Irish comedian Mary Bourke on eking out humour from being a carer for her husband
Mary Bourke tells her own story and looks at the plight of carers in her five-part BBC radio documentary, Who Cares?
Mary Bourke is an Irish comedian living in London. In 2020, during a covid pandemic lockdown, her husband Simon Clayton, also a comedian, suffered a massive stroke. It propelled Bourke into becoming his carer. Her life changed in a million ways from that moment. One of the things she noticed was the need to manage people’s emotions around her, what she describes as “emotional labour”.
“Everybody wants a happy story,” she says on stage. “No one necessarily wants the truth. I’ll be at a party. A comedian will come up to me. He’ll be very nervous because he realises that he’s on the cusp of a tricky conversation.
