Art You Care About

 
 
 
 

Transcript:

Once you figure out how to write and perform and you’ve made enough people laugh, you start asking other questions: what’s the point?  Why am I doing this?


An’ I have a lot of reasons why I do stand-up.  But the most sustainable one for me is, you have to hold yourself to a standard that you’re only going to make art that you care about.


You have to keep making the art functional – in the case of comedy, it has to make people laugh.  You can’t stop doing that part.  Kind of important.


The audience still needs a reason to care. // The venn diagram where you care and they care needs to overlap.


But I don’ think the way to find that overlap is by trying to please the audience.  I think you have to give in to your own curiosity and hope for overlap, through that process.  Being selfish is more sustainable than trying to do things for other people.  Maybe that makes me a bad person, I don’ know.


I’ve been very intentional the past couple years to work on and really struggle with more difficult jokes, challenging topics.  Things that interest me more than a cute observation.  I still like cute observations, but they’re not as interesting.  There’s no depth.  There’s no conversation to be had.


I don’ remember where I read this, but it’s worth obsessing over…this is important to think about, I read this somewhere: “You can’t feel love for your achievements if you are playing a persona.”


Ooof…right?  Ya feel that one in your guts?


If you feel empty in what you’re doing, chances are you’re being fake.  That’s my theory.


I fake things all the time cuz of social pressure.  It’s super annoying.  I’m not proud of myself for it, nut it’s a way to scrounge through life.  If you’re ok with being a scrounger.


But I’m getting a lot better at not faking it with comedy and that’s exciting to me.


You can’t feel love for your achievements if you are playing a persona.


The quote gets even more devastating; here’s the next part: The persona is incapable of receiving and feeling love; it can only experience praise.


Praise, not the same as love.


Don’t aim for praise.  Not in your art; not in your life.  Not a good thing to aim for.


Here’s more of the quote that I don’t remember where it came from: You must be genuinely existentially connected from your heart to the things you are doing.  Praise for the persona will never connect with you emotionally because you are not emotionally connected to what you are doing.


So that’s something I think about a lot.  Don’t be a fake punk seeking praise.  That’s a waste of a life.  Don’t do that.


Today’s mental health exercise is to think of a time in your work or art or relationships when you were being a fake punk, and don’t do it again.


This is as good of a time as any to quote Lady Gaga.  Lady Gaga said on a random TikTok I saw, she said: “What I think an artist needs more than discipline, or even talent, is a perspective.  So if you are always changing what you do based on what other people say, you completely lose yourself…”


…In the music, the moment, you own it, you better never let it go.


You want to anchor everything in your art to your perspective.  You have to be the filter.  When you fake it, it’s not anchored in your perspective.  You’re not adding anything to the conversation.  You’re just trying to blend in.


Art doesn’t blend in.  Art says something different.  What’s the different thing that you feel an urge to express?


I was reading an article on Pixar’s rules for their stories.  They have a series of rules they have their writers read when they’re working on story structure.


One a’ the rules is “Why must you tell this story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.”


Must.


You must tell this joke.


Burning within you.


Something needs to be on fire.


That’s the goal.  That’s how you avoid being fake.  What is on fire?  How are you going to deal with the fire.  That’s a good place for art to grow out of.

I was listening to Jerrod Carmichael talk about how most of the time when he watches stand-up it feels dead to him.  Jerrod, very funny.  Pretty good at stand-up.  But his most recent special, Rothaniel, not terribly funny.  Highly interesting.  Felt more substantive.  It was him talking about his family, personal identity. 

So that was an effort by him to make something that felt more consequential, more alive?  And that’s all well and good.  I was interested in what he had to say.  I think it was good that he made that.

But I’m still more interested in comedy.  I’ll listen to your life’s story, I’ll hear your challenges and struggles and try to connect with you as best I can through that.


But I still feel at my best when I can embrace the comedy in all of our struggles.


Some people think there are some things that shouldn’t be laughed about.  I disagree.


An’ maybe that’s just a fundamental emotional orientation thing that varies from person to person.


Some people like me are wired to think anything can be funny, other people are wired to think very little should be made fun of.  To each their own.  People be different.


I think if you can’t laugh at something it has too much power over you.  You’re giving it too much weight.  There should be some aspect of it you can laugh at.


Nothing is that serious.


Some people think certain things are that serious.  Ok.  We disagree.


The tricky thing about trying to create jokes that feel vital and alive and consequential is…at the end of the day, they’re jokes.


They naturally lean silly and inconsequential.  So it’s a very fine line.


You have to be able to use an art form that feels designed for immature people and make it resonate with mature, upstanding members of society.


You have to rattle peoples’ cages a little bit in a way that they appreciate – in a way that not only do they enjoy it while the cage is being rattled, but maybe they even are encouraged by the rattling to step outside the cage themselves, do their own exploring.  They’re still thinking about the experience and talking about it with their friends.


I think there’s still a way to do that within the art of stand up comedy.  But you can’t fake it.  You gotta do it for real.


You gotta plant your flag and have a perspective.  You gotta take those risks.

Michael Franke