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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith,

literary editor for The Spectator. And my guest this week is the comedy writer Joel Morris,

whose new book is Be Funny or Die,

How Comedy Works and Why It Matters.

And very early on in this book, Joel makes a bold claim that he's going to tell us

the secret to comedy.

Joel, it is a bold claim.

What set you out on the path that made you think you could...

I don't know.

You've got to get the reader's attention early on.

Yeah, I ended up in order to prepare to do this,

and in order to have a career writing comedy,

I'd read a lot of books about comedy.

And very often they claim, well, I'll reveal the secret.

And they often reveal the secret of a bit of comedy.

The most common one is they'll reveal the secret of stand-up comedy, which I think there is a definite, like, craft and a learned skill to.

But they're very, they seem to fight shy of revealing the secret of comedy, how comedy works.

And I thought, I think, not that I know, I think I have a sense of it because I've worked in the field for so long

...