Serena Terry says she’s moving backwards. 

The comedian who first found fame as Mammy Banter online and already has sold out tours in venues the likes of the 3Olympia and the SSE Arena under her belt is taking on her first Paddy Power Comedy Festival this July.

‘I wanted to push myself more this year in terms of stand up and meet like-minded people, if that makes sense,’ the Derry woman says. 

‘I feel liked I’ve been siloed in the stand up world because I have obviously had the advantage of social media and been able to book and sell out these big rooms, but it gets quite lonely.’

People she has talked to advised her to get on the comedy festival circuit where she’d meet like minded people who would understand where she’s at. And it’s a personal growth thing for her too.

‘I feel like this is the first year I am going into standup in a proper way,’ she says. 

‘My trajectory was from social media up so I am fully aware of how lucky I’ve been that I haven’t had to do the slog of the pubs and the clubs and go that way, but that’s had its disadvantages because I haven’t got as much stage time the previous two years. I’ve just been going straight out.’

‘To shape my craft, get better, part of my promise to myself was to get out there and go backwards, start doing smaller pubs and clubs and open mics and just build up my hours and my credibility for myself because — and it’s getting better — but I have felt like I cheated a bit, that I came up in such a different way that it does lend a bit of insecurity on my side in terms of credibility as a stand up.’

This insecurity is only from Serena herself - her shows have been big successes but she feels she has raised the bar this year and is more accepting of herself.

Doing something like the Paddy Power Comedy Festival is exciting, she says, a huge test that will open up her audience to more men - the majority who come and see her shows are women.

But tickets for Terry’s show Therapy have been snapped up because she’s funny and sharp and for no other reason than that.

She has unquestionable talent, which makes it hard to believe that a few short years ago she was working as head of communications for a software company in Derry. 

Life changed dramatically — first there was the death of her two brothers, twins who died within six weeks of each other aged just 38, closely followed by Covid and lockdowns.

‘When I was younger, I dabbled in acting and stuff, but I was living a typical kind of mid-thirties life —mortgage, two kids, car. I thought “this is my life now, this is what is planned for me and I will climb the corporate ladder and I’ll do the nine to five”.’

Her grief over the death of her brothers was something she was trying to figure out when we were all plunged into lockdowns and the weirdest life imaginable.

But when her daughter showed Terry TikTok one night, her mindset changed as the laugh it gave her was something she felt she could give to others.

‘I started doing TikToks and I thought “Do you know what? I could give this a go”’ and so Mammy Banter was born.

Her online profile took off and when the offer to write her first book for Harper Collins came in, Serena quit the day job.

‘Financially it was a scary risk, but it was as soon as I got offered the book deal with HarperCollins, they gave me an advance and in my mind I was thinking “that’s my mortgage for three or four months.” So that was my security blanket. 

'And I knew nobody could take away my professional experience, time served, my degree. I could always go back there. So it really was that blessing that comes with grief that you don’t sweat the small stuff, you’re thinking it’ll work out. Worse things could happen.’

Last year Terry had a tour booked that she had to postpone because her marriage breakup and the illness and subsequent death of her father took its toll — the tour, she says, would have been ‘s**t’ at that point and she knew she had to postpone for her own mental health.

It’s part of what her tour Therapy has been centred around, though.

‘I do feel like there are blessings in all of that hardship and that trauma. Obviously it’s s**t, and I still have tough days, but again, I think you need to go through the bad times to appreciate everything good that happens then afterwards and I feel like I’m just getting under that. I’m just pushing myself as hard as I can.

‘Comedy is my coping mechanism. I think it’s just ingrained in us when you’re from Derry or or Ireland — that’s how we cope,’ she says. 

‘My tour Therapy is all about finding the light in the dark and that’s what resonates with people. I find with my audiences it’s being able to relate to something, and that can’t always be good stuff. Nobody wants to come and see a comedian talk about how great their life is — that’s a TED Talk.

‘Personally, I want to have somebody say the dark part out loud, the thing that I’ve also been going through and think about it and feel normal,’ she says. ‘And that to me is a beautiful part of comedy in that you can make people feel less lonely just by being honest, just by being self-deprecating and it feels so natural to me. 

I don’t think I would be able to process it all any other way. It’s like therapy for me, getting up and talking about that stuff. And seeing people laughing and nod their heads and like I’m normal too, just as much as they’re feeling it.’

The therapy is ongoing too —Terry uses talking therapy which works but she’s tried the ‘bulls**t’ the ashwagandha, the breathwork and that gets a going over in her comedy too.

And she is looking forward to giving a new festival audience a taste at the Paddy Power Comedy Festival, meeting new comedians, rubbing shoulders with the bigger names and creating, for want of a better word, some work colleagues to hang out with at the theoretical comedy watercooler.

‘It’s lonely doing gigs on your own and then going to hotels,’ she says. ‘So it is genuinely just feeling like you’ve got colleagues in a career that is very isolating. 

'All the work I do is from home and then when I’m on the road, I am always on my own, so I never had any colleagues in that sense, so now it’s like I have a bank of colleagues and I think that’s why I am enjoying standup so much this year as well.’

Her children are 10 and 17 and so there’s a bit of mammy guilt that kicks in when she’s leaving for work, something she’s trying to combat in her own mind.

‘I just want to stand on my own two feet, make those connections and have my wee unofficial pods of colleagues all over the place,’ she says. 

‘That’s where I think I need to get to truly be happy. It’s the pride stuff and showing my children that when you get knocked down you back up again. 

'Everything goes back to pride and just picking myself up and recognising that I’ve done that. And I’m still continuing to look after the people that I love, and that’s what life’s about.’