In the run-up to Christmas 2023, Molly McGuinness came down with tonsillitis. Before long, she was rushed to hospital with chest pains. The infection had developed into a rare case of Lemierre’s syndrome, leading to pneumonia and sepsis in her lungs. Admitted into intensive care, McGuinness underwent a tracheostomy and was placed in an induced coma. At one point, she was reckoned by doctors to be the most severely ill person in Manchester’s ICU.
OK, so this probably doesn’t have the ring of a ‘stop me if you’ve heard this one before’ funny story. Actually, though, that’s how it ended. McGuinness, then an up-and-coming stand-up comedian, came out of the coma after nine days and made a full recovery. Within about 18 months, her debut stand-up show Slob was garnering rave reviews, bagging her a nomination for best show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Now, McGuinness is touring Slob around the country. “Essentially, the word ‘slob’ is meant to be a positive thing,” she says. “We should all slob out, as much as we can at least. It’s important for our health.”
The road to Slob has had plenty of ups and down. Growing up in Irlam, young McGuinness developed a deep love of writing. “I always wrote stories and and then I started writing scripts when I was a teenager. Well, I didn’t really know how scripts worked, but I loved writing dialogue. I loved being able to create a place, a world.”
Molly McGuinness. Photo by Drew Forsyth.
Becoming a performer wasn’t necessarily on her wish list, though. “I always saw myself as a writer. I never thought I would perform. I never really did anything like that, never saw myself as a natural performer. To be honest. I liked the idea of it as a kid, but I was also really shy, and I got really bullied. I went to quite a rough school in Salford, so I wasn’t going to get up on stage and start doing stuff, but I loved telling stories and I loved writing.”
This passion, coupled with particular admiration for Caroline Aherne and The Royle Family, drove McGuinness on. At the age of 23, she started a Creative Writing and English degree at MMU, followed by an MA in Screenwriting at Manchester University. “When I did my Creative Writing degree, my tutor said that I was really good at writing comedy, but I didn’t realise it was comedy. I love comedies, they’re my favourite things, but I also love David Lynch and John Waters, Quentin Tarantino, all these different things. I feel like I was just trying to write about characters in my life, things that came from reality but didn’t have a genre. I didn’t really try and write jokes, but I think it just naturally came out quite funny.”
McGuinness duly began to focus on writing comedy scripts, channelling her storytelling instincts. “I was always really good at telling a story to my friends,” she reflects. “I think I was just naturally a good storyteller. Everyone would sit around and be ready for me to tell a story.” It still didn’t occur to her to try and make the leap to becoming a performer, though. “I just couldn’t even imagine it. I didn’t know how you got into it. Maybe it was a confidence thing, but I didn’t know anybody that did anything like that. It just never seemed achievable, really.”
Stand-up
For a time, McGuinness combined dead-end retail jobs, bits of writing work and various industry scriptwriting schemes. Then one day, while working at the Ann Summers shop in Manchester’s Arndale Centre, she got talking to a couple of lads working on a stall outside. “They were flirting with the girls that I worked with, who were saying, ‘ooh, they’re comedians’. That was always something that was in the back of my mind, but I didn’t understand how it worked. So I went and chatted to them, and it turned out that they ran this open mic night.”
McGuinness promptly found herself signed up to do her first ever stand-up set. “I got absolutely bladdered just to deal with it, because I was so nervous. I didn’t know you could actually write it down, write the jokes. Like I said, I was good at telling stories to my mates, so I thought I’d just do that.”
Her first turn didn’t exactly change the world, but she kept at it. Even then, though, she’d go through periods of not gigging at all. “I always took a few little breaks. I didn’t do it consistently. I think it was because I didn’t really take it seriously. I was so focused on writing, and my writing was doing well, so this was just a fun thing to do. I always enjoyed it, but it just felt like a hobby for a while.”
One breather in particular proved to be pretty decisive. “I took a bit of a break, and then COVID happened, so that little break became quite big. During COVID, I really missed it. I was just desperate to get back, and I was thinking a lot about what I wanted to say. By the time I came back and everything opened up, I felt like I was a much better comedian than I’d been before.”
Molly McGuinness. Photo by Drew Forsyth.
At this point, surely nothing could stop her. But then something did: that aforementioned life-threatening infection. In fact, she’d already started developing her first full-length stand-up show – what would ultimately become Slob.
