Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Stuart Goldsmith. This is the Comedians Comedian podcast, a podcast designed to get inside the heads of your favorite comedy, heroes and creatives and find out what makes them tick, how they cope and whether or not they're happy.

And this has been going, I think, for, what is it? Is it 14 years or is it, I don't think it can be 15 years. I think we're 14 years in.

So if you're new to the show, lovely to have you listening. And today I'm going to speak to

someone who is quite unusual for this show because we've got, we have all sorts. We've got

we've got someone who's the lead singer of a band coming up. But this one in particular,

Ken, as a comedian, is very,

very well-established and very, very funny, but also has a special thing. So not only is he a stand-up, a writer and a professional poker player, but he is the absolute master of going viral

on LinkedIn with over 200,000 followers.

We're going to talk about that in some detail.

He's also written for Have I Got News for You, Mock the Week,

and he even created a Doctor Who audio episode.

But in the first half, we'll talk about how signing up for an open mic with Ed Gamble changed his life.

We'll talk about rewiring his brain from being a maths

prodigy to becoming a viral comedy genius, my word's not his, and why the best strategy is sometimes

playing dumb. We'll talk about whether poker psychology is the same as being a stand-up, and we'll

discover the dark arts of weaponising the comments section.

There's never been a better time to support this independently produced podcast so you can have a lovely warm feeling that you contributed to a thing you love,

as well as exclusive extra content with Ken,

full video and audio, ad-free episodes,

and a very special episode 500, tune A.

You can find out more about that at patreon.com.com.

But here is the fiercely brilliant Ken Cheng.

...