WATCH YOUR DREAMS DIE AND BE HAPPY NOW.
Meditations on standup comedy, the healing path and the liberating spectacle of watching your childhood dreams die. (Now with added masturbation jokes.)
For those of you who don’t know my background, I spent 13 years as a standup comedian before I found plant medicine and the healing path.
13 long years spent swearing in sweaty, smoky pub backrooms, learning the art of making drunk strangers temporarily forget about their lives through the medium of masturbation jokes.
I was convinced this was my life path, and it was for a time. I used to think they would have to pry the microphone out of my cold, dead hands before I ever gave up.
But I was wrong.
It was an exciting if not poverty-stricken and precarious existence. I had a lot of early success, which in a way totally fucked me up. I won some prestigious awards and got on TV. I was told I was going to be the next big thing. There was lot of pressure on me to be this next big thing, but I didn’t even know who the fuck I was at that point, I was 21 years old. Riddled with unresolved personal issues, I imploded, sabotaging myself onstage every night and exploring the outer edges of the artform, which meant for about 5 years I wasn’t very funny. My ‘comedy’ act was more like a solipsistic one-man psychodrama that a lot of confused and disappointed audiences were forced to witness, much like hostages in an existential terrorists bombplot that promised explosions that never went off.
I was also doing a shit ton of acid at the time which didn’t really help.
I burnt so many bridges, most major club owners would not touch me with a ten foot barge pole after this period, even when I finally got my act together (literally) and remembered how to be funny again. Understandably though, they were trying to run a business, not create a space where an artist could figuratively crywank himself to death onstage every night.
I failed to realise at the time that I was really just re-capitulating my unhealed childhood corewounds onto the outside world, and specifically into the workplace, like so many people do. Then one night whilst abusing the audience once again, I had a moment. Staring out at their confused, frightened faces, I suddenly realised that they were not my childhood tormentors who’d made my life hell in…
