373 - Greg Jenner
The Comedian's Comedian Podcast
Stuart Goldsmith
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2021
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you thought wrestlers shared some of the tropes of comedians’ lives, wait til you hear about historians! Comedy-adjacent public historian, writer of “Dead Famous” and other superb books, and creator and host of “You’re Dead To Me” (BBC Sounds) Greg Jenner had factual oversight on every word of Horrible Histories ever recorded, and wrote some of the jokes too. He’s also a student of ComCom and probably our most learned ever guest…
We talk about his creative process in constructing analogies that package and frame his research; learn about the pitfalls of generalising and the responsibility of the historian; and he shares his deeply personal struggle with mental health, anxiety and extraordinary insomnia, and they effect they still have on his fraught relationship with celebrity.
30 mins of extra content available exclusively to the Insiders Club include Greg delving further into his anxieties, particularly those that accrete around social media and listener feedback; the joy of online kindness; “factoids” and his doomed quest to rid the internet of viral “fake facts”; and we learn about the hidden link between Rattus Rattus from Horrible Histories and Greg himself.
Go to www.comedianscomedian.com/insiders for this and much more, including the exclusive Insiders Q&As with Nish Kumar, James Acaster and Alfie Brown, and your invite to the forthcoming ones with Fern Brady and a “self-help for comedians” special with Amanda Donnet (MClinPsych)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello Stu here just popping in before the show starts to let you know that my comedy special |
| 0:04.2 | I need you alive is now available at Stuart Goldsmith dot com |
| 0:08.1 | There's a link there where you can watch it on an breathtaking array of places for the rest of the month |
| 0:13.2 | Including the 800 pound gorilla website Amazon Prime in the UK and US X-Box |
| 0:17.8 | God knows how they do that as well as loads of other links to catch it on audio go to Stuart Goldsmith dot com and |
| 0:23.6 | Watch this show that I am staggeringly proud of and do watch it if you can because it's very pretty |
| 0:30.9 | You |
| 0:45.4 | Hello and welcome to the show today. I am talking to Greg Jenner |
| 0:49.2 | What's he doing on the show? He's not a comedian. I hear you cry |
| 0:52.4 | Well, maybe not but he has been a huge part and and continues to be and a key part of |
| 1:00.0 | Horrible histories, which is one of the funniest programs available for children |
| 1:05.2 | Every element of that show every word every sketch has gone through him |
| 1:09.2 | He also hosts your dead to me, which is a BBC podcast that I've been lucky to guest on several times and it's very very funny |
| 1:16.5 | Pitting well not pitting anyone against anything really, but including a comedian and a historian with great |
| 1:22.6 | Facilitating and he also has written some very funny books including dead famous, which is a history of celebrity |
| 1:28.9 | He's also he regards himself as a student of this podcast |
| 1:32.2 | He's a big fan of the show and it seemed like a really sensible thing to do to get him on and find out what makes him tick and find out |
| 1:40.0 | We did and there is some stuff in the later part of this show, which I will sort of add a nebulous trigger warning to |
| 1:46.1 | I always feel trigger warnings are a bit like spoilers |
| 1:48.8 | But if you are the sort of person who has things about which you are sensitive and occasionally listen to trigger warnings |
| 1:55.2 | Particularly those to do with mental health and how we treat ourselves then consider yourselves |
| 2:01.1 | Julie trigger warned content warned I prefer content warning content warned in a |
... |
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