Was bullied by the standup colleagues
Published at 07:00
Evelyn Mok was close to giving up on her comedy dreams.
In “Summer in P1”, she now talks about how exposed she was by her own colleagues.
– Those who were closest to me were the same people who would eventually break me, she says.
Evelyn Mok38, is today a successful comedian and has appeared both on big stages and in various television programs. But it has not always been obvious to her that she would be a comedian today.
In 2008, she began her career on the stand-up stage. She quickly climbed the ranks and got her own comedy series on SVT called “Evelyn’s Videoblogg”.
– But something started to go wrong. Even though I put myself on stage as often as I could, I didn’t get any funnier, just more and more anxious, she says in her summer talk.
Moved abroad
She decided to take a break from Sweden and moved to London.
In the beginning, she felt welcomed and accepted by her stand-up colleagues.
– But I noticed that the sharper I became on stage, the more damnable the comedians around me became.
A colleague and friend of Mok told her that she had been disqualified from a novice competition. Later, Mok found out that the whole thing was “just a prank”, i.e. a joke.
– The bullying became so serious that my roommates started reacting to my comedian friendships. “What kind of people do you associate with?” they asked.
Then she thought it had to do with the fact that comedians usually tease each other. There was a bit of rough jargon and “friendly mischief”.
– What I didn’t know at the time was that those who were closest to me were the same people who would eventually break me, says Mok.
She says that one of the people she was closest to in the comedy industry hung her up on stage by telling physical, intimate details about her.
– I felt humiliated and removed. Somewhere I fell apart.
Evelyn Mok: “Clearly depressed”
She felt worse and worse and canceled more and more standup gigs.
– I was clearly depressed, says Mok.
At the same time, she did not want to move back to Sweden as she saw it as a failure.
In the midst of her misery, she began to use it on stage. She joked about herself and her mood, and it hit home. She got bigger and bigger in Britain. In the end, she was noticed by international media such as the BBC and praised by, among others, the presenter Graham Norton.
Despite the success, she had a hard time appreciating it.
The pandemic became her salvation. She could go home to Sweden and Gothenburg.
Mok says that there she realized that those she thought were her friends were instead her perpetrators. For a long time, she found it difficult to talk about the tough time in London.
– But I want to talk about it, because I want people to understand how devastating relationships like this can be. Above all, how lonely it is, because emotional abuse leaves no physical wounds. The goal is to make the person become their own worst critic and eat away at their self-esteem until it is gone. That’s why we have to talk about it, because when you talk about it, you slowly but surely start to erase the shame instead of fattening it.
