After I finished high school, I moved to London and was very serious about doing standup. I think the good thing is that it allowed me to learn what an audience expects. It gave me a sense of timing, and it also got all the bad jokes out of me. I wrote a lot of stuff and performed it and saw that it didn’t work, and that was very helpful — particularly starting out as a writer.
As a standup comedian, Mo Willems found out very quickly which jokes were funny—and which ones weren't.
Caldecott-winner Mo Willems grew up in New Orleans. He spent much of his youth telling stories and drawing. Willems especially loved reading “Peanuts” comics and then sketching Snoopy and Charlie Brown himself. “I even wrote a letter to Charles Schulz,” Willems recalls, “saying that I wanted his job when he died.” During high school, Willems acted in plays and started doing standup routines at comedy clubs.
