RUTH BONNET
Ruth Bonnet was born and educated (to a degree) in London. Thanks to outstanding academic mediocrity, in lieu of a performance arts degree, she sang (everything from session work to a four-part harmony cabaret group, to busking, to bars and pubs with a guitar).
Her mother, having been an actor, encouraged her with the proviso that she learn shorthand and typing. To this day, her Pittman’s is about two words per minutes, her typing, over 100. She segued to office work to support herself but found her community once she hit New York in the late ‘80s. The Manhattan piano bar scene was at its peak, and the talent that poured into these smoky rooms once the curtains had come down on Broadway was fierce. With the realisation that she would never be able to compete on voice alone, Ruth began performing parodies of show tunes that no one would deem it necessary to sing (Surrey with a Fringe on Top about subways and cab rides, for example).
In the mid- to late-‘90s in Los Angeles, we were told that were giving out sit-coms to comics upon landing at Burbank Airport, so she began doing stand-up in rooms such as the Improv and the Comic Strip. She no longer uses that material, not because she wasn’t woke even back then, before there was a name for it, but because her material was mainly about politicians and most of them are now dead (not at her hands, it has to be said).
She spent 18 months in Chicago as a singing waitress at the now-shuttered Davenport’s Piano Bar, and did a well-received cabaret called Strange Bedfellows.
Back in the UK since March 2026, Ruth is thrilled to be in Liverpool and is gingerly approaching stand-up again.