It’s not always easy to come up with something on the spot. It’s like when someone says “Hey, tell a joke” and you mind goes completely blank. You knew hundreds of jokes a moment ago, but now they’re all gone. The same thing probably happens to actors, musicians and anyone else who has found an outlet to express themselves. Sometimes there just isn’t a way to get everything out.
That’s where I am today. I’ve started three different posts in the last few days and just kind of trailed off. They were good ideas for posts too! I’m sure I’ll eventually get back to them and finish them off, but today it just isn’t happening.
I’m not sure if this is the cumulative result of a four-day weekend followed by some serious dental surgery (I was the patient, not the guy with the drill, luckily) and a couple of days of top quality pain meds or just good old fashioned writers block. The creative juices just aren’t flowing and the only way I’m going to fix that is by finding the literary (not literal) clitoris. It’s like I’m 13 years old again and just can’t find the bloody thing (I’m kidding, at 13 I was only just figuring out that an orgasm wasn’t a microscopic life form, though I’m sure my biology teacher had a good laugh at that essay...). The point is sometimes things don’t come out in a rush, you have to work at it for a while, let it settle, before coming back and going at it a bit harder... dammit I’m still thinking about clitoris’s. Is that the plural? Clitoriseses? Clitorii? Clitorati? That just sounds like a very invasive paparazzi. Or a celebrity gynaecologist with a camera. Either way... ugh.
I had a point... Sometimes it’s hard to articulate a thought, this is made harder when the thought isn’t coherent to begin with. I had a friend writing a stand-up comedy sketch a while ago who was a bit short of material. I offered to help him out with some ideas and evaluate what he had so far. So, once we’d been at the pub for a few hours we were starting to get some pretty good stuff down on paper. Napkins and coasters really, but they’re still mostly paper.
I had the great suggestion to get on stage and talk about how hard it is to write a stand up comedy script. My reasoning was something like “You’re supposed to write what you know, yeah? So write that this is harder than we thought! Whose round is it?” Which seems reasonable, a lot of comedians talk about stuff they know. Women complain about their boyfriends, men complain about their wives, gay comedians complain about their handbags, Jerry Seinfield complains about being rich and still not funny. Why not complain about trying to write something funny?
You have to write a stand-up act tailored to an audience you don’t even know yet, this can go badly if you go too high-brow to a crowd full of gorillas that some cheerful bloody zookeeper thought it would be funny to put mullet-wigs on and then drop off at a local pub’s comedy night. This went badly in the case of this friend who once did a gig in front of a crowd of miners (people who mine, not under-agers) and didn’t get a single laugh from a few jokes about party drugs. He later found out that this was due to the fact the people who hand out random drug tests were sitting in the same room. You’ve never met a group of people who suddenly found they (quite deliberately) knew so little about illicit substances. It could have been snowing cocaine in that room and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in there that would admit to thinking it was anything but a very unusual bit of weather.
So you get on stage and talk about how hard it is to come up with material, and how times have been tough for comedians all over since Michael Jackson died and George W. Bush left politics. Talk about some of the stuff you wanted to say, talk about the stupid conversations you had coming up with new material, talk about the fight you got into at the bar when you tried out a new joke on the barmaid. How were you supposed to know she was Jewish?
If you can’t come up with something funny to talk about, talk about not being able to come up with anything, then write a blog post about it.
-Worst Guy Ever.
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