I’ve faced the hecklers for 40 years.. but it’s nothing to what you get on the wards
Comic Jo on learning to tackle abuse
One thing comic Jo Brand has mastered in 40 years of dealing with hecklers, body shamers and bullies is the art of the barbed putdown.
So when it comes to career highlights, it is not playing capacity crowds or big TV specials that make her most proud. It is a chance encounter with one particular fan.
She says: “A woman in her early 80s came up to me in central London. She said, ‘I saw you many, many years ago and I remembered all your best putdowns.
“‘I’ve used them so many times with people that have been rude to me or shouted at me and they’ve just been brilliant, so thank you’.”
Jo developed her thick skin and sharp tongue long before she joined the stand-up circuit as a plus-size woman in a very male world.
It was her 10 years as a psychiatric nurse, first at Cefn Coed Hospital in Swansea and then Maudsley Hospital, south London, that really gave her the skills to bring down the bullies.
Jo, 66, says: “I’ve had [criticism] for
As a nurse on locked wards I was used to getting much better abuse, more imaginative
nearly 40 years. I’ve been spat at, had drinks thrown at me. But having been a nurse on locked wards, I was used to getting some much better abuse, to be honest with you. Much more imaginative and much more cutting, you know?
“For example, someone would shout, ‘F*** off, you fat cow’. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t heard it before.
“I had heard it before, better – accompanied by a side dish of how they were going to kill me, or they were going to rape me.
“And I’ve been hit as a nurse – I’ve never been hit as a comic. I’ve had beer thrown at me, but you know.”
She has always been selfdeprecating – and even used to call herself the “Sea Monster”.
But when heckled about her weight, she has a stock comeback.
She says: “I would say something like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I deliberately keep my weight up so a tosser like you won’t fancy me’. So that would get a bigger laugh than the original heckle.
As soon as you show a bit of vulnerability and start to falter a bit, audiences get worse. You can’t show any vulnerability at all.”
Jo, speaking as a guest on Jamie Laing’s new podcast Great Company, recalls one gig she was especially proud to turn around, a corporate bash in a hotel for about 900 builders.
She says: “When you do those gigs, they don’t know who’s going to come on, so you’re kind of a surprise. So I got announced and I could just hear basically an audible sigh of despair.
“So I said, ‘I can tell you’re looking at me and thinking what on earth does she know about building. Well,
my dad is a structural engineer, my brother’s a quantity surveyor, and my husband’s an effing plank’. That got a massive laugh and then they were much warmer to me.”
She wasn’t lying – her father was a structural engineer. But it was her mum’s job as a mental health social worker that really inspired her.
Jo recalls her mum taking her and her two brothers to the psychiatric hospital where she worked on days off to use its sports facilities.
Jo says: “She would take us to the very big psychiatric hospital in the middle of nowhere because they had a badminton court.
There were lots of people wandering around and I just thought it was a fascinating place.
“I was never scared of it. I think because my mum was so relaxed.”
She trained as a psychiatric nurse herself, working in locked wards with the most ill patients, and married fellow mental health nurse Bernie Bourke in 1998. They have two daughters Maisie and Eliza. Her nursing career helped Jo understand her dad, Ron, who she suspected suffered from depression, which went undiagnosed for years, as well as a terrible temper.
Jo says: “He wouldn’t see anyone about it. My mum tried to persuade him for years and eventually he did when he was in his mid-50s.
“He was prescribed antidepressants and it absolutely changed his life and it changed him for the better.”
Great Company with Jamie Laing is available on all podcast providers
JO BRAND ON HECKLERS AND HER EXPERIENCE AS PSYCHIATRIC NURSE
I thought it was a fascinating place. I was never scared of it because mum was so relaxed
JO BRAND ON GOING TO MUM’S WORK AT PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL