Jonny & The Baptists on touring The Happiness Index

Written by: Kat Mokrynski
Published: Tuesday 18th March 2025

After a successful run at last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Jonny & The Baptists (Jonny Donahoe and Paddy Gervers) are bringing The Happiness Index on tour. The show was inspired by the "happiness index" that David Cameron sent out during his time as Prime Minister, trying to find a number to put on the level of happiness people were feeling in the UK.

Recently, we had the chance to speak with Donahoe and Gervers about The Happiness Index. We discussed how the duo first got started in musical comedy, what the creative process was like for formulating this show and even how the word "ladder" can be used to describe it!

How did you first get started in the world of musical comedy?

Jonny: Oh, well, now that's so long ago, and we've told the story so many times, it's almost impossible to know what's true! But essentially, about 14,000 years ago in 2011, we started working together. I was mostly a comedian and Paddy was mostly a musician. We'd both done work the other way around, and we wanted to do it together - we did this as our side project, for just a bit of fun. Got booked for a gig, it went quite well, so we got booked for another gig that went quite well. And then because of that, weirdly, we ended up headlining a festival in Croatia - a possible mistake booking, sure! So we had to write enough for that length set. And then it stopped being a side project when we just kept doing it, and people kept asking us to come back and do more until it became what we do now. And so that's quite fortunate, but it's true!

Paddy: I don't really know what to add to that! It sounds a bit like we went to the shop to buy some veg, and then we ended up working at the shop!

Jonny: We have four things in common. We have very similar tastes in music, very similar tastes in comedy. We had the same kind of left-wing progressive politics, and we both had a number of mental health breakdowns. Between all of those things, it coalesced into this partnership. Because, other than that, we're slightly different looking. You're very tall and I'm also tall, and you're very thin and I'm quite thin! [Laughs]

And what inspired you to create your current show, The Happiness Index?

Paddy: The Happiness Index is interesting! I'm not going to ruin it, but the ending of the show is an ending that we've been making a joke about doing since we started working together, and then we came to write the show and said, "Maybe this is the one where we do that ending." So we started from the ending and worked backwards to say, "How would you realistically get to this point where the audience will go, 'Yeah, that makes sense.'"

Jonny: But I suppose the starting point is 97 Prime Ministers ago, when David Cameron was in charge, he set up a Happiness Index, which was a questionnaire he wanted us all to fill in to show just how happy he and the Conservatives had made Britain. And when they got the results, they shelved them, understandably, because they weren't quite what they wanted.

Paddy: I received that test because I, at the time, was living in David Cameron's constituency, and I'd just come of age to vote. So I got sent this questionnaire and I filled it in. I had been struggling with a number of mental health problems. But then I got told by the government that I was also sort of numerically sad and statistically depressed! And so the show charts from that moment till now, against the background of whether or not there is a connection between the nation's happiness and our own personal happiness - how people vote, and whether there is any correlation there. It's more set dressing, I'd say, the politics in this show, but it's the framework.

Helpfully, there are so many Prime Ministers that it does give a five-act structure! So it charts each of our spiraling brains. And it's also fun! [Laughs] It's a show we wanted to write for a long time. We've always done political shows, but about five years ago, particularly when we approached and then were in the pandemic, our shows moved away from party politics and went to a lot more to do with mental health and the NHS - more about the population than its sometimes unelected leaders. So the show remains very political but takes a bit of a more human stance.

So you started the show from the end. Is that something you normally do with your shows? Or was this a different creative process than normal?

Jonny: It was definitely a different creative process generally because we worked with a really lovely director called James Rowland, who's a storyteller and theatre maker. The way he often makes a show is to have a concept; know where you're going; not write a thing down; improvise it in front of an audience; and then just keep doing that over and over. You keep the spontaneity of it - it's like creating oral work, and that's what we did with this. We started without a script, but with a bag full of post-it notes with ideas on and then we laid them all out. Then he made us perform an entire hour - the first time was obviously dreadful! And then you keep doing that until you feel like you're building on something. It's a really interesting and different way of working. We'll definitely do it again, but it's really hard. It makes for very different work. It's quite an interesting thing when you're doing a storytelling show to try and galvanise some of that. Because we're not storytellers - we're stand-up/musical comedian/theatre makers - but it's a nice way to lean on another person's art.

