You won’t hear me ranting about the sanctity of life in my routines. Mostly I’ll tell you that life isn’t particularly precious and it’s the opposite of rare. I’m not “high on life” and, while I try to enjoy mine, I’ll accept that for the majority of sentient creatures on this planet life is (to quote Hobbes) “nasty, brutish and short.”

In my comedy I’ve characterized life as difficult, unfair, absurd, pointless and cruel. A “comedy persona” can be very different from what you’re actually like in real life but I’ve chosen a path that prioritizes authenticity and sincerity, so the misanthropy and pessimism I highlight in my routines isn’t radically different from how I actually see things.

Life might be weird, hard, scary and stupid but it’s also necessary. Without it you can’t do much, and you need undead powers to even have that option. It actually doesn’t matter how we feel about life because we still have to do it.

And doing life might be the best creative advice I can give to comedians and any artists (yes, comedy is an artform!). All those difficulties that come with doing life the hard way (and most of us are doing life the hard way) are actually the fuel for our stories, our motivations, our inspirations, our insights and our jokes.

Almost every joke is borne of frustration. Almost everything you ever laughed at started with someone’s bad experience or feelings about how something was wrong. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an injustice or a design flaw, things that don’t function as we feel they ought to is the #1 source for joke material.

So yes, exposure to design flaws and injustices are an excellent way to find stuff to write about. And we can find them almost everywhere because everything in this world has injustices and design flaws. Dating, your job, the economy, your family, shopping, anything on the news… if you can’t find anything wrong in your world that can be the seeds of comedy then your filter bubble is working too well. You’re too insulated from life and you need to get out of your echo chamber and have a look at the weirdness and ugliness that lurks in every corner of the real world.

So many comedians do is refuse to talk about their day jobs. Trust me, the number of comics in Australia who don’t need a day job or secondary source of revenue (TV work counts as a day job, by the way) can be counted on one hand. We all have day jobs. And for some bizarre inexplicable reason we all seem to believe that you’ll think less of us if we admit to you that we work for a living.

Jobs are an excellent source of comedy material and the most relatable because it makes us equals, telling you that we share experiences and frustrations. I’ll never understand why most comedians prefer to insult themselves or talk about the most intimate and/or humiliating parts of their lives than admit they work for a living like the rest of us. It’s bizarre.

Life with all it’s indignity and mundane minutiae isn’t just where all comedy comes from – it’s where all art comes from. Comedy just happens to be more honest than most other art forms, which often pretend the only noteworthy parts of existence are spiritual or lofty.

Real art gets it’s hands dirty. As Picasso famously said, good taste is the enemy of art and creativity. Legendary comic George Carlin categorised his jokes as falling into three categories – The “Big World”, the “Little World” and Word Play. The “Big World” would be about grand themes like politics, religion and society. The “Little World” related to traffic jams, the contents of your fridge, bodily functions and the like.

Wait… did one of the most respected and influential comedians who ever lived talk about farts and shitting and mundane stuff like that? Absolutely.

Any time I feel guilty about routines that might be characterized as puerile (and I have had DMs from pretentious armchair critics who think I should limit my discussion exclusively to highbrow topics), I remember Carlin saying the material about bodily functions is the most unifying relatable material that you can present, that those things not discussed in “polite company” are precisely what we all understand and share.

And I remember that I think the “word play” that everyone thinks is so chin-strokingly clever is pedantic, painful, patience-testing and revolving around puns (which I mostly hate).

Of course there is such a thing as puerile humour. We all recognize that. But most artists I like, whatever their platform, have a penthouse-to-pavement view about what to focus on and include it all in their art.

Let’s talk about the visual arts for a minute – -specifically, the Impressionists. People praise the Impressionists for inventing pointillism and being the first artists to capture light. Believe it or not, that’s only a small part of what made the impressionists cool. There’s another two reasons that have much greater social significance.

Firstly they were the first painters to open and fund their own exhibitions, which was a very punk-rock DIY thing to do. Previously artists were commissioned by the church, royalty or by rich benefactors… and this meant that pretty much all art was designed to impress and win the favour of the church, royalty and rich benefactors, and it was mostly of the church, royalty and rich benefactors. The first Impressionist exhibition was amazing because the artists put it on themselves, advertised and sold directly to the public. It was risky – if it weren’t a success we might be living in a very different kind of world right now.

And because they weren’t being paid by the church, royalty or rich benefactors they painted whatever the fuck they wanted. After centuries of biblical scenes and portraits of princes these artists were bringing us street scenes and images of the working class. The artists of the Impressionist movement were the first ones to tell us they found ordinary people to be as intriguing and worthy of examination as angels and archdukes.

Art should be of life, and life isn’t in ivory towers. Life is out in the streets!

There’s no shame in being a comedian who lives an everyday life and works at an everyday job. I’ve seen many comics who get successful and become less relatable. They quit their mundane lives and become a full time entertainer, spending all their time in planes and clubs and hotel rooms. And then their material becomes all about planes and clubs and hotel rooms. It might be a more luxurious world but it’s a much smaller one to write about, and less relatable to most of us.

The lifestyles of the rich and famous might actually be less interesting to us than we suspect. They might be bizarre but probably not as funny.

We might all prefer not to turn up at the McJob, serve the customer, queue at the supermarket, shower every day, clean out the cat litter or vacuum the house but there’s comedy potential in all of it. Complaints and observations about cleaning the cat litter are going to be funnier than complaints and observations about the maid doing it.

Because I’m a wonderfully creative and gifted comedian I get asked about the creative process and finding ideas to write about. I’ve touched on this before, but my #1 advice is to do life. Life is where the funny is. Get out there in the world and make sure you get your hands dirty. If you’re lucky enough to live in the penthouse make sure you still know what the pavement looks like. And remember: Enduring the annoyances of life is the minimal price for being able to comment about it.