at one point, i thought my greatest artistic work was a chunk of jokes about the movie "snakes on a plane." (advice to myself and others who might want it)
do you have questions? me too! do i have answers? let's find out!
dear friends, readers, fellow universe inhabitants,
thank you for being here!
i am grateful to you and for you!
usually i use this space to share short jokes, poems, and other quick funs.
sometimes, i use it to share longer pieces i’ve written, like this one that i wrote in response to a younger comedian friend who asked me a question a few years ago about EXPERIMENTING vs PROVING YOURSELF.
i hope you find it some combination of enjoyable and meaningful!
THEIR QUESTION (IN FIVE STANZAS):
Hope that you are well and that you don’t mind giving me some comedy advice. (Thank you for sharing all your responses lately! They’ve been remarkably helpful.)
My question deals with the aftermath of writing something you’re truly proud of. You write it, you perform it a bunch, it does better than anything else you’ve ever written or done, it singlehandedly gets you booked for a while…and then it feels like it’s time to move on.
But how can I? I’m still at the point where it feels more important to prove that I can do well than to workshop something new. I don’t want to sacrifice a chance to do well at a show (especially if it could likely get me booked again!) to try something that I’m sure wouldn’t do as well.
Not to mention, writing feels like a moot task now since it’s hard to imagine that I’d produce something better, at least in the near term. I remember hearing Gary Gulman discuss this same feeling after doing his State Abbreviations Documentary bit. While everyone else is lauding your great work, you as writer are depressed that you’ll have to top it someday and it feels impossible.
How have you gotten past what you may have (at one point in time) considered your best work? Both in terms of getting yourself motivated to try doing something better, and strategically working out your new stuff (to the detriment of what could be a great show). I’m obviously not at a point where I can “build an hour, trash it, repeat.” In fact, when almost all my sets are between 5-10 minutes, I’m forced to make the choice with every show.
MY RESPONSE (IN A DOZEN-ISH STANZAS):
good questions!
first, i'll ask YOU a question. how have you been doing it all this time? the way you phrase the question seems to imply that this is something that's happened more than once, which means you have, multiple times, created something that you're truly proud of. it started as nothing, and now it is something. how did you do that? can you keep doing that?
next, i'll say that it might be a false dichotomy to think that you EITHER have to "prove yourself" OR "workshop something new." if you have ten minutes in a set, you could certainly start with something strong and end with something strong, and try out something newer in the middle. i certainly didn't come up with this method, but it makes a lot of sense to me. you can do as much tried and true stuff as you want, and even just try a line or two at a time. maybe that's what you HAVE been doing. maybe that's what's been working. certainly, it can!
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