This is me at open mics

Shit comedians are still better than okay songwriters. Just saying.

Sea Change

The last months have been haunted by a mixture of change and stasis. Just when I thought I was on the right path in stand-up comedy, shit happened and I stopped. I had to suddenly move house and that had a nice financial impact on my career (attempt) boost. The fact that I live more than two hours away from London, far far away from the city life, certainly doesn't help either. I came to a standstill.

My last gig was a disaster. I bombed big and felt that was it. It's the worst thing, when you finally have your material starting to flow, your timings improving, and then - ta-da - you're shit. But nobody is really suddenly shit. To me, bombing is just something that happens when you and your audience are not made for each other. You are mutually shit. It's the opposite of love, and it's not hate: it's a mutual lack of attraction.

So I stopped, then I started again. Somewhere else. I decided to focus on the things I could do now, even though my love of stand-up remains unchallenged, relentless. Suddenly I found myself in two musical projects where I'm singer-songwriter.

I had no clue I could write or sing songs. But the strangest things happen, and the music has given me a boost, a magnitude of hope I so needed. Every song I complete, no matter how flawed, is an accomplishment, a small piece in my happiness puzzle.


Burger Queen from Ruben on Vimeo.

This led to an urge, and I started working on other things. My routines changed. My bedroom became a workshop. And for that I have to blame Austin Kleon, whose two books 'Steal Like an Artist' and 'Show Your Work' I found in a Manchester indie bookstore laid ground for the work I started doing. I got back into drawing. I started writing again and filming stupid videos. An urge became a routine - shit just got real.

In my workshop, and have two main walls, The Wall of Masters and The Wall of Guidance. The first, is composed of a set of pictures from my favourite artists so that I remember why I'm here, based on Kleon's tree of artistic influences. My friend Ricardo prefers to call it The Artistic Boob (as it turned out, it ended up looking just like one).

In this boob, I'm the nipple.

The Wall of Guidance has quotes from some of my favourite people and others who happen to just have good advice. Louis CK, Ricky Gervais and many others have a place there. It helps me stay on the path. Every morning, even when I don't read it, the words on the wall stay in the unconscious part of my mind.

You probably can't read it, but it's all there.

 So as projects go, apart from the music, I'm writing some poetry. When I went in my garage one of these days to clear out some old stuff I found some magazines, and decided they were going in the bin. But then I decided against it. I remembered Austin Kleon's 'Newspaper Blackout' and how he was using something somebody else wrote to make his art. So from here, and for the last four weeks, every day 'Scattered' is what I'm doing. One poem a day, non-negotiable. The words come from those old magazines I was going to get rid of.

Words waiting to be part of something.

Yes, my words come from a box of deodorant.

After I cut the words out, I put them in a box, which, for the sake of things, I called 'Wordsmith'. The words or wordsmithereens, go in there and only come out when it's time to make a poem. I never have any idea what I'm writing about. The words decide that for me. I'm not writing here, I'm rearranging, I'm completing a puzzle. The words find me and the poem is born.

One of my recent ones, 'Alchemy'

Every end is a new beginning. Things change, it's no big deal. My favourite advice, straight from the Wall of Guidance:

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work

Flaubert

bombing: from heroes to zeros

There is something tragical about comedy. I can't speak for other comics when it comes to what compels them to make others laugh. To me, personally, it is at first a narcissistic thing. The whole my-life-might-be-shit-but-I'm-still-going-to-share-it-with-you kinda thing can be both poetic and selfish at once. But comedy is also and to me mostly, about bringing happiness. That's why stand-up - paraphrasing Doug Stanhope - works better in bad places. Think of some shitty town or city where people are essentially unhappy, and that's where comedy thrives.

Some say stand-up is one of the bravest things you can do. That might be a bit of a stretch. Bravery is making love to a morbidly obese woman with a moustache. To get up on that stage to be judged by others can be one of the most frightening, surely, but is "brave" really the adjective we're looking for?
I think most of us comedians act in narcissistic ways, by telling the world about the good and bad things that happen to us, about our views on everything.We want to belong but we're not quite up for it. Comedians are natural loners.