Paddy: It's good as well, because now we live in different countries. We used to write twenty minutes and then dig it for ages and go, "Oh, that's bulletproof now. We can put that into a show." And now we can't really gig in the same way, because we live seven hours away from each other.

Jonny: I live in Glasgow, and Paddy lives in . . . I can't remember what it's called . . . .

Paddy: London!

Jonny: That's it!

Paddy: [Laughs] And so now a lot of our shows become arriving at the same place and walking out on stage and going, "Hello, what are we doing?" There was about a year where every single one of our shows started with us catching up on stage because we hadn't seen each other in months until that moment, and we realised that was actually quite fun!

Jonny: A nice little bit, so we started using that.

Paddy: And that does sound like a convenient excuse for having not written a lot of material!

Jonny: But the thing about improvising is, we generated nine hours of material that you strip and strip and strip back. So it's quite a different process. It's quite fun/scary!

Paddy: Keeps it from going stale, as well.

In comparison to The Happiness Index, what is your typical creative process like for a show?

Jonny: I wonder if this is more common than people let on. Every time we start a new thing, I'm like, "How do we do this? Does anyone remember?" Every time you restart, you have to learn again in the first couple of weeks of making. Whilst we're doing Happiness, we're also at the start of our next project, which is a very loose adaptation of Dante's Inferno. I say "very loose" - I have not read it.

Paddy: Neither have I!

Jonny: So it's never gonna be bang-on. But the point is, the traditional way to make stand-up is to go out on stage, have a list of ideas and start making in front of an audience. The way you do theatre is to formally write it and then learn it and perform it. What we do is half of each, and that's what works for us. Because if it's just scripted, learnt, performed, it doesn't have that spontaneous, genuine thing that you get in comedy. But if it's entirely like that, it can't have such a weird and unusual story frame and all those things that we like to add in - the songs and things.

Paddy: What I've discovered recently is now that we have tech in the show, because there are lights and things, we got asked recently if we could send the tech script to a venue. Never written any of this down. We had to write one up and there are pages of it that are just blank with a stage direction that says, "They bicker."

Jonny: Our producer, Nisha, is absolutely brilliant - does so much for us. She can touch type, so she listened to the audio and typed it up. There are bits where she was like, "I don't know what the hell you're sayin!"

Paddy: "They will talk at this stage for up to fifteen minutes."

How do you find a balance between the silly moments and the more serious ones in the show?

Well, the personal stuff comes very easy. The only way to talk about those sorts of things is to try and be fun, to try and be engaging and entertaining about it, because then it allows people to feel, to let them into it. And some of the some of the saddest bits in the shows are also some of the funniest because, in order to get there, we've had to be quite ridiculous. The political stuff the last ten years, apart from it being incredibly depressing, is silly - it's not like it's made any sense or been very serious. We've just had a rolling catalogue of narcissists and sociopaths each running the country for forty days, bankrupting us, and then another one of these idiots comes in. So that's not hard. You get a lot of the humour of detailing what's happened in the last decade by just saying it aloud. You don't even have to add the joke on sometimes, because it's just like, "Oh, wow, I forgot they really were that awful and incompetent!"

Paddy: There was a time when we tried to shy away from talking about politics on stage, because it felt so relentless and people were coming out for a nice evening. You didn't want to come out and be like, "Oh, hey, do you remember how everything is shit?" But interestingly, in trying to shy away from that and talk more about brains, it turns out that is quite interconnected. And we ended up talking about politics anyway, because our day-to-day lives are now political, whether we like it or not.

There was a time when people could have the luxury of saying, "I don't want to do politics," but now it is so ingrained in everything. Every one of your everyday struggles is in some way connected to the state of the world around you. When that state of the world is pants, you're going to end up referring to it. And I think the balance works in this show because we did it in reverse. We used to go, "Here's the political situation, here's how it made us feel." And now our shows are a bit more, "Here's how we're actually feeling. Oh, and by the way, this was going on at the time." It turns out it is a two-way street.

