A little over a year ago I was living in Austin, Texas, a place where you can slalom from barback job to temp gig like some greased up butterball turkey hurled between bearded jorted shirtless troglodytes in one of those World's Strongest Man competitions. I was doing just that, flying through the air, not a care in the world, writing a lot of material about suicide and GG Allin and pajamas and shit because it was becoming clear that I was not going to be marketed off as one of the cute new sweatered alt comics to watch that year or any year. There's freedom in knowing that, though. When you're washed up you can do whatever you want. You can walk around wearing an open Hawaiian shirt with your sunglasses congealed to your eyeballs listening to spotify without logging into a private session with reckless abandon because hey man there's nowhere to go but up, and that probably isn't happening.
I think if you ever find yourself down and out like this you should take advantage of it because there's a certain bruce lee esque fluidity that you get when you act without actully caring about the consequences of anything. For some people this leads to playing Bjork videos on multiple TVs in their one bedroom apartment and finding out what bullets taste like, but for the rest of us it leads to creating cute little paintings and monologues. I guess what I'm saying is that I'd previously spent some time in comedy trying to write ten minutes that would get me in front of some coked up marketing graduate in town from the b'uhhig c'itty who would then take me to TV-Wood and make me into a Z list demigod. This actually works for a number of people and that's why if you go watch a comedy show half of the sets go like this:
"Let me tell you a little about myself."
"I'm this race and some other shit"
"I'm single or not single"
"I look like this"
"comic books"
"this is my impression of [Zach Galifianakis]"
~Fin
It's basically an actor's audition. There's nothing wrong with it really, but it's easy to get stuck doing shit like this forever and lose sight of why you decided to pursue the ancient moronic art of telling jokes in the first place.
Hey man, do whatever you want with your set, but I'm saying creatively it's easy to miss the forest for the woodsmen jacking off in it. Most of us will be completely devastated by this industry, even if we're at some point moderately successful, so I say get weird with your shit. Fuck writing that 10 minute audition for Hollywood set, just write. You're doing stand up in the first place because you're a psycho, so climb down that well and pull some scary Ringu shit out.
Here's what I'm being so self congratulatory about: I recorded an album that I think was fueled by this whole gun to the head, nothing to lose, Bjork is speaking to me through the lottery-esque fluid state of mind. I really enjoyed producing the material for it because I was just writing for the purpose of being funny and creating a long set that had an arc and a mood and shit. There was no other purpose than I just wanted to make a thing. That felt a lot better than obsessing over which jokes are gonna win me the big comedy contest at the county watermelon festival. I'm probably wrong and it probably sucks, I will definitely die in obscurity, but this definitely at least happened.
It's available here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/humours/id900843799