Tag Archives: Christian Reilly

I Know You Have Something To Say

I was talking to a nursery school teacher once. She said that when you see little kids playing, one of the the first things you hear them say is, “That’s not fair!”

If you’re reading this and you’re 12, tell me you’re not a little confused about how adults carry on and how they tell you to carry on. If you’re 30+ and you’ve had a lifetime of bosses, tell me you don’t have any feelings on co-operation versus coercion.

Those negative comments on YouTube are a creative act*, compared to just consuming. In fact, some people are at their most artistic when they’re running things down, and that’s a shame.

We’ve got no shortage of opinions, thoughts and feelings on a wide range of topics.

There is a shortage of people who can turn those thoughts and feelings into something useful to the rest of us who live outside the thinker’s head.

You’re an expert when it comes to your own experience of life. Paint us a picture, write us a story, yes, even do us a drum solo. Let’s hear it.

*Maybe the answer to not liking things is not trolling. Maybe it’s to build a more pleasing thing. Build a better YouTube channel, write a better joke. You’re already in front of the computer!

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Chewing Gum For The Eyes

This might be my favourite description of TV:

If you were a being from outer space watching people making and consuming TV, you’d see 0.001% of humanity inserting ideas and images into the minds of 99.999% of humanity.*

At media and publishing companies, there’s a person or a whole department whose job it is to tell people no.

Now the good news:

As the 99.999%, you can really choose what to with your eyeballs these days.

As the 99.999%, we can make things for each other.

PS. If you have nine seconds, and you fancy a bit of chewing gum, here’s Father Ted on this issue.

* I forget who said this, but it was on David Barsamian’s Alternative Radio.

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First Night Nerves And Picking Your Advice

Here’s some useful advice I got before my first stand-up gig.

I was really nervous the day before.

I had tried some of my lines out on actual people. There was no Twitter back then. I knew from their reaction that my first gig would be carnage.

I was lucky enough to be able to ask Rich Hall for advice. I said to Rich, “Is there anything I should keep in mind when it’s all going tits-up?”

He said, “Yeah, remember this. EVERY. BODY. DIES…”

I tuned out for the rest of it. (He went on to say, “…Even me!”)

That’s not the useful advice I meant. After performing for a few years, I now totally get what he was preparing me for, and what a generous thing it was to say, but at the time it shook me.

As it turned out, angels intervened and my first open spot was cancelled due to someone in the venue having a heart-attack before I got there*. Phew.

My next bite at the cherry was three months later. This time, when I got nervous the day before, I asked a newish act friend of mine if he had any advice.

He said, “Yeah. Just stand there, get through your five minutes. If you get a couple of laughs, literally two, you’re doing really well”.

This really took the pressure off and helped me get through those hard early gigs.

Maybe, because my new act friend was having experiences a bit closer to my own, his advice helped. Maybe you have to travel a bit of road to be able to interpret the advice of someone so far into a journey you’re just starting out on.

Maybe the lesson is that everybody’s got a valid point of view, but no-one knows what you need.

Or maybe the lesson is cut down on fried food.

*(The show before my cancelled first gig was called “Cabaret Extreme”. Ironically, the flyer said “You’ll die laughing, or we’ll die trying”)

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Mmm. Apple Pie.

There’s a line from a book that keeps bubbling up in my head since I read it (a few years ago now).

It’s from Carter Beats The Devil by Glen David Gold. Carter, a magician, is being grilled by an investigator, who is trying to throw him off balance by talking about two other magicians that he’d seen doing a similar rope trick to Carter’s. Carter responds:

“There are few illusions that are truly original, it’s a matter of presentation… In other words, I didn’t invent sugar or flour, but I bake a mean apple pie.”

Happy baking!

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How Do We Do It? Volume! Jokes Are A Numbers Game

It took 100 million hours to build Wikipedia*. Phew. But that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the 200 billion hours people spend watching TV annually.

This is according to Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus. He says since the 1940s, in our free time, we’ve been steadily moving from a consuming posture to a creating (and sharing) one.

I was at a comedian’s conference (I know!) once, and a promoter described a new act whose work ethic he liked (me too!). This new comedian had a day job. On the ride to and and from work (I’m guessing 30 minutes each way), this person made it their mission to write ten jokes. That’s do-able. Five on the way in, five on the way out.

Fifty jokes a week, two hundred jokes a month. An hour a day. Your leisure time is still your own when you walk through the door.

In the old days, you could write all you want, but you’d still have to wait for a gig somewhere to see what flew. Now there’s Twitter and a whole bunch of other stuff I don’t know about (I’m assuming!).

Two hundred jokes a month. Tweet your best, what, twenty? Fifty? Do the lot! It’s your life. You can interact with an audience and learn something.

