“I liked making people laugh – I worked as a mental nurse for ten years and that was not a cheery job,” was Jo’s response to interviewer Liza Tarbuck’s opening question: “What got you into stand-up?”
The ability to be confident but not arrogant was her answer to what makes a good nurse and comedienne.
But there the similarity ends – or does it?
Jo’s legendary ability to humiliate hecklers, combined with her sense of the ridiculous, are key to her survival as a female stand-up.
These are skills which, according to some hair-raising stories, she developed every day when working at a mental hospital.
Although it’s been a while since she exchanged nursing for comedy, Jo spoke passionately and with great humour about the need for society to be less fearful of, and more understanding towards, people with mental illness.
She also read engagingly from her novel, The More You Ignore Me which, surprisingly for someone (unfairly) reputed to hate men, champions Keith – the husband of a mentally ill woman who is always there for her, even though all he gets for it is abuse.
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