Standup comic Emmanuel Sonubi brings his laughable Curriculum Vitae to The Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth

​However Emmanuel Sonubi came close to literally experiencing it when his heart stopped during a show.

"It came out of nowhere,” explains the Londoner. “It’s a condition called dilated cardiomyopathy.

“I had no idea I had it, but this happened in 2019 in Dubai while I was doing a comedy show. It was the end of my set, I was telling my finishing joke then suddenly I couldn't breathe. I didn't know what was happening.

“I was very fortunate to get through it, but it changed my outlook on a lot of things. I'm healthier now than I was before that – I changed how I train, I changed my diet, I stopped smoking.

“With that and then the pandemic, I got a much clearer picture of what I wanted from life. I said, ‘what am I doing?!’”

Emmanuel turned professional as a comic in 2020 – four years after first being convinced to try out at an open mic night.

Emmanuel’s new show is called Curriculum Vitae, which takes the audience on a hilarious and sometimes poignant journey through a variety of jobs and industries many of which, he was wildly unqualified to do. From working in IT to the doors of London’s nightlife, all while building up an impressive list of musical theatre credits.

Asked when he last had to actually give someone his CV, he pauses to think for a moment.

"Someone asked me this before, and I said something else, but I've just thought of something I hated more. I'd blocked it out!

“I went through a period where I had no work on, so I had no money to even get the (SIA licence) badge I needed to do door work.

“Any honest job is good money, so my brother-in-law lent me money to get my badge. Then through a friend of a friend I got a job managing retail security contracts. One of them was for Waitrose in Edgeware Road in London. I hate that place more than words can say. Retail security was the worst job – guarding other people's stuff that I don't care about was the hardest thing to do. And some of Waitrose's customers were some of the worst people imaginable...

“You're meant to stop everything, but I'd be thinking, if he wants the chewing gum that badly...

“The main reason I hated it was more because I didn't want to do it. If I'd done it 10 years earlier it wouldn't have bothered me, but it represented the polar opposite of where I wanted to be in life. It taught me a good lesson – it taught me patience and consistency. I said to myself, ‘I have to do this job for two and a half years to clear everything and then I can start again’. It was a slog, but every shift was one closer to the end. When I got to leave there, ah, it was the best.”

He recalls another incident that makes him squirm now.

“It was about 2016, and I was applying to do roles for recruitment.

“I actually had an interview for a really good place and I ruined it with a joke. I had this lovely interview, and I reckon I was sure foot-in.

"At the end of the interview, this guy was saying, ‘You're going to be great, you can clearly do this’, and then he says, recruitment is just selling people. So I replied: ‘I don't know if you know, but that's kind of wrong. They stopped doing that a few hundred years ago.’

"I said it as if I thought it was funny, but he went straight into ‘I-can't-laugh-at-that’ corporate mode, and it was, ‘Thank you for your time,’ and I never heard back from them.”

However Sonubi says his chequered career history wasn’t about him working towards being a comic.

"None of my jobs fed into standup – standup was never the goal. I only realised this was what I wanted to do about eight minutes after I first did it. And that was when someone convinced me to try an open mic night.

“Comedy has always been an escape me, and laughter was a way to deal with the bad.

“Theatre taught me how to be on stage and drama taught me how to tell a story, door work taught me how to have presence, sales taught me about relatability, but all of those different things were part of the jigsaw puzzle that put together and became a standup comedy show.”

You can find out if he’ll be needing that CV any time soon at the Wedgewood Rooms on April 28. ​​​Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.