Judi Love’s New Standup Tour Dives Into Trauma, Triumph, Motherhood, and Her Rise From Social Worker to TV Star

Judi Love is gearing up for her new standup tour All About the Love, a 23-date run that will take her across the UK next year, and she’s building the show around sharp humour, painful memories, and the lessons she’s carried into her mid-40s. The comedian tested early material at a sold-out Bedford gig where she mixed new stories with crowd work while explaining that the show is still evolving.

One of the most striking stories she shares is the time she was kidnapped at 17 years old by a boy she met at college, a traumatic event she now recounts on stage with humour and clarity. She explains how the situation started with red flags she didn’t recognise, including the boy arriving at her mother’s house naked and crying during their first date.

Love says the incident escalated during a second visit to his home, where she was forced into a shower and held hostage for nearly 48 hours, an experience she now uses to show how people can survive and reclaim their narratives. She emphasises how laughter helps her process old wounds and hopes her transparency gives others permission to release shame and heal.

Her life has been packed recently with television work, including regular appearances on Loose Women, roles on panel shows, and standout moments on Last One Laughing UK and Taskmaster. She also has a script commission and acting roles, including the upcoming Channel 4 comedy Schooled and a part in Girl Group, a Rebel Wilson film slated for 2026.

Off-camera, Love has dealt with grief and family challenges, including supporting friends through loss and parenting her two children, now 20 and 16, as a single mother for two decades. She notes that success doesn’t erase the emotional impact of raising children without their father and says she is often exhausted by the weight of responsibility.

She has started a fitness routine to get healthier rather than slimmer, and she has begun therapy now that she has the resources and mental space to understand long-standing patterns. She also jokes about facing perimenopause, describing it as another challenge that she refuses to let interrupt her work.

Despite severe stage fright, she committed to this new tour because standup allows her to speak without the filters required on daytime television. She plans to talk openly about racism, sexism, misogynoir, single motherhood, and her South London identity, topics she can only partly address on Loose Women due to broadcast restrictions.

Love grew up in East London as the youngest of five, raised by Jamaican women who came to the UK during the Windrush era and worked in nursing, cleaning, and social care. Dyslexia went undiagnosed during school, but she excelled creatively and later became a young carer when her mother suffered multiple strokes, an aneurysm, and eventually dementia.

Her years working in social care shaped her empathy and awareness of how fragile stability can be, especially for working-class and Black women. After her mother died in 2009 and she fell into depression, a friend helped her escape to Barbados, a trip that inspired her to pursue comedy in 2011 while also completing a master’s degree in social work by 2014.

She eventually left her council job in 2019, taking on cleaning and zero-hours roles to support her comedy career, which has since brought her into the orbit of major figures like Kevin Hart, Chris Rock, and Dave Chappelle. She recently became the first Black British female comic to sell out the London Palladium and aims to do the same at the Eventim Apollo.

Love is also vocal about the pressures of representation and the harmful strong Black woman stereotype, a topic she explored in her master’s dissertation. She hopes to avoid internalising those burdens while still pushing boundaries in her career.

Looking ahead, Love plans to pursue a PhD in psychotherapy and jokes about clients finding their therapist to be “Dr Judi Love” in her backyard office. She says being a 45-year-old woman now gives her the freedom to study, tour, parent, love, or live boldly in ways the women before her could not.

For full tour dates and bookings, you can visit her official site at Judi Love Events.