Nevertheless, I write everything down irrespective of initial perceived quality, knowing that most of the jokes I forget are good ones. My iPod Touch has a single Note titled 'Comedy'; it's just this long-ass list of ideas, some good, some crappy, some short, some long. Just looking at it then, the top of the list had a joke about how patronising one of the librarians at my high school was (some of this shit is old, man :P), and towards the bottom sit a few recent lines on things like gay marriage and plain cigarette packaging, as well as a few random ideas and one-liners. Most of my material sits in Microsoft OneNote, with sections for each bit or topic I've written about, as well as a rather long list of miscellaneous material that doesn't fit anywhere. Some of the bits are only a couple of sentences long, ideas that haven't come to fruition yet, and perhaps never will; others are rich in content, paragraph after paragraph of good ideas expressed in a concise manner, pleasing to the ear in its hypothetical delivery. Some bits I go over and practise out loud just for the fun of it, to see if I can improve their wording, or to provoke new lines in my head in order to extend upon what's already there.
I first remember trying to be funny in French class. My first successful joke was in Year 8 or 9, during a writing exercise. Some of the exercises in French required us to write our own sentences using certain new vocabulary or grammatical elements; on this particular day, we had to write a sentence using a possessive pronoun. Without really thinking it'd be that funny, I wrote down "Le bébé n'est pas tien." ("The baby isn't yours."), and upon its delivery, I was met with many lulz. I didn't think right there and then ":O I have to do this for a living! :D", but it was a great sense of achievement. Someone in the class even approached me afterwards to tell me how funny they found the line. I don’t even know if I want to do this for a living, but we’ll get to that later.
French continued to be my lulz factory through its writing exercises, especially the roleplays. Every so often, we’d have to write a short scene surrounding a certain topic or activity (going to the supermarket, learning to drive, etc.), composing and presenting it entirely in French. Certain people in the class (myself included) always tried to make these as funny and absurd as we could. Even though it was a language class, much of the humour was slapstick, because we usually had trouble understanding what the performers were saying—as performers, with this in mind, we pantomimed as much as we could to get the message across. Making people laugh through dialogue was incredible, though, cos not only did you make lulz, you made lulz with another fucking language. That's hard, man.
But, as much fun as short group scenes can be, my thing is solo comedy: stand-up. When I was younger, I’d seen stand-ups on TV a few times, and was a little fascinated by it. It was just unusual to see people standing up in front of a crowd and telling jokes, especially when I knew them from a TV show (Seinfeld, for example). I remember thinking stand-up comedy to be a strictly televised event, where a bunch of comedians would get together and present their five-to-ten minutes—what I thought to be their entire collection of material :P That’s what most stand-up galas are: just groups of comedians walking on, doing a five-to-ten minute set (sometimes shorter, two-to-three minute sets), and leaving for the next person. It seemed strange to me that these people would base their entire careers off of five-to-ten minutes of jokes, let alone find great success with it. I never had cable TV though, and this was before YouTube, so I wasn’t to know what a comedian’s true work looked like for a while.
I distinctly remember two five minute sets I saw on TV, though I couldn’t tell you what year I saw them in—they were both from Just for Laughs compilation specials, the ‘Best of the Best’, I suppose. One is Mitch Herberg’s last appearance on Just for Laughs in 2004. I just happened to turn the TV on, and there he was, telling these off-the-wall non-sequiturs. I loved ‘em, and wanted to hear more, but I think I turned the TV on after his name had appeared in the lower thirds (and I don’t think he said “I’ve been Mitch Hedberg!” at the end of his set either). The second was a Bill Hicks routine from 1990 where he talked about how the ‘This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.’ PSA they were airing in the States back then, and how hypocritical it was for them to run liquor commercials on TV in conjunction with them. This was my first taste of satire, my first taste of true critical thinking:
“It’s OK to drink your drug! We meant those other drugs, those... untaxed drugs.”And look where the weed debate is now :P
I was also heavily into The Chaser's War on Everything, another televised comedy program. A friend of mine turned me onto the show, a half-hour weekly romp where seven satirists lampooned anything and everything worth lampooning. They bashed the absolute shit out of current affairs programs, confronted politicians like it was nothing, and frequently took on taboo subject matter with their material. They ran into controversy more than a few times, and their greatest stunt (infiltrating the 2007 APEC conference in Sydney, getting within ten metres of George W. Bush's hotel) made them too recognisable by the public for their stunts to be as effective—they were kinda brought down by their own success. The show fuelled the wannabe sceptic within me, and, with help from like-minded teachers at school, I began to have a more constructive approach to critical thinking. Though I wasn't fully aware of it at the time, they were a huge influence on me and my mindset at the time, and the sheer nerve they displayed in their stunts impressed me to no end (even though some of them were faked—but you'd have to be an idiot to think it was 100% real :P).
