The Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes: Tape 15
Captain’s log: This week’s introductory paragraph has a sci-fi theme! Greetings, Earthling [newsletter recipient] and welcome to the Arrowhead Star-Cruiser [Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes], a weekly intergalactic battleship [interactive newsletter/notebook project] from gunk-faced alien Zoblatron [comedian] Joz Norris. If you’ve decided it’s time to be vaporised [got bored of the newsletter], you’re more than welcome to eject yourself into the vacuum of space [unsubscribe] any time. And if you’re still on board the spaceship [subscribed to the newsletter] then let’s go zap some black holes or something [read on?]
“Career” “Paths”
This week’s question, if you’d like to share your thoughts on it with me, is:
What is the worst possible outcome? Is it acceptable? If it is, what does that enable you to do?
Tape 15 is inspired by this excellent thread by the wonderful comedy writer Sara Gibbs, in which she breaks down the key differences between the US and UK models for comedy writing careers, and outlines quite how bleak a picture it is at the moment for people looking to find their way into the UK comedy industry. She followed it up with this thread, in which she counters out the doom-and-gloom of her first with some more positive tips on how you can find your way as a comedy writer in the UK, based on her experience. Both threads are excellent, and should be required reading for people looking to get involved in comedy, but weirdly I didn’t actually find them all that depressing. I found that they sharpened my focus and resolve quite a bit.
I was also reminded of something Laurie Anderson said in her recent chat on Adam Buxton’s podcast. Anderson pointed out that when she started out as an artist in the 70s, the New York art scene consisted of roughly 100 people. Choosing to pursue an artistic career was an inherently unusual, radical thing to do that most people simply didn’t consider doing, so it was inevitable that within that scene meritocracy would prevail, that the very talented or very lucky ones would become superstars, and that pretty much everybody could find their way towards a sustainable career as an artist. Today, that’s simply not the case any more. There are thousands of people trying to make it as comedy writers, comedy performers, comedy producers, comedy directors, and on and on, in the UK alone, not to even mention what’s going on in other countries or in other artistic disciplines. You hear the same thing commented on in comedy a lot as well, that in the early 90s there were perhaps a few dozen comedians performing at the Edinburgh Fringe full stop, so of course they could be pretty much guaranteed to find an audience and build a career for themselves up there. These days, all of us have grown up watching success and acclaim being heaped upon the select few people who had chosen to do it in the time we were growing up. But the success of shows like X Factor and everything that came after it, and the proliferation of social media into our lives have combined to create an atmosphere where a successful creative career is no longer an exceptional, unusual, radical thing to pursue - it’s something many, many people feel pre-destined for, even entitled to.
The fact that there are now too many people trying to find their way into an industry that was built around considerably fewer people, and has not done very well at expanding, particularly when it comes to making itself more accessible for people who have not traditionally been well-served by it, is not good, or admirable, or fair. It is something that will hopefully change as people continue to work hard, to get more unrepresented voices heard, to cater more to unrepresented audiences, and so on and so on. It’s not a good thing that people trying to find their way into comedy are, for the time being, essentially doomed to a life of precarious freelancing. But it is, on the other hand, a good opportunity to foster a positive attitude to our own creativity. At some point in our careers as creative people, whether we’re writers, performers, directors, whatever we may be, we have to accept that we’re not doing this for reward. We’re not doing this for perceived glory or adulation. We need to be doing it because there’s nothing else we CAN do, or at the very least, nothing else we want to do. I don’t say this to glamorise failure or to try and endorse the precarious lifestyles that people in comedy are forced to accept as part and parcel of their life choices - as I said, it’s a situation that can and should change. But I say it because the best work happens when you remove the promise of reward from the thing you’re making. When you’re making something because you NEED it to exist, not because you WANT it to exist in order to impress other people. Thinking this way shifts the goalposts away from “How am I going to succeed in this career I’ve chosen?” towards “What can I do to continue being able to make the things I need to make?” This is what Ben Target calls “building a sustainable artistic practice,” something he recently ran an online course in for Angel Comedy - do keep an eye on him in case he runs one again, he’s one of the best people.