No matter how bad or frightening you think comedy is, I guarantee it gets worse. To begin doing it is the most difficult bit. But at the beginning you're so shit you don't really care that much. You keep thinking "fuck it, I'll eventually get better". And that is the main issue right there, when you start improving. Your confidence goes up, you're getting good laughs, then the unexpected comes: You bomb.

Yeah. Your material is better, you're sort of funny, and then suddenly you have one gig that's really,  really bad. I had one two months ago, and it is a hard thing to recover from. The worst part was that last time I gigged in that same place, my material killed and I felt, for the first time, like a comic. It was my first ever good gig.

This time it was the other way around. But somehow, I could tell, from the moment I walked into that room, that the whole atmosphere was wrong. The audience wasn't right for me and I was wrong for them. My material didn't suit this audience. My self-deprecating sexual jokes fell flat. My great ten minutes became the shittiest ten minute set in the history of comedy.

I couldn't get away, I didn't know what to do. I had ten minutes, that was all the jokes I had. So I just carried on even though my main desire was to abandon the stage and say, in a Eric Cartman voice, "Screw you guys, I'm going home!". Sadly, that could have been the wisest of choices. Those ten minutes became a long and very painful experience.

In the end, the only thing that will help any comic overcome bombing is experience, because it is never going to stop. Even my favourites Bill Hicks, Louis CK or Bill Burr have bombed badly. Some of those performances have become the stuff of legend and even been edited as albums - as with Hicks' Flying Saucer Tour - or Youtube sensations - like Bill Burr's Philadelphia rant.

Bombing is bad, but it happens. You don't always have to run away from a rabid midget, but from time to time, you might do. Shit happens.
It's all bombing is, a minor incident.
So don't stop.
Keep bombing.
Bomb better next time - it means you haven't given up yet.

the making of dick jokes and other funny systems, chapter one.

The genesis of everything funny seems, at times, rather complex. I have been watching comedy from a very young age and I still have doubts over what is and isn't funny. Many great comedians never know if a joke will work. They suspect it might but until they actually try it in front of an audience, how do they know? There are so many factors at stake for a joke to work, such as the way it is delivered or the type of audience you're telling it to.

Comedy can be learned in many different ways. I have assimilated a lot about process from comedy writing books and have listened to advice from some of the comedians I admire. However, I still find it quite difficult to find an effective method for writing stand-up material. I always found this particularly strange, that filmmakers, painters and writers share their secrets but comedians, somehow, don't. So with this collection of posts I will try to share what methods and inspiration I've emulated from others.

For me personally, the very first step is always the subject. It can be anything but I personally prefer it to be something I am passionate about. My starting point - before I start writing anything - is to remember the advice of the great George Carlin:

This is key to me. I have to care about my subjects. I mean, you don't have to and you can probably still come up with plenty of funny stuff but if you want to be different, your view of the world matters. Of course you can make jokes about anything. Carlin had observational routines more focused on everyday things (the little world) like the brilliant "Stuff" to his most political material he did in his later years. It really doesn't matter what you're talking about, if it drives you crazy, make it funny!

From the books on comedy I've had the chance to read, there are two that I've found particularly useful. Sally Holloway's 'The Serious Guide to Joke Writing' is a great one to have always around when you're writing. My second favourite is Oliver Double's 'Getting the Joke', as it comes full of advice and quotations from other comics.

There are several useful tools in Sally Holloway's book but I'd start with the joke webs. Many comedians have these in other formats, such as Jerry Corley from Stand-Up Comedy Clinic who produces lists of words related to the main subject. Either way, a joke web is basically a web of subjects, being that you start with your main subject and make connections to other subjects that are, even remotely, connected to the main one. A bit like this one I did on religion:

So after you find your subject, do a joke web on it. Think about as many things connected to that subject as possible and we're on our way to make some jokes.

More on the next chapter.

words from the great C.K.

JW: Your material always seems incredibly thought-through. It’s not just button-pushing for the sake of button-pushing.

