These thoughts vanished from the moment my son mewled into the world. Within the first month of his life, the weight of responsibility for trying to turn him into a good human transformed into a jagged stormcloud of abject horror. A question reared up in my head, ‘What would be my one mistake in bringing him up that would turn him into a mass-murdering serial killer?’

I imagined that day in the police cells, after he’d been arrested for killing, cooking and eating thirty different strangers from Bruges.

‘Oh, Son, why did you kill, cook and eat all of those people?’ I’d ask.

He would look at me and say, ‘Don’t you remember, Father?’

And I’d shake my head.

‘It was that day on the beach. Chesil Beach, I think. There was a sudden gust of wind and I dropped my Strawberry Mivvi and it landed in the shingle. And you shouted at me, even though it was not my fault . . . And from that point onwards, I KNEW I’D KILL!’

In the last hundred years there has been a great deal of research in neuroscience, psychology and genetics into why we are the people and personalities that we are. Such research, which shines a light on both the intrinsic make-up of our brains and bodies and on our childhood experiences, can be incredibly valuable in understanding why we end up doing the things we do – whether it’s working as a hairdresser, killing Belgians or becoming a stand-up comedian.

If I think hard, there definitely are some good moments I can recall, such as the time I poured fruit punch into the hair of Tom Simpson, a boy who had made my life unpleasant at the school bus stop. The sugary punch attracted insects to his scalp, and it ended up becoming an unbearably itchy entomological menagerie. Happy days!

The biographical details of childhood can rarely be ignored these days, and it’s the rise of psychotherapy and neuroscience that has made our childhood inescapable. We’ve all been given an alibi for our lousy behaviour.

We’ve read the childcare books and the memoirs, and we know that somewhere there is a childhood event that has doomed us.

It would be easiest to identify what such an event was, if it was one nice and neat, tumultuous emotional catastrophe that led in a direct line to a desperate need for public acclaim or just acceptance. Has your whole life turned out this way because of the day you wet yourself in art class and had to wear a pair of replacement pink frilly pants? And sometimes there really is just one such event. Alexei Sayle told me about the old saying, ‘Show me a comedian and I’ll show you someone who lost their father when they were eleven.’

Amongst contemporary comedians the most well-known example of bereavement being linked to creativity is Eddie Izzard. Eddie’s mother died from cancer when he was just six years old. He believes that everything in his life has been about getting over that; it is where his comedy comes from. His analysis of his situation is that his audience acts as a surrogate affection-machine to replace his mother. Izzard has repeatedly spoken about the effect of the sudden loss of all the affection his mother provided, and his belief that it is linked to his desire to perform and achieve. ‘I know why I’m doing this. Everything I do in life is trying to get her back. I think if I do enough things . . . then maybe she will come back.’¹ His drive to do twenty-seven marathons in twenty-seven days, to learn to do his stand-up shows in fluent French, German and Russian, his political ambitions – for Eddie, all this has been a direct result of losing love so young. I think it is a convincing theory.

Comedian Paul Chowdhry, who – like Eddie – has built himself up to arena comedian without using the regular mass-media route, lost his mother when he was five years old. ‘You don’t quite understand it when you’re five, the only things you see are superheroes who have lost a parent and become a superhero. But that doesn’t help a child. When you’re five, you don’t get it, you think they’ll come back.’²

Comedy guru Barry Cryer lost his father in the war. Over a pint, he once told me that he never knew his father nor anything about him. With post-war stoicism and the muffling of grief, his mother never spoke of him. The only conversation he ever had with anyone about his father was at a Freemasons’ event that he’d been hired to talk at many years later. A Mason asked if Barry was one of the brotherhood and Barry was then regaled with stories of his father’s time in the Masons. I wanted to ask him how much he felt the loss of his father may have contributed to his desire to perform, but then I thought, ‘He’s got to eighty years old and without spending too long on the psychiatrist’s couch. Why ruin it all now?’ We had another beer instead. Eric Idle’s father survived the war. But on his way home, with all the trains full, he hitch-hiked instead. He was killed in a car accident on Christmas Eve. Eric’s brilliantly vicious festive song ‘Fuck Christmas’ is a far more haunting melody since I read this story.

Death and childhood bereavement aren’t the only life experiences that a psychoanalyst would have a field day with, when examining what it is that may make a comedian tick. Neither of Richard Pryor’s parents died at war, but he had an unusual upbringing nonetheless. His father was a pimp who was prone to violence, and Richard lived in the brothel where his mother worked and which his grandmother, his primary carer, ran. His mother was nearly beaten to death by his father and she left Pryor when he was five years old.

Lenny Bruce’s parents divorced when he was five and he was shunted around different relatives during his childhood. Alexei Sayle mentions itinerancy as a possible springboard to showing off. He says that a sizeable proportion of the comedians he worked with at The Comic Strip were ‘army brats’. Jennifer Saunders, Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, Keith Allen, Dawn French and Rowland Rivron all had parents with some service-based itinerancy. Peter Cook saw little of his father, as he was away in Africa for the Colonial Service. Cook recalled that his father used to receive the news six months after it was published. ‘It went to Africa by boat, then up the river. He’d then open up The Times and exclaim, “Good God! Worcester are seventy-eight for six!!”’³

Certainly, if you are moving school and location with frequency, then ‘Ta-dah’ – you have to keep making an impression on your new classmates in a desperate attempt to make new friends, so jokes and larks it has to be.

