If anyone had told Barbara Scully five years ago that she would soon be enjoying her “sixth career” – this time as a standup comedian, or comic storyteller – she would have laughed in their face. “But once you get to 60, you realise that failure isn’t a big deal,” she says. “As long as nobody’s going to die, that’s grand.”
Scully, who lives in Dublin, is now performing her one-woman show Because I’m Worth It around Ireland to capacity audiences of up to 200 people. “I’m on a mission to try to tell women in particular not to fear getting older, to embrace it, to push back against all the bullshit about how you should be fighting ageing,” she says. “The more women like me who are willing to stand up and say: ‘This is me and I am 64 and I’m not really bothered about spending my time and money and energy on trying to look younger …’” She trails off. “I’m actually spending my time and money and energy doing stuff that makes me happy.”
Her previous five careers comprise travel agent, word-processing tutor, fundraiser, stay-at-home parent and author-broadcaster. She embarked on No 5 after a personal crisis. “I couldn’t get a job, even though I had a chunky enough CV. I presume it was the fact that I was 50 and had a 10-year gap where my career used to live [while she was raising children],” she says.
“The day I realised I couldn’t even get social welfare, I sat in the car on the driveway in tears, thinking: that’s it, I’m washed up, I’m done. Once I pulled myself together, I thought: OK, if this were one of my kids, what would I tell them? You’re going to have to make your own work. Look at what it is you enjoy doing and try to make that work for you.”
Scully had always loved writing and talking – she had done a fair amount of both as a charity fundraiser. Over the next decade, she built up a freelance portfolio: she wrote opinion pieces for newspapers and a book called Wise Up: Power, Wisdom and the Older Woman; she appeared as a panellist on the chatshows Midday and Elaine on the free-to-air channel Virgin Media One. She continues to co-host a regular agony aunt slot on Seán Moncrieff’s show on the national radio station Newstalk.
When her book was published in 2022, Scully was contacted by two women who were setting up an Irish chapter of Funny Women, a community of women in comedy. They asked her to help with a show – to publicise it, she thought. “No. We’d like you to be in it,” they said.
She agreed to read out part of her book between comedy slots, but when the day came, she realised that a reading would “kill the energy”, so she rewrote a chapter on smear tests as a sketch.
“I went on stage and after two or three minutes felt laughter coming back at me. It was like rocket fuel. It was something I’d never experienced before. It was huge. Really energising … I came off stage and I went: ‘Oh my God, I loved that.’”
A year later, in December 2024, Scully was approached by a hotel to do an event about her book. She performed a one-woman show instead. “The following year, I toured that show around modest venues, small rooms, capacities probably 70 to 100. I was starting to realise that life was not what I was expecting it to be. Actually, it was much better. There’s so much negative talk about menopause … But menopause is only a portal. Once you’re through it, you’ve got this tremendous period of life.”
Scully grew up in Dublin, “in a male-dominated house” she shared with her parents, three brothers and sometimes a grandfather and an uncle. By 16, she was 6ft (183cm) tall. Her brothers nicknamed her “H”, for heifer. “I was never going to fit into society’s idea of how a girl should be – petite and not taking up space,” she says. “I learned to use my voice pretty early on.”
Increasingly, she senses “a huge connection between who I am at 64 and who I was at 18 or 19. There’s that same feeling. The world’s my oyster. I can do whatever I want to do.”
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