Life and Laughing: My Story by Michael McIntyre Read Free Book Online

must have been very young at this time; in fact this might rival Poo-gate as my earliest memory. I love cuddling my two boys but seldom wonder what the experience might be like for them. They are little, soft and wonderful. I am not.
    Well, I vividly recall these early-morning cuddles with my dad. Not only was he a big naked hairy man, but his mouth was about the size of my little head. I will never forget his hot cigarettey breath blasting into my tiny face. At regular intervals, my hair would be blown horizontal as I would try to avoid it, like Keanu Reeves avoiding bullets in the Matrix trilogy.

    My dad and me eating breakfast in bed – the scene of his morning-breath cuddles.
    Morning breath (something I have discussed at length in stand-up) is bad enough – cigarettes certainly don’t improve things. Occasionally my father would be sipping coffee in bed. The combination of morning breath, cigarette breath and coffee breath became almost lethal. I think he was one garlic clove away from actually killing me. I would peek over to the other side, where Lucy and my mother were enjoying day-beginning cuddles and then return to my father’s life-threatening monster breath blowing a gale into my face. Come to think of it, maybe this is what was affecting my vocal cords. Maybe my morning dad cuddles also shaped the way I look. Nowadays I always look a bit windswept and squinting, which is exactly how I would have looked in the eye of his breath-storm.
    My dad was a heavy smoker. Outside of his wives and children, the two great loves of his life were Marlboro and Camel. He began smoking as a twelve-year-old in Montreal when, believe it or not, smoking was encouraged for health reasons. Then, your ‘five a day’ referred to cigarettes. It was as if he smoked every minute of the day. Remember in those days there were no restrictions on smoking. So he’d be smoking in restaurants, on aeroplanes, in cinemas, on the bus, on the Tube. He was smoking when he said his marriage vows, he smoked while sleeping and when he swam underwater. My dad never managed to quit.
    I myself started smoking as a teenager and smoked about a pack of Marlboro Lights a day until my mid-twenties. Giving up was one of the biggest achievements of my life. I read Allen Carr’s book How to Stop Smoking and would recommend it to anybody trying to kick the filthy habit. In fact, I have recommended it many times, including to a very sweet, chain-smoking former tour manager of mine who then accidentally read Alan Carr’s Look Who It Is! , the 2008 autobiography by everyone’s favourite camp comedian. He then bizarrely reported, ‘I read that Alan Carr book you told me about. I thought it was hilarious and yes, I have been smoking less, thank you.’
    Apart from my parents’ room and the living room, the rest of our Hampstead flat is a bit of a blur. Strangely, comedy was already in the building as living in the flat above was the comedy writer John Junkin , who appeared with the Beatles in the film A Hard Day’s Night . I don’t ever remember him upright. He was always sitting, in fact almost lying, in his chair, and he seemed to have most of his life around his neck. His glasses were on a cord hanging around his neck, as were his lighter and a bottle opener. I think he might have also had a compass and maybe a medal for the longest time sat in one chair. Even as a toddler who could only grunt I thought, ‘That’s odd.’ The other bizarre thing in the Junkin household was the astonishing amount of Lucozade. This family was addicted to Lucozade. The whole flat had a sort of orange glow, like David Dickinson’s bathroom.
    John was married to Jenny. Jenny and my mother became the best of friends almost immediately, chatting to each other, from their respective flats, through makeshift telephones made of plastic cups and string. My mother’s name was Kati, pronounced ‘Cottee’ (I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this before), but Jenny called