“I’ve started several businesses. Maybe 17 have failed out of 20. I fail quickly. I fail frequently. Entrepreneurship is a sentence of failures punctuated by brief success.”
The words of a successful/unsuccessful entrepreneur.
It makes me think of joke writing. For “business”, substitute “joke”.
A good stand-up show is all your successes in one place.
With stand-up and entrepreneurship, the trick is to find ways to fail that mean you can keep playing the game.
I got into show business because I hate the honest, ugly, savage, truth of waking up human, knowing that one day that I won’t wake up and those days or moments before that last sentient moment will probably be quite tricky.
The only solution to living with this painful reality is love*, a practice that’s not always easy, which takes a lifetime of work, vigilance and bravery to acquire the capacity to do it.
Of course, love is an end in itself, and the solution to the human condition and so on, but we’re all really busy at “work” due to everybody’s “love” of certain other ideas.
There you go. Truth in three paragraphs, whenever you need them.
Now bring on the lies of authors, songwriters, storytellers! I need a rest!
What’s that? All of a sudden, I’m hearing: Great writing tells the truth. Great fiction tells the truth. Great art tells the truth.
Truth, truth, truth, truth, truth. Ugh.
Surely all this truth needs breaking up with a dick joke once in a while?
Just saying, if you’re now thinking of a rude joke and smiling, treasure that feeling.
My work here is done.
*I’m not being touchy-feely. This is the scholarly definition of love, put forward by Erich Fromm in The Art Of Loving.
…is where preparation meets opportunity.
I’ve been prepared and lucky.
I’ve also been unprepared and unlucky.
Furthermore, I’ve been lucky and unprepared and I’ve been unlucky and prepared.
Guess which one of these variables I’d recommend focussing on?
Good luck!
Hey there. You might be reading this because you know me, or you saw me at a gig, or Google made a mistake, or we’re family, but let’s face it…
I’m a nobody. Good.
Adolf Hitler. Jimmy Savile. Jeremy Clarkson. If history teaches us anything, it’s that Somebodies are the problem. They should probably be banned.
If you’re a somebody and you’re reading this, sorry but it’s not for you.
What’s great about my story is that it’s not: I was a nobody, then through persistence, I met Bill Gates in a lift, convinced him to fund me, and now I own an island. That’s the blog post a Somebody would write.
What’s great about my story is that it’s this: I was a nobody, then through persistence (and luck*), I found a way to do what I love most days of my life. And I’m still a nobody. And there are others like me. Isn’t that great?
If I can do it with all my nobody-ness – you can, too.
Have you heard of the post-industrial economy? In short, it’s this. You’re fired.
I’m hearing the smart people say that it’s becoming vital to figure out how to make it without institutions.
So. I’ll try and be as honest as possible about my experiences here, and maybe you can take something from them. Or add to them. You should ask if you want to know something specific. And take it with a grain of salt**.
*I will be publishing a definitive “how-to” guide about luck tomorrow.
**I will be publishing a definitive “how-to” guide about truth the day after***.
***I don’t even know if I’m telling the truth in this last footnote.
Update. I thought it was more important to do the truth post first. So these footnotes are a bit of a massaging of truth. I think this might be irony.
…is:
Good. (Enough).
Holding out for “Perfect” will leave you unpublished every time.
Just me, but I think we’re all anarchists, in that we hate being told what to do, but we’re also all masochists, in that we wish somebody would make things easy for us, and tell us what to do.
Total freedom is still scary to us. Mostly, we’re descended from serfs.
Because we hate being told what to do, but also crave being told what to do, we’re always constructing reasons to be obedient where they don’t exist.
Do you want to put your heart and soul into making something? Do you care enough about it to take the hits and get better at what you do?
Then don’t obey your fear of taking a creative risk. That’s an order!
Between an audience and a performer there is the invisible fourth wall.
A difference between most performance and stand-up is that comedians “don’t have” the fourth wall. Or so it needs to seem.
Just my take, but I wouldn’t worry too much about “breaking” the wall.
There are all kinds of way successful comics out there, from the ultra who-are-you-what-do-you-do? types to the the tightly scripted one-liner merchants and there’s a place for them all.
People come to know you through what you’ve created. That’s intimate enough.
I reckon even the comedians that get audience members up on stage to dance/answer questions/pick a card haven’t broken the wall. It’s still a show, there’s still a wall, and those punters just became props.
I say pick your own relationship with the wall. For me it’s more of a serving hatch.
The diners can come into the kitchen if they like, but the stuff that’s relevant to them is coming through the hatch.
Is there someone out there who is better than you at a certain thing? Does it bother you?
Well, answer me this.
I know for a fact there’s someone out there who could take you in a fight.
Why hasn’t it stopped you walking around?
Welcome to being alive. With 7 billion choices, yes, there just might be someone out there “better” than you in some category.
It’s your turn right now. You can be best at dealing with that.
I’m always forgetting that all my favourite people are mould-breaking one-offs.
Note to self. Stop trying to fit in.
Yesterday, I mentioned my old improv teacher told us there were only two ways to get a laugh. The first one was covered yesterday.
The second way to get a laugh (I was told) is reincorporation.
That could be as simple as a comedian harking back to a thing she introduced earlier in her routine. The second time she brings it up, the context has changed and this change makes us see the original thing in a new light, inducing laughter.
It doesn’t have to be a thing brought up in the routine. It could be a thing already in the consciousness of the audience.
If I parody a famous singer, as well as dropping the status of the famous person (satisfying, as mentioned yesterday) it’s also a type of reincorporation. You’ve heard it before, now I’m using it in a different way.
I’d say observational comedy falls into the reincorporation category. The comedian is making you see a thing that you’ve seen a million times before, but making you realise you hadn’t truly seen it until you saw it the way the comedian saw it.
I guess some musical comedy is a type of observational comedy. “Have you noticed (x) sounds like (y)?”
Maybe if you’re having trouble with a joke, it could be that you’re not lowering the status of someone or something (your target might not be one your audience can build hostility towards), or you’re not reincorporating, because you’re making an observation about a thing that’s not in your audience’s consciousness at the moment that it needs to be.
If you’ve been doing stand-up, this might be stuff you’ve already worked out, but hopefully I’m saying it in a way you may not have heard before.
Reincorporation without the laughs!
PS If anyone has anything to add to this, I would love to hear from you.
Christian Reilly 