“I’d turned 30 and I suppose I was feeling like a slob, because I was skint. I had this crappy job, I wasn’t getting a lot of shifts…I was feeling a bit guilty for having fun, and for just lazing about and sleeping in a lot, comparing myself to my friends at that time. I’d started writing a version of the show, and I was trying to use the word ‘slob’ in a good way, almost take it back for myself, to make me stop feeling so bad about it, to embrace being a slob. And then I went into the coma, and I had to be a slob for quite a long time.”
On the road to recovery, McGuinness was recuperating, learning to deal with low energy and fatigue.
“For the first time the doctors are telling me ‘stop, relax’. I had to lie around and chill out. Sitting and resting really made me think about what ‘slob’ meant.” Gradually, she returned to gigging – something she hadn’t even been sure was possible – while the material for Slob, and her relationship to that title, continued to evolve. “When I originally started writing it, I didn’t really mean it,” she admits. “I wanted to believe it, whereas after being poorly, I realised that I needed to stop beating myself up for not being in a certain place in my life, that it’s okay really.”
And yet, what’s great about Slob (and it is great) is that McGuinness’s life-threatening health crisis isn’t exploited to tug at the heartstrings. It’s really just part of the whole story, along with crap jobs, a bit of badly-timed romance and a profound love of Meat Loaf, plus a buffet.
“I didn’t want it to be a hospital show,” McGuinness says. “I didn’t want to be known as the girl who was in a coma – not even for a career reason, just in life. After being so poorly, I almost felt a bit embarrassed about it. I wanted to talk about it and was very open about it, but I would immediately make jokes about it, because people were so worried about me. That would make me feel awkward, so I would try and laugh about it. In the same way, I didn’t want to do a show that would upset people and make them think of me as only a sick person.”
Delightfully daft
Slob went on to become a great success at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, which raises certain questions. The cost to comedians of putting on an show in Edinburgh is becoming prohibitively expensive, which means that some new voices aren’t coming through because they can’t afford it. There are attempts to remedy this, including Best in Class, a live showcase of working-class comedians from across the UK, and the Keep It Fringe initiative, fronted by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, which offers bursaries to upcoming comedians, both of which McGuinness has benefited from, though she notes that Keep It Fringe has slashed the number of bursaries it is offering this year.
Molly McGuinness. Photo by Drew Forsyth.
“I’m so lucky that I had such a good run and such an amazing time, but I just don’t see how this situation can carry on,” McGuinness says. “It’s a shame and it is a problem. I don’t think Edinburgh should be the only thing that can make a comedian. It’s really important that people go and see local shows and support them as much as possible. Here in Manchester, XS Malarkey is great – they’ve always got new acts on – and Fairfield Social Club is brilliant, too.”
In fact, McGuinness is also part of a double act called Molly and Paul Try Heron Foods, an unironic, delightfully daft celebration of the budget food store.
“I love it, because it’s the opposite to my stand-up,” she says. “It’s not scripted, so it just feels like you’re playing and having fun, and that’s such a refreshing thing to do.” Performed in tandem with Manchester-based comedian Paul Campbell, who’s been wowing audiences lately with his own solo show, The Lost Tapes of Somerfield (yes, it’s about the defunct supermarket), their collaboration developed out of regular walks to the Stretford branch of Heron Foods while McGuinness was recuperating. “I’m so proud of Paul,” she says. “He was the first friend I made in stand-up, and now he’s become ‘the supermarket comedian’. He’s so talented, so naturally funny.”
When her Slob tours ends, though, will McGuinness be happy not to talk about her coma experience on stage anymore? “Yes and no. It will be like closing a chapter on it, which is good. And, like I said, I don’t want to be the coma comedian for the rest of my life.”
She adds: “There’s just so much interesting stuff about it that I really want to delve into, though. I think it will be the end of it with comedy, at least, but I will definitely tackle it in another form. I probably will for the rest of my life. It’s just such a crazy thing to have gone through. I feel like it’ll always be a part of me. But I don’t think I’m going have any deep meaning in my next show. I’d just like to do silly jokes again.”
Main image: Molly McGuinness. Photo by Drew Forsyth.
Molly McGuinness’s Slob tour includes dates in Newcastle (The Stand, May 23) and Manchester (The Carlton Club, June 4)
