I seem to have forgotten how to think, am I alone in this? I wonder. What I mean is that it feels as if I never sit and think things through anymore. Situations and occurencies seem to just take me and toss me about on the waves of their whims, I just float and don’t struggle against it, I just wait to see where it lands me.
If you were to ask me how I feel I couldn’t realy answer, I don’t feel good and I don’t feel bad, I just feel ‘ok’ . There doesn’t seem to be any highs and lows anymore, just a feeling of acceptance of where I am in my life and the place I have been given. How would I describe it? No idea. I still get annoyed now and again, especially at injustice and the way politics ruins so many lives and always seems to get away with it. It’s just that I never seem able or willing to form a really in depth analasys of the situation, it’s like a sort of mental fatique.
My opening sentence of ‘not being able to think anymore’ is of course exageration- one of my specialities - what I mean is I can’t seem to concentrate long enough on one subject so as to form an opinion which isn’t just based on ‘gut feeling’. Thoughts fly through my mind, pushing each other to the rear, so I never get the time to dwell on one particular thought for any measure of time. It’s also like that when I am reading or listening to things I really want to know.
I think ,or try to think , a lot about authenticity - it’s what we comedians all want to be -authentic- but we rarely take time to investigate who we actually are, and what our authenticity is. Yet to be a good comedian, and I mean a cut above the rest,it is essential to find just that, ‘what makes me me’? Who am I and what is authentic about me, and how can I be true to that? Only this can bring a comedian to the root of his or her being. Most of us comedians can get away with doing material on what we think people might want to hear and then give it a personal touch, but that is just doing a sort of comedy ‘product placement’, it’s not authenticity. It’s this search to find the ‘me inside me’, that made me take the decision to get out of the theatres and back on to the small stages, hoping that this confrontation with the rougher side of my chosen genre will reveal to me part of what I need to know.
Stand-up Comedy is the only ‘real interest’ I have outside of family life and messing around in the garden. Stand-up Comedy, and how it works, and how I can get it to work for me. It’s been my profession for 18 years and it’s given me a good income, loads of satisfaction and a ‘place in life’ , but I still don’t really ‘get’ what’s happening when I’m on stage, it’s sometimes like an out of body experience, sometimes when on stage it’s like I can see myself and what I’m doing. Lately I don’t even think of preparing a set list before I go on stage, I’m enjoying the excitement of just going on and seeing what my brain tosses up for me to talk about. It seems like I’ve started a new journey, a journey to find my ‘inner voice’ (being a comedian I feel silly just writing that).
I didn’t think it through, it just seems like something that I needed to do, I’ll keep you up to date with how it works out. As long as my ‘inner voice’ has a sense of humor we’ll be ok, I think.
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