Ruby Wax: ‘Therapy took me to the basement of my soul. My parents were living there’

On the eve of a new tour, the British-American comedian who soared to fame in the 1990s spills the beans on some of her most famous television guests - including Donald J Trump.

Ruby Wax. Picture: Charlie Clift

Your new stand-up show addresses your stay in a psychiatric facility in 2022 after a serious bout of depression. It’s hard to imagine that experience was very funny… Well, if people just want stand-up comedy, you know, like, “A funny thing happened on my way to the vet,” this isn’t it. It’s a little spooky going to Australia with something that isn’t all-out stand-up comedy. I’m doing the Melbourne Comedy Festival but this is not a shining example of somebody standing up with a mic telling jokes. It’s a story. It’s a play. It goes dark and it goes light, it’s a little like Hannah Gadsby – what the hell, what am I saying, I’m not like her – but you know what I mean, the show goes on that kind of a rollercoaster ride.

It had been more than a decade since you’d last been hospitalised. Did you find treatment had changed much? They never had this thing before called rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation). It feels like a hair dryer blown directly into your head. Honestly, they put it on and it looks like a 1950s hair dryer. That’s the reason I think I recovered. That, and I did this kind of therapy where they took me down into the basement of my soul.

That sounds ominous. What did you find when you got there? My parents. I’d always used them as material – the first book I wrote was about them and Carrie Fisher did the editing and said, “Your parents are almost as bad as mine”, which is the best review you could ever give anybody. But I guess I didn’t realise deep down inside, I was still locked inside that house with them.

Performing on stage

You’ve written about the power of stripping back “armour” – which in your case is humour – to understand your true self. Why is that so important to do? Because it’s too heavy. It gets too weighty by the time you’re older and you have to lug it around, and you’ve heard all your lines plenty of times before. People say at a certain age you either turn into wine or vinegar, and I think which one you become involves doing that striptease, taking your clothes off, because honestly, it takes too much energy to fake it.

They’ve given you an OBE for all the work you’ve done around mental health awareness… Ha, yeah, who thought that you’d get a reward for that?

What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in terms of acceptance of people with mental illness? When I started, I didn’t tell anybody I had a problem, because good luck holding on to your job. When people found out it was like, “How long is she going to be sick for?” and “Is it catching?” and, you know, “Is she going to pick up a knife and kill everyone?” I started doing a show 15 years ago, maybe more, where in the second half I had the audience talk about their own experiences. In the beginning they were apprehensive, but now people just want to be heard, and you can’t shut them up.

Why was it up to you to take on this particular public health battle? It wasn’t meant to be up to me. I got outed. Comic Relief outed me by taking a photo of me and putting it in Tube stations in London, these giant pictures with a caption that read: “One in four people have mental illness” and they didn’t ask my permission. They kind of outed me by accident. So, I decided I’d pretend that was my publicity poster for a show, so then I had to write a show. That’s exactly how it began.

Wow. So it pushed you into the spotlight. I did the show for two years in mental institutions because I was too scared to take it out. And when it did go out, people said, “Oh, we identify with that” and so I met my people, and that’s what the joy is, you meet your tribe.

During the 1990s your TV show Ruby Wax Meets… featured the most incredibly famous guests. Do you think a format like that could exist today? No. Look, at the time, they’d only ever agree to do five or 10 minutes with me – but if I was entertaining enough, if I flirted enough and I was funny and showed them a good time, then they said, “Stick around” and they’d tell the PR to go take a hike and we’d spend maybe a week together. So I never had permission, straight out, to stay a week with Imelda Marcos or move in with Hugh Hefner.

Interviewing Donald Trump. Photo: BBC

Another of your famous guests was Donald J Trump. How did you react to his re-election? I knew what was coming. Everybody always acts like, “Oh, guess what he did today.” But if your grandmother had dementia, and you go, “Today, she wore underpants on her head and couldn’t find her car keys,” like, why are you so surprised? It doesn’t surprise me. He was vicious when I met him, yeah, this guy was a killer. I felt really dirty sitting in a plane with him, and he clearly hated my guts. That’s why he dumped me out of a plane.

Did you approach that TV series as a comic foremost, or as a journalist? I wanted to be the journalist. Towards the end, I went after [Palestinian political leader] Yasser Arafat, and I got him, and the BBC said, “Absolutely not. You’re an entertainer.” I would have loved to have gone on to do that kind of show. I didn’t always make it funny. I mean, the interview with OJ Simpson was serious, and I think I got further with OJ than a lot of journalists.

Quite memorably there’s a frightening clip of him brandishing a knife at your hotel door. Whose idea was it for him to do that?! He did it! We’d been working with him for maybe 17 hours and you know, I was entertaining him. He gets tired, lets his guard down and that’s when people do crazy things. But I’m telling you now, I would have much rather have been a journalist.

It’s not too late, Ruby. Well, it is too late because I’ve lost interest. I couldn’t interview somebody for five minutes now. In another world, I would have loved to get Obama but it wasn’t the right time, and movie stars don’t do it for me anymore. I love science brains now but I don’t think they make great TV.

Is there a science to comedy, do you think? Why is something funny? For me, it just is, or it isn’t. When I script-edited Absolutely Fabulous, I knew why it was funny, but I don’t think I could ever explain it, and I don’t think a computer will ever be able to do it either.

What’s the last thing that made you properly laugh really hard? Oh, I was watching Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the new one, so awful. It was so awful. And I was heckling the screen, I was actually heckling the screen and I made myself laugh. It’s just, you know, she looked like a blowfish. I don’t know what the woman has done with her face, but you know, when something is so terrible, it’s funny.

What about the last thing that made you cry? I can’t cry! I’m on medication and I don’t cry. It’s true. I’d like to cry sometimes, but I can’t get up the juice. There’s nothing there. My eyes are dry. I mean, if it was something horrific I probably would, but I haven’t cried in years!

Ruby Wax’s I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was tours nationally from March 20