My career is a joke and I'm okay with it
3 ways standup comedy made me a better creative
For over 10 years I dabbled in the dark art of standup comedy. I bounced between dingy open mic nights in pubs from Paddington to Hervey Bay, to Fitzroy, peddling my jokes about pubes and my girlfriend dumping me via text (she’s now my wife, but that’s another story). Eventually I even found my way to the glittery lights of Melbourne Town Hall, where I got my 4.5 minutes of fame performing in front of 1200 odd people for the Triple J Raw Comedy final.
During this time I also happened to stumble into the bright lights of advertising as a copywriter. Over the years I always found it interesting how the two paths intertwined. How each craft fed off the other in a beautiful cycle of creative goodness; serving up similar challenges and trappings, while also demanding similar strengths.
So here’s how telling jokes has helped me sell stuff.
1. Spinning a good yarn
What compelled me to do standup? A troubled childhood? Sad clown syndrome? A deep seeded desire to find love in the laughter of strangers? Perhaps. But mostly I was drawn to standup for the same reason I was drawn to Grade 1 Show ‘n’ Tell — a love of sharing ideas and stories (shout out to Mrs Williams if you’re reading this).
Show ‘n’ tell was my time to shine and I always elected to tell. I’ll be honest, a lot of the time my tales were complete BS, but it was all in the name of entertainment. And the best part was when my audience actually bought it.
So you can see how this love led me to advertising.
Writing an ad is a lot like writing a joke. You’ve got to entice the audience in with a good setup, and land the punchline. If you don’t hit the right beats and nail the timing, you’ll probably lose them. In advertising this can mean poor sales and nasty comments from some bloke called ‘anonymous’, in comedy the feedback is more immediate and visceral “Get the fuck off!”.
The same goes for pitching to a room full of clients. Comedy taught me to look at presentations like a ‘gig’ because a lot of the same principles apply. I go in with the same attitude of trying to win them over, to sell them on myself before landing my gags (or ideas). And I still home in on the one client glancing at their emails or staring blankly in an effort to win them back.
And just like a gig, sometimes you get crickets. “Oooookay...We’ll get back to you with feedback”. Fuck.
2. You gotta work it
There’s a saying in standup — there’s no substitute for stage time. Every comedian has a funny muscle and the stage is our gym. If you don’t flex your funny on a regular basis, you lose it.
The same goes for great creative and working that other fairly important muscle. There’s no substitute for putting in the hours (fuck how am I going to timesheet this?!).
And that workout is often painful.
See the thing is, writing jokes is fucking hard. You write, and write and write and 95% of the jokes suck. Yep, terrible. Funny as a fire in an orphanage. And how do you discover they suck? By getting in front of a room full of strangers and releasing them into the world, hoping they’ll fly like a majestic dove, only to see them shot down in a blaze of awkward silence.
So in many ways, writing jokes was the perfect preparation for a life writing ads.
That’s probably why, when I sit down in front of my Creative Director with a notepad full of infantile ideas, I get the same feeling as when I step on stage with a freshly written joke. The same butterflies in the stomach. If they like it I get the same buzz, if they don’t I get that same flat feeling. Ah well, at least they didn’t threaten to beat me with a microphone stand (seriously that happened once). Standup taught me to roll with the punches and threats of physical assault, turn over to the next page and keep working “But wait there’s more!”
You probably already see the link with advertising here, which leads me to my next point...
3. Embracing the sweet kiss of death
The first time I did standup was a truly horrendous experience. I naively signed up to a comedy competition on a whim, what the hell I thought? It doesn't look that hard. I proceeded to awkwardly crouch in front of a microphone (I was too scared to adjust the height and apparently a midget performed before me) and die for 5 minutes, which felt like eternity.
But for some reason I came back. I died, night after night in gruesome fashion. Then I came back for more, like some kind of zombie that feeds on muffled chuckles. Until the chuckles turned into chortles and eventually, full blown lols.
That’s the funny thing about comedy— it’s all about dying. And so is coming up with ideas.
Because creating ideas is a similarly morbid process. You often die multiple deaths a day. You bite and scrounge for them, you kill some yourself, you refine some until you love them, then your boss kills them, or a client kills them or they just gradually die a slow, painful death in research. Death is just part of advertising life.
An amazing thing happens after you die enough times. You become okay with it, immune. Invincible. You stop seeing it as a failure and more a necessary stepping stone on your way to success. That has proven perhaps the greatest gift comedy has given my career.
It’s this key comedy learning of resilience that I find myself drawing on now more than ever.
Like many in our industry, I was recently swept up in this pesky global pandemic and my set has come to an abrupt end. It’s kinda like the standup equivalent of being interrupted mid-joke and being politely asked to leave by the room’s management. “We just realised due to financial difficulty we can’t pay you for the rest of your set, please get out.”
It’s a kick in the guts, a smack down. But I’m okay with it, because if standup has taught me anything, it’s how to get back up again.