WHY I STOPPED BEING A STAND-UP COMEDIAN

Chapter 3

If you're one of the few people in the world who doesn't perform stand-up comedy and you're thinking of taking it up, let me give you my best advice: Get a good therapist.

 Not because being a stand-up comedian can screw you up. Being a stand-up comedian is one of the best jobs in the world. When comedians go on stage they tell the audience, through their jokes, all about themselves. What their likes and dislikes are. What their prejudices are. What kind of personality they have. And every time the audience laughs the audience is, in effect, telling the comedian: “We love you and we agree with you.” And then they applaud you. And when you've finished they ask you for more. But if the same situation was happening around a dinner party table everyone else at the table would be saying, “Why don't you shut the fuck up?”

 So I'm not saying get a therapist because performing comedy can screw you up. I say get a therapist because it's the perfect way to write an act. Don't talk about yourself at a dinner party. Talk about yourself to a therapist. It's their job to listen. Furthermore, not many therapists interrupt you halfway through a cry for help and say, “Why don't you shut the fuck up?”

 Apart from the good ones, obviously.

 I wrote some of my best material after spending a lot of time with a therapist called Dave.

 The kind of therapy Dave practices is called Psychosynthesis, and it's based on the premise that our personality is comprised of many personalities: The kind you, the cruel you, the sober you, the drunk you, the you at five, the you at thirty, etc. Some parts of our personality we like. Other parts we don't like, and these we suppress. And that's why we end up needing therapy.

 Dave, for example, has a part of his personality that he calls The Lorry Driver. The Lorry Driver is a pig. A big, fat, tattooed sexist pig. This is not a part of his personality that Dave is keen on. But instead of suppressing that part, he works with it.                                   

Dave was jogging round a race track. He passed some boys. They started heckling. He passed them again – more heckling. And this is starting to get Dave down. It's spoiling his day. So he makes a decision: “Any more heckling – and I bring out the Lorry Driver.”

 He passes the boys. More heckling. Enter the lorry driver. “Which one of you pimply little gits wants his nasty little head kicked in, then?” Exit the boys. Dave carries on running round the track. Dave is feeling happy. Dave is feeling good – but more importantly – so is the Lorry Driver.

 “We showed them, eh Dave?”

 “We showed them, all right, mate. Well done.”

 I discovered that I was suppressing a part of my personality which I called the Nine Year Old Boy.

 Neil Innes used to say (and sometimes still does), “I've suffered for my music and now it's your turn.”

 The Nine Year Old boy suffered for my comedy and then it was his turn.

 Because the Nine Year Old Boy had very little going for him when he was nine – except for his imagination. But in those days imagination wasn't considered a particularly valuable commodity. But thanks to that little boy and his imagination I was eventually able to lead a very pleasant life as a stand-up comedian. But I locked the little boy away. I didn’t want to be reminded of his loneliness. I turned my back on him. I did to him what the world did to him.

 So, when I stopped being a stand-up comedian, and I had some time on my hands, I thought, “Right. Time for the Nine Year Old Boy to be in charge. He can take over. I'll bring him up.”

 It was great. The first thing he did was to get rid of all my clothes. Like a lot of comedians I wore black all the time. He made me wear a bright red jacket, a bright blue shirt, and bright yellow trousers. I looked like Noddy. All my habits changed. No more alcohol. You don't drink when you're nine. No more drugs. The only quarter I scored was a quarter of wine gums.

 And I learned things. I learned that when I went for a walk in the park, by habit I'd walk on the path. But the grass is more fun! I learned other things. I rediscovered what it's like to go outside and just play.

 But then show-biz reared its horrible head.

 We were walking along one day when the Boy said, “Why don't we put on a show?”

 And I said, “All right, but I'm not performing it.”

 And he said, “Don't worry. We'll get someone else to perform it. You can direct it or something. I'll produce it. We'll form our own company. We'll call ourselves The Red Blue and Yellow Magic Hammer Consortium. And we'll have headed notepaper. And the word Red, we'll print in blue. The word Blue, we'll print in red. And the word Yellow, we'll print in yellow. That'll screw them up.”

 And I said, “Hang on, that's a three-colour print run. We can't afford that. We're only on pocket money.”

 And he said, “Print run? Print run? We don't have a print run. We go down to Woolworths and we buy a box of paints!”

 Right…

 And we did. And we got an actor, and we got a script I'd put together based on the work of a writer called Philip K. Dick, and I directed it, and we got reviews in the National papers and it wasn't very good. (It did improve, eventually.) But it didn’t matter that it wasn’t very good. That didn't matter at all. What mattered was, we had put on a show.

 We had imagined something and something had been created.

 Isn't imagination the most powerful tool that we have?

 Nothing exists unless someone imagines it first.

 And where is imagination found in the most abundance? In the mind of a child.

 No child says, “I can't draw.”

 No child says, “I can't dance.”

 Only grown-ups say that.

 And no child says, “I can't tell jokes.”

 Any child can do that.