And what was it like performing the show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year?

Jonny: It was lovely, actually!

Paddy: That was a good one.

Jonny: Yeah, it was really fun. So we have a really good venue that we always go to now at the Fringe, which is a Spiegeltent - a big, wooden, weird, amphi-theatrical tent. It's great, it's big, you fill it with lots of people and we have lots of fun. And I do really love the Fringe. It's quite a weird place because it's prohibitively expensive now for people to make shows or go to them - not because of the price of the shows, but because of the price of staying there. So it's a complicated thing, but our experience this year was great because we just went and did the show. People were very complimentary and we sold lots of tickets, so you can't really complain about that at all! It's nice being in one place because we tour so much!

Paddy: I think we also set up a framework this year with a show about mental health. Now that we've been doing shows like that for a while, we're more aware of how we've got to look after each other, both on stage and off. We've done shows in the past, never to disaster, where we've danced with some pretty dark stuff, and then been young enough and, in our eyes, drunk enough to be like, "We're coping!" And now, doing this show, we're aware that it touches on some stuff for both of us. We just have to make sure that we're having a nice time around it, otherwise you could end up in a cycle where you use that hour on stage to go, "Oh, this is how sad I am," and you come off and go, "Everything's fine!" And then you make mistakes and have an awful time. But we were really good this year! We were really organised and we had people around us who were making sure we were okay.

Jonny: And we do have really good people. Our producer's wonderful and our director, James, just incredible talent. It's really nice getting to point in your career where you get to work with other people, because at the start you're just sort of a bit lonely. You're just doing it on your own because there's no resources to have anyone else. You get a bit further on, you get to be part of a team. Even though it's just two of us on stage, it's eight people involved in the show, and that's really lovely.

What do you hope audiences take away from The Happiness Index?

Jonny: Merch!

Paddy: Loads of merch. T-shirts, tea towels, bags . . . We've got CDs! No one has a CD player anymore, but God, we sell them!

Jonny: Maybe a chair?

Paddy: Yeah, you can probably get away with a bit of a set if you're really sly!

Jonny: Some of the glasses from the bar...

Paddy: To get people to approach a tricky topic and to get someone to laugh about it is a really good way to talk about difficult things. It's like when you meet someone for the first time. If you're meeting someone and you've got to say, "Hello, I'd like to talk to you about this very difficult thing," they're much more likely to stay and talk to you if you open with a really good joke - they're up for hearing what you say next. So I'd like to think that hopefully, people leave our shows thinking that we've tricked them into enjoying something that traditionally they'd hate! [Laughs]

Jonny: Talking about something serious?

Paddy: Yeah, talking about stuff that's difficult and dark. A lot of us want to spend our free time not thinking about horrors and not dealing with our own problems. But if you can then say, "I've had a really nice time, but I'm also in tears," that's a really cool thing. I think that we're a very unusual act. You'll come away with a sense of joy, but you won't particularly be sure how you got there. I quite like leaving on a mystery!

And finally, how would you describe The Happiness Index in one word?

Jonny and Paddy: Merch! [Laughs]

Jonny: Accessible. All of our venues are accessible. We don't play venues that don't have a lift.

Paddy: We could probably say "uplifting." I keep wanting to say ladder because there's a ladder just out of shot that we both keep looking at!

Jonny: Beyoncé!

Paddy: Can we stick with ladder? It's like a ladder - there's a lot of steps, but you won't always want to climb it. And I can't!

Jonny: You're not legally allowed to!

Paddy: What was that thing that's like, controlled chaos. There's a word for it!

Jonny: If this were in German, it'd be a lot easier! In German, you can portmanteau words really quickly. And the other thing is, the Germans are very good at words that mean something that's quite hard to put your finger on. For instance, there's that word that means you're happy and you're sad at the same time. And I think the word is ladder. [Laughs]

I can't remember exactly, but I'm gonna go with that.

Jonny & The Baptists: The Happiness Index tours until 21st June. Info & tickets