Comrade, I’m so glad you asked. But this is neither the time nor the place. Instead, let me tell you about what drives us to write comedy.
In the words of Jim Carrey’s The Mask (or, in the words of Jamie Kennedy to his business manager upon accepting the lead in 2005’s Son of the Mask) “Because I gotta(?)”.
We are no different from other artists. We wake up, we pour Scotch over our low-GI cornhusks, and we stare emptily at the droning aircon unit affixed to our neighbour’s balcony until we start to make ourselves laugh or cry. Then we go to our day job and search for time-chewing creative derivations of our mundane work, much to the chagrin of Mr Frankston. Come our evening stroll, we are percolating with four-act plays and a YA novel series about a travelling robot circus. By supper, we’ve condensed these ideas into a single visual gimmick involving a toaster with googly eyes.
Even though very little may come out at the end of each day, the drive is always there. The restless, clawing need to spin off into nonsense, to find new comedic angles, one or two good lines, perhaps a character tick, scribbled onto the back of EFTPOS receipt or recorded into the subterranean Notes app of our phones, lost or forgotten for the next year and then half-remembered and clumsily pitched to the other and retracted just as fast as we delivered it. Like a blurted confession of admiration to our favourite Jazz Saxophonist, it regrettably stays with us until we crystallise it in our heads and sit down weeks later to transpose it as coherent English.
For a deeper dive, we come from funny families. Jokes are like trying to distinguish yourself as a way to fit in. Aside from a bloodline to regional Queensland dry humourists, we grew up consuming the very best wholesome comedy (Steve Martin, Robin Williams, The Simpsons) and sought to be funny all the time as children, teens, twentysomethings, that paragraph ago. It also became a mechanism to try to deflect potential bullies or find a like-minded friend by speaking a certain kind of gibberish. This blog could very well be re-titled Being a Weird Kid with Low Self-Esteem.
When we’re too busy to sit down and dedicate time to seeing how funny we can be, we don’t feel very good. Like we’re not ourselves. Like we have no purpose. I mean, beyond parenting our kids (which one or both of us definitely have). Even if we do sit down and dedicate the time and we don’t feel funny or as productive as one of those creatively sabotaged day-job days, we can cheerfully inform others that we “did some writing earlier”. Not that image is all important to us, but it is somewhat comforting especially when we’re scraping the barrel. I’m reminded of the time I was introduced to a friend of a friend at a party. My friend pointed a thumb at this acquaintance and said “photographer” and then pointed at me and said “writer” - before I called myself one, before I had earned it, and up to that moment only quietly hoped deep down. One word to describe me and he said it and it was Writer.
What a piss-poor last sentence.
Damn it.
Ah well, it counts.