Wednesday, January 14, 2004  

Self-Indulgent Artistic Noodling - FAIR WARNING

I just had to get this out of my head. It's boring and not in the least funny...so skip it if you want to.

So I bagged the Studio on Thursdays, and already I can tell it was the right choice. I feel a little fire in the gut that I vaguely remember as being related to the creative impulse. It's good knowing that I'll have to get off my ass a little and ask people for stage time if I want to try something new. Not that I've wanted to try anything new for an awful long time, mind you. It really struck me today how apathetic I've become...not just in my writing, but about being a comic in general.

When you first start, EVERYTHING is grist for the mill. You're so excited to even be doing this stuff that you churn over every news story, scandal, family legend, stupid friend, drunken binge...all you want is material, and you can't write fast enough. Something like Schwartzeneggar getting elected is a gift from God, 5 pages of jokes, easy. Sure, they'd all blow, but you'd be on fire to write them, because you were finally a comedian, and that's what you want to DO.

Then you get some traction, some notoriety, and the impulse changes, but it's still strong. Now you have to get gigs, so you gotta kill. Or you get a following, and you want to keep them. Something happens, and you sit down at the computer or in the coffee shop, and your process is mature now. You don't bang out 5 pages of shit. You know your voice, so it's maybe 2 pages of decent stuff, lots of potential. You know that in a week, you'll have weeded out the crap jokes and you'll have a kickass new 3 minutes that you can't wait to tell. You hit open mikes you usually avoid because you're dying to try them out.

I am in such a different place now, and I don't know if it's a sign of artistic maturity or the begining of the end, but that impulse, that "shit, I gotta write about that" moment has all but disappeared on me. Everyone seems funnier than me these days. Hell, Dennis Kuchinich had a great line about the Bush administration going to Mars ("I see they're still looking for the weapons of mass destruction"). FUCKING DENNIS KUCHINICH is writing funnier stuff than me. Margaret Cho, who I personally consider to be about as funny as colo-rectal cancer, got off a couple of good ones at the MoveOn.org awards about the Bush/Hitler ads. I mean, there's national buzz about Bush being like Hitler, and it didn't even DAWN on me to try to write jokes. Ditto Bush going to Mars. I mean, I'm even supposedly a political comic, a satirist. But my muse is asleep at the wheel, man. I mean, I've gone through periods of writers block or a streak of bad shows, but at least I was actively engaged in being a comic. Maybe a shitty one at the time, but I was awake for what was going on. I heard Bush was going to announce a Mars expedition, and I muttered "what a dick." That's the sum total of my creative impulse. "What a dick."

My wife's ex-fiance writes comments in her LiveJournal that are fucking funny. Like really, really funny. And he's getting a masters in social work or something. Yet he's writing good stuff! Where the hell am I? I honestly don't know if I've just evolved artistically and am so wrapped up in being intimate that I no longer need stuff like the Mars mission to get me going or if I'm really in a downswing. I know I *can* write good jokes. Sometimes I even do, but man, I miss that drive, that irresistible urge to be the guy who has the great joke about something. Like I said, maybe this is what it's like to be a mature performer, but it sure feels like I've taken a wrong turn somewhere.