Love, loss and laughter: Janine Harouni’s Man’oushe comes to Mumbai and Bengaluru this weekend

Love, loss and laughter: Janine Harouni’s Man’oushe comes to Mumbai and Bengaluru this weekend

“Funny is my way of coping with life,” says Janine Harouni, ahead of her trip to India, where she’ll be performing in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Titled Man’oushe, her show was nominated for the main Edinburgh Comedy Awards in 2023, and comes to India courtesy the Soho Theatre in the United Kingdom.

Soon enough you realise that is not the usual run-of-the-mill spiel you hear from a comic. “I was selling brownies at an outdoor market in London in the pouring rain at 10 in the morning and I thought, ‘I’m about to turn 30, I haven’t worked as a performer or in a job I enjoy for a year now. No amount of bombing on stage or being heckled could be worse than this,” says Janine.

“I’ve always wanted to do comedy, but I was too afraid. I had previously been in a West End Play for a year and a half, but after a full year of complete unemployment I had nothing to lose,” she candidly admits, speaking from her home in London, adding, “So towards the end of 2016, I signed up for my first open mic and a year after that, I started participating in competitions in London.”

Janine says these shows were a lead up to her first hour-long show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, “which is basically when I became a professional comic.”

And with a sense of “perfect timing,” the universe screeched to a standstill due to COVID-19. “It’s what every live performer wants just as their careers are taking off for the entire live industry to shut down. It was great,” she says with that self-deprecatory, conspiratorial tone of voice that wins her allies at shows.

Even so, Janine believes that the break helped her in the long run. “I think because I found success quite quickly. I didn’t really know who I was or what my voice was at the time. A lot of people wait longer than I did to do their first hour-long show; I had been doing standup for only about two years when I took a show to the Fringe.”

“My first show was nominated for Best Newcomer, but I felt I was better at writing than I was at knowing who I was. So having the time off, plus the therapy I had started attending at the time, helped me look inward. Assessing that at an early stage in my career has made me a far more confident performer.”