Urzila Carlson will always remember her first joke. She was eight years old and her parents were divorcing after years of abuse at the hands of her violent father. But in 1980s South Africa, divorce was scandalous – never mind that her father once hunted his own family with a handgun (they were whisked to safety by a savvy neighbour), or that he would beat her with a sjambok, an Afrikaner stock whip. At school, other children teased Carlson about the divorce while the teachers pressed her for details. When she complained at home, her mother told her exactly what to say if they asked again.
When the next teacher asked, eight-year-old Carlson looked up and said: “Miss, it’s my dad’s fault. My mom really, really wanted to be a widow but my dad wouldn’t drink the poison.”
The teacher laughed. Carlson was hooked.
“If you talk to comedians, you see a lot of humour is born out of trauma,” she says now, sitting in her home in West Auckland 42 years later. “Growing up in South Africa in the 80s, just to cope with how everyone reacted, you had to make fun of it, because no one understood. Even the other parents were like, ‘Wait, your parents are divorced?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, bitch! They weren’t chained together! You can leave!’”
She delivers this in her typical deadpan, cheeky South-African-via-New-Zealand accented half-shout, familiar to fans around the world who love her often bawdy routines – like explaining what a “gunt” is, or how she told her family that her then wife was pregnant (“The dildo exploded – our Tupperware is due in August”). Carlson is particularly popular in Australia where she is a regular on TV, including Have You Been Paying Attention? and Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, and she holds the record for most tickets sold at Melbourne’s international comedy festival. Internationally, she has appeared on QI, Taskmaster New Zealand and Amy Schumer’s Netflix comedy Kinda Pregnant.
In her latest standup show, Fatty on a Yacht, she recalls turning up for a day on a friend’s boyfriend’s dad’s boat, expecting a tinny and finding a super yacht complete with a hot tub and jetskis. “I had showed up in my lifejacket that I bought at a garage sale two houses down, and a cap that says ‘Queer All Year’ on it. There was a crew serving food and stuff – I had buttered bread rolls in my Esky. I looked like a dickhead.”
She is now back in the southern hemisphere with a sketch show titled Urzila, to be broadcast in Australia later this month, and a sitcom with Nazeem Hussain on the way. Despite her following in Australia and the US, Carlson refuses to relocate. “Everyone calls West Auckland ‘Bogan Central’, but I love it,” she says. “I convinced my sister and my mother to move here – my mum will literally beat me up if I immigrate again, she’s had a gutful.”
‘Comedy got very serious’ … Urzila Carlson in a sketch in Urzila. Photograph: Dylan Coker/Warner Bros.
Carlson has two children, and recently decided her 13-year-old daughter was old enough to watch her routines: “I can’t say anything filthier than 13-year-olds do at school.” She recently took her daughter and her friends ice-skating “and they were all saying to me in the car, ‘can you roast us?’ … I just looked at them in the rear-view and said, ‘No, because I’m a professional comedian and I will destroy you. You’ll go home and tell your mum.’”
Her phone dings, which reminds me of something in her standup: do you actually get DMs from women trying to pick you up, I ask. “Oh yeah,” she says and reads out the message she just got: “You in that bright red shirt with glasses is making me feel things I shouldn’t.”
“Now I just ignore it,” Carlson says. “If I say thank you, I’ll get tits. I always say, ‘Please don’t do that. I don’t need to see you naked.’ And they go, ‘Oh, you’re not into tits?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m not into unsolicited nudes.’”
She gets dick pics too: “To those I just say, ‘That’s cute – it’s just like a penis, only smaller.’”
Carlson grew up in mining towns around South Africa, the youngest of three. The night her father hunted his family with a handgun, Carlson, her siblings and mother lay on the floor of their neighbour’s car as he drove them to his friends’ house in the next town.
“While I didn’t have a clear idea of what was going on, I do remember that in their house I felt completely safe for the first time in my life,” Carlson wrote in her memoir, Rolling with the Punchlines. “I’ve never met them or heard of them since, but along with the neighbour who bravely drove us away that night, I have no doubt they saved our lives.”
After the divorce, her mother, Lettie, raised the three kids in Benoni, east of Johannesburg. They were “dirt poor” but happy. “My mother had to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, so we ran the household,” Carlson says. “When the oldest is 10 and we’re cooking, cleaning, doing the washing – you develop differently. I look at my kids now and I’m like ‘Damn, they have a completely different childhood than we did’.”
As an adult, Carlson found life in South Africa increasingly demoralising, but discovered freedom in travel. She funded a trip to the US by selling fudge door-to-door with a sign that said HELP ME GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. The final straw came in 2006, when armed men stormed the office she worked in and robbed everyone at gunpoint. The very next day, she saw an ad: “Want to emigrate? Why not New Zealand?” Three months later, she was there.
(L to R) Amy Schumer and Urzila Carlson in Kinda Pregnant. Photograph: Scott Yamano/Netflix
It was New Zealand that gave her a first taste of standup. She was leaving one job as a graphic designer for another, and got a farewell gift from her colleagues: a fake contract to sign, to make her do an open mic spot at an Auckland comedy club. It turned out they had already booked her for it – “and 70 people in the agency were going,” she says. “I said, ‘How hard can it be?’”
She wrote four minutes of material for a five-minute slot (“I thought I’d give them one minute to laugh. How arrogant!”), got on stage and was a hit. The next day she got a call to let her know she was through to the next round: without knowing, she had entered a talent competition. She had never seen a standup show before, and went on to win New Zealand’s best newcomer.
When the global financial crisis came along and brought redundancy with it, it was like the universe was telling her to go professional: “I thought, you can’t ride two horses with one arse. You’ve got to go for it.”
Two horses with one arse? “I think that one was in the Bible,” she smiles.
Urzila Carlson: ‘I don’t want to say to another comic, ‘I don’t want you to talk about abuse”.’ Photograph: Andy Paradise
To this day, she still gets terrible stage fright, and rarely has a support act: “I’m the only one I completely trust … I don’t want to say to another comic, ‘I don’t want you to talk about abuse’, or whatever. I’d rather just not have one. I don’t need to be worried about them and me.”
A few years ago, she noticed, “comedy got very serious. Comedians started to become preachers. People would say, ‘I’ve never cried so hard in my life!’ And I’d be like, ‘Er, it’s comedy?’” The way she sees it, it is her duty to write new jokes for each new show (“Audiences give you new money every year, so give them new material every year”) and, most importantly, make them laugh.
“I get my fair share of hate online,” she says. “But then some people write: ‘You make my day brighter’ or ‘Because of you I got up and got on with my day’. Old ugly men can call me a fat, dumb bitch all day long – it can’t override those people.”
She thinks her difficult childhood has shaped her energetic optimism. That, and lots of therapy. “Being in a negative mindspace is not an option for me,” she says. “I’m just so thankful to do what I do. I love it so much. And I think because of my fucked up childhood – make no mistake, it was fucked up – I go, I’m not gonna let 10 years of childhood fuck up the rest of my life.”
Even her father, who died in 2016, left her with something positive. “My dad’s whole family are storytellers, and they’re very funny,” she says. “Even my dad was funny – he was just an asshole too.”
Urzila Carlson is now touring Australia until 31 August, then the UK and Ireland 9-27 September. Urzila starts on ABC on 29 April at 9.25pm with all episodes available on ABC iview.
In Australia, domestic and family violence counselling is available from Full Stop Australia on 1800 385 578. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.