In her late 30s Jane McKeever found herself in a position many dream of — an enviable corporate job, a supportive network of friends and family, and a comfortable lifestyle in the bustling city of London.
Yet, despite her outward success, a persistent whisper in her mind kept her awake at night: “Is this all there is to life?”
It wasn’t dissatisfaction with her job — she loved her role as a marketing manager and the creative challenges it offered. Instead, it was a yearning for something more, something profoundly different.
“I realised that while I was comfortable, I wasn’t truly living,” she recalls. “I wanted to take a risk, to push myself out of my comfort zone and live life in all its fullness and have no regrets when I look back.
“I decided to try stand-up comedy as the thought of getting up on stage, telling jokes, and trying to make people laugh really scared me. It was like the ultimate challenge.”
Once her decision was made, Jane didn’t hesitate to get started and she immediately enrolled in an eight-week comedy course.
Setting herself the ambitious goal of performing 20 gigs in her first year, she dove headfirst into the world of open mic nights, working her day job and then catching the tube to all parts of London in the evening.
Jane at her first stand up-gig, London 2016
The initial performances were rough: “The first time I did it was terrifying and there were nights when no one laughed,” she says with a chuckle.
“Most of the time you had five minutes to get up and tell jokes and you are standing looking out at all these faces of strangers in the room — there could have been 30 people or just five.
“There are no guarantees you will make people laugh.
“Starting out I struggled to try and remember my jokes. I have had some heckling and rooms where there were no laughs and some with just a few.
“I did have a terrible one called a ‘Gong Show’ where you stood up for a minute and then could be voted off. There were three people in the audience who held up cards if they didn’t want you to continue and with me all three cards couldn’t have gone up any quicker.
“I wasn’t exactly booed off, but it felt similar as they made it clear they did not want to see or hear any more jokes from me.”
Despite these setbacks, Jane was determined to keep going.
Never losing sight of why she started kept her turning up night after night: “To me the end goal was what was important and I saw it as a learning curve,” she admits.
Jane performing in Derry
“It got to the point when I was more relaxed and just got up to try stuff out, be silly and do my best to make people laugh.
“No matter how good you are you can still get up and have a bad show but that is what I like about it, the risk.
“To me the reason for doing it was to face my fears and realise when I have done it that I am still here and maybe I am stronger than I think.
“Comedy to me is all about laughter, I love that belly laugh and if I can make people laugh, that is medicinal, a real tonic.
“I think we all need to be able to sit back and laugh for an hour and forget our troubles and that is what pushes me.”
For the first three years comedy continued to be a hobby, albeit a very serious one.
Then Jane ratcheted up the fear factor by deciding to try her hand at improv — a live performance with no preparation, relying instead on creating comedy on the spot in response to suggestions from the audience.
“Improv really got me excited as I loved the mischief and fun of that in-the-moment creativity,” she enthused.
“I took a summer off work in 2019 and went to Chicago which is the home of all the great improv stars, they all started there, it is the mecca for improv.
Performing in Chicago in 2019
“I did a training course on improv stand-up for new comedians, and I loved it.”
Then Covid-19 struck and the world’s comedy circuit like everything else came to an abrupt stop.
For Jane, the pandemic gave her the breathing space to decide if she really was prepared to give everything up to pursue comedy full-time.
Taking a leap of faith, she packed in her job in London and moved back home to Belfast to follow her dream.
“I quit my job to go freelance so that I could do more comedy, but I knew it would be really challenging and I would need support, so I came back home,” she says.
“I knew I needed people behind me backing me and cheering me on, people who would believe in me and care about what I do.
“I come from a big family, I have three brothers and three sisters and to have them and mum and dad and my friends, who I have known since nursery, all here to cheer me on made it just feel right to come home.
Stand-up at the Black Box, Belfast, 2023
“Mum and dad have been a real inspiration to me. Mum started a new business in her 40s and dad changed jobs in his 50s and they are continually doing things that are interesting and purposeful.”
Jane joined Tinderbox Theatre company’s theatre maker development programme Incubate where she learnt how to put a show of her own together.
All artists taking part in the programme were then invited to perform at a sold-out festival in The Mac theatre in Belfast on March 1.
It was Jane’s first real opportunity to perform improv alone in a theatre and it proved a thrilling experience: “I was so blown away by the audience, their energy and their excitement,” she says.
“Standing backstage waiting to go on I realised just how far I had come, and I thought ‘this is pretty cool’.
“I felt really proud and so grateful that people came out and I got to do it.
“I know it sounds corny, but I did feel so privileged to have that chance and it was great being able to connect with the audience so that we were all getting something out of it.
“I was just talking about my life as a child and then what it might be like as an old lady and my present self on my journey through midlife, all with moments the audience helped to create. It was amazing. I even created a poem on the spot.
“Part of the thrill of improv is that you don’t know what is going to happen and I was very relieved and excited that it went well, and it showed me that my own show had potential.”
Jane with sisters Claire, Helen and Catherine
With the help of a small grant from the Arts Council’s individual artists programme, Jane was able to develop her own show — Janey Mac is Hot (Blame the Hormones).
A hilarious look at her life as a perimenopausal woman, for her first two shows in Belfast’s Accidental Theatre in May she had a packed house in stitches both nights.
Jane says: “It was so exciting to finally get onto the stage as an artist in my own right, it was brilliant. One of the nights completely sold out and I had different ages of men and women, from their 20s to people in their 70s, and they were crying with laugher from beginning to end.
“I would love now to take it on tour across Northern Ireland.”
Reflecting on her journey, Jane says she is both humbled and proud of what the past few years have brought: “I loved my job in London, and this was never about escape, it was about a calling and thinking about deep down what it was I really wanted to do with my life and following that voice that says there is more.
“I’ve gone from questioning my life choices to doing something that really makes me feel alive.”