Learning about laughter: The Comedy School

It is often said that stand-up comedy is the most nerve-wracking of all the performance arts. It's perhaps surprising then, that many still want to give it a go. Keith Palmer was one such person, who started out doing community outreach work with the National Youth Theatre and then trained as an actor. Disillusioned by acting in his mid-twenties, he tried doing a few comedy gigs – but soon realised it was more difficult than it appeared. ‘I looked around for somewhere I could learn how to do stand-up and there wasn't anywhere,’ he says. ‘The BBC did comedy masterclasses but you had to be earning a lot of money to be able to afford them.’ The other thing he noticed was that there weren't any black or Asian people doing comedy. ‘If you had asked anyone to name a black comedian in the 1980s, the only name they could come up with was Lenny Henry.’