‘I texted my agent from the ambulance’: Susie McCabe on surviving - and laughing about it

When Scottish comedian Susie McCabe first picked up a microphone, it wasn’t part of a grand plan.

“It was just a dare,” she laughs.

“One night, a friend and I had been over to visit Maz Carruthers. Maz had just come back to the UK and been diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer.

“This was maybe early 2010, back before chaos enveloped the world. Life was just floating along, and we said, ‘we should do something to scare ourselves’.”

The “something” turned out to be a stand-up comedy course.

“My mate said, ‘Let’s do it, I dare you'”, McCabe recalls. “And I thought, well, it’s a dare – you can’t say no to a dare.”

That spur-of-the-moment challenge set her on a path that would make her one of Scotland’s best-known comedians, selling out theatres from Aberdeen to the King’s in Glasgow.

McCabe is now a regular on radio and television, a fixture at the Edinburgh Fringe, and one of the few comics to have earned the praise of her comedy hero, Billy Connolly. But she’s never forgotten that first jolt of fear.

“That’s the dichotomy of stand-up, isn’t it?” she says. “The adrenaline, the fear that if it fails, you’ll never live it down, but when it works, it’s the best feeling in the world. It’s like a drug.

“That’s why comedians that have been successful, and went away from doing stand-up, they always come back to being a stand-up. They always end up touring. They can do radio. They can do TV. They can do everything. But they will still always love just treading boards and making people laugh. And I think that’s the best thing in the world.”

Born and raised in Glasgow’s East End, McCabe’s comedy has always been rooted in working-class experience – stories of family, friendship, and the absurdity of daily life.

“I’m observational when I talk about my life and kind of tell stories and try and be a bit of a raconteur,” she says. “And that’s what I love. I love looking at the absurdities of life and kind of poking fun at it.”

McCabe’s gift for exposing the daftness in everyday life has made her a favourite on the Scottish circuit and beyond.

“You’ll see it in an audience,” she says. “I used to have a bit about how when a son returns home to his mother, the mum’s like, ‘I’ll make you a bite to eat,’ and a whole roast appears on the table.

“But a daughter walks into her mother’s and suddenly the mum’s like, ‘You need to put the kettle on,’ as if they’re dehydrated until the daughter appears.

“And that is a thing where you would see husbands looking at their wives going, ‘That’s you.’ And they’re going, ‘That’s you. That’s your mother.’ And I think I love the daftness of it where people really home in and go, ‘That’s our house.’”

Before comedy, McCabe worked in construction – one of the few women on-site.

“I’ve always tended to work in a man’s world,” she says. “And I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy. So, I’ve always felt quite comfortable in those surroundings.

“But when you’re in those surroundings, you as the woman need to be better. And that’s just a fact of life. Now, I’m not saying it’s right, but you have to be better. So, whether you’re working on sites or you’re working in entertainment, you have to be good to be taken seriously.”

It’s that grounded confidence, coupled with a deep pride in her Glasgow roots, that fuels her success.

“I come from a city that has given this country Dorothy Paul, Elaine C. Smith, Karen Dunbar, and Janey Godley. So, there is no way that women aren’t funny,” she says.

“What I do think is that there’s a public perception, and I’ll be honest, I’ve had most of that perception from other women. And it’s always women of a certain age. A man has never said to me, ‘Women aren’t funny.’ I mean, they’ll say that to you online when they’re behind a keyboard. But they won’t say it to your face.

“I’ve had women come up to me after shows, and they’ll say, ‘I really enjoyed that. And I didn’t think you’d be funny, because I don’t like women comedians.’ And you’re like, are we still fighting against this? No one goes up to a woman accountant and says, ‘I cannot believe you can count.’ Or goes up to a female engineer and they’re like, ‘How are you getting on with that engineering?’ You wouldn’t dream of that. But there does seem to be that perception that women can’t be funny on a stage.”

McCabe has clearly proved them wrong. Her shows routinely sell out across Scotland, and her audience now spans generations. “Fortunately, I’ve managed to break through with a lot of that, and a lot of my audience are women. But a lot are also men.”

In 2024, her resilience was tested when she suffered a heart attack while travelling to a gig – and, in typical fashion, found the humour in it.

“I remember sitting in the ambulance getting taken to the specialist heart unit at Bristol Western Infirmary. I text my agent, and I just took a picture, and I went, ‘I’m going to have some show next year.’”

Even then, laughter came first. “Because you’ve got to find the humour in that,” she says. “You’ve just got to find the humour and you’ve got to look at the silliness of the situation.

“Okay, it’s very serious and all that, but my life was saved by an amazing team. They’ve done an angioplasty on me, and I’ve been fine ever since.”

Performing about it, she says, has been cathartic. “When you’ve went through trauma like that, it’s very cathartic to kind of share this experience and say, ‘But wait until I tell you what happened. And then I found myself using a commode and then I found myself doing this’. And it’s stuff that people are like, ‘This is a nightmare.’ ‘Oh no, this is a… that’s that I’m having Weetabix from a breakfast’.”

Her comeback was marked by one of her career highlights – winning the Sir Billy Connolly Spirit of Glasgow Award at last year’s Comedy Festival.

“I just remember thinking, this is the strangest moment of my entire life,” she says.

“Billy Connolly said my name, and then he told my own joke back to me… And you think, ‘well, that’s it!’ I’ve literally made Billy Connolly laugh out loud. So, it doesn’t matter what a critic says ever again, because that is the ultimate stamp of ‘you’re funny’.

“To me, he’s the best there has ever been. And that is the end of that discussion. But for him to tell your joke back to you and see that you made him laugh out loud in this kind of wonderful way of lecturing a Glasgow audience, as he put it, it was… he got me in a nutshell. That’s like John Lennon saying you’ve written a good song. Who cares what the rest of you think?”

Far from slowing down, McCabe is already deep into new projects. She’s writing a new show for Glasgow’s King’s Theatre called Coming of Rage – “because I’m 45 and angry” – and preparing to tour her acclaimed Fringe show Best Behaviour across the UK and Ireland next spring.

“The show about me trying to be my best behaviour post-heart attack… Audiences will be the judge if I’m on my best behaviour.”

Watch Scotland Tonight: A Conversation with Susie McCabe tonight on STV and the STV Player.