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Comedy isn’t just a career for Bella Hull. It’s a compulsion. “Standup for me is like – I have to do it,” says Hull, who first picked up a mic aged 17. “Regardless of what the response is.”
A decade in, the response is resoundingly positive. The 28-year-old had a sell-out show at last year’s Edinburgh fringe (Doctors Hate Her, which explored a break-up, insanity and the occult), appearances on Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz, and a coveted role as writer on the new UK version of Saturday Night Live. “There’s something symbolic about being the person with the voice,” she says of standup. “A lot of situations in my personal life, I don’t feel like that at all.”
Hull was a shy child, constantly on edge amid her parents’ “messy” marriage breakdown, an outsider at a private girls’ school where she was “mixed race and overweight”. She lived in London and Kent, including formative years with her “expressive” grandma, who was often found barefoot or gardening naked. Comedy provided solace and she would watch standup specials and record her observations in a journal, until the urge to do it herself became too strong to ignore.
The decade since has been spent “in some of the most unsafe basements you could possibly imagine”, Hull jokes, as she threw herself into the comedy circuit. She studied history of art at Cambridge, drawn there by its comedy heritage. But the ubiquity of Footlights’ alumni among the comedy pantheon led Hull to the grittier world of comedy clubs. “I was obsessed with paying my dues,” she says. “I met a lot of people at Cambridge that had ‘golden boy syndrome’. They would sit back and think, ‘Where’s my TV show?’ Well, you don’t fucking deserve a TV show because you’re not good enough. Can you make a stag party in Nottingham laugh? I don’t think so.”
On stage, she melds a compelling persona – a woman on the edge, fixed smile concealing a spikier centre – with formidable craft, tightly written gags peppering every topic. “I just got a personal trainer,” goes a line from Doctors Hate Her that made this paper’s best jokes list from last year’s Edinburgh festival. “She’s horrible to me but my body goal is a thicker skin.”
Among the neat punchlines, her shows traverse disordered eating, family breakdown, relationship issues and mental health. As the old meme goes, inside Hull there are two wolves: one, the club-drilled comic subduing audiences with an unprecedented gag rate; the other, a tortured artist forging meaning from her darkest experiences.
Her parallel obsessions as a teenager were comedy and art, her idols Ali Wong and Tracey Emin. She now recognises Emin’s influence on her comedy: “She’s so unapologetically intense.” This year’s Fringe show, Mad Cow Disease, will be “very Emin-coded”, a collection of “feminine shameful detritus” ranging from ant infestations and the dread of revealing her true self to a new boyfriend, to fears of inheriting mental health conditions and yearning for a baby “which I think is very taboo for a female comedian”. That she can turn something “sad or dark or heartbreaking” into laughs has always felt magical.
Hull’s love for club comedy is clear and it’s been a “rigorous” training ground for her joke-writing and stage confidence. Initially, she’d shake and even vomit with nerves before shows. Yet it forced her to inhabit a version of womanhood that audiences would accept. “You’ve got 30 seconds to make them laugh when you get on stage,” Hull says. “If you’re a woman, you’ve maybe got 10.”
She was told never to wear revealing clothes and found out why after being “horrendously heckled and wolf-whistled”. Aged 21 and in a remote part of England, she had a famous older male comic making “consistent jokes about how they were going to rape me after the show. Everyone was laughing. That was the norm.” Many women don’t last long in that environment, she says, but she doesn’t regret this path.
“I love having something to push against,” Hull says. “I love proving people wrong. You have to have a bit of teeth.” They were on full display in her HIGNFY appearances, where she playfully roasted Ian Hislop and scored an off-the-cuff zinger at the expense of Russell Brand. “Gags are your armour,” Hull says, and so she became used to hiding behind punchlines.
Increasingly though, she’s pushing against that club instinct, exploring her poetic, sillier side, and introducing surreal monologues, act-outs and props into her shows. On SNL, she spent six-day weeks hammering out topical jokes and sketches, but it was also a chance to try “weirder” stuff. There was a sketch set at baggage claim where a scatty hun (Aimee Lou Wood) admits that her lost suitcase contains a bomb. Or the Weekend Update dating correspondent Scrimpch, a “really sexual Italian man who was stuck in London because they’d left him on a school trip”.
“I love when she’s written a feature that a cast member is going to do with me because I know I’m going to find it really funny,” says Ania Magliano, star of Weekend Update, who first met Hull at Cambridge. Even back then, Hull was naturally funny and daringly honest, says Magliano. “She is a true weirdo, a real eccentric, and she’s confident leaning into that. All of us girls go through a phase of thinking we have to be ‘cool’ and she’s a great example to embrace your weirdness and follow your instincts.”
Hull seems genuinely surprised that she got the SNL job – initially, she didn’t even want to apply – but being part of something bigger, so different from the solo world of standup, has been “so meaningful”.
Scrimpch was a hit on TikTok and Instagram: Hull’s own posts often do big numbers (one video about a fashion disaster has 24.6m views), but social media’s growing presence in comedy doesn’t always sit comfortably. “There’s something about having to show everyone everything all of the time that can upset the artistic process,” she says. “Working away in the darkness makes it much more likely that it will be authentic.” There’s also a pressure to virtue signal and “stand for something”, but she’s drawn towards riskier, more divisive jokes. “I want to be horrified. That’s what I find impressive, when people can scoop out their shame and make it funny. It’s not brave to have the right opinion.”
After August in Edinburgh, then series two of SNL in September, what’s Hull up to next? “I don’t want it to stop,” she says. “But if it does, I’ll be OK, because I’ll go back to the clubs. Being able to make people laugh is the meaning of my life. It’s what I’m alive to do.”
