Jo Brand
Jo Brand
Josephine Grace "Jo" Brand is an English comedian, writer and actress. Starting her entertainment career with a move from psychiatric nursing to the alternative comedy stand-up scene and early performances on Saturday Live, she went on to appear on The Brain Drain, Channel 4's Jo Brand Through the Cakehole, Getting On and various television appearances including as a regular guest on QI, Have I Got News for You and Would I Lie to You?...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth3 May 1957
thinking years people
I think my comedy, the put-downs I do to hecklers, are the accumulated bitterness of years of people feeling that it's perfectly acceptable to make a comment on your appearance when they don't even know you.
grandma people lucky
I used to get a lot of people saying 'Oh, you are such a lucky granny.' But the fact of the matter is you can be a grandma at 35 these days.
smile years expression
So, my style has hopefully changed over the years and it is more relaxed, and I do tend to smile and have more than one expression these days hopefully - which I didn't at the beginning.
fun dad sunday
I used to do bell ringing in Benenden church. It was really good fun, actually. My best friend's dad was the local vicar, and so it was expected as her best friend that I would go to church every Sunday with her.
thinking people purpose
I think some people ramp a side of themselves up for performance purposes.
thinking keys attributes
I think the key attributes for a good speaker are someone that's articulate and someone that puts a fair amount of humour into what they do.
may pilots festivals
What they did was to make a pilot and it may well go to series at the next festival but I don't have any news on that. It's already been on Paramount actually, but as it's on Paramount it'll probably be on several more times... hopefully.
kids
I thought I was funny as a kid.
thinking views comedy
There's a general sense that women are more relaxed and less defensive in comedy than they used to be. I think it's easier than it was but underlying it all there is still a pretty sexist view of women on stage, which to me hasn't changed that much.
attitude mean men
Some men are deeply likable but have attitudes I don't like. Does that mean I should completely dismiss them? It's like saying: if someone votes Tory can you like them? And, yes, I can. I have friends who vote Tory, and I'm appalled, but that's not to say they're not great people in so many other ways. We have a tendency to oversimplify things.
hate thinking hecklers
There have been some very extreme hecklers in audiences whose bile was so hateful and so meant that it would be a bit frightening to think that all I'm doing is jokes and yet someone hates me that much.
animal fans england
British ferries have stopped transporting live animals to the Continent. This has made it very difficult for England fans to get to Away matches.
children nice two
So, I kind of rather was hoping that people thought it would have a nice mixture of different topics and it also takes in the fact that I've had two children recently.
reading political use
Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press knows that, on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper.