The last few months have been a whirlwind of events (good and bad) that haven’t provided many opportunities for updates of substance, and that’s why you haven’t heard from me here in a while.

I’ve been around, though, and this last month I’ve done lots of shows at NAFA (the North Australian Festival of the Arts) with the Guilt Free Comedy team which has been a great opportunity and an exhilarating experience.

Townsville comics are very aware that we generally only get 1-2 performance opportunities a month and with NAFA we’ve been able to do that most days, to large and small audiences (and often we don’t know which one it is until we actually come out on stage) to local and tourist audiences alike. It’s been alongside comics we know, bigger-name comics and comedians from other cities, under a variety of big-top tents with massive stages and impressive lights. In all it’s been great for experience and learning as well as a constant thrill-ride.

I’ve tried to switch around my material for all the shows I’ve done. I know that the appeal of getting up lots of times in a month is for many comics a chance to really practice and polish a serviceable ten-minute set, but for the sake of my fellow comics and and punters supportive enough to come to two or more shows, I’ve chosen to try do at least something they didn’t see yesterday. I don’t love watching the same set several times; even if it’s my own.

One of the results of this is that I’ve ended up reviewing the catalog of material that I’ve written. I’ve always been pretty prolific and believe I’ve built a respectable body of work for the (almost) three years I’ve been doing comedy. I can recall several of my sets that I’ve ‘killed’ with over the years. But surprisingly, I’m finding less usable material than I assumed I had.

Admittedly I haven’t been quite so prolific this year, and that’s largely due to the tumultuous nature of the year I’ve had. Some of it’s been a bit tragic (my partner is from war-torn Ukraine, my beloved dog Rufus passed away, health issues, etc for starters) and it’s too early to use any of it as comedy-writing fuel. As the saying goes, “Tragedy plus time equals comedy” and without the time element, it just can’t be comedic right now. And frankly, I just haven’t felt “the funny” too often in 2022.

Even my catalog produced less usable material than I’d have thought. Sarah Silverman famously remarked that “comedy is not evergreen.” She meant that both comedians and audiences outgrow 15 year old jokes due to social and political changes, but it turns out that I’m not even able to use much of my material from 2021.

For example: 18 months ago I had a set that I could pretty reliably kill with that was loosely based around my relationship with alcohol. Admittedly I’d amplified the situation for the bit, and the jokes are still pretty funny, but I can’t really perform it now because I’ve mostly stopped drinking. I’m not “on the wagon” and I’ll still have a beer with you, but I mostly don’t bother so it’s hard to deliver the material without it feeling like I’m doing someone else’s jokes.

The same applies to a lot of what I wrote in my first year, much of which was centered around being single and dating. The politics and social dynamics of dating still fascinate me (especially internet dating, dating in my fifties, etc) but it’s just not that relevant to where I’m at. I’m 18 months into a great relationship that I plan to spend the rest of my life in, and even though the jokes are still funny I just can’t feel them enough to present them with any degree of authenticity.

The same goes for anything about having a dog in my life, which I no longer do. Dogs, dating, alcohol… these are just some of my history I can’t access right now because I’ve changed.

There’s also the material that can’t be used because society has changed. It’s what most comics are thinking about when they talk about jokes being “not evergreen.” It’s not just fashions and music tastes that change with time: our values words do also. This isn’t a huge one for me because I always prefer to err on the side of “political correctness” but comedians are very aware that our present deeds might be considered past crimes 15 years from now, and we could all be vilified in the future for saying things that everyone agrees are perfectly reasonable now.

And then there’s the jokes I’ve outgrown from a skill/experience perspective. My earliest material isn’t as good on a technical or structural level as what I can write now. I could write funny stuff, but it was at least six months before I really got a sense of the actual mechanics of humour, so I was far more reliant on techniques like hyperbole than I am now. When I comb the back catalog I don’t bother with the first six months because I know I can do better.

So… I think I’ve got about 2.5 hours of material but once I cut out anything too old, to out-of-touch, anything related to dogs or dating or drinking, or anything that just doesn’t feel like me anymore, I have considerably less. A lot less. Like a lot, lot, lot less. Like, I could perform a 40 minute show I’d be happy with, but it’s nowhere near the nearly 3 hours of material I’ve written.

Obviously the lesson is that when you’re a comic you can never write too much. Comedians need to keep writing because some jokes spoil like food and some jokes get outgrown like clothes.

We’re writers. Real writers. I explain to my literary friends that comics are all emulating Hemingway, trying to communicate the maximum of content with the minimum of words. We’re writers who understand syntax, the use of plosives, alliteration and onomatopoeia. We know how to build and release tension in our writing. Writing comedy is a craft that’s every bit as legitimate as writing poetry or drama.

The difference is that our work has a temporal quality. Don deLillo can point to every novel he’s ever written and it’s all part of his canon. Songwriters can perform their songs for years (I remember seeing Psychedelic Furs in concert a few years ago. Every song they performed had been written 25 years earlier and nobody minded at all). But it’s an extremely rare joke that can be told regularly for 25 years and still be effective enough to keep using. Comedians are writers who have to constantly keep writing.

As I said, I haven’t had an especially prolific year, and it’s been nice to just focus on the craft of performing for a while. But I need to get creating again, and I might need to review my own advice for it.