Baby steps. See what works. Five jokes on the way in, five on the way out.

Also, a great thing about the internet: If you do something a bit rubbish, no-one looks. No-one’s got the time. There’s 200 billion hours of telly to catch up on!

*That’s what it took to build Wikipedia to its 2009 extent.

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Mess It Up!

A couple of days ago, I saw a busker beat-boxing and playing harmonica at the same time. It’s probably quite hard to do.

Not many of us have tried beat-boxing and playing harmonica at the same time, so the fact that he was doing it really well wasn’t good. He was making it look run-of-the-mill.

Just my way around it, but when I parody someone, I’m not necessarily going for pinpoint accuracy. Sometimes it’s better to mess it up and make it look tricky.

I could deliver the music bits of my act a lot more smoothly, but I’ve noticed that if you start getting too music-y, people’s brains start doing whatever it is they do when they hear music.

A bit like a straight stand-up who delivers their lines too pat, you run the risk of re-framing what you’re doing. The audience might start feeling like they’re at the theatre or parliament, instead of the club they walked into.

They say Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels. Nobody cared. I can relate to that. Maybe comedians (and beat-boxing harmonica-ists) are the Ginger Rogers of entertainment.

Maybe it’s good to trip on your dress now and then to show the work that went into it.

(I know Ginger Rogers was the Ginger Rogers of entertainment, but hopefully you catch my drift!)

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Maybe You Were Put On Earth To Muck About

In bits of my comedy act, I sing like a real singer would. Sometimes people say afterwards, “You should do music for real”.

I did and I do, but in my experience, if you show up in a place where they’re expecting a musician to show up, and you do music – all in tune and what-not – well, that’s just what they were expecting you to do.

Thank you, Music Guy, for doing exactly what we expect from music, you’re like a CD, but a person. Thanks, here’s some indifference.

Les Dawson had much more success – screwing up the notes and not worrying about a record deal.

In the Wordpress ebook about blogging, it features two writers, one with 60,000 readers, another with 24,000 readers. They both have a similar story. “I started off writing about (x) and then I tried writing about (y) and suddenly things took off”.

It’s a solid case for mucking about and putting yourself under a real deadline to do it. Without the pressure of a delivery date, these writers might have walked away from their experiments, missing out on their undiscovered passions and a tribe of thousands who care about the same thing.

They say if you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Maybe we’re Swiss Army knives!

Back to screwing up the notes!

Have a great weekend! Muck about!

PS. Yes, I know someone will accuse me of being some kind of tool, before you start.

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Schrödinger’s Joke – Observe With Care!

Here’s a joke involving Schrödinger’s Cat*. Let me be the first to comment that the act of observing the joke might kill it.

The joke also involves the work of Black Lace, who wrote the song “Agadoo”.  I think both “Agadoo” and Schrödinger’s Cat are hard to grasp, but hopefully I’ve made some sense of them for you.

Everyone loves science these days, but it’s a mixed blessing. Without some kind of Hippocratic Oath, it’s only a matter of time before scientists come up with another nitroglycerin, another uranium-235, another file format to share the music of Justin Bieber with…

In Power Systems, Noam Chomsky says that back in the day (around the early 1600s), if you were holding a cup of boiling water and then let it go, the steam would rise to the ceiling and the cup would fall to the floor. I’m not a scientist, but I think the same would happen now. Anyway, Noam’s point is that back in the day, actual scientists would’ve explained the cup-steam phenomenon thusly:

“The cup is going to its natural place and the steam is going to its natural place”.

There were some pretty clever people around, but no-one knew to be puzzled about why the cup and the steam were doing different things. And then Galileo got puzzled about it and all hell broke loose.

Makes you wonder what we’re not being puzzled about these days, doesn’t it?

*My big regret with this clip is having to leave out the final punchline (due to an audio drop-out), which is Morrissey singing, “Girlfriend in a conga, oh you’re so embarrassing…”

P.S. There’s some great Chomsky here and some great Schrödinger’s Cat here.

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I’ve Been Shot! And I’m Gigging With Rich Hall!

I was shot yesterday… By a great photographer!

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Here’s a pic that we liked. The rest are for my 2015 Edinburgh Fringe show and have a different look – but I guess I’ve got to pay the talented Mr Andy Hollingworth before I show them off!

My Edinburgh Fringe show this year will be about creating songs with utility that serve humankind. Really.

…And this just in: I’m guesting on Rich Hall’s Hoedown this Wednesday, which will be ace, not least because Rob Childs and the band can’t half play.

Don’t forget, if you want my new album for free, just email me at info@christianreilly.co.uk with the word “Ebeneezer” and I’ll send you the link.

I’m also Tweeting, YouTubing and Facebooking , and would love to hear from you.

 

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