My first thorough comedy experience, though, was to happen by total accident. It was early 2008, and I was in my local video store, rummaging through the Comedy section, looking for something interesting that I hadn’t seen. I happened to see a case with a picture of Robin Williams just... standing there. I looked on the back, and he appeared to be on a stage, by himself... “What the fuck is this?”, I thought. I couldn’t figure it out. But it was Robin Williams, and I loved this guy in everything I’d seen him in, so I rented it. I got home, put it in the player, and watched it. It was one of his stand-up specials: an hour-and-a-half of Robin Williams just... telling jokes! I thought they only did this for five-to-ten minutes! How is he doing this? How? He was so full of energy, and so clever—I’ll never forget first hearing him talking about turning Neverland into a theme park, saying “You must be this high to ride Michael!” I was in hysterics throughout the entire thing, not to mention enthralled to see someone doing the same kind of weird comedy performance I’d seen years ago, but for ninety minutes straight!
Not only was I laughing, not only was I enthralled, but I was inspired. “What if I could do that? That would be so awesome if I could do that!” But I had no jokes, no training, and no balls, so it was a pipe dream at the time—just a cool thing to think about.
Around the same time, I started to like a girl in high school called ‘Sally’, whom I’ve mentioned in this blog before. It wasn’t long before I was staring at her in Science class (made harder by the fact that she sat behind me :P); and I was thinking about her non-stop, wanting to approach her, to talk to her, to say hi and maybe ask her out... but like that was going to happen :P I didn’t know how to confront her, seeing as I was shit-scared of rejection, so I just kept my distance and admired her from afar.
But I thought about the stand-up routine I watched, and went “...hmm... maybe this could be useful. If I did stand-up, I could tell Sally I liked her, or at least get the word out about me liking her (otherwise impossible given my lack of social integration), without needing to talk to her face-to-face! It’s perfect! She’ll know everything, and I won’t have to affront her :D” I was doing an Intro-to-Drama class at the time (and enjoying it), so I figured that would provide me with the stage training I needed—I just had to write the fucking thing.
So I devised a plan: I’d write the material such that the first half of it was about everyday life, school life, etc.—having nothing to do with Sally at all—and the second half would be about how I liked her, how I couldn’t confront her, how I thought about her all the time, ending on some kind of name reveal. I realised, though, that it seemed crucial to have Sally in the audience while I delivered my monologue, such that she heard it for herself and would know exactly how I felt... nothing a rigged raffle draw for a free ticket can’t fix :D I seriously thought about having a ‘draw’ for free tickets—either a few across the whole school or one ticket per year group—then having her name be the only one in the hat. Either that, or pinning a printed class roll to a board, putting a thumbtack over her name, closing my eyes, and moving my finger down until I hit the thumbtack. Whatever I could do to ensure her presence, I would have done (short of asking her in person to go :P).
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t without its flaws. I mean, first off, where was this material gonna come from? Was I even that funny? I’d had a few laughs in drama class, sure, but nothing the other students hadn’t gotten themselves. I’d gotten laughs in French too, but that was French class, not a stand-up performance. All I had to go off was the Robin Williams performance I’d watched and the Just for Laughs bits I mentioned earlier, and I had no ideas... like, no ideas. And even if I’d written all this, would it have been good material? Half-an-hour of good material can take a comedian years to get right—but I didn’t know that at the time, did I :P
But even if I’d written that material, and even if it had been better than anything my idols have ever written, and even if Sally was front and centre, laughing her cute little ass off... would it it really have been a good idea to call her out in front of an audience like that? I mean, the way I wanted to do it was, after talking about the girl in question, having everyone in the audience stand up (provided I knew she was there). I’d sit people down Guess Who style—sit down if you’re a dude; sit down if you’re over 18; sit down if you’re under 15; sit down if you don't study particular subjects, etc. She would have been just sitting there in the crowd, a crowd that could have been quite sizeable had I made a really good assembly announcement, and before she knew it, she’d have been standing up alone in front of the entire audience... all so I could ask her on a date in public. No pressure...
