The theme is style. Fair warning, it’s from several disparate seemingly random instances of thought which have provoked the theme. Settle in for a bit of exploration.
Comedians come to mind initially. For the longest time I’ve flirted with the idea of wanting to do comedy, but don’t feel like I like my style. That is, I can crack a joke, but I never seem to be able to hold a room for a prolonged story. I don’t just want to be a smart-ass. I don’t just want to fill in the blanks mad-libs style of how many jokes are structured. Add to this that I already have outstanding comedians talking about the things I’d like to talk about. Much as I wouldn’t want to “flirt” at being something like a doctor, I feel it disrespectful and unrepresentative of the appreciation I have for comedy if I didn’t have a voice and deep seeded desire to express myself in that medium. As well, the market is oversaturated even with comedians I like.
Decisions are made in service to how you’ll approach comedy. George Carlin considered himself a writer more than comedian, so his sets are long diatribes if not speeches with maybe a joke tagging along here and there. Richard Pryor dug in deep and mined his personal crazy life. Bill Hicks was practically a radical preacher. It’s hard to think he sat down and had each of his screams or exasperations meticulously timed out like Norm Macdonald who stuck to a script for years. Perhaps it’s a runoff of a certain level of fame, but eventually people get referred to as “legendary” or “groundbreaking” or some status that escalates their quirks and style to somewhere almost unreachable.
I tend to enjoy comedians where they feel like they’re just in a conversation. They relate their life and perspective the same way on stage as they would around a dinner table. Some interview I watched, a comedian said something to the effect of “Sure, everyone wants to kill on stage. The real goal though is to be the funniest one in the parking lot after the show.” That person’s got something special. This is not to belittle preparation or rehearsal, but the idea of “being a comedian” versus “doing comedy” sticks out to me. I think when you hear stories of working for years, travelling, being lonely, being poor, then finally getting a break, you almost feel guilty if you genuinely care about comedy and didn’t put in your dues if you got famous from Youtube or Last Comic Standing. Like Dane Cook working the internet before it became cool.
I suppose I’m concerned about style because I’m concerned about identity. Speaking to my previous blog’s theme, how much of your identity is perhaps a meticulously laid out plan with certain benchmarks and goals, and when are shooting from the hip? I met an overly-enthusiastic gentleman who inserted himself into my crowd which decided to read at a Borders once. He was forcing it, having come off of being a fat introverted guy who found Buddhism and made himself choose differently. Eventually he seemed to mellow out a bit and it flowed more naturally. It’s that, what if he never mellowed? Or, what if the same forces that compelled him to be fat were the same ones that pushed him the other direction? How do you speak to the underlying identity when it’s wrapped too far in positive psychology or quasi-religious dogma?
An identity is a fragile thing to me. I can look at my own just to speak to that. For a long period I was an angsty awkward high school kid, more on the confident asshole side, but no less lacking much direction or perspective. I was THE person you could learn any aspect to the religion/science “debate” for years. All I cared about was learning every possible angle I could of that problem. When that died down and got boring I was in college, but I didn’t drink; a fairly loud statement of identity for that environment. I got into a relationship as something of an experiment, tired of being a loner in my dorm most of freshman year. Now I was the asshole with one of the only cute girls willing to exist around the computers and computing dorm crowd. The next year I start drinking and create a party house. I become someone random kids yell out to as I walk to class.
Year by year little decisions to shift between loner and popular, regularly laid or not, alcohol and drugs or sober. I remember when I couldn’t imagine getting a tattoo or pierced, had no idea why people would bother with such things. My only tattoo so far takes up a large portion of my back and my eyebrow is so subtle and fitting people I’ve known for years forget it’s there while they’re talking to me. Even this year of being boring is a kind of shift from the hyper-stressed and obsessive approach I take when doing things in business. It gets unbearably frustrating to run head first into walls over and over again so I veered off.
It’s important to me then to make sure I know what underwrites my behavior. Why I’m always popular and a loner. Why I always want to be shit faced or could stand to never drink again. What is it that’s going to allow me to be interesting again when I’m done watching every movie and tv show in existence? I think it’s an insistence on using a medium to relate verses hiding behind it as an identity. I’ll watch a thousand movies and not care about losing on trivia night. I need to crack jokes even if they’ll make you cry. “I” am only ever here when I’m acknowledging and manipulating the moment presumably impacting and seeking feedback from you.
How “I” relate to comedy is in the moment. I could see my comment to a heckler being funnier than 5 crafted minutes. How “I” relate to alcohol is in getting peeks at who I think you’d like to be more of when you’re sober. “I” relate to communicating by attempting to speak as deliberately as possible despite knowing every second is someone’s opportunity to run my words into a different direction. I wanted to impress upon my friends to keep their “I” while they were going through grad school as or as all the problems of our current economic situation beared down on them. I worry about cliches and cultural tides. I worry about singular played-out boring identities taken up matter-of-factly as relationships to friends or nuance degrades.
It’s something that I think happens when you’re not paying attention as you get older. Things aren’t shocking anymore. You can get the gist. You’ve spent enough time rehearsing aspects of your personality they’re “well-enough,” independent of whether they are in fact well or enough. You’ve spent so much time getting so many impressions that every new one serves to whittle you down. I can feel it in my “acceptance,” wrong word, of watching daytime talk shows or being unable to throw a glass through the window at whatever crazy beckoning of a nuclear holocaust comment some Fox News asshole said today. The bullshit feels so normal or old-hat, it practically registers as “correct.”
And is that where I want myself to go? Do I want to accept the superficial and detrimental conversations from the brain-trusts on The View about police violence? Do I want the gleaming smiles and endless clapping of morons for the free blender they’re getting after the show? Do I want to accept the Lindsey Grahams and Ted Cruzes as “genuine opposition” or “the other side” as the natural course of American politics? Fuck no! Shit’s crazy! Shit should always piss you off. Shit should be thrown out and ridiculed and passionately debunked because when it’s not, the “normalcy” of that bullshit sends shockwaves through our lives.
But it’s not always as blatant as someone saying something tantamount to “fuck women, black people, or peace.” People roll their identity into hobbies, relationships, and jobs just as easily. The consequences even harder to follow because the minute to minute rationalization is supposed to speak to some goal down the line. I think we need to stop. I think we need reflection. I think we need to feel the pace of time more deeply. I think we should yearn for more of the unfamiliar and remind ourselves of who was around when we were crafting the best versions of ourselves. It’s the difference between survival and living, between being friendly and having friends, and whether you’re “doing comedy” or a comedian.
I see how easy it is to get trapped. I see the sadness creep up when you realize you literally have nothing else to talk about. You no longer are forming the shared memories. You’re not approaching things from any angle other than the one that takes your mind off your current stress inducing thought. The identity is handed to you by the fearful and comfortable that came before. It’s a false security. It’s a lonely island. It’s a black hole sucking all the interesting bits that used to hang off you. An identity is about awareness. It’s a fight to keep yourself right here working with all the forces trying to shape it. Keep working.
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