“Man, I wish I had a punchline,” says Alex Novak on stage at a comedy club in the new film Is This Thing On? It shows the father of two, played by Will Arnett, stumbling into a bar in search of a late-night drink and unexpectedly doing a turn at the open-mic session to get in for free.
“I think I’m getting divorced,” he says. “What tipped me off is that I’m living in an apartment on my own, and my wife and kids don’t live there.” Grappling for a punchline turns out to be existential. Novak returns, finding the limelight invigorating and triggering creativity.
The film is based loosely on the life of Liverpudlian comedian John Bishop, who was working in a pharmaceutical company and separating from his wife when he chanced upon a comedy club, and ended up performing after a Geordie doing chicken impressions. Watching it, I felt surprisingly moved. Not by the jokes, which were sadly wanting, but by the depiction of midlife turmoil, and the search for joy and meaning. Middle age has its challenges, sandwiched between caring for children and parents.
Commentators have argued it is as much of a transition as adolescence. Though isn’t all life a work in progress? Some 40- and 50-somethings, conscious of their mortality, have an urge to make their jobs more meaningful or less stressful. I know women desperate to make up for lost ambition after their children have left home.
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The film raises interesting questions about career change. Whether a side hustle should become a hobby or a new direction. While it was vague about whether Novak ditches finance to tell jokes full-time, it captures the idea that experimentation may be the right way to find a new vocation. Herminia Ibarra, author of Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, has written that the myth of a successful career change “is knowing what we want to do next and then using that knowledge to guide our actions. But change usually happens the other way around: doing comes first, knowing second.”
Contrary to the trope of dramatically quitting the day job to pursue a new direction, transitions can take time. In Bishop’s case, it took six years of working in sales while gigging in the evenings and weekends until he made the leap at 40.
Another comedian, Romesh Ranganathan, did gigs while teaching maths. “I loved stand-up, but I never thought you could do it as a job,” he says. This is chiefly because, like other creative and entertainment jobs, comedy is so precarious.
Viv Groskop, comedian and author of How to Own the Room, started comedy at 36 and did 100 gigs in 100 consecutive nights in 2011. She tells me, “you absolutely have to do another job concurrently: stand-up is an unpaid apprenticeship for at least the first year or two years and even then you’d be in the – very small – top bracket if you were earning £500 [€580] a week for live work”.
For mid-lifers, she suggests, OnlyFans, the site that hosts adult content, is probably less work for more reward. Whenever I read a story about an artist or fashion designer who made it in their 40s or 50s after a career switch, I reflexively google to see whether they had family money or retired from banking with a payoff. Some hobbies should remain as such. Not only due to the economics or the amateurism, but also because the activity that once brought joy and relief becomes a grind as a job.
Second acts can trigger lament about wasted time. I ask comedian Sindhu Vee whether she regrets her early years as an investment banker. “Definitely not,” she tells me. “Banking gave me a lot: basic professional skills, some more complex skills, like how not to feel intimidated in male-dominated spaces, financial security and a vast ability to tolerate long hours and very little sleep.”
Particularly important is grappling with late nights on stage and early mornings with school-going children. If you make a change, it can have ripple effects. The film is acute on the impact of Novak’s reinvigoration on his wife, who is spurred to make changes in her own life.
And his friend, who feels threatened by this more creative version of himself. Reactions are unpredictable. As the old Bob Monkhouse gag goes: “When I first said I wanted to be a comedian, everybody laughed. They’re not laughing now.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
