20 challenges to being a comedy writer

At times, the comedy industry can feel like a fun, fascinating, magical world of wonder, and there's a BCG Pro article to be written about how genuinely life-affirming being paid to make people laugh is.

This isn't that blog.

This one focuses on what we'll euphemistically call 'the challenges' of being a comedy writer. It can be a tough industry and we think it's important that we don't pretend in BCG Pro that everything is perfect.

As a result, we asked some full-time comedy writers (who shall remain nameless, so they don't get fired!) to work up a list of the negatives of the job. Some of their answers are slightly tongue-in-cheek, and some might conclude that we asked them on a day they were filling particularly bitter about some rejections (it won't take long to see what we mean, ha ha), but - yeah - here's what they wrote...

1. Everyone in comedy was in the Footlights

You might just think 'oh that's an old trope, sure the Monty Python boys and The Goodies were members, but that's not true now'. Wrong. Every single person in the whole industry was either in the Footlights or went to public school, and that is an indisputable fact. "Phoebe Waller-Bridge didn't!" Yeah, well her grandad was an actual baron. Case closed.