His-and-hers comedy … Stewart Lee and Bridget Christie. Photograph: Rex Features/Martin Godwin for the Guardian

Take my husband: Stewart Lee, Bridget Christie and the rise of comedy couples

This article is more than 9 years old

With alliances between standups increasingly common, relationship gags are entering a brave new era in which both parties get to air their dirty linen on stage

As comedy gets ever bigger, and as its age-old gender imbalance erodes, so we encounter a new(ish) phenomenon: husband-and-wife (or girlfriend-and-boyfriend) standups. The outstanding Edinburgh fringe example is Bridget Christie and Stewart Lee, but they're not alone. Sara Pascoe tells jokes about her beau, John Robins, in her show – and vice versa, apparently. Sarah Millican recently married one-liner comic Gary Delaney. I'm not forgetting comedy couples of previous generations – Ade Edmondson and Jennifer Saunders; Lenny Henry and Dawn French – but it's only now that we're seeing solo standups discussing, on stage, their intimate relationships with other solo standups.

So what's the protocol? At one extreme, there's the example set at last year's fringe by comedians Nat Luurtsema and Tom Craine, who made respective shows about their recent breakup (complicated by the fact that they're both members of the same sketch group, Jigsaw). Luurtsema even advertised Craine's show at the end of her own, inviting you to view the two performances as a heartbreak diptych. But things aren't usually that intimate. Pascoe talks about Robins's reluctance to have children, and apparently he addresses her behaviour when she's pre-menstrual.

Christie gets knowing laughs talking about her "fictional onstage husband" – specifically, how sexist and racist he is. At least half the room laughs because it knows who the husband is; in Christie and Lee's case, both parties are well enough known (in comedy circles, anyway) to allow one another's personae to be part of the joke. That's not the case with Pascoe and Robins, and so instead (in Pascoe's show) the joke draws on the idea of comedians in love, and how difficult it is to have your dirty linen ridiculed in public.

That's partly why this is becoming a rich seam to mine. Standups have always joked about their husbands and wives, their mums, dads and kids. This professional obligation to cannibalise and make light of the lives of their nearest and dearest is a vexed issue. And it's vexed because it's problematic. On the one hand, it makes us uneasy: we feel instinctively that a joke isn't quite fair game when it's about someone that can't answer back. We wonder: how does the wife/kid/dad feel about this? On the other hand, many people love this confidential standup, because it's improper bordering on illicit. At its best, it supplies the kind of politeness-busting thrill we look for in comedy.

The relationship humour of comedy couples retains the advantages and circumvents the disadvantages. In these instances, the partner can answer back. It allows the audience to enjoy other people's secrets (or fictionalised secrets) guilt-free, with the bonus that we also get to enjoy the performer's anxiety about the likely payback. There's also the gossipy frisson, too, of hearing what people we know only through comedy are "really" like in their personal lives – a prurience that Christie tickles but doesn't satisfy. I dare say we'll encounter more and more comedy couples as the industry expands. In the meantime, it's intriguing to watch the pioneers working out what makes his-and-hers comedy tick.