It was a silly plan, but it never went anywhere, so it was ultimately harmless... for a while :P
Near the end of 2009, I still liked Sally. Shit, I liked her more at that point than I ever had (years of dreaming about being with someone will do that to you :P). This whole time, that comedy plan of mine had been dormant, not an active pursuit, but still in the back of my head. I can’t remember exactly when this was, nor what triggered it—I think it was either having a friend having me listen to part of a Mitch Hedberg album on his iPod, or coming 2nd in my Youth Theatre class, where I'd pulled off several successful comic roles—but one day, I went “You know what? Let’s start writing some things down. Let's make this happen.” Not long after I started crushing on Sally, we got broadband, so I could have been watching clips of comedians on YouTube at the time too, though I could swear I only started doing that heaps in 2010. Nonetheless, I was inspired, and I went for it, writing down ideas I had for both the first half about life in general, and the second half on my love for Sally. They were nothing but random dot points, but it was a start.
It was too late, though, for this plan was to die in only a few weeks’ time. Come the Year 10 Formal, after seeing Sally, that was it. I’d had enough. I had to ask her out. I just had to. This shit couldn’t go on anymore :P I came home that evening and wanted nothing more than to confront her and get this over and done with (though the balls required to do so were still nowhere to be found :P). I did, however, remember the document I made with all the comedy notes in it. I opened it and made notes specifically on the Formal evening: how it looked like some kind of Mafioso youth group gathering, how I was baffled people were using flash when taking pictures outside in broad daylight, how there was a strobe light for the dance when I thought we were trying to reduce the number of epileptic fits in young people. And, of course, there were a whole ton of dot points on how Sally was just teh hotness, and how I wanted to talk to her and ask her to dance, but couldn’t because friends wouldn’t fuck off for even two seconds—how it ended up being one big, failed tactical espionage mission :P
I continued to pursue Sally at school, and as I made progress, I continued taking notes on my observations, both my myself and the situation as a whole. When I made the English speech where I announced her name to the class and said I liked her, I noted how one particular student covered their mouth as if they’d seen the second coming of Christ. When I talked to her for the first time, complimenting her on her dress at the Formal, I noted how I talked so much that she needed to politely shut me up so she could get to where she had to go. When I went into school the Monday after graduation to ask her out, I noted how I stood around shaking like a cocaine addict waiting for her to come out of her classroom, and that was after waiting for five hours just so she’d show up on site :P
For the two weeks ranging from the Formal to being rejected by Sally (if you didn’t see that coming, you are a nub :P), I was making fun of the situation, both of the world around me and my reactions to it. I filled pages with idea after idea, note after note, eventually turning some of them into lines. I had the strongest sense of inspiration ever. And it wasn’t even to impress and ask Sally out anymore! Sally was over, a thing of the past; but I could now look forward to writing about my experiences. This was a new drive, a new world to explore. Now I wanted to get up and tell everyone about how I liked Sally—not to impress her, but to have fun and make people laugh.
I love telling this story cos it makes me feel all warm inside. I mean, remembering how many butterflies were in my stomach due to Sally’s mere presence is cool enough. And this situation is one of the few reminding me that, yes, I have had balls before, and yes, I have done some scary shit for a dream before—and that it made me feel awesome, something I can easily feel again if I push myself to the limit like I did when I asked Sally out. But it also reminds me of where all this began, where this whole comedy thing started: with me going crazy over some girl, then taking the piss out of myself and the world around me as I ended that chapter of my life. It gave me a way to turn something wild, scary, and ultimately painful into a positive reflection, allowing me to see the good in what could have easily been dismissed in some emotional fit as a waste of time. It was the pivot on which my life tilted—without Sally, I would not be where I am right now, I would not think the way I think, and I would not be the person I am.
For Sally, it was probably just that time when the awkward boy talked to her a few times and asked her out. But for me, this is everything. I can't imagine life without this comic framework, without this mindset—but I don't have to. I can just enjoy it :)
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