on pop culture

Reference humor is very much like the weather in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It waltzes capriciously from one extreme to another, it knows no historical precedent. There's no formula to predict it.

I see movies constantly, watch my share of television. I keep abreast of things on the internet, which itself is a more insular place than it seems like from the inside. But there's no way of knowing, even given a crowd's median age, wardrobe, or the venue they inhabit, what avenues of mass media they'll follow you down on any given night.

Case in point- I have a joke, really the only survivor from my early days, which prominently involves Wham! that never seems to be too old for anyone- 80's references in general seem an easier bet than nearly any other decade, seemingly an entire ten years laced with a perfect mix of irony and nostalgia. I was born in 1984 myself, I remember absolutely none of it, pop-culture-wise.

I've worked in libraries and stayed tuned into to bestselling fiction for most of my adult life, thus I have a Nicholas Sparks joke that can be very hit or miss. Sometimes, in the right crowd, I replace it with a Twilight joke which is more universal (but the punchline itself is less biting. It needs work.).

Movies I reference constantly, but even there, even the hugest movies aren't always familiar ground. I had an Avatar joke that never really caught on for me- I think it might be because, despite the big numbers, the majority of people saw it once and moved on with our lives. I do a somewhat involved bit about The Matrix (it's about the déjà vu cat) that does pretty well- because even though it was an R-rated release over a decade ago, everyone's seen it more than twice by now.

It's a challenge that I relish- it makes consuming new art and media exciting. Even if I see a film and find it terrible, it still means I've punched a lottery ticket for my favorite drawing anywhere.

on blank pages and other people

What is it about creativity that makes time mutable? Bursts of productivity seem like they escape my hands as water, and I wake up to deserts of half-formed ideas, the minutes dragging by in chains of frustration.

Something about writing, about starting a sentence or a setup, makes clocks tick louder and the world focus in on your immobile fingers. The background fades away in slow motion and we sit there, alone and helpless.

The answer, for me, is to make the void smaller. I don't do improv, but I envy the group dynamic that it draws its basis of support from- look into the eyes of your partner, and you're never lost.

I've had a lucky three months, the best three months of my life in many ways, of meeting new people and being challenged. My world has gotten bigger as the void shrinks to nothing, and it's only made me hunger for more new things.

Comedy, especially for me, is just having one half of a conversation. Finding it and embracing it has made me regret the parts of my life I thought I could slide by hardly talking to anyone.

on conversation

You are all guinea pigs. I'm sorry, but this is true. Some of you mean a lot to me, I do my best to honestly engage with people, I do, but there is a part of my brain that I cannot stop. It is looking for ideas and phrases and the rhythms of speech that can be divorced from context and filtered through a microphone.

This might make me maddening to have a conversation with, I couldn't particularly say. In the Caste of Killers podcast last week, we touched on this briefly: how people might hear something that came up organically in your act later and feel used. But that's how it is, we don't try to pick the bones of social interaction like scavengers. We're just following instinct at a certain point.

If anything I think it's lead me to value open and honest conversation even more, to realize when I need to be serious, when someone isn't in the mood to be entertained. Now I'm at a point when I look for people to have meaningful debates with- I've even been antagonizing the high schoolers I supervise at my part time job with fundamental debates about the nature of religion and politics.

It's just that, with that part never shutting off, it's the simplest thing to switch from one mode to another, to widen or narrow the mind's lens and dance with my thoughts accordingly. It's the effort to resist being frivolous for the sake of laughter, to cheapen relationships by never really leaving the stage, that I'm hoping I avoid.

Because the meaningful things are often the funniest- it's just that we can't force ourselves to get there. Let's get a drink sometime and just talk instead.

on exhaustion

In my head there are filters. I think about what I say before I say it, and only a fortunate confluence of predisposition and schooling have engendered enough quickness to make myself appear spontaneous.

I think too much about facebook comments, blog posts, greeting cards, phone conversations. I start every sentence several times before it gets enough momentum to reach a predicate. It lends itself well to the crafting, re-crafting, and over-analysis of jokes.

But it doesn't lend itself to telling them. It was beyond me, for a long time, to understand (even as I was compelled myself) how comedians can reconcile the agony of finding the right words with the inexplicable impulse to expose them to many people at once.

And the effort of trying to pit those instincts against one another, the need for expression versus the capacity to filter yourself into silence, ended up making me uneasy and terrified of what I was doing and relieved when it was over.

But then I got tired.

Tired of long days. Tired of worrying, tired of dodging the future. Tired of having potential, tired of marveling at the time going by. Somewhere I decided to talk as much as I can and filter it when it seems like it's becoming unwieldy, to sleep when my eyelids force me to and wake up as soon as I get another idea.

Comedy is about being fed up with absurdity in the world, on the face of it, but it's really about being fed up with a past version of ourselves. And the more exhausted I get it, the more nights I week I shake myself awake and find a stage somewhere, the less I pick and choose words out of fear- now I find new ones out of excitement and variety.

