The trouble with Generation Z: ‘None of us can talk about love’

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To her 33,000 Instagram followers, it might look as if the comedian Ania Magliano has everything in order. At 26 she has been nominated for the biggest prize in comedy, the Edinburgh Comedy Award, supported Ed Gamble on his present show Hot Diggity Dog, and is part of the writing team behind Amelia Dimoldenberg’s viral YouTube series Chicken Shop Date. She is happily in love with her fellow comedian Will Rowland, of the comedy duo Crizards. And last month she was announced as the comedy nominee for The Times breakthrough award at the Sky Arts Awards.
Yet she shares the anxieties of her Gen Z peers. Ageing? Yep. Comparing herself to other people? Of course. Her relationship falling apart? You know it. “On the way here, I realised I’ll be 27 next year which kind of spun me out a little bit,” she admits as she sips water in the bar of Soho Theatre in London. “Isn’t that meant to be when everything in your life starts going wrong?”
Already Magliano has had what she calls a “freak out”. Last year she moved in with Rowland and soon after, they started to argue for the first time. “On paper you think, ‘Oh I’m going to move in with this person who is my favourite person, what could possibly go wrong?’ And then it turns out … yeah, everything.” A self-confessed commitment-phobe, she found the transition uncomfortable. “I’m having to push against the instinct that you can’t have anything nice and stable because it’s scary.”
These feelings form the foundations of Magliano’s third show, Forgive Me Father, running at the Edinburgh Fringe. In it she talks candidly about her and Rowland’s relationship — their different communication styles, her fears that the contraceptive coil might be the root of their disagreements, her obsessive stalking of Rowland’s former partner of eight years on social media; “It is risky what I’m doing, it could get back to her.”
Magliano knows she has a tendency to overshare, “but our generation is prone to it, so I don’t feel unusual”. Her relentless honesty has served her well so far. Her previous Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated hour, I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This, used a bad haircut as a way into talking about being sexually assaulted. Why would you want to relive such trauma in front of an audience of strangers? “When you talk about something it gives you more control over a situation,” Magliano says. “I’ve got a new memory almost … now I feel like I have power over it.”
She is used to discussing trauma “quite casually” with her Gen Z friends. “The joke I made about my haircut being the worst thing that happened to me was a joke I genuinely would say all the time.” But she has found that opening up about love is more difficult: “None of us can talk about it.”
Forgive Me Father, then, comes with added stress. Not only has Magliano opted to talk about her romantic feelings (“cringey”) and the way her parents’ divorce has affected her relationships, but she has to follow the success of her previous two Edinburgh shows. The Fringe can be a rat race; there’s always someone above and below you, Magliano explains, and it is easy to fall into the trap of comparison culture.
Does she think this is exacerbated in her generation by a lifetime spent on social media? “I think so,” Magliano says with a nod. “I know social media is bad, I know it is going to make me compare myself, whatever. But then I spend an hour on TikTok and I’ll be like ‘Oh, I’m ugly.’ It gets deep into your brain without even realising it.”
Despite her Edinburgh gongs and the star lustre of colleagues such as Gamble, whom she supported earlier this year, it is her writing for Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date that gets the biggest reaction from friends. Each week Magliano researches Dimoldenberg’s guests, who have included Jennifer Lawrence, Billie Eilish and Louis Theroux, then presents her with a list of bespoke questions. She is quick to add that she is not the “hidden scriptwriter” and that Dimoldenberg still mostly improvises: “The questions are just there for an emergency.”
Stand-up, though, is what Magliano loves most. She fell in love with comedy while interning at the Fringe in 2016, before beginning her English degree at Cambridge. She remembers “a weight being lifted” after watching a routine by Desiree Burch about oral sex: “I’m always striving to recreate that feeling.”
At university she joined the Footlights society but “it was a mixed bag of experiences”. There were “scary” weekly auditions in front of older students and an underlying sense of never “feeling funny or good at anything”. It was dominated by men, so with two friends she set up a rival comedy group for women and non-binary people called Stockings, which did not require people to pass auditions. “It was so nice, it was so fun — and we did it,” she says.
After, Magliano moved to London and worked at a recruitment start-up to pay the bills. “It was a job that people of our generation can get by virtue of having an Instagram account,” she jokes. She gigged in the evenings, until the pandemic hit, when she decided to move back home to live with her mum in Buckinghamshire. Bored, she began putting videos on TikTok, which is when her career started to take off.
She reflects on the irony that it was social media that launched her: “It feels like a real ‘f*** you’ to schools, who were like, ‘No one will hire you because you have a Facebook account’. Now, people will hire you because you have a Facebook account. Thank you very much.” She is successful enough to work as a full-time comedian but Magliano says she finds it difficult to envision her life beyond this year’s Fringe. Maybe she’ll make a TV show or more TikToks — either way, “I want to find forms of comedy that make people less alone in life,” she says.
Her relationship goals are more tangible. “It is all the obvious stuff like, listen to each other and talk about what you need.” Because, despite her reluctance to say it and the nagging feeling that she’s “betraying something” by committing, Magliano is smitten — and, she says, “it is actually OK”.To August 25, pleasance.co.uk; touring from October, aniamagliano.com