A lot of men think they’re funnier with alcohol. Here’s the sobering reality

Liam Withnail used to have a rule when he was MCing stand-up comedy nights. For each part of the show, he’d direct his audience banter to a different section of the crowd.

“If I didn’t do that, I might forget who I had spoken to,” he says. “I would have a drink before I performed and it was a crutch. It was funny juice. It’s like a magic potion.”

The award-winning Edinburgh-based comedian now hosts the Enjoy an Album podcast and is the resident MC at the Monkey Barrel comedy club. He’s also been sober for a decade.

Drinking and joking had landed him in trouble before. He’d repeated material during gigs. Some clubs had stopped giving him work. But it was a hard link to break – the industry revolved around booze in many ways, with inebriated audiences and some jobs even paying in beer. Even more, it seemed perfectly natural that a drink or few makes you funnier.

“When I decided to knock it on the head I was really nervous about performing again, regularly sober” says Withnail.

But something else happened: he got funnier. Suddenly he wasn’t worried about repeating material, or asking the same person about their job twice. The self-imposed rule went out of the window and the routine got better, full of callbacks to earlier jokes, follow-ups on audience banter. Cleverer material.

Which is weird because, obviously, you’re a laugh when you’ve got a drink in you. A lot of men think that’s true, research from Alcohol Change UK has discovered. Half of UK men think they’re funnier with a drink in them, while four in ten say alcohol helps them connect better with others.

Withnail was definitely one of those, he says. But he poses the counterpoint to the idea that tequila fortifies the funny bone: “I don’t think you would say it about people you know.”

Brits are reportedly drinking less alcohol than ever before, with an average consumption of 10.2 alcoholic drinks a week the lowest since a peak of 14 weekly drinks in the mid-2000s. Yet deaths from alcohol have been creeping up, with mortality rates increasing almost 50% from 2019 to 2023.

The concept of a month without alcohol has been around for a long time. But in 2013 Alcohol Change UK turned Dry January into an official campaign – and it’s in aid of this that Withnail is doing a sober comedy night, Funny AF, on 20 January at London’s Lucky Saint pub, along with Friday Night Dinner star Tom Rosenthal, Rory O’Hanlon and Michael Akadiri.

Read more:

• Forget Dry January – young Brits are giving up on booze altogether. Here’s the sobering reason why
• Bank holiday weekends mean beer gardens and booze – but drinking culture may be about to change
• I was drinking three bottles of wine a day and totally losing control. Here’s how I got my life back

As head of HR at a company of around 100 employees, Karl Considine would regularly drink from the morning while working in lockdown. He was also a Lady Gaga fan, and the release of her Chromatica album sparked one incident he now looks back on and laughs.

“I sent out an all-company communication asking people to stream it so that we could get her to number one,” he says. “The CEO was like, ‘Karl what the fuck is going on.’

“I can laugh at it now. It is funny, but it’s also pretty tragic and sad that I was in a state like that.”

Coming up to five years sober when he talks to Big Issue, Considine says part of the journey has been learning to figure out what he actually enjoys. “When drinking is the only thing you do. I genuinely had no idea what I was into and what I liked. I had to go on a bit of a self-discovery to figure some of it out,” he says.

But as the years of sobriety have gone on, Considine has seen society move in the same direction: “Ultimately the motivating factor is longevity, isn’t it? People want to live longer and they want a healthier life”.

A mental image of a stand-up gig is likely to feature a merrily sauced audience chuckling along. For Withnail, however, drunk audiences can be a nightmare to perform to. At one gig in December, in peak Christmas party season, he says two audience members were thrown out for falling asleep. Sometimes he will turn up to a venue on a Friday night and “know the gig is going to be horrible.”

Instead, Withnail has found sober audiences receptive rather than buttoned-up. He can get out the really good material, the stuff which flies over drunk punters’ heads.

You can win tickets for the Funny AF comedy night before 9 January on the Try Dry app.

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