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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Tears of the clowns: Comedians who battle with serious mental health problems

This piece of mine appears in today's Daily Express.

She is the woman who has made millions of Britons laugh with her old-fashioned slapstick humour and gawky charm. But as Miranda Hart revealed in an interview on Desert Island Discs it hasn't all been plain sailing. The popular comedian and television star admitted she found it tough at the top. "I think it got to a point a year ago possibly when it was all a bit too much," she said. "It was quite lonely and I was struggling."
Hart's problems should not surprise us. Many of our greatest comics have struggled with the pressure of trying to make us laugh and many have battled with depression and other mental illnesses. 

You can read the whole piece here.

1 comment:

R J said...

Thanks, lots of good points here. But the phenomenon is not confined to the UK. Look at Andy Kaufman in the States, who was, shall we say, very very strange (even though his death in 1984 appears to have been due to natural causes, he was only 35 when it occurred). The 1999 movie Man on the Moon gives an account of Kaufman's career which is little if any more weird than the reality.