When comedians fail on stage they are said to “die”. Mark Watson is a comedian – chiefly known for having staged 24-hour-long marathon gigs and for appearances on panel shows such as Taskmaster and Mock the Week – so he has experienced these “mortifications”, a term he applies here to analysis of eight personal setbacks.
It’s axiomatic that only successful people write books about being a failure, and I thought at the outset that Watson was underplaying his hand. There’s no mention in Mortification of his first-class degree from Cambridge or his 260,000 Twitter followers. He also downplays the success of his seven novels. These have psychological themes and Watson has, in recent years, opened up about his anxieties and neuroses in various podcasts (Mortification itself began life as an audio book), so he can be credited with having anticipated, rather than exploited, the booming self-help genre.
