Making Trash
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Transcript:
I like stand-up because it allows me to fail. Repeatedly.
To make any progress in life, you have to fail constantly. Maybe not constantly, that’s probably bad…but, a lot a’ the time. At least 20-40% of the time. If you wanna grow and get better at anything.
It’s necessary.
I’ve never made any progress in my life by doing anything else.
That’s the only way I know to get better at anything, is to fall flat on my face. I have to bite it over and over and over to get good at anything.
But what sucks, is that lots of people will not give you room to fail. There are large numbers of people who like to hate on failure. They look at failure as a bad thing. They won’t let you take risks.
That negative pressure against failure, the over-glorification of success - that’s gonna try to push you toward a form of cowardice. You’ll be less inclined to take on difficult challenges.
That’s not healthy.
What I love about stand-up is, I get to fail. I get to fail publicly. And then I get to work off the feedback of that public failure without it being blown out of proportion.
The amount that I have failed has proportional consequences that match up with the failure.
If I bomb telling a joke, the consequence is I don’t get a laugh or I lose the audience.
Every once in a while you see some comic get hammered for a joke, and it blows up into a big deal and a bunch a’ people get mad. An’ it’s like; they already got the feedback.
Either it worked or it didn’t. If the joke ate it, it already ate it. You don’t need to emphasize how much it ate it.
There’s this fetishization of kicking people when they’re down. They’ve already been kicked. You’re being a weird hateful bully. Let them fail and learn from their failure. Don’t act like they hurt you personally. They didn’t.
Luckily, I’m failing consistently enough as a stand-up comic that no one cares enough to make something like that my problem. Not yet anyway. You have to have enough success before people will get truly excited about trying to ruin you for your failures.
Good art requires failed expeditions. A good life requires failed expeditions. You have to take risks and fail or you aren’t gonna see much of the world while you’re alive.
Don’t let people scare you into not living a real life. I’ve made that mistake many times in my life. Too much. I’ve wasted a lot of years caring far too much about other people’s distaste for my failures. I’ve finally kind of learned that it’s better to try to do the things I want to do than to let other people ridicule me into a position of cowardice.
Don’t wait until you’re in your 30s to start living life that way. Don’t let other people’s low expectations and appraisal of what you’re capable of set your bar.
Set your own bar. Set it as high as you want. Knock your head into it as many times as you want. Don’t let other people convince you that it’s not worth getting concussions trying to jump over that bar. The concussions are worth it.
Speaking of concussions, let’s talk about Jordan Peterson.
What? What a strange transition…
Jordan Peterson, he’s a Canadian psychologist. Some people love him. Some people hate him. Whatever you’re opinion, he’s become very popular over the past 6 years or so. Viral news stories, he’s written some books. Made a lotta YouTube videos. Does these massive public lectures. Sells out auditoriums and theaters all over the place.
So, Jordan Peterson, he talks about why he thinks his Biblical Lecture Series got so wildly popular on YouTube.
Here’s why he thinks that is. I promise this is going to relate to stand-up comedy.
Most people can’t lecture about the Bible in a way that a modern audience finds compelling. It doesn’t capture the typical modern viewer’s attention or imagination.
The reason Peterson thinks he was able to connect with people is that he wasn’t telling people what he thought. He wasn’t telling people. “This is how you should read these Biblical stories. This is what these Biblical stories mean definitively.” Instead, Peterson states that his approach to his lectures is to try to investigate something that is beyond his comprehension. He doesn’t fully understand the stories either, but he’s trying to figure it out and he’s sharing his thoughts. The lectures all come from a place of humility. He doesn’t know. He says “Here’s what I think might be true here.” And then he watches the audience's reaction.
It’s an investigation that results in revelatory surprises for everyone involved.
Peterson talks about how he is often surprised by how the audience reacts to the things he says.
He talks about how the problem with most Christian Churches, or religions in general for that matter, is that they often are moralizing - telling you what to do and what to think instead of leading along an investigation. Many religious institutions pretend to have all the answers, and yet they are all led by perfectly fallible human beings who screw up all the time. It’s fundamentally dishonest.
Leading a lecture as an investigation becomes a more participatory exercise for the audience. They’re processing the material in their minds in much the way Peterson is and they can feel that he is paying attention to them.
Talking to people, if you’re any good at it, is different from talking to a wall. There’s give and take.
And when he lectures, Peterson is doing that investigation on his feet - on the fly - he’s stumbling. He doesn’t get it all correct. He trips. He falls. He gets lost. Again, there’s humility in his approach to the task at hand.
