I’ve read about them in books

“I’ve read about them in books.”He tells me about one particular book he much admires. You can’t, for example, do a routine about being a new father taking joy in your new baby. Do that, and you’d lose the room immediately; the energy would just evaporate I know about these things,” he adds, expertly. But, OK, fair enough, I take your point, you smug bastard! Though I’d still say depression in comedians isn’t on an epidemic level, it’s just that comedy, by its very definition, must rely on a certain level of misery in order to work It’s what makes you funny. Poor guy drank himself to death.”John Belushi? He wasn’t depressed! He was just a happy drunk, although it’s probably true to say that he drank a little too much. “OK,” he concedes, palms up in defeat, “I’ll give you that one There’s always the exception that proves the rule.

Another?”I give him Spike Milligan, John Cleese, Peter Sellers Even Victoria Wood, I say, has battled her demons. O’Briain is frowning now, and so I offer him one more: John Belushi. Nothing so overridingly bleak, in other words, that he was forced to find succour in the comforting arms of laughter. He does comedy simply because he happens to be funny, that’s all. “So I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m a fairly well-adjusted human being,” he says in a gentle Irish lilt that makes melodies of sentences “And I’m not particularly prone to depression, either.

People tend to think that this is inevitably the case with comics, but I don’t think it is ever actually true. Name me one comic who has ever suffered from depression.”
Off the top of my head, I tell him Tony Hancock. We had been discussing his Dublin childhood, which was a happy one – father a trade union arbitrator, mother a homely housewife – and unfolded without major incident School was fine, likewise university. To date, there has been little misery in his life, and no trauma.