousands of messages from women, who I really connected with over this horrifying shared experience,” she says, her eyes unusually serious now. “But it ultimately made me really sad because we see these huge rape charges just get dropped time and time again. I’ll keep talking about it because these sorts of topics I truly consider my life’s work, but at the end of the day, I think about the people who fall into the same situation that I did but don’t have the privilege that I do. What about them?”

The publication also provided a second and unforeseen function: weeding out the men not sufficiently emotionally intelligent enough for her dating pool. “One guy I had literally slept with about three days earlier just didn’t message me for ages, and then when he finally did... He said something like, hey, how are you, and then something about my tits.”

It would be easy to slot Campbell neatly into a category of woman comics who speak with urgency about gynocentric issues and woman abjection: Amy Schumer, Nikki Glaser, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Silverman, Ali Wong. However, such comparisons, while oftentimes intended complimentarily, often smell like a trap; one intended to question the radical nature of such dirty talk by boxing it in yet again (see: Dworkinism; and weep).

But Campbell’s comedy feels different, upending the male fury to which we’ve become scarily accustomed and ambitiously climbing the misogyny ladder from enough distance to jibe while also reconsidering our motives. By the end of the show, Campbell will have unravelled herself in a number of acutely intimate situations, but whatever image she leaves in her audience’s minds, she’ll have put there herself. Her comedy is a raucous gynocentric delight, built to resist and a reminder that a woman’s humour can cut even deeper than her fury.

Grace Campbell plays the Sugar Club, Dublin on March 23 and Limelight, Belfast on March 24