What I Learnt About Life from Comedy
For a few years I tried to do stand-up comedy. I was…inconsistent is probably a nice way to put it. I occasionally would have a great gig and strut around with the confidence of a much penis-ier person, but very often I would slide off stage filled with regret and the vague sense that I was letting down my ancestors. Once a lady came up to me afterwards and said ‘never mind’ and I welled up because I thought it had actually gone quite well.
I gave up. It was probably safest for my close family who had to put up with the self-hatred for days afterwards.
However, in those adrenalin/anxiety filled years, I learnt from pretty good life lessons. Yes, I may have disappointed a room full of people in the backroom of a pub in a small Scottish town, but I think I became a better person because of it. Here’s what I now know to be true:
You Can’t Die From Shame
Believe me, if you could, I would be a skeleton in the car park behind the pub of a small Scottish town by now. The empty silence which follows a failed joke is an interesting physical phenomenon. It takes on extra dimensions: you can smell it and you can use it to look through time, back to when you thought this was a good idea, and forward to the moment you’ll have to make your way off stage and walk through the bemused crowd. Fun fact: it smells of burning tires.
But I’m alive. And (after a while), I realised that if I could do this thing so badly, if I could try something which scared the sweat out of my bum cheeks, then I could do a lot more than I thought. Because, sure, speaking up at a meeting is hard, but it’s unlikely anyone will throw a bottle of beer at you.
You can make friends as a grown-up
Comedy is a community. It has to be. You’re performing on the same bill as the same group of people regularly, you’re facing the same problems (tough crowds, dodgy promoters, rockstar youngsters who’ve zoomed up the career ladder past you) and you generally have the same interests. It’s a world full of big personalities, curious quirks and some of the smartest people I have ever met.
If you can keep up with the banter (top tip: be wittier than me), it’s an amazing way to make friends who will become like your family within three long car trips to that pub in a small Scottish pub. You could visit my bones while you’re there.
You still have to work hard
See, here’s the thing. I didn’t really get this until I left comedy and took a look back through binoculars at the misty world I loved so much. There are, maybe, 1 out of every 500 comedians who are naturally funny. Who can just get on stage and just talk, and it’s amazing and you’ll listen and fall in love with them and be jealous of the accent and their life and their amazing funny face, and basically everything which got them bullied at school.
But then, you realise how much work goes into the really good ones. How much they travel, how much they polish their jokes and take it deadly seriously. There’s a stereotype of stoned comedians, sleeping until 2pm (which you would, if your work finished at midnight with a 3 hour drive home) and never really doing anything. And sure, they exist, because they exist in every aspect of life. There are definitely dentists who get off their tits whenever they can, live off pizza and only leave the house when the smell of farts gets too overpowering.
The really amazing comedians though? Holy crap, they work hard. There’s a lot to be said for picking a thing and just chucking yourself all in, with the clear determination that you’ll do the very best you can at it. At my very best, I I had one foot in the water, but kept taking it out because I couldn’t work out a way to jump so I just kinda flopped about with one soggy foot.
Everyone Should Try It
I don’t mean everyone should become a stand-up because, Elvis knows, there are enough people trying to do that. I mean, everyone should try being on stage and talking. Learning how to read a room, how to talk even when you’re scared, even how to hold a microphone better could make your presentations better, your social skills better and — hopefully — your ability to speak up in life when it seems impossible.
From my time on the edges of comedy, I learnt the power of entertaining people. How people listen when they’re happy. How they learn to trust a good compere, and how they fall in love with a comedian who cracks open a piece of their heart. Employ comedians to host your events (and pay them properly) and if you find out someone on your team is trying stand-up? Encourage and support it because yes: they might run off and travel the country doing sex jokes to strangers, but they also may find happiness, confidence and friendship in a lonely, confusing world.
But, for the love of everything, don’t go and watch them. Nobody wants to see their boss in the audience when they’re doing sex jokes to strangers.
