A Humorous Exaggeration of My Semi Fictional True Self

You will no doubt have noticed that the gap between posts has grown of late. In the past this had been due to unavoidable factors such as woe, self pity and wallowing, the sort of things that really get in the way of sitting down and bashing out some nonsense. Tend to wash less too, but that’s irrelevant (unless you have to sit next to me on a bus, in which case it’s horribly, sick swallowingly relevant). This is no longer the case, by which I mean that the sporadic blogging is due to something else, not that I no longer wallow or self pity. I do still do that, I definitely do. No, this time it’s because I am spreading myself across various passions: music making, stand up writing and enjoying time with my daughter. There is the small matter of my job demanding eight hours of me daily, which in turn produces the necessity to drink really quite heavily over the weekend. To forget you understand, not because I have an alcohol problem.

The last two weeks have been mainly devoted to the conception and initial writing of a two man stand up show. It’s hard being funny, you’ll have noticed obviously, and has been most time consuming. We have a basic set up, a good idea and maybe three jokes, but they are pretty good ones so we’re probably on track. I’ve been concentrating on my bits, in order to have some bits, and have been finding the process of making things amusing, whilst staying on message, to be tricky. I will write a couple of pages and then go back over them, wondering if I can get away with that, or make this slightly more offensive for cheap laughs. It’s a minefield. It’s alright to make a joke about the piss stained elderly to a young, hip crowd and you can openly mock the stupid as long as the idiots watching don’t think they’re them, you can even crudely mimic the disabled as long as you’re clever about it, but at the same time you can fire off one line about fat bastards and clock one in the audience and it can really throw you off, y’know?

You also become a bit boring when you’re trying to think funny. You sit and write, or stare and think. Sometimes you start talking and then have an idea, or the person you were talking to says something brilliant, and you have to write it down. Have to. I’ve been playing around with offence, seeing what will and won’t upset different social groups, what bit of something mean, negative or even upsetting can be twisted to allow for a chuckle. It’s a good game, but does mean that some people get a bit cross about stuff. Weather the storm and move on. It’s not something to sustain though, people don’t like it when you’re a prick. At the moment my on stage character is a gently humorous exaggeration of the semi fictional being my true self hides within during reality, which if delivered correctly should result in folk giggling during, but also leaving going ‘confirmation of his miserably arrogant condescension aside, those were three good jokes’.

Of course, as I’m not writing the whole thing, I will have someone to blame if it doesn’t go down well. The real beauty of co-doing anything is that in success, at least half of it was because of you, if you’re honest probably more like 78%, so most of it, and in failure it was completely nothing to do with you. Ace. I wonder if, on upsetting somebody by saying something from my stupid brain and mouth, I could explain it away by saying my dialogue is written by somebody else. Probably could, not the brightest bunch are we? Clearly I’m counting on the charm of my co-writer to shine through, which should be easy due to my charm being so thin that it’s pretty much transparent, and the fact he’s not a massive bastard.

Anyway, that’s why there have been less blogs, and why there may be the odd week when I simply don’t have the time to write something about not having the time to write something, or something. Each second is precious in this crazy life I lead, only this morning I had to skip conditioning, taking but one bottle into the shower, in order to save valuable moments. It’s pretty mental. I’ll be doing one a week probably, maybe a couple of shorter posts here and there, and there is always the possibility we’ll give up on being funny, or deem our material too funny, a risk to the fragility of the human mind. That’s the most likely, one of the jokes – I think the second – is so funny people may actually involuntarily move bits of their face and body to titter, rather than just being conceptually amusing, within their stony faces.

Right, back to it. Now then, how can I make orphans funny?