Joy
Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Transcript:
This is gonna be uncomfortable for me.
Joy.
Joy. When’s the last time you felt joy?
Remember when you were a kid and joy was still a level of emotion that was available to you? You could experience joy?
I have nephews. They’re very young. They hit joy quite easily. You jus’ sit with ‘em, make a silly face, let ‘em try to fight you like a super hero – they jump right up to joy.
What is joy? Overwhelming happiness? Tears of joy? Elation? Ecstasy? Triumphant exuberance? A mediocre film starring Jennifer Lawrence?
You want your stand-up aiming for joy. That’s the gold standard. What better feeling can you gift to another human being?
Joy to the world!
That’s the goal.
You’ve got to try to transmute the bitter, broken, painful stuff, into joy.
Your job as a comedian is to put a little magic back in people’s lives. Something people can’t wrap their heads around or explain. The mystery of joy.
If you haven’t watched Adam Sandler’s comedy special 100% Fresh on Netflix; this is an advertisement for that. That is a man doing joy. That’s how you produce joy on a stage. It’s joyful comedy, even when it’s not.
You gotta perform from a place of joy. If you want it to be good. You’re not always going to perform from a joyful place. Sometimes it’s gonna be bad. But if you want it to be good: joy.
And you can do frustration, and apathy, and boredom, and shame, and depression, and anger, and bitterness, and envy, and confusion, and anxiety, and disappointment, and disgust, and fear, and loathing, and Las Vegas…but you always have to end up aiming toward joy. That has to be the north star of all of it.
Laughter is joy. It’s that place of unexpected joy. It’s joy where it shouldn’t be. It’s upside-down joy. It’s bewildering joy. Joy that befuddles; plays tricks on the mind.
Comedians, we talk about all the dirty, strange, off-the-beaten-path, outside-the-mainstream, culturally unacceptable things…but we have to strive to bring those things into the fold in a joyful way.
“You shouldn’t smile about that,” …but we want you to smile about that.
All of those non-joyous negative emotional states can in fact be the exact opposite. It’s only a matter of perspective.
And it can be hard on the comedian, trying to do this. There is value in embracing those other emotional states. Sadness can be good. Resentment can be good. We wouldn’t have these emotions if they didn’t serve a purpose in life. You should pay attention to and investigate your emotions, not just write them off or suppress them or immediately try to transmute them into the more favorable emotion, such as joy.
But after you’ve done some processing, maybe try the joy thing. It’s silly and weird and funny to go through that emotional alchemy. Does the heart good.
Some comics, myself included at times, it’s like, “Whoa…you’re still down in the dark hole. Ok…hmm. Not sure we wanna jump down in that scary pit with you.”
Flailing around in the scary pit. Maybe that’s still an art piece. You’ve made a thing that is approaching art. But is it stand-up comedy? It’s stand-up. You’re standing up, talking into a microphone. It’s conveying things, emotionally, contextualized in a semi-relatable way, we’re all feeling and vibing with this sort of, but laughter doesn’t strike us as the appropriate or spontaneous response…
If that’s the case… if you’re in that space. You’ve created some tension or nervousness in the room, but you haven’t turned the corner on it – you haven’t figured out how to redirect that emotional inertia toward joy – back to the lab.
How do you put some love into that joke about that dark, scary thing? The thing goes bump in the night…what are we going to do about that together? How do you light a fire that makes everyone feel a little more safe?
How do you make the joke feel like a hug in the end? It should feel like a warm hug when you’re done.
Sometimes when you’re feeling frustrated, apathetic, bored, shameful, depressed, angry, bitter, envious, confused, anxious, disappointed, disgusted, fearful, loathesome, or Las Vegas…ya just need a hug. It’s kind of a catch-all that way. Figure out how to give a joke hug.