Comedy is a bit like terrorism. There’s no one set route into it, but it invariably ends up with your family explaining to anyone who will listen that they’ve no idea how you’d ended up like this. I once had what my mother considers to be a proper job in IT. She could explain it to the neighbours, and they wouldn’t pull sympathetic faces. People know what computers are and they’re useful. Stand-up comedians on the other hand, well that’s just a modernday court jester who doesn’t even get to meet important people. They should have seen it coming though. I was the weird kid who sat inside reading Terry Pratchett books when everyone else was out playing football.
It has now been twenty years since I last told someone to ‘turn it off and on again’ in a professional capacity and since then, I have made my living from comedy or ‘comedy adjacent’ activities. I was a stand-up comedian, a kid’s TV writer, a gun-for-hire writing for comics on panel shows, an in-stadium announcer for a professional sports team (once described as ‘The second most annoying man in British rugby’ – and most recently, an author. As of three years ago, an author is all I