It took a year and a half of third shift to wear me down this much- if I ever spend any time on the road, I might even say things the very instant that I think of them. But as long as I'm weary and well-spoken, as long as I force sleep to catch me after a long footrace, I'll hit the pillow closer to myself than I've ever been.

on friends and sitcoms

I grew up watching television. Everybody did. We all go through times when we scoff at it, we call it an opiate- we might even have a phase when we haughtily claim not to even OWN a television (which is pretentious-code for being poor), but it is a part of us, a small nagging presence or a ubiquitous cultural filter. It's made it hard for me to enjoy the rhythms of adult life.

I grew up on 90s and 00s tv sitcoms- and I'm sure this is true of other decades as well- but these shows spend the majority of every 22 minutes focusing on groups of attractive young adults hanging out socially. Seemingly every night. They have a single, major narrative to their lives each week, and spend no time in the bathroom, at work, at the gym, commuting 45 minutes every day, et cetera.

It's a paradox of relatable glamor, of mundane fantasy. It all has to be entertaining and fun and well-lit and ripe for product placement and studio laughter and quips, but it has to appear to be in our grasp- if we squint our eyes it could be a real coffee shop or bar that just happens to be missing a fourth wall. I think subconsciously I was taken in.

And then I grew up, and here and there I would have groups of friends. Eventually they would splinter at life's natural attrition, people move, people get married, people get new friends. It takes an enormous amount of will and an even bigger amount of favorable circumstance to maintain a group of sitcom friends- with any luck you can find a workplace that vaguely resembles a workplace sitcom instead.

Is it any wonder then, that my new solution is to try and do comedy every night? A group of people compelled to flock to the same places, to find the same laugh-track patterns, to define themselves in terms of a common narrative?

Of course, like my favorite sitcoms, I think it's healthier to work in at least one moment of maudlin sincerity each week. But otherwise I'll keep at it until I don't need a day job to conspicuously fail to mention, until I look at the people on the screen and find them ordinary.

I guess I'll still have to go to the bathroom, but I can edit that out for more local ads once I'm syndicated.

on narcissism

Stand up comedy is inherently contradictory. It's based on the assumption, or the mutual delusion, that an audience on some level needs to hear what a given comedian has to impart. But so often that message is couched in self-deprecation and irony that it passes a point of over-saturated falsity- some crystallized point between Rodney Dangerfield's lack of respect (even as he got rich) and Anthony Dice Clay's manufactured bravado (even as his career cooled considerably).

So where's the line, and how does it end up defining us when the microphone is off?

On Monday I told another comic that I've always been relatively humble (which is a paradoxical thing to claim) and I was met with laughter. I realized that in this context, going out five or six nights of the week and assuming my voice needs to be amplified, assuming my visage needs to be spotlighted, I was letting the specific narcissism of performance inform my personality in a deeper way than I thought.

And honestly? That might be fine. In my experience, unearned cock-sureness might seem just as bad as an aggressive lack of self-esteem, but it gets a hell of a lot more done.

A dash of confidence can work wonders: suddenly the risk of failure is invigorating instead of paralyzing, compliments are rewarding instead of somehow ungainly and inappropriate (is there anything worse than a steadfast refusal to take a compliment? It's a sort of arrogance that takes much more effort to maintain, in its way).

All we can do, I think, is try and keep on the near side of the unknowable line between vanity and determination, and remember the kind words or the laughter or the therapeutic compulsion that put us up there in front of a crowd in the first place.

the first day of the rest of my life

I know, it's a pretty cliché phrase to use. But how many people can pinpoint it? It was February 21st, 2011.

Let's back up. I started doing stand up comedy in 2005. It was the next natural step in a lifelong transformation- from a quiet, reserved kid to an irrepressible loudmouth. I still don't have the vocal chords or vox stamina for the amount of talking I've been doing- I feel like this is a vestige of my reticent childhood, the dust shaking from the remarks I would've kept to myself in the past.

But in '05 I was ready to try and connect with people. It went okay- I was a Creative Writing major at the time, I worked on my material with a vague studiousness. But I wasn't confident about it, I wasn't fearless.

So my life went on. I drifted out of a relationship, I got downsized from a job that might've been a career if I wanted to apply myself. But that's the problem with me, or it always was. A lack of application.

I went a few years without performing, but comedy never left my mind entirely. I worked a third shift job for a year and two months, and then I started to feel an itch. A burning pilot light, maybe.

I scouted out a competition held by the Caste of Killers (veritable heroes of the Milwaukee scene) in January, and the light turned into a small campfire. The last time around I bought a 4-pack of pocket notebooks from a convenience store. I couldn't find the one I was using. I did find an unstarted little green one.

I wrote down some things. On February 21st, I went to Carte Blanche studios and told jokes again.

I know it sounds like I'm romanticizing my struggle or something- it was a much quieter revolution than it seems. It's easier to mark a turning point in your life when you write down the date in a little green notebook, sure, but I can't even tell you how great the sense of 'before' and 'after' is from my point of view.

Because here's the thing: I'm trying now. I'm trying as hard as I can. And even if it takes forever, even if it never goes anywhere or amounts to anything, even as it leaves me weary and sleepless and willing to leave everything behind, it's worth it.

I'm applying myself. It's a first.

So hey, I'm Duncan Carson. I'm a comedian. Nice to meet you.