Stand-up comedy has become such a staple of American entertainment that we may forget that it was not that long ago that it was a more rarefied profession.
And we may also forget just how hard that profession is.
In the late 1980s, just a few years into the start of the stand up explosion, a young writer producer named Betsy Borns put together a book about stand up comedians and how they work.
Borns called her book Comic Lives.
So here now, from 1987, Betsy Borns.
After Comic Lives Betsy Borns went on to work in TV on Roseanne, Friends, and All of Us, among many other projects.
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