Tape 147: Asking For Help

Or; "The Young Comedians Of Today," Or Something

Over the last year or two I’ve been expanding my identity from the admittedly broad and vague perameters of “someone who makes things” to the slightly more specific and compartmentalised “someone who makes things, and also helps other people to make other things.” This sounds a lot like nothing, so let me elaborate. In practise, this means that I’ve been working as a sort of mentor/outside eye/creative consultant for other comedians, helping them with their comedy scripts and, more specifically for the purposes of this week’s newsletter, their live shows. They’re usually comedians earlier on in their careers than I am who for some reason have identified me as the person they think can hammer their ideas into the best shape (I say “for some reason,” I reckon about 66% of the time I do these sessions it turns out the comedian is interested in either neurodiversity, folklore or both, so clearly those are the vibes I’m giving off).

With some of the acts I work with, I end up becoming closely enough involved with the show, or closely enough aligned with the performer, that I end up attaching myself formally as that show’s director (I’m doing that currently with Edy Hurst, Cerys Bradley and Lulu Popplewell, who are all excellent). But of course I only have limited time and headspace to attach myself to shows in that way, so what usually ends up happening is that I do a limited number of sessions with a comedian just helping them explore their ideas and find the best approaches for them so they can continue working independently on their show and make it into the best thing it can be.

I initially went into this new role with a huge amount of imposter syndrome - I worried that I might find I had a very limited bag of tricks, and ran out of things to say, or I’d find that my ideas were inflexible and hard to apply to different kinds of performers and different kinds of shows. But as the months have gone by and I’ve worked with stand-ups, clowns, character comedians, storytellers and theatre-makers, it’s been remarkable to see how quickly those feelings fade as I’m able to track the extent to which I’m actually helping. I’ve seen people’s confidence come on in leaps and bounds, I’ve seen ideas we’ve discussed in sessions turn into really exciting new avenues to explore that help move their shows to the next level. It’s really satisfying to be able to tell yourself “Oh, I’m actually good at this” after one of these sessions, no matter how incongruous it feels to think that many years of pratting around and being stupid have actually left me with a mysterious kernel of knowledge and experience I can hand over to a new generation. It’s sort of like if Obi-Wan Kenobi had spent a decade wearing a toilet seat on his head or beating up an invisible dog (kind of regret that one, actually).

On that note, one of the things that has really interested me in doing these sessions is the extent to which many of these acts I’ve been working with remind me of myself when I started doing comedy. Many of them are relatively early in their comedy journeys (urgh, sorry for calling it a journey, just off to throw myself off a cliff, still typing this as I fall, aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh splash, ok coming home now to carry on writing, I’m soaking wet now). They’re working on their first or second show and figuring out how best to communicate the essence of what they do to an audience, and so naturally I sometimes see them falling into some of the same pitfalls I did, or forgetting to consider important things it took me a long time to figure out. It can be really helpful to step in and point out where they might be ignoring a blind spot. But the sheer fact that I’m sat there discussing these things with them shows that a lot of these newer comedians are already successfully avoiding one of my biggest mistakes when I started out - they’re all willing to ask for help.

When I started out doing comedy, I heard the same thing in response to the things I did onstage an awful lot. I never really had much of a plan, and I didn’t even watch much live comedy. I never consciously imitated anyone (though I’m sure plenty of unconscious influences found their way in), I just got onstage and did whatever came naturally to me. People were very quick to tell me I was weird, and that I was part of a new wave of alternative comedians, whatever that meant. What they said very often was something along the lines of “I don’t really understand what makes your stuff funny. If anyone else did your ideas, they’d be rubbish, but something about you makes them funny.”

Built this balloon version of myself in 2013 so that I could play two different characters and make them have a conversation onstage.

It’s an objectively lovely thing to be told that you have funny bones, but my response to it was to retreat into arrogance, which is just a kind of fear really. I assumed that because the essence of my comedy seemed to be “Nobody else understands how to make these ideas funny,” that the only way to make my ideas work was for me to just do them exactly as I wanted, with no outside help at all. Anybody else would just misunderstand my ideas, I thought, so I looked at my shows as opportunities to just communicate the core essence of each idea as faithfully as I could to how I imagined it. I made five entire shows before I ever tried to collaborate with other people on one of them.

The first time I ever made a show as a result of building a small team of collaborators around that show was Mr Fruit Salad in 2019, which was also my first show to ever make much of a dent on the wider comedy world, in an act of wild coincidence. It’s almost like spending five years refusing to contemplate the idea of showing your work to anyone else imposes limitations on the quality of the work. Now, I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the difference in quality between my early shows and my more recent shows, and I was very flattered to receive some lovely replies from readers telling me they were big fans of those early shows and I shouldn’t do them down. Admittedly, I was being excessively harsh to my past output for comedic effect, but it is important to remind myself that the basic building blocks I was working with - the core ideas, the sense of energy and chaos and fun - remain things I’m very proud of, and I’m glad they were shows that created positive memories for people. But I was so trapped in my own fear of asking other people to come in and look at my work and help me to make it better that I always look at those early shows and wonder what they might have become if I’d approached them with more rigour and openness to collaboration.

