MANCHESTER man Sam Brady never expected to be a stand-up comedian. Brady was a hugely successful management consultant in finance in London and Manchester – but his realisation that making huge amounts of money didn’t bring happiness and then the death of a loved one had him completely re-evaluate his life.
“I was married and had a little girl. I got divorced and I went off to try and be a Buddhist monk, so I lived as a monk but at the weekend I got to spend time with my daughter. I was a weekend dad,” he explains.
“I’d been in the Buddhist community for three years when my ex-wife sadly died. So I had to leave the community and became a single dad. I say in my show that I’m a failed Buddhist monk, but obviously I didn’t leave through choice.”
Brady’s show, Kindness, has been to Edinburgh and on tour across Britain and having done a date in Dublin he comes to Belfast next week. The show has been described as incredibly uplifting, with highs and lows and filled with self-deprecating laughs.
At the core of the piece is an act of kindness bestowed on Brady himself.
“I’ll not spoil the story, but after my ex-wife died somebody did a very kind thing that was really unexpected. So that was the thing that made me write this show,” he says.
“There’s a lot of comedy in how I tried to be a Buddhist monk and struggled. I’ve always tried to be a kind person, but I fail all the time because I can be grumpy and impatient and bad-tempered. But we’re all like that; you can’t be kind all the time.”
So what made him ditch his high-powered career in business to try and become a Buddhist monk?
“I grew up in a Catholic family – I have Irish roots – but I always struggled with a belief in God, so I gave up religion in my early 20s and there was a vacuum in my life and I filled it with work.
“I worked really hard and I was quite successful in big financial institutions and made a lot of money by the time I was in my early 30s. I was suddenly making loads of money and didn’t know what to do with it. I was married and we had a child and we had a big house and a big car but I was working up to 70 hours a week.
“I reached a point when I started to think that there must be more to life than getting money and spending it. I went to a meditation class and I realised that I was unhappy and my wife was unhappy and our marriage was failing. We had all this stuff but it wasn’t making us happy.
“When our marriage ended, I gave my wife everything and I went away and started with nothing. I knew I wanted some sort of spiritual life but I didn’t believe in God and then I came across Buddhism.”
Yet he says he didn’t travel to Nepal or some other exotic destination to undergo his monk training.
“I did go to the edge of civilization – Moss Side in Manchester,” he laughs, referring to the notoriously 'gritty’ area of the city. “But it was great, because I lived with people who had kindness as their number one priority – nobody cared about ambition or drive.”
After Brady left the Buddhist community to bring his daughter up, he needed work and so started giving talks and seminars on business analysis.
“It all felt a bit dry, so I started throwing in a few jokes and people said I should have a go at stand-up. I thought about my three years of studying Buddhism and then my ex-wife passing away and everything else and I was struck by the absurdity of human beings and how we always seem to get our priorities wrong.
“So I started doing stand-up clubs, where I’d be playing to drunk people, then I wanted to do something with a bit more depth. I wrote a show called Meditation Ruined My Life in 2011 and then I wrote this Kindness show.”
He says the show mixes autobiography with stand-up and admits that it isn’t a 'joke-after-joke' set-up.
“The theme of the show is about kindness and how I think it’s our common humanity that really matters. I believe that every human being is capable of doing one kind thing that somebody will never forget.”
:: Sam Brady brings his show Kindness to the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast on Wednesday October 21 at 8pm. For tickets (£10/£12), see CrescentArts.org or call 028 9024 2338.
