The Mash Report's Rachel Parris on why it's 'harder' to satirise Labour: 'They're not ridiculous'

“I just really like the word ‘poise’,” says The Mash Reportand Late Night Mashstar Rachel Parris, who is – ahem – poised to answer indy100’s questions about the upcoming second leg of her UK tour for Poise, starting with what she plans to explore in the performance combining musical comedy and stand-up.

“But also it’s a word that’s been levelled at me over the years, in terms of people describing my manner – both on TV and on stage – and using it in ways, though, that’s really unusual for a comedian and for a female comedian,” she continues. “Because I think there’s lots of different ways that a comedian can look, and for a funny woman to be, and at the moment – it goes in waves – the style is where it’s got to be chaotic, chaotic manner, or chaotic Gen Z, Fleabag, Miranda, falling over, can’t hold down a job.

“There’s quite a lot of stereotypes, so in a way, ‘poise’ is just a tiny, tiny bit of what I talk about in the show, which is how there’s lots of different ways to be a woman, and lots of different ways to be a comedian.”

Alongside being known as a popular satirist on Mash in its different forms (starting off on the BBC between 2017 and 2020, before moving over to Dave from 2022, where Parris took over from Nish Kumar as presenter before it was cancelled a year later), the comedian will also be familiar to London theatregoers as a member of the company behind West End improv hit Austentatious.

The show, which sees actors rustle up an entirely new novel by the Pride and Prejudice author on the spot, currently enjoys a weekly residency in London’s Arts Theatre and is touring to a number of venues across the UK until the end of the year.

A lot of the comedy from the show, of course, comes from the sheer spontaneity and unpredictability of it all – an amusing thought against the backdrop of an increasingly chaotic world.

So, how much of our lives should we leave to the unpredictable, and to what extent should we have some more rigid foundations to help us through the never-ending sociopolitical turbulence?

“I’m a huge supporter of the principles of improv, if you like, being good for you and your life. I don’t always manage it,” admits Parris. “So one of them, for example, is ‘support your scene partner’. The way for you to feel good on stage, is to make them feel good.

"So it begins in not being selfish and not worrying too much about yourself, and I think at the moment, all of us in the world, there’s a lot of the inward gaze of self-examination, going like, ‘how am I? What am I like? What’s my identity? What are my feelings? How is my brain? What is brain?’ And obviously, it’s good to think about that a bit, but then you can go a bit crazy, and I speak from experience, if you think too much about yourself and your inner workings.”

She continues: “Actually, thinking about others is good for them, and it’s really good to take your brain away from only thinking about yourself. ‘Yes, and?’ is a really nice way to be in the workplace. Because I know I’m quite a control freak, actually. So in both relationships and working relationships, if someone comes up with an idea and it’s not what I was thinking, trying to not go, ‘oh, that’s not what I want’. But instead, going, ‘yeah, OK, and what about if it was also this’, and going someone else’s way for a bit to see how it feels.

“So I think there’s all sorts of principles with improv which are just good life practices, and it’s not about being unpredictable; sometimes, it’s about meeting things with grace and working as a team.”

Yet, in addition to being a “love letter” to musical comedy, Poise takes a look at that very word being used to describe her. So how is she planning to carry out some introspection without going “a bit crazy”?

“With comedy, to be honest, and music – that helps,” Parris replies. “I talk about all sorts of things about myself, about motherhood; about having anxiety; about sex, sexuality; and through comedy and through music. It’s like therapy, to be honest, rather than dragging myself down.”

Lord knows comedy has helped the public through some trickier times – a fine example being the administration of the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister, Liz Truss, being summed up with just one word: lettuce.

Countless memes and soundbites have graced the internet over the years, along with an increasing number of social media satirists such as Rosie Holt, Jonathan Pie (played by comedian Tom Walker), Nerine Skinner and Munya Chawawa – something which hasn’t passed Parris by.

“I don’t think satire is going to go anywhere, but I do think it’s going onto social media, and not on TV,” she says. “Obviously, there are still really long-running shows – you’ve got Have I Got News For You still on. I mean, they cancelled The Mash Report, they cancelled Late Night Mash, they cancelled Mock the Week. So many of them are going away and they’re not replacing them, and that’s not just satire, that’s, really, a lot of TV.”

TV, Parris explains, is changing, along with the comedy career ladder. “For young comedians, it used to be, ‘oh, if you do really well, you might get on TV, and then once you’re on TV, that’s your career made, and you can make your career on TV’, and that’s not the case anymore,” she continues. “TV is not the endgame, and in some cases, it’s barely on the ladder.

“You can get on TV and it have no impact at all on your career,” adds Parris. “The goal is to have loads of views, loads of followers. There’s comedians selling out huge, huge theatres having never been on TV and having just had a consistent amount of views on social media. I think that satire will move its location from TV to our phones, basically, and it's up to us to figure out how best to do that.”

Another challenge outlined by Parris is how to satirise Sir Keir Starmer and his new government, after 14 years of successive Conservative governments offered up such bizarre and unbelievable characters as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Raab.

The comedian thinks it’s a fair bit harder to satirise the new faces.

“In terms of policy,” she begins, before stopping herself. “Do you know what, I was going to say it’s as easy, because you’re always just mocking the people in power, who are taking the actions, but it is harder, because their policies… Yes, they’re already doing things that I don’t like, but the fact that I can pick and choose the things I don’t like, says a lot, because with the Tories it was just a total shambles across the board."

Parris then turns to personalities. “With the Tories, for that long run of years that they were in, by the time they became a member of the cabinet, we’d already known them for years as someone else,” she explains. “By the time that they became PM, we’d already known them as a member of the cabinet. So, as a writer and a satirist, I’ve gotten to know people like – obviously – Boris Johnson, years before he was PM and there’s so much to laugh at there.

“I remember when Liz Truss first got in, they were asking me on The Mash Report to do an impression of her,” she recalls, “and I was like, ‘I don’t think there is an impression there, she’s very normal-seeming,’ but she wasn’t.

“It’s justfamiliarity, and I think when Keir Starmer first got in, people were like, ‘well, he’s hard to do an impression of, actually’, but he’s not, it’s just becoming more familiar with who they are. I think that is the challenge, it’s the unfamiliarity that we have with the Labour cabinet, because we haven’t gotten to know them yet.”

But Parris also believes Starmer’s cabinet is mostly one which is hard to laugh at.

“They’re not ridiculous. They’re not absurd caricatures,” she says. “I mean, god, you look at Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, these are all absurd, cartoon-like people with extreme views. Then, you look at Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, and Angela Rayner, what are you taking the p*** out of? ‘Oh, Angela Rayner has been gotten by the taxman. Oh no, she’s been fully exonerated by HMRC within a matter of weeks’.”

I mention the recent right-wing anger over Rayner, the deputy prime minister, having a fun time in Ibiza.

“Exactly,” Parris agrees. “Yeah, while they’re in recess, and done a bit of dancing, and then she’s back on the job immediately as soon as she’s called.

“You can be like, ‘oh, Rachel Reeves, another Oxford graduate in power’, who went to state school in Lewisham, whose parents are hard-working schoolteachers. There’s less to mock! It’s a bit harder and I actually talk about the fact that it’s harder in the show, but there’ll be stuff. It's early days, but I’ll find stuff for the show.”

And the show – or rather, tour – begins on Wednesday at the Oxford Playhouse. The full list of dates and locations can be found on Parris’s website.

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