The Importance of Hard Work in Comedy

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Comedians are talented in the first place but it takes 10 years of hard work to hone that talent into something exceptional. I've made comedy look like hard work and they were not good nights you know, he says. The trick is in concealing the hard work people think it isn't hard work because they watch it and it's just a person talking on a stage or it's just some words in a book. You need polish and control and skill and experience like that which cannot be learned from watching someone do their thing for five minutes.

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to Angela Barnes, podcaster, comedian and regular panel guest on Mock The Week (and much more!).

Angela Barnes has zero tolerance for anyone reassuring her that she's pretty - it talks over her lived experience, and does nothing to change her self-perception. Here, she discusses living with Persistent Depressive Disorder, which has made her whole life feel like the drizzly English climate, but which has also made her more able than most to endure the hard-knocks life of a stand-up comedian.

A very cheerful chat which always zeroes in on the important points with lazer focus, picking up on where Angela is in the greater pandemic situation, working with her PDD, building daily frameworks, having a comedy tribe which normalizes certain behaviours and actions, fear of rejection, CBT, entitlement, TV, the perils and - well, perils of social media, and the notion of beauty on a grand scale.

ANGELA LINKS

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We Are History podcast

KATHERINE LINKS

The Wintering Sessions

Katherine's writing class