"This sounds brutal and it is"

"We might as well face it - stand up comedians may be funny, but they are not in the least bit cool. In fact, you probably have to discover just how inadequate you are before you can be funny. Cool is distant, mysterious; cool doesn't care. If it's cool you're after, buy some dark glasses and join a band instead.

But if you are uncool enough to want to tell jokes for a living, consider this. Being on a stage at a comedy club is like a night-marish amplification of that moment at a dinner party when you've launched into a spicy little anecdote and you suddenly realize the whole room has gone quiet. Everyone else is not only listening to you but judging you too, and you have no choice but to plough wildly on with your story. When a joke is a bit 'clever', there's an agonizing pause while you wait for the audience to get it, and then pass judgment. From your vantage point on the stage it seems like a pitiless binary system - yes or no. Even if some laughs are bigger than others, there's no grey area in between getting a laugh and getting nothing. Live comedy audiences are ruthless and insatiable. If they smell fear you're done for. And you're only ever as good as your last joke. Not even your last show - your last joke. Every comic has a bag-pocket full of 'bankers' - the funny lines that always get you out of trouble. But even one of those doesn't buy you very much time - thirty seconds of sympathy before they want the next one.

This sounds brutal and it is.(...) It's as though a comedy club is the chosen arena for a fight to the death, where either the audience or the comic gets out alive - but never both."

"The Naked Jape: Uncovering the hidden world of jokes" - Jimmy Carr & Lucy Greeves