The jokes I would have told
“Writing stand up is ideas is like being a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead yet” – Grainne Maguire (Stand-up and possible ghost)
Hi Daytrippers
I’ve been doing stand up comedy for longer than I admit to. When sat in green rooms comics will inevitably ask how long you’ve been going for. Sometimes it’s just to make conversation, but a lot of the time there’s definitely a measuring stick to it. Oh shit, you’ve been performing this long and you’re still an open spot/oh no you’re not even twenty and you’ve leapfrogged me to places I can barely dream of etc etc. It’s good to keep your cards close to your chest. Of course, another reason you should always be cagey is that, like all entertainment and entertainment adjacent industries, comedy is full thrall to the cult of youth.
What matters for new and promising acts is not that they’ve spent a long time honing their art, but that they are new and exciting, and their voice is refreshing, but in a way that has already been prejudged to be the kind of refreshing voice a producer would like to see. Agents love acts in their early to mid twenties, who might not be bronzed reality stars themselves, but they’re aesthetically pleasing enough to stand charm-gawkingly next to them in light entertainment panels. I am of course being very cynical here, and entirely unfair to acts who I knew in my first years of performing who’ve gone on to do some outstanding things and entirely deserve their success. I still don’t admit how long I’ve been going though.
Sometimes when I’m being in a self deprecating mood my answer is, “Long enough for everybody I started with to has either become a professional or given up.” It’s good because it doesn’t tell you how long that is, and it’s also good because it’s true.
Still, the fact remains that by any career metric, I’ve never got anywhere with standup. A few paid gigs fall into my lap here and there, and sometimes I even get a promoter to tell me that, “I think you’re really funny mate. You’re not entirely my audience’s thing but I love it.”
But for all that, I’ve built an identity around being a comic. I’ve been through the Edinburgh festival mill, my applications to perform being roundly ignored whilst open micers with a few gigs under their belt somehow land with options to spare. I’ve driven four and half hours to Bristol in the driving rain for a ten minute spot. I’ve performed inside, outside and next to a funeral. I’ve had a man tell me that he was going to wait outside my venue and glass me. I’ve turned up to a packed Brighton pub and been told that, with no MC, I would be performing amongst a load of diners who had no idea there would be comedy interrupting their dinner, competing with fruities on one wall and football on the other, none of whom had any idea that I would be there. In fairness, I did try to start my show, only to be tapped sharply on the back by a woman who said, “Excuse me, we’re trying to eat our dinner.” And fair enough.
So instinctively, nearly every day of this pandemic that has robbed me, and everybody else like me of my ability to tell jokes in the close confines of poorly ventilated basements, I’ve still written routines nearly every day. They’re great too. Shorn of the punishing disappointment of unleashing a spark of brilliantly observed wit, only for the audience to stare back in bemused silence, none of my routines have been confined to notebook heaven. I’m writing and writing and writing and writing, but nobody can ever listen.
When things come back, as I’m sure they will, I’ll perform again, of course I will. But something will have changed. I don’t want to write about the pandemic, but it is a shared experience that we all have some form of relation to and I can’t imagine my art won’t have been affected by it. In the aftermath of WW1, not everybody was writing about their time battling trenchfoot and praying not to be sent over the top, but the way that a renewed but profoundly damaged people who had shared that experience together created and reacted to art did.
So, to stop the routines going to waste, I’m starting a weekly series of short videos, entitled the Jokes I Would Have Told. They’ll be short 30sec to 1 min vids, on my Instagram and TikTok accounts (@jacobhashishaton), starting this Thursday. It’s all new material, and hopefully, a few of them might even be pretty good.
Ciao
Jacob