(cont)                                                                                                       7th Oct 10

I can’t think of any better job than one that makes people feel good about themselves. Well… apart from being Cheryl Cole’s body make-up artist.

So, we know why audiences like comedians. But why do people like me want to be comedians?   Is it something that’s rooted in our childhood?

It might sound like a cliche, but did we use comedy in school as a defence-mechanism to stop the bullies picking on us?

As I wrote that, I just realised something.  Long after they’ve left school, many comedians, by the very nature of what they do, which is to make fun of the people who run ( and ruin ) our lives, whether they’re local councillors, traffic wardens or Prime Ministers, are still using comedy to stop the bullies picking on us.

Except these ‘bullies’ don’t wear school uniform and pick their noses on the ‘bus. They wear suits or high visibility jackets and pick their noses in their BMW’s.

Good comedians use the power of humour to prick the ‘ bullies ‘ pomposity, point out their incompetence and ridicule their self-importance.

But being able to do that takes years of experience and every comic has to start somewhere.  Every big- name comic with 2000 gigs, a platinum DVD and a couple of Baftas under his belt has never forgotten his very first time on stage when he tried to make people laugh – and the odds are he was probably was more of a miss than a hit.

But if he only got a couple of laughs, they would have been enough to spur him on to do more gigs and, with luck, become better at his craft.