or why I don't do stand-up comedy anymore


I don’t know why I started. I just knew that I didn’t want to die without having given it a go. There was a notorious newbies and new material night with a long waiting list but no other barriers to entry. My reasoning was, if I’m just living and breathing anyway, why not do it in a queue? I’d also seen some pretty atrocious things and thought that I might not be great but I would be better than that. So I signed up, I showed up, I kept going.

When I say that I kept going, I didn’t dive into the depths of hustling required to have anything near to a fruitful career. I was doing the bare minimum. I liked doing what I could on my own terms. It was bearable. I made choices to make it bearable. Like everyone alive ever, I’d been burned before, trying to Make It Happen. I’d had a good run of being well for a while, finally building some of that self-esteem that I’d heard so much about, and I wasn’t keen on setting fire to that promising structure just so I could have the chance of being on a panel show one day.

I liked making a room of people laugh. I liked saying, I’ve got a show. I liked being in my body and out of my body all at once. I liked the company I found in those circles. Again, I made choices. Once, I even had a promising meeting. It was enough for me, but it wasn’t enough for the dream scenario of being seen, like, seen, seen, you know? But that’s the thing about dream scenarios. The magic happens because of who you are, not what you do.

A year and a bit in, I had a show. I was running late, coming back from holiday. Awful things were happening, and about to happen, so it was a relief to have some mundane problems. Dragging my thick, wheeled suitcase behind me, the venue manager raised an eyebrow.

“This isn’t my act,” I reassured him. He gestured to the back office. I waved to the acts I knew in the backstage area and opened the office door with no hands and a crash.

A softly spoken young man with red hair smiled at me. He explained that he had just graduated and that this was his first show in the real world, not the university circuit.

“I guess I’m hiding,” he smiled.

I repeated the, this isn’t my act, reassurance line, with a bit of buoyancy. He laughed. I offered to introduce him to the other acts and kept chatting with him. It was a kindness done for me at my first gig and this felt like the time to pay it forward. Wearing the only clean clothes left from my suitcase, I did okay. He did an incredibly bold anti-comedy bit. Afterwards, I told him he reminded me of Andy Kaufman.

“Who’s he?” I felt a surge of tenderness for him. I marked a point of pride for myself, that I’d get to be the bridge to this reference for someone.

Catching up a good while later, when a lot of the awful things had happened and new ones were unfolding, his pixellated face was ruddy as he talked about the planting and weeding he’d got done earlier. It took a while for us to get round to talking about how we were feeling about getting back into it. We’d both done our first shows in the same year. Sitting in the audience, I wished that I had his guts, his surreal talent. He said that he missed it, the feeling of a set or an hour going well. He paused.

“But is it as good as a full day on the allotment?”

On a similar theme. Alt text: A WhatsApp conversation. The sender says, “Did you know we have a blackberry bush in the garden? I am going to pick blackberries instead of work.” The receiver has reacted with a red heart and replies, “I didn’t. This is great.”