I’m spending an afternoon with comedian Ania Magliano. First a cup of chai latte (“I gave up coffee to reduce anxiety”), followed by a visit to Fightzone, a gym in East London where she regularly takes boxing classes for its anti-anxiety benefits. “In my body, when I’m anxious or angry, I keep it in my arms. I want to hit things,” Magliano says. “There’s a bit of a stereotype of: ‘Imagine hitting someone in boxing?’. And yes, sometimes I do that too.”
Audiences for the 25-year-old’s latest set, I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This, will hear all about her forays into boxing, woven into a complex story of personal rebuilding. Nominated for best show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, it’s deceptively light-hearted. There’s some crazy stuff about a terrible haircut, dating, volunteer work gone wrong and a threesome. These jokes provide cover for more sensitive topics: breast reduction surgery, the need to stay safe and, at the root of it all, trauma.
All the stories are true, although Magliano laughs because she is worse at boxing than the show suggests. She tried it for the first time before the pandemic. “I was going through a difficult point in my life. This was really the thought process: I like warm weather and I’ve taken two boxercise classes. So I googled ‘box camp Thailand’.” She quit her job, left London knowing she would have to move in with her mother on her return, and spent a month at a Thai boxing retreat. “No one does something so extreme if they don’t have something extreme to get over.”
That extreme thing was an assault. The way such an experience flows into your life is at the heart of Magliano’s new show.
There are clichés about “trauma” shows in comedy: jokes that give way to solemnity after 40 minutes to make the audience cry. When an artist gets it wrong, it can feel raw, unresolved, and uncomfortable. Magliano spent months and nearly forty previews finding the balance. Rather than focusing on the experience itself—the show had to be funny, and she didn’t want to evoke unwanted memories for anyone watching—Magliano carefully and purposefully narrates its impact. Why did she want to feel physically strong? Why did she avoid romantic relationships? Why did the botched haircut make her feel so powerless?
“It went through varying degrees of exploration into the parallels between having a bad haircut and more traumatic things,” she says. “I struggled with getting a difficult subject on stage in a way that didn’t make people feel bad. That caused things to go in a completely different direction.”
In 2016, just before heading to Cambridge University to study English, Magliano got a job at Edinburgh’s festival fringe, with the intention of improving her theater skills. Once there, colleagues recommended comedy shows. She recalls a Desiree Burch routine about oral sex: “It was the first time I saw a comedy that was empowering and made me feel good about myself. It was a revelation. I thought: this is what I want to do.”
Five days after the pony she tried to get up on her own. It didn’t go well: “There’s something liberating about your first performance going badly. I remember leaving the stage thinking, if that’s the worst that can happen, I can handle it. If that dies on your ass, it’s a bit of a rush.
Determined to make comedy her university hobby, she was drawn to the famous Footlights group. She found a strict hierarchy, dominated by men. When she participated in the association’s tour show, she had “negative experiences in every possible way.” As one of two female performers, she noticed that the men were reluctant to give funny roles.
So Magliano and two friends founded Stockings, a comedy society for women and non-binary people. There would be no auditions, just a supportive space to develop ideas and perform. This year in Edinburgh, a former member approached her on the street. “She said, ‘Without that I would never have done comedy.'”
After Cambridge, she moved to the capital, got a job at a start-up and started performing comedy in the evenings, eating “a sad tub of Huel” for dinner. But while they were living at home after escaping from Thailand, the pandemic started. With no live shows, Magliano started posting videos on TikTok. “You get addicted to the likes and views, but you don’t get the reward of hearing people laugh.”
When live performances returned, she “wiped the slate clean” and focused on new material. “I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder where I was criticized for not making enough jokes,” she says. Her debut show, Absolutely No Worries If Not, arrived in Edinburgh in 2022, packed with punchlines. In some ways it was a classic introductory hour, with jokes about Magliano’s family (Polish mother, Italian father and their divorce), quarter-life crisis and bisexuality – but also surreal detours about ‘horse girls’ and Jacqueline Wilson. She initially wrote it as a coming out story, but under the guidance of her director, Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Jordan Brookes, she realized that ‘coming out wasn’t a big story in my life; that then became the joke.”
That desire to go beyond the obvious is perfected in Magliano’s latest show, as she plants seeds with each joke that pay off as the hour progresses. She says: “I wanted to make a show that had every element in it. I wanted to feel like there was a reason for it to exist.”
There was a version of the show that was harder to do. I would come away from previews feeling completely washed out
She had never thought about talking about her breast reduction on stage, but a conversation with comedian Sarah Keyworth helped her realize that it was “the perfect amount of vulnerable and stupid.” And unusually – the audience says: ‘I’m listening!’ I’m glad I’m talking about it now, it’s very liberating. But this is very personal. The surgery was a big decision and I didn’t tell everyone in my life. I thought people would judge me.”
As she added other elements, a theme emerged. “A few people said, ‘You make a lot of jokes about violent men, what’s going on?’ There is a dark undercurrent.”
She went into more detail about that. In any show that touches on personal trauma, the artist must decide how much to reveal. “Sometimes people don’t realize it’s a vulnerable thing to do,” Magliano says. “Especially if you seem comfortable talking about it on stage.” The subtle approach she chose allows her to be honest without compromising her own well-being as she performs night after night. “There was a version of the show that was much harder to do. Leaving the previews I felt completely washed out.
She originally spoke about the legal complexities surrounding sexual violence. Many people are unable to talk publicly about sexual assault after receiving legal threats or action. It’s something Magliano has experienced personally. But attempts to include those details in the show “irreparably changed the mood” among the audience, forcing her to drop them.
Magliano still plays with moments of tension; a particular sexual abuse joke she made on the show usually elicits gasps. “That’s a true representation of who I am,” she says. “Many of my friends who have had similar experiences joke with each other and talk openly. The real way it’s talked about isn’t something I’ve seen people do on a show.
That authenticity connected with people. “The most meaningful compliments I received came from people who could really relate. The way they spoke to me was so incredible, but also implicitly sad; I wish you had nothing to do with this.” Luckily there was light in the dark – many people also showed her pictures of their own bad haircuts.
Sexual misconduct is still an unresolved problem in the arts. Magliano’s performance in Edinburgh took place before the publication of allegations against Russell Brand and she wonders whether audiences would have reacted differently “if everyone in the world had thought about how comedians are sexual predators”.
But she thinks it’s a sign of progress that audiences are now actively embracing a young woman performing such a show. “It’s gotten to the point where I can talk about it on stage and people are open to it.”
Now, the feelings Magliano explores in the show that drove her to that Thai boxing camp aren’t so urgent. But the hobby still has its place, she says next to the boxing ring. “I don’t know how much I learned here that would help me in a fight,” she says. “But it means you have a little secret in your back pocket.”
Magliano tours I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This, January 12 to March 28; tour begins Belfast.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse is available from Rape Crisis on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support at 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available from 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html