‘I joked about my life – Ma’s murder, child abuse, gangsters’: how Janey Godley became the queen of comedy

The Scottish comedian has drawn on her grisly Glaswegian childhood to create comedy gold. She talks about saying the unsayable, escaping her gangster in-laws and taking on Donald Trump and Boris Johnson

Janey Godley proddings her chin lovingly, as she talks about ageing. “I enjoyed putting up word-paintings on Twitter of me with no makeup. See every wrinkle, ” says the Glaswegian comedian, who is 58. For a glancing instant, she sounds a little awestruck. “I subsisted rape, I lived my Ma being murdered, this is my face. If it offends you, don’t look at it. I anticipate other people should have that attitude.”

Godley is sitting in the kitchen of the elegant Edinburgh tenement flat she has rented for the duration of the fringe with her daughter Ashley Storrie, a successful comic too, of whom her mum is glowingly proud. It is a biblically rainy day, and Godley has made a shoe-changing station of plastic bags and a small stool at the front entrance, anxious to keep the carpets clean.

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