All comedians talk about how many times they’ve died on stage,” says Emmanuel Sonubi. “But because it had never happened to me, I had this big fear that it would.” It was the late 2010s, and the London-born comedian was having a moment. He was gigging constantly at increasingly high-profile venues, and as a result the fear became bigger. “Dying on stage, on an open mic in some random pub, no one cares about. Doing it on Live at the Apollo is terrifying.” Then, in 2019, Sonubi did nearly die – actually die – going into heart failure during a gig in Dubai. “After you’ve experienced the worst, telling a bad joke isn’t that bad,” he says.
After six years and plenty of emotional processing, Sonubi has mined his brush with oblivion for seriocomic detail in his new standup show Life After Near Death. It was one of the big hits of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival – a roundly well-reviewed show that juggles punchlines and pathos to cement Sonubi’s growing reputation as one of the country’s most reliable up-and-coming stand-ups. Now Sonubi is touring it around the UK. Speaking today over video from his home in North London, the 44-year-old comic is in good form. We were supposed to have done this in person a week or two prior, but for a bout of Covid on my end. (“I have held it against you,” he says, straight-faced, “and you are now my nemesis.”) Yet even over Zoom Sonubi radiates easygoing charm: it’s easy to see what’s made him such a popular performer on stage.
Sonubi grew up in Enfield, the youngest of six children, and the only boy. “My childhood was a lot of extremes,” he says. “I remember a lot of laughing, a lot of fun – but, looking back now, a lot of trauma. I didn’t have much of a relationship at all with my dad, and the parts that were there weren’t great at all.” When it came to his mother and sisters, however, he was “was very well loved, and it took me a long time to really realise that”.
His teenage years, however, were, he says, “absolutely feral”. He speaks onstage about his past drug use, his repressed internal struggles. “I became a bit of a chameleon,” he says. “I didn’t know who I was meant to be, where I fit in… especially growing up in Enfield in the 1980s, we were the only Black family on the street at first. I didn’t know where I was meant to sit, so I tried to kind of fit in everywhere.”
Becoming a standup was, says Sonubi, something that “happened by accident”. He had always liked comedy, and tried for years writing sitcom scripts with friends of his, projects that would ultimately “just fall by the wayside”. He made some inroads in musical theatre, earning a prominent role in the 2006 stage musical Daddy Cool, adapted from the work of Boney M. Around this time, he also worked as a dance teacher. When his first child came along, however, he decided to quit entertainment – “because I decided that my child needed stability,” Sonubi says. “He wasn’t going to grow up in the same way I grew up. Because I’ve always worked, mainly because when I was young there were so many of us, and we didn’t have loads. And I wanted my child to just enjoy being a child. That to me was the best gift I could give.”
Yet the instinct in him to get up on stage still niggled. After a period spent working in IT, Sonubi was lured into stand-up by a comedian friend. “I remember watching her perform at a comedy venue in London and thinking, ‘I know how to do this. You just tell the story.’ And because I’d always performed, I know what a performance should look and feel like.”
Finding his niche was another matter. He recalls an early gig, in which he was one of a run of comedians performing 10-minute slots. “I’d never met the act the went on before me, but he basically went on and did the exact same set I was about to do,” he recalls, wincing slightly. “Not necessarily the same jokes, but all of the topics in the same order. And then I realised, you’ve got to find the thing that only you can say. It’s like post-Covid… you went to every comedy club and every comic had a set on Covid, on banana bread, on walks, on distancing… and everyone got really bored of it very, very, quickly.”
For a while, Sonubi’s persona was one of his past lives as a doorman. “I was watching Al Murray on TV. And I realised, you say ‘Al Murray’, you hear ‘Pub Landlord’. It’s so easy to remember. And so I thought of all the jobs I’d ever done, and chose the one that has always been a throughline, on weekends, regardless of my day job. That became the glue that held the comedy together. ‘Just go on stage and be the bouncer. And then everybody would go, ‘Oh, Emmanuel? He’s the bouncer.’”
By 2019, Sonubi had been gigging as a comedian for around four years, although professionally for only a couple, and had got to a point where he was performing every weekend from Thursday to Sunday. He had nailed down a style – anecdotal, observational, with a hint of gleeful London bolshiness.
But physically, something was going awry. “There was a point where I started to just put on weight,” he recalls, “and no matter how much I worked out, it wouldn’t go. But then I was also eating crap and drinking every weekend. And I just felt like something was wrong.”
A few days before jetting out to Dubai to perform, Sonubi went to A&E. He didn’t have any of the normal symptoms of heart disease, and left with the diagnosis of a throat infection. “That throat infection then spread and hit my chest, then my lungs, and it filled my lungs up with fluid. And then, from there, that triggered cardiomyopathy,” he says. (Dilated cardiomyopathy is a form of heart disease in which the heart doesn’t pump sufficient oxygen around the body.) “And it just got worse and worse to the point where it felt like I was inhaling glass.”
He was on stage when his heart “just went”. At first he thought he was suffering an asthma attack. “All I could think of was ‘I want to go home. I just need to get home,’” he says. “But subconsciously, your brain goes, ‘you’re dying’. I thought it was lung cancer, because I was coughing up blood. They took me to the ICU, and it was the worst few days of my life.”
Now, six years later, Sonubi is out of the proverbial woods, taking medication and living a radically healthier lifestyle. His career has picked up where it left off and continued rising: since the pandemic, he’s hosted Live at the Apollo, and been nominated for Best Newcomer and Best Show at the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards. But it took him time to be able to talk about what had happened on stage – not just to joke about it, but to treat it with the gravity the experience demanded.
“I was reading back through my show, and I was like, ‘You’re still not being honest… There’s so much stuff that you’ve left out,’” he recalls. “And you know why you’ve left it out: because it hurts. And it’s because you don’t want to say it, because you don’t want to admit to the things that you did.” So he re-wrote, went deeper – closer to the bone.
“Once I started to rewrite it, I started to love it – because there was honesty in it,” he adds. “And there are still parts of this I still find really difficult to say.” In other words, Sonubi hasn’t just shed his fear of dying on stage. He’s conquered his fear of living on it.
Emmanuel Sonubi will be on tour with ‘Life After Near Death’ until 31st March 2026. Tickets are on sale now and are available from www.emmanuelstandup.com