If you can get beyond the annoying surface-level political stuff that comes from Jordan Peterson on places like Twitter, if you read his books and watch his lectures, he has a lot of interesting things to say about art and beauty. He talks about how beauty doesn’t preach or moralize. It just is. It’s self-evident. It doesn’t have to try to logically justify itself or argue for itself; people simply recognize it when they see it.
In the same way, jokes don’t preach: they just make you laugh! It’s funny because it’s true and it surprises you and it does it elegantly. Ultimately, it doesn’t offend you - it’s like receiving a weird unexpected gift. Good jokes are much funnier than they are offensive. But it’s not easy to get that balance right. You have to explore.
That’s my goal with stand-up. When I’m really nailing it as a comedian, I’m investigating something that is somewhat beyond my comprehension. I don’t have all the answers. I’m exploring and I’m reading the reaction of the audience. They’re exploring with me.
So, the point is, if a stand-up comic is going to get any good at stand-up comedy, they’re already paying very close attention to the response from the audience. They’re already approaching the art form with a high level of humility. Ego doesn’t work for stand-up.
You can have an ego ironically. You can have a surface-level ego as a character element, as a shtick.
As soon as you develop a real ego and think you’re hot shit, think you’re cool, all that crap - you immediately cease to be funny. Part of the reason why is that you lose respect for the response from the audience. You lose touch with the people you’re supposed to be connecting with.
So to bring it back around to what I was saying at the beginning: There’s no need as an audience member to go after a comedian and try to turn them into this image in your head of a horrible person. You don’t have to like the way they are exploring their thoughts and ideas on stage. That’s fine. But it’s wildly unnecessary to yell at them for being a bad person because their joke didn’t land.
It’s nearly impossible to make it as a stand-up comedian. It’s the 8th wonder of the world that anyone ever accomplishes it at a high level. It’s very hard.
Just let people succeed or fail on their own merits. If they don’t learn their lesson from audience feedback and stay humble; they’re not gonna make it anyway.
No one busts into a music jam session and berates the band for not cutting a perfect album then and there.
Literary critics don’t get to tear apart an author’s first draft. Editors get to do that. It’s productive criticism. They don’t publish it on Twitter and have random people tell the author he doesn’t deserve to pursue his art form anymore. Critics have to wait for the publication of the final product.
Bombing is integral to the creative process of stand-up. It is a tool for refining the joke. Don’t apologize for that. Embrace it.
It is right for the audience to dislike a bad bit, but they can’t then also get mad at you as an artist or as a person.
I mean they can. And they will. But you just have to ignore that, cuz they don’t get it. They don’t understand the process. They don’t see the progress you’re making from falling flat on your face in all these embarrassing ways.
So there might be boos and canceling along the way. Part a’ the journey.
Your first stand-up will be trash.
All art is that way.
The first photo you take as a photographer will be trash.
The first blog post you write will be trash.
The first YouTube video you make will be trash.
Just, no matter what angry people running on minimal sleep and poor nutrition say to you on Twitter, keep making trash in public.
That’s the recipe for progress. Life, death, rebirth. Rinse and repeat.
You won’t be appreciated until you get it right. No one will care until you’re succeeding at the thing other people never believed you could succeed at.
But the cool thing is, you can learn to appreciate the little successes that no one else sees. You have a front-row seat to all of the progress no one else notices.
When you write your first joke that works great.
When you figure out how to do that act out the right way after trying it six different ways.
When you finally figure out how to talk about more personal stuff on stage.
When you learn how to control your pacing.
When you get better at reading the audience’s reaction and noticing subtle body language signals you never used to pick up on.
No one else sees any of that but you. And that’s kinda cool in its own way. You get to know your chosen art form better than anyone else. You get to see how the magic works.
That’s its own form of success. And the only way to get that up close and personal seat to the show is to fall flat on your face, over, and over, and over…
If you still don’t get it, go watch the Tony Hawk documentary Until the Wheels Fall Off. It was directed by a really talented creative, Sam Jones. He has a very cool series of interviews with artists on YouTube called Off Camera with Sam Jones - you should check those out. It’s also a podcast. But Tony invented an insane number of skateboarding tricks, and he was not fully appreciated for what he was doing right away.
He was being creative. He was stumbling. He looked like a fool to a lot of people for a long time. Until he didn’t and we all had a great time playing his video games.
Also, he figured out how to have some fun and make friends along the way. Don’t forget that part.