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Time for Laughs

In 2022, I’m making time to create for creativity’s sake, not money.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
7 min readJan 3, 2022
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Right at the end of 2019, I decided I wanted to become a stand-up.

Timing, obviously, has never been my strong suit.

I can’t say it had been a lifelong dream, but I was always a comedy fan. Growing up in Finland, I learned English from American sitcoms and watched Conan O’Brien every night of my adolescence. When I saw Saturday Night Live and learned who Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell were, it felt magical, like I was witnessing something truly amazing.

In later years, I started watching stand-up, learning about it, seeing every Netflix special, reading books, listening to every podcast. Not because I wanted to become a comedian, but because I love comedy as an art form.

Not a Speaker, but a Performer for Sure

To be clear, I am not a public speaker. I still have a hard time speaking up in meetings at work. Every presentation in school made me sweat and made my face turn red, with one notable exception: the one time in high school I needed to make a speech.

I listened to my classmates giving their prepared performances about the economy, the environment and other Smart and Important Issues. I watched the most popular…

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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