Comedian Alex Tighe On Anxiety, Second Chances And The Strange Magic of Making Strangers Laugh

Long before Alex Tighe thought seriously about becoming a comedian, he discovered what it felt like to make a room laugh entirely by accident. He was around 14, sitting in a Spanish lesson, a painfully shy teenager who reckons half the class had probably never heard him speak. Somewhere next door came the sudden crash of a table. Before he had time to stop himself, Tighe announced: “Sounds like Miss next door has fallen over again!” The class laughed. So did the teacher. “It was an incredible feeling,” he remembers…

It is tempting to see that moment as the beginning of something, although Tighe himself probably wouldn’t dress it up quite so neatly. Born in Devon to a Royal Marine father stationed around Torpoint, he moved north following his parents’ divorce, back towards their family roots around Ormskirk and Maghull. He describes his younger self as “painfully shy” and “a massive nerd”, with making people laugh nowhere on the agenda. Yet that Spanish classroom reaction clearly lodged somewhere.

By sixth form, the quiet teenager had discovered something else. During breaks — when he and his friends were supposedly meant to be studying — Tighe would sit around a table talking, telling stories and making his mates laugh. Occasionally, people from other tables would be listening too. “I loved it. It was the best feeling. I literally only finished college because I loved those moments.”

Stand-up was beginning to creep into his consciousness. Live at the Apollo, Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and the stand-up sections of Russell Howard’s Good News provided an education of sorts, although comedy initially appeared to belong to people who could do things he couldn’t. His mum loved Lee Evans, whose extraordinary physical performances hardly suggested an obvious route forward for an anxious teenager from Merseyside. “I was like, ‘I can’t do what he does!’ However, after seeing other styles that were more like me, I thought I’d give it a go.”

Tighe’s stand-up debut came at 18, at his sixth-form college Christmas talent show, magnificently titled The X-Mas Factor. With little idea of how stand-up actually worked, he wrote one joke and padded the rest of the set with repurposed Christmas cracker material. However, it wasn’t a triumph. “I got sympathy laughs. Maybe I’m being harsh. I’ve kinda pushed the experience out of my head.” But what he does remember is the result. “At 18 I lost to a 12-year-old lad singing Rolling in the Deep…”

That capacity to turn embarrassment back upon himself remains important to Tighe’s comedy now. His material can move towards darker territory, but his stage persona is rooted in something recognisably close to the person behind it. Ask how much of Alex Tighe onstage is actually Alex Tighe and the answer is emphatic: “It’s always me. Everything I say, I’ve thought and worked with. Let it ruminate in my head for months. And I enjoy that every time I’m on stage I get to be that version of myself.”

There is, however, one important distinction. “The version you see on stage is me. Just me dialled up by 10.”

For someone who describes himself as a “very anxious man”, comedy offers a peculiar freedom. Anxiety provides plenty of material because, as Tighe puts it, you talk about what you know. Yet stand-up itself isn’t something he finds particularly anxiety-inducing. Instead, it is often the small, apparently inconsequential things in everyday life that occupy his mind and eventually become funny.

Comedy, though, hasn’t transformed his relationship with anxiety, and he is careful not to pretend it has. There are times when it becomes overwhelming and “nothing is funny”. But stand-up provides another outlet, separate from therapy, and occasionally creates connections beyond the performance itself.

“It’s also nice having people come up to me after gigs and tell me their anxiety stories and being able to connect with people on that basis.”

Tighe’s first attempt at becoming a stand-up didn’t last. He began at 18 and stopped at 20, anxiety playing its part, but also an acknowledgement that he simply wasn’t ready. “I didn’t have enough life experience and I wasn’t really that good.” What followed was an eight-year absence from stand-up, during which he pursued acting and studied the craft. Those years proved important. When he eventually returned to comedy, he did so with greater stage presence, more life behind him and considerably more to talk about.

The catalyst was the end of an eight-year relationship. “I thought, ‘Screw it! Now is the time to try again!’” The difference was immediate. After that first gig back, Tighe walked away with a thought that hadn’t occurred with quite the same conviction first time around. “You could actually get good at this!”

If the first incarnation of Alex Tighe the stand-up was an 18-year-old trying to work out how comedians made people laugh, the second had something more substantial to draw upon. Acting had given him confidence onstage; life had supplied the material. And Hot Water Comedy Club gave him somewhere to put it all together. It is a venue that has become central to his second shot at stand-up.

At one point after his return, Tighe was performing there at least once a week. Different audiences meant different reactions, forcing him to understand that material cannot simply be learned and delivered identically every night. A joke that lands perfectly in one room can disappear into silence in another. That repetition is where stagecraft develops. But sometimes, of course, you learn because everything goes horribly wrong.

Tighe remembers dying particularly badly at a gig in Southport. Jokes failed, attempts to adjust to the room made matters worse and eventually he reached for a joke about a disgraced breakfast television presenter. One woman even walked out. Southport has subsequently acquired a slightly mythical status in the Tighe story, regularly resurfacing as his comic nemesis. But beneath the joke is an important lesson. “Dying on stage happens. It’s about how you deal with that. Don’t panic, but don’t blame the audience either. Just accept it and move on.”

That ability to react is increasingly central to his comedy. Tighe writes differently now from when he began, when funny thoughts would simply be dropped into the Notes app on his phone before he tried to connect them into a story. These days he makes a conscious effort to sit down and write, sometimes heading to a coffee shop and working through things he has noticed or experienced. The aim is still to preserve the feeling of telling a story among friends.

“Roast” battles have accelerated the process. Given a fact sheet about an opponent and perhaps a week or two to produce material, there is little opportunity to wait months for an idea to “ruminate”. The format demands speed and precision, as well as the willingness to have exactly the same treatment directed back at you. “Roast battles are harsh. The idea being to say nasty stuff in a funny way.” There are boundaries, agreed beforehand, but otherwise appearance, work, family, pets and where you live can all become material. Especially Southport.

His approach to darker comedy follows much the same principle. Tighe enjoys slipping something unexpected into a set precisely because his anxious, conversational persona doesn’t necessarily prepare an audience for it. But shock alone isn’t enough. “If you’re being dark for the sake of being dark, you’ll find it won’t carry you.”

Comedy, for Tighe, ultimately returns to the same sensation he discovered at school and later around that college table: creating a temporary community through laughter. “The feeling of making an entire room laugh is magical. It sounds super cliché but I love having a room who don’t know who you are immediately become that group of mates sat at the table with me in college. Just all enjoying a laugh together.”

It is perhaps why, despite having performed regularly, developed his writing, survived the bad rooms and learned how to control the better ones, Tighe remains reluctant to describe himself as a comedian. Not yet. For now, progress continues one room at a time. Hot Water remains central to that journey, the place Tighe regards as his home club and where regular stage time has helped turn the second attempt at stand-up into something rather more serious than the first.

And what would success look like five years from now? There is no grand declaration about fame, television or selling out theatres. His answer is characteristically modest. “Progress, I think.” If he is still enjoying himself and moving further onto the circuit, Tighe says, he will be able to look back and feel things have worked out rather well. If it never becomes a career, he insists he will continue anyway.

Which brings us back to that Spanish classroom and the shy 14-year-old blurting out something funny before he could stop himself. The surroundings have changed, the stakes are higher and these days he actually intends to make people laugh. But perhaps the essential attraction hasn’t changed very much at all. A roomful of strangers becomes, briefly, that table of mates.

And Alex Tighe still loves the feeling.

Follow him via Instagram – @alextcomedian