I only changed school once between the ages of five and thirteen, but that was bad enough. I was having a lovely time at the local village school, but when I was eight I was upgraded to a fee-paying preparatory school, to be moulded and prepared for a lifetime’s sense of superiority. That’s when it went downhill rapidly. I didn’t even know I was odd until then. I automatically turned from being a normal boy with a normal group of friends into someone who seemed to be carrying a contagious disease, as, it appeared, were all of the other late entries. The playground was a contamination pit. You could get ‘Calvert disease’, ‘Hagyard disease’ or ‘Ince disease’. Newcomers were outsiders, treated in much the same way that white blood cells would treat new bacteria. A few other rejected boys had been there longer and were no longer highly infectious, merely kept at a distance, as one was overweight and the other ran in a ‘funny manner’. But was this enough of a traumatic experience to set me off on a completely different course from the one I would otherwise have pursued? I don’t think so.

Adoption can occur in very different circumstances, but can lead to attachment issues and is often said to impact heavily on a child’s understanding of the world and the people around him or her; indeed, therapists have to undergo special training even to speak to an adopted person, so complex are the potential issues involved. At least eight comedians that I have worked with were adopted, including Stewart Lee, Mark Steel, Robert Newman and Rhona Cameron.

Some of them found out they were adopted when they were quite young, while others didn’t discover this until well into their teenage years. Some of them have gone on to use their experiences as an adopted child as material for their shows, whilst others have brushed over it, giving it little meaning at all.

Jo Brand believes, though, that there is a statistical over-representation of comedians who were adopted and of those who lost a parent when very young. She believes that ‘those sort of huge, catastrophic incidents in your early life do not bode well for your future mental health’.⁴

Mark Steel was brought up in a working-class family in one of Kent’s less impressive towns. In middle age he found out that his biological father was a card-playing companion of the notorious Lord Lucan and of gambling wildlife park entrepreneur John Aspinall. Steel has discussed adoption with other adopted comedians and has concluded that ‘We’ve all come to live with it. I don’t think any of us are in a state about it. I never felt like an outsider.’⁵ His conclusion is that the experience of adoption and grief is not rare, and yet most people who experience these things early in life will not decide to become comedians. Equally, I’d say that there are many who do not experience such things and do become wildly successful comics.

Perhaps I needed to look elsewhere for the childhood comedic impetus? Kurt Vonnegut suggested that the youngest child in any family was always a joke-maker, ‘because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation’.⁶ Straw-polling a group of fourteen comedian compatriots, I found that eight were the youngest in the family, two were only children (which technically makes them the youngest), three were the oldest child and only one was the middle child. The middle child was Matt Parker, a stand-up mathematician, so I am sure he would tell me that such a small sampling risks being statistically irrelevant. One of the youngest was a twin and was only the youngest by an hour, but I reckon that still counts for my bias. In my unscientific trial, it seems there was an element of truth in Vonnegut’s words. But looking at the work of the comedians polled, I am unable to draw any conclusions on how their family positioning affected their level of funniness or success. I have certainly laughed as much at one of the eldest-child comedians, Mark Thomas, as I have at most of the youngest. Thank heavens he doesn’t have the extra privilege of being last from the womb or I would have found it even harder to follow him at the benefit night in the Red Rose Comedy Club.

And as I ponder these various childhood experiences that have stimulated or influenced comedic greatness, I wonder how – if at all – I fit into any of these groups? I am not adopted. I did not lose a parent in childhood. My parents weren’t in the army and, as far as I know, my grandmother wasn’t a pimp for my mum or for anyone else. But I am the youngest of three. Though I have grown up to be the biggest show-off of the three, I was the least outwardly confident in the family. I was highly strung, volatile, shy and likely to become visibly upset if I didn’t win Pass the Parcel at my own birthday party. I was the babyish baby brother.

I do have a ‘traumatic event’ filed in my memory-card box, though, but even now I wonder if it was traumatic enough to count as trauma, and I feel a certain embarrassment at bringing it up at all.

It was late winter and dark. My sister had been riding a pony with her friend, and she and I were both in the back seat of the car, with my mum driving the short distance to our home. I was searching for my machine gun, my favourite toy, under the passenger seat. It had a handle on the side and it made a rat-a-tat-tat sound when you turned it.

I don’t remember the moment of collision, but I presume there was a thud and a jolt. Everything stopped and was quiet, and then the sobbing started. I was two years old – though I was a grown-up three-year-old in my mind, as my birthday was only a week away. I know this because there was going to be a party, and Mum had planned the cake. It was my sister who was sobbing. Her head had struck the right-side passenger window and was bleeding. Another car had been on the wrong side of the road, hurrying to get home. His impatience changed everything.

Mum was motionless in the driving seat, head up, eyes shut.

I can still see it all clearly. Though I am aware my memory may have changed the details with each revisit, the stillness of her face is consistent.

I remember saying, ‘Why’s Mummy’s eyes closed?’

My sister didn’t say anything. She was seven. Time moves differently when you’re two. It’s much bigger then, and there is more room to play in it. Such long afternoons up trees. My mother’s stillness dominated everything. Although I could still see her face clearly, I couldn’t see the damage done.

The rest is collage and jumpcuts.

One woman ran from her car with a toilet roll, to stem the flow of blood from my sister’s head. She was quite a big lady, who looked kind. My dad had been following us in his car and this was the one piece of good fortune in all the bad luck, as it undoubtedly saved my mother’s life. He persuaded the ambulance driver that the local hospital did not have the facilities to deal with Mum’s injuries and that she must be taken somewhere better equipped. Later on, the medical people would say it was this act of furious persuasion that saved her life.

We are all unreliable narrators of our past. My injured sister, Sarah, remembers it slightly differently. She saw more than me because she was sitting up rather than searching for a plastic gun. She saw the lights of the car coming straight at us...