An Edinburgh Comedy Award double-nominee, London comic Emmanuel Sonubi has been slowly but steadily on the rise for the last five years. A confident and relaxed stage presence, his latest show, Life After Near Death, touches on how he survived heart failure and the strange and funny ways we find to keep going when life gets tough.

2025 is your tenth year in stand-up isn't it?

Yes, it is. This is year number 10! I think it's 10 years in November? I actually forget the exact day that I started. I could probably find it though, so I should probably have a look.

It all started at an open mic night. Were you lured onto the stage? Or did you know beforehand you were going to give it a try?

I was persuaded beforehand by a friend of mine, who had done a comedy course. And she was saying to me, 'there's this open mic that you should definitely go to, it's called Dirty Dicks and it's at Liverpool Street (The Dirty Dicks pub in Bishopsgate, London), so emailed them, you'll definitely get on.' And I really didn't want to do it, but I thought if I'm emailing them, the likelihood is they'll never get back to me. But they did (laughs). Once I said I'd do it, I was like, okay, now I have to do it.

But the funny thing was that what gave me the confidence to do it is when I told my friends, and they were supportive, which was very weird because you know what boys are like? You could do something as small as change your haircut, and we are going to give you a full-on roast for at least a year! Whereas this, all of them were like, 'yeah, that sounds about right. You'd be good at that!' And I thought, maybe they're right.

Did you know straight away, on that night, that you wanted to see where stand-up would take you?

There was that point, when I first got that first laugh, where I thought, yeah, this makes sense. (Then in August 2020) I decided I wasn't happy with what I was doing and comedy was the thing that made me happy - and I thought I'm not going to let this be my hobby, I'm going to go and do this and I'm going to do it properly.

You'd previously worked in musical theatre and door security - which don't seem obviously connected to stand-up, but actually like the perfect training.

You literally get everything you'll ever need from both. The theatre taught me how to have stage presence and door work taught me how to use that stage presence in an authoritative way that makes people listen.

Your new live show, Life After Near Death, comes from a real near death experience ...

Yeah, yeah, I was on stage, in Dubai. It was at the end of the gig and I just couldn't breathe. I got back to the UK and then I was in intensive care for about two, three weeks, something like that. And then when I got released, I was treated as an outpatient. When I got home, about a week after that, I then had a mini stroke.

When did you think this near fatal incident could be 'comedy gold'?

I actually thought that instantly, when I was in hospital [in 2019]. At that point, I was starting to write my first show, and I just got to the 40-minute mark of the show, and I couldn't think of what to write. And lying in a hospital bed, I was like, 'oh, great. I'll write about this as a joke.' That's when I started to really think it through and start trying to process it. It never made it into that show.

But this show isn't just about that that brush with The Grim Reaper is it?

No, no. The near-death part is only a small portion of it. The real story is how it's affected me since. It really is life changing. So the nice thing is I now get to share that with other people.

Emmanuel Sonubi: Life After Near Death is at The Glee Club, Birmingham, on 9 October 2025 as part of Birmingham Comedy Festival (3 - 12 October). www.bhamcomfest.co.uk

Photo credit: JIKSAW