Yeah, sometimes. But I’ve said things onstage that are totally indefensible if you take them at their naked truth, and it’s all part of a thing. I remember when I did the joke the other night about the weird babies, and I said Chinese babies are the same as deformed babies — that’s just…what a horrible thing to say, and Pamela said to me, her natural stance is, “Don’t pick on people, don’t say things, you don’t have to hurt people,” but she now said, for the first time, things like the Chinese people joke are really important in your act, and they are, because I’m fucking around with a lot of big ideas, and if I just did those, it would start to…I don’t have the authority to really talk about those things, I don’t have the education or the right to seriously talk about these things. I have no fucking right to be talking about that, and when I make a joke like about a baby with a tree branch growing out of its head and a Chinese baby being the same thing, I’m just being a dick, and I’m being a dick in a new and exciting way, I’m really good at it, and I’m able to find jokes like that in places that people didn’t know that they were before, so that’s just a really good joke to me, but it’s also weird, it takes away my credibility, it makes it clear that, look, I don’t expect you to believe any of this, I’m just being a dick, I’m just enjoying myself. It’s just fun. Really, this thing about evolution I said, you’re really going to think I’m taking it seriously? I just said that Chinese babies are deformed for being Chinese — what kind of person would say that? If you’re a really Hitler-esque eugenic person or something, or someone who’s just honking a big horn and being a dick, just riding a bike with exploding shoes, just being a numb nuts…

Do your thing and now, because fear never goes away

I've always wanted to be a comedian. But where does the funny come from? Stand-up has been called 'the toughest job in the world' but that's bullshit.

The fact that it took me eight long years to get the balls to take my jokes on stage is testimony only to my past cowardice.

My first ever 'gig' was at the King Gong, the monthly gong show at the Comedy Store, in Manchester. I must have been to the toilet more times than I can count. If you thought 'pissing yourself with fear' was just a figure of speech, well, it isn't.

The number of thoughts going through my head was countless. I had my material, my cowboy hat and was ready to rock. Except I wasn't. As much as people love to romanticize it, losing your virginity often isn't such a pretty thing. I sucked, big time. I wasn't terrible but I was very, very far from where I wanted to be.

The important thing here is, it doesn't matter how shit you are going to be at first - you have to start somewhere. I have a few funny friends with such great comedy brains who I think would be great comedians but some have no appeal to go onstage. Maybe they'll turn out to be great comedy writers. Maybe they will never take that step. Who knows?

Others simply can't get past the fear, as I couldn't for eight years. The thing no one tells you is, the fear never goes away. You never really overcome it. I always go back to the prison scene from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises for inspiration. In that scene, Bruce Wayne constantly fails to escape and can't quite understand why. Until the Blind Prisoner, ironically, makes him see:

Blind Prisoner

You do not fear death. You think this makes you strong. It makes you weak.

Bruce Wayne
Why?

Blind Prisoner
How can you move faster than possible, fight longer than possible without the most powerful impulse of the spirit: the fear of death.

Bruce Wayne
I do fear death. I fear dying in here, while my city burns, and there's no one there to save it.

Blind Prisoner
Then make the climb.

Bruce Wayne
How?

Blind Prisoner
As the child did. Without the rope. Then fear will find you again.

The absence of fear isn't courage, it's stupidity. True courage comes from understanding your fears and acting despite them. If people didn't fear death, how many of us would choose not to live?

When I'm onstage, the fear is there with me.

I still remember the exact moment when I decided to do stand-up comedy. I woke up on the morning of my 27th birthday, and something was missing.

In spite of everything, I wasn't happy. I had realized something I hadn't thought about before. I was three years from being thirty. Thirteen away from forty. I had come to terms with the thought that, sooner rather than later, I was going to die - and I hadn't done any of the things I dreamed of.

Most of my favourite comedians had started quite young. Hell, Bill Hicks started doing stand-up when he was fourteen. I had some catching up to do.

I was afraid, and that fear of dying without having lived on my terms was the catalyst for everything that came after that.

I haven't even reached twelve comedy gigs yet. In fact, not counting the gong shows, I've probably managed a total of about eight. It doesn't matter though.

The fact that I've started something is the most important thing for me.

Fear isn't the obstacle, it's the fuel.

Now make the climb. Without the rope. Then fear will find you again.