Sooz Kempner talks about her latest show Class of 2000

Following her sell out 2023 Fringe show Y2K Woman, viral sensation Sooz Kempner is taking to the road this autumn with her brand-new show Class of 2000, which arrives at Lowry, Salford on 16 November. Continuing with the theme of growing up in the early 2000’s, Sooz’s new show takes a look at class though the lens of a teenage girl growing up during the turn of the century.

Tell us about your new tour of your latest stand up show, ‘Class of 2000’.
Sooz: “Hello! Class of 2000 is a show about looking back on who we are at 15…and being surprised at how little has changed! It’s also a show about the wonders of the Viennetta. How can something that beautiful still cost less than two quid? I wanted to write a nostalgic show for anyone who remembers the 90s and had massive dreams as a kid”.

What do you hope audiences take away from the show?
Sooz: “That the Viennetta truly is the peak of human design”.

Your show is set during the Millennium, when you were fifteen years old. What would you like to tell your fifteen year old self if you could?
Sooz: “This is a strong theme in the show actually! I’d love to tell her that eventually she’ll get to be a full-time comedian for a career and it won’t be nearly as glamorous as she’d hoped BUT it will still somehow be the absolute dream job. I’ll also tell her that, one day, you’ll be able to listen to any song you want instantly and won’t have to spend three days downloading it from Napster”.

How did you find being a 15 year old girl growing up in Horley?
Sooz: “Horley is the most standard commuter town you’ve ever seen in your life so with nothing fun to do in the town itself I immersed myself in things like video games and movies and the burgeoning internet. I thought I was the height of class and sophistication because I owned a Gul pencil case and sported a black plastic tattoo choker, and maybe I was to be honest”.

Given that your show centres around the year 2000, how did you spend your millennium New Year’s Eve?
Sooz: “I was on the Isles of Scilly with extended family. It’s wild there, everyone does fancy dress and just sort of staggers between the three pubs on the main island…I wore my very best silver sequin boob tube from New Look and spent the whole night holding it up coz at the time it was more tube than boob. I had teamed it glitter lip gloss and back then I had two hairstyles for big nights: scraped back in a bun with two strands coming down OR crown of multicoloured plastic butterfly clips. As the new millennium was such a special occasion…I’d done both. I was also quietly terrified of the Millennium Bug and was slightly convinced that, as Trevor McDonald counted down to the midnight, the TV would start running around like a spider”.

How did you get into performing stand up?
Sooz: “I’d always wanted to try it but figured it was just for other people, I had no idea how to start. In my early 20s I did NewsRevue, the world’s longest running live sketch show, and one of the guys in that had started stand-up so I booked my first open mic, figured I’d try it out for about 6 months and see how things went and now it’s been 15 years and there’s literally no way out haha”.

We hear this was your 10th year performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. How did your 10th year compare to your first?
Sooz: “I was very lucky with my first fringe in 2014, I had stumbled across great marketing by accident (the show was called Defying Gravity and was Wicked-themed) and I had cracking audiences. This very much lulled me in to a false sense of security….in 2016 I took a multi-character show to the fringe, inspired by my childhood faves, Victoria Wood and Steve Coogan, and I played to an average of six people a day in a dark, damp cave. They were mostly baffled. The worst day was when two people came to see the show…and they didn’t know each other. And one was a big TV commissioner. They sat politely as I had the longest hour of my life on stage to date. Afterwards I thanked the commissioner for coming with tears streaming down my face which was very dignified. The fact that I returned to the fringe after that was probably more a sign of foolishness than bravery but over the past few years I really built on what I learned from that lucky first fringe and horrendous 2016 fringe. Now I have lovely, returning audiences and I’m proud to say it’s currently 8 years and counting since I last cried in front of someone who could do something for my career”.

What have you learnt in your ten years performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?
Sooz: “I’ve learnt that the more personal you make your show the more people will relate to it. It’s so strange and not something I’d ever expected but it turns out if you describe extremely specific things that happened to you…people will remember something from their own childhood that they hadn’t thought about in decades….and laugh. I’ve also learnt that if you think something is really funny when you’re writing it it usually works on stage. Although that wasn’t true when I wrote a four minute song about the TV show Luther which absolutely nobody enjoyed and I scrapped it after three tries. I still believe in you, Luther: The Musical! The people just have to catch up!”

You won the Variety Award at the Funny Women Awards in 2012. Which funny women across your life have inspired you the most?
Sooz: “I grew up on Victoria Wood, French and Saunders, and Ab Fab, they were always on in my family home and I actually didn’t realise how much they’d influenced my comedy until I’d been doing standup for about five years…but revisiting their work really showed me how what you absorb at 7 will inform what you do as a fully-grown adult. Thank goodness the house wasn’t just full of Roy Chubby Brown tapes! Both sides of my family are full of funny women too, we all seem to specialise in gallows humour. The year before my Edinburgh debut I saw Bridget Christie’s show, A Bic For Her, and no single hour of comedy has inspired me more. I saw it at exactly the right time and she showed me that you can do comedy about whatever you like, make it personal, make it angry and people will relate, laugh and come back for more.”

What makes you laugh most?
Sooz: “I’d like to say truly original absurdist political satire and then list ten examples but my honest answer is: videos of cats falling off stuff. Have you seen any of this sort of thing? Absolutely brilliant. No notes”.

You act on stage and on screen too, as well as your stand up career. How does that inform your stand up style?
Sooz: “It’s more that stand-up informs the acting. Stand-up comedy is, or certainly should be, a performer at their most vulnerable. You’re going up on stage and every 20 seconds essentially saying “Do you like this?” and hoping for direct positive feedback from the audience. So when you then act in a show with other performers and somebody else’s script I can’t tell you how relaxing it is”.

And finally, what are you most looking forward to about coming to Salford?
Sooz: “Meeting people who didn’t know they felt the same as I do. It’s amazing how many people I meet after shows who say ‘but I thought I was the only one who remembered something extremely weird from 25 years ago?’ and an entire audience has gone “EEEYYEEEEEEP!” when I’ve brought it up on stage. It’s the best! I also like to check out the local Wetherspoons”.

And where can people find, follow and like you online?
Sooz: “I’m still on X (the website formerly known as Twitter), they’ll have to drag me out of there in a box, @SoozUK if you are similarly unhinged. I’m also on Instagram, TikTok, Youtube…all of them it turns out, just search Sooz Kempner and there I’ll be”.