Jonny Pelham

Jonny Pelham
Born	Undercliffe, West Yorkshire, England
Occupation	Stand-up comedian

Jonny Pelham is a British comedian and writer. Born in Undercliffe in West Yorkshire, he endured multiple complications from popliteal pterygium syndrome and two years of sexual abuse before attending Newcastle University, where he took up stand-up comedy; after winning several awards and performing several shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he underwent therapy, which prompted him to address his abuse in both his 2019 stand up show "Off Limits" and a subsequent appearance on Live at the Apollo. The reaction to the latter caused him to suffer a mental health crisis, which he explored in his 2023 Fringe show "Optimism Over Despair". He has also appeared in Bobby & Harriet Get Married, Late Bloomer, and Brad Boyz, and presented the documentary Let's Talk: Child Sex Abuse.

Life and career

Early life and early career

Pelham grew up in Undercliffe, a suburb of Bradford in West Yorkshire, at which he was one of the very few white people in the area. He has two brothers, and both parents of all three were therapists. He suffered from popliteal pterygium syndrome, a condition suffered from by about 200 people in the UK, and which gave him webbed toes, a cleft palate, a cleft lip, and surplus nipples. He also required regular surgery on his legs, and spent one summer at Camp Courage. He attended Oasis Academy Lister Park, a school where 80% of the pupils were Muslims, at which he was the only white pupil in his class and the only white member of the youth gang "Blazing Bangladeshis". As a child, he was raped repeatedly by his mother's friend, who she had hired as babysitter, with the abuse lasting for two years when he was around seven and eight; he would cope with both the abuse and his medical condition by dreaming. When he was sixteen, the National Health Service offered him £30,000 worth of cosmetic surgery on his face, despite the procedure coming with multiple risk factors and the country being in recession, which dented his confidence, as he had not previously thought there was anything wrong with it.

Pelham started performing comedy while at Newcastle University. At the time, he was too nervous to ad lib, so would learn his scripts verbatim. Early attempts were not successful, prompting his agent to send him a How to Write Jokes video; he later improved, and came second in both the Chortle Student Comedian of the Year awards and So You Think You're Funny in 2012, and then the following year he placed third in the Laughing Horse New Act Of The Year competition. The year after that, he was nominated for best newcomer in the Chortle Awards. He performed three shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe between 2015 and 2017: "Before & After", in which he discussed the NHS' offer of facial surgery, "Fool's Paradise", about his experiences of therapy, and "Just Shout Louder", in which he talked about his attempts at dating.

"Off Limits" and Live at the Apollo

Around 2016, he attended a funeral, which made him question his lack of romantic and sexual experience, prompting him to seek therapy. At the time, he had thought of the abuse as something he and his abuser had done together, parts of which he had found pleasurable, and only realised that he was not complicit on the London Underground after sharing a carriage with a class of primary school children, prompting him to run off the train in floods of tears. After his therapist suggested that the topic would be unsuitable for comedy, he interpreted this as a challenge, and after feeling that his 2017 show had been inauthentic, he used his 2019 Fringe show "Off Limits" to talk about the abuse right off the bat; an early version of the show contained a joke about an eight year old Pelham complaining after his father came home early as it meant his abuser could not masturbate him after raping him.

Off the back of the show, he performed a set about the topic on Live at the Apollo, a BBC One stand-up comedy series, which led to strangers stopping him in the street to tell him about their experiences, which caused him to realise he was not quite as over his experiences as he thought and for him to return to therapy following a mental health crisis. In 2021, Dan Smith of Bastille used a Rolling Stone cover story to assert that his band's fourth album had been inspired by Pelham's 2019 set's discussion of maladaptive daydreaming. During the first COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom, he attempted a few online gigs, but found they were not for him, so spent his time writing, and in 2023, he performed his show "Optimism Over Despair" at the Fringe, which explored his regret at oversharing his abuse on Live at the Apollo.

Other works

In 2017, he played a fictionalised version of himself in Bobby Mair and Harriet Kemsley's sitcom Bobby & Harriet Get Married, and in 2018, he starred in Late Bloomer, a short for Sky Arts. Later that year, Chortle announced that he would make a sitcom pilot for Channel 4, Blazing Bangladeshis, a semi-autobiographical show about his time in a youth gang of the same name; by broadcast, it had changed its name to Brad Boyz. In 2021, he presented a documentary for Channel 4, Let's Talk: Child Sex Abuse, in which he met among others a survivor of Barry Bennell and a man who was sexually attracted to children but was choosing not to act on his urges.