Stuart Goldsmith: What I've Learned

I'm doing comedy all wrong.

Chances are you've been trained in your job. Even if you're self-employed maybe you were an apprentice, or you took some classes. Even weirdo live-art performance artists can find one or two courses that might teach them the difference between “juxtaposition”, and another thing that isn't juxtaposition. Maybe they could put the two together.

In 2011, I realised that I'd had no training whatsoever in what had then been my main source of income for four or five years. I wondered if I could find some master craftsman of comedy who'd be prepared to deliver a lecture or masterclass in how they did it, to a paying audience of me and a bunch of other stand-ups of my level*. Simon Evans said he wasn't interested, but he'd let me buy him a coffee.

Two hours later, I scrambled to write down all his words of wisdom: great stuff, big stuff, fascinating conceptual stuff about art and storytelling, and other stuff I don't remember because I didn't scramble fast enough. I wished I'd recorded it, and then kicked myself when I realised just how simple that would have been.

(By this time I'd also heard a few episodes of the WTF podcast, and got frustrated at Marc Maron interrupting guests to talk about himself. Maybe he'd have been a bit less self-involved if he'd once been a street-performer?)

From what I remember, my conversation with Simon was a perfect example of how the interviews now tend to run. Everyone says they don't have a system. Everyone then goes on to explain in intricate detail exactly how they cobbled together their version of “how I do it”. The choices they make and why; the strategies they practise before and on stage; the way they absolutely refuse to or swear by—or aren't too fussed about—all the tiny little flecks and jots and intonations and breaths and rhymes and rhythms and curses and banalities and cornerstones.

I thought if I could learn all those things, familiarise myself with all those decisions, if I could work backwards to discover the formula, then I'd be able to be like them. I'd be able to stop just “doing comedy” and be “A Comedian” like the people I grew up mimicking in the school classroom, to an enraptured audience of one friend. I'd be able to take my place in “The Comedy Industry”**.

And gradually, piece by piece, interview by interview, I realised I was doing it all wrong. I always had been!

There is no formula, and any time spent looking for one will necessarily make you more like someone else, or everyone else, and less like yourself. The people I regard as greats are great precisely because they did it their way.

New acts and wannabe new acts email me and ask me for advice—the show has established me as some minor sort of comedy expert***, or at the very least pundit, in a way I never intended or expected—and these days I always say the same thing: “don't take any advice from anyone.”

I still do the interviews, and I still ask comics**** what their system is, but now it's simply to fuel my fascination, not because I think it'll help. I see the industry as a giant thriving garden of butterflies and wasps and earthworms and Sam Simmons with a trowel, and every type of plant under the sun...and I'm determined to nail the bastards to a bit of card.

I've learnt the big lesson – I was doing comedy all wrong, but now i'm quite happily doing it all wrong my own way.

* there's no such thing as a “level”
** there's no such thing as “the comedy industry”
*** there's no such thing as “a comedy expert”
**** nope

 

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Do your homework...

Fest recommends some required comedy listening to get you into the spirit of the Fringe

Albums

The Rubberbandits: Serious About Men
Limerick’s premier gangster rap outfit—they of the Spar-bag masks and filthy little gobs—lay down a collection of bad-taste bangers, from ‘I Wanna Fight Your Father’ to ‘Spastic Hawk’. Learn the words so you can holler along with Mr Chrome and Blindboy Boatclub at one of their riotous live shows.

Glenn Wool: Let Your Hands Go
A real classic from the road-worn king of the reprobates. If you’re yet to catch one of Wool’s consistently acclaimed Fringe hours, this is the perfect introduction to his gleeful takedowns of the suited and the sanctimonious, spoken with all the howling fervour of a televangelist.

Podcasts

Richard Herring’s Edinburgh Fringe Podcast
‘Rhefp’, as all the cool kids are calling it, is the hungover Scottish cousin of Herring’s much-loved Leicester Square Theatre edition. Recorded at the Stand, it features interviews with the Fringe's best comics, a few bite-sized sets, and more baffling in-jokes than you can shake a talc-filled tit at. Your host is as immature and disrespectful as ever. May he never change.

Tom Rhodes Radio
This journeyman US standup ambles round the world, flattering the pants off anyone who steps in front of his mic. You might not know too many of the interviewees, but Fringe mainstays like Stephen K Amos, Des Bishop and Chris Martin will keep the culture shock at bay. Amicable, in-depth chat that’s good for long drives and chronic loneliness.

Videos

The Bitter Buddha
This affectionate portrait of a man at war with himself—and quite a few others—does for stand-up what The Devil and Daniel Johnston did for outsider music. A tortured, unmarketable oddball experiences a middle-age renaissance, with younger, hipper contemporaries professing his genius. Though not entirely convincing at first, bit by bit we see what makes him special.