To be fair, collaboration as a principle was very important to me at the time - I also wrote recently about how collectives were a big deal on the comedy scene a decade ago, and I was making lots of anarchic, collaborative shows with Weirdos Comedy at the time. But for some reason that collaborative spirit didn’t seem to feed back into my solo work very much, and I’m sure a lot of that came from fear of criticism. But there also didn’t seem to be much of a culture of hiring people to come in and work on your show as an outside eye back then. I don’t remember hearing about people hiring directors to work on their shows until a few years later. Maybe it was all going on in another part of the comedy scene, but in the corners of it I was playing in, I simply didn’t see that happening. It wasn’t that the idea of closer collaboration was being dangled in front of me, and I was turning it down. It was almost like in order to do it, I would have had to actively come up with the idea of doing it, and it simply never occurred to me, not least because I really didn’t have much money in those days and the thought of spending it on collaborators maybe felt too extravagant or high-risk to me.

Slowly, this shifted. Ben Target started hosting sharings and scratch performances at his flat that a few of us would come to in order to share work and then discuss it. When I started work on Mr Fruit Salad, it came after a year when I’d taken a break from making new comedy work due to Bad Mental Health (kept staying up until 5am to stare out of my window and see if anyone interesting walked past, kept bursting into tears in karaoke booths, that sort of thing). When I felt like I’d recovered from that, I wanted to put some of those feelings of hurt into something joyous and silly, and I finally overcame my fear of inviting other people in. For the first time, I didn’t just want to make a fun show - I needed to, and I felt like if I failed at channelling that difficult time into something I was proud of, then what was the point of it all? (Important caveat - I do not believe that emotional hurt are in any way noble or necessary or that they become worthwhile if you channel them into making art or anything dumb like that. Making that show was just part of how I got back up and got on with my life, and I wanted it to be good so that I could feel proud of myself again).

These days, I finally realise that inviting other people in is the most important thing you can do with your own creativity. I remain proud of many of the ideas in those early shows, and I try not to look at them with regret, but I will always wonder what other collaborators might have helped me turn them into.

These days, when I do these sessions with newer comedians, of course I don’t only see them making the same mistakes that I made when I was newer. I also see all the excitement and originality and authenticity that I hope other people saw in my early stuff too. It’s a real pleasure helping them to hone in on what’s truly brilliant, and helping them to skirt around the pitfalls and traps that it’s easy to wander into when you’re still building your voice. But honestly, the thing about them that inspires me the most is that all of them have learned a crucial lesson years earlier than I did - asking for help doesn’t weaken what you’re making in the slightest. All it does is make your work better.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy - Last night I had the honour of playing a series of disgusting rogues and rakes in Christian Brighty and Amy Greaves’ new Radio 4 sitcom, The Many Wrongs Of Lord Christian Brighty. I think it’s out in August sometime, and you must keep an ear out for it, it’s going to be very special.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most - Well obviously, any number of hilarious moments in the aforementioned radio show, but using both of these sections for the same thing feels like cheating, so instead I’m going to give this to Tony Law, who I saw at a gig on Tuesday for the first time in ages and who made me absolutely howl by going on in a top-hat and opening with “I know what you’re thinking. Beard. Hat. Beard-hat.”

Book Of The Week - I’m currently reading The Home Stretch by Sally Howard, which is an analysis of why we need to talk more about equitable distribution of household labour. Me and Miranda do alright at this, I think, but this book is a good reminder to keep analysing that and not get complacent about who does what.

Album Of The Week - The Mary Wallopers, the self-titled debut by the Mary Wallopers. These guys are at Green Man in August, so I thought I’d get into them, although I’ve since found out they’re on after I leave. They’re great though - it’s very fun, raucous Irish folk music in the vein of the Pogues. Their version of “Cod Liver Oil And The Orange Juice” is a delight.

Film Of The Week - Longlegs. This film is so stupid, and next week’s newsletter is going to be a full review of it, because I need to explain why it’s not the scariest film of the decade and is actually one of the dumbest.

That’s all for this week! As ever, if you enjoy the newsletter then please feel free to recommend it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe. Take care of yourselves until next time and all the best,

Joz xx

PS I always end the newsletter by saying you can make a donation to my Ko-Fi if you want to and making a point of explaining that I have no plans to monetise this newsletter soon. For the time being, that remains the case, and what I do know is that I will never make it so that you have to pay for this newsletter - the weekly mailouts will always be free. However, because Substack has a “pledge” option, where you can pledge a future subscription if there ever did become a paid version, I thought I’d turn that on so that you can pledge your support in the future if this newsletter means a lot to you. I’m toying with the idea of a paid subscription that includes a second weekly email that explores additional ideas, and access to the chat, community etc as that continues to build. If this newsletter means enough to you that you might consider subscribing for £3 a month, feel free to pledge. I will let you all know well in advance if I do ever get to the point of activating a paid version, and will be very clear about what advantages that paid version would involve. For now, this is just about gauging interest levels because increasingly, it looks like having some sort of monetised stream to our online platforms is one of the only sustainable ways for creative freelancers to make a living. Please don’t feel obliged to pledge, I still want this to be accessible to everyone, I’m just experimenting to see what happens, really.

PPS Here’s me forgetting that radio is an audio medium and going overboard with face acting in The Many Wrongs. So glad this moment was captured.