Warming Up

Congrats to all the pricks who said I should be keeping tins, not pans in my carousel cupboard. The tins fall over and then down the side of the cupboard and block the carousel. I was able to fish them out a bit easier this time, but fuck me, what a stupid idea that was. 

Back to square one. 

I will be keeping all my square ones in there instead.

Chris Evans (not that one) has been doing an amazing job getting all your stone-clearer kickstarter rewards ready and we’re getting close to having everything ready for you. I think it’s just the T-shirts to sort out now, plus all the stuff I need to sign. The 16 page Kickstarter manual arrived (in Wales) today and it looks magical. Sorry, you non-kickstarter idiots, this stuff isn’t available to buy anywhere else (a few spares might go up on eBay or as prizes for monthly badger draw). Thanks also to Steve Brown for the photos and the very hard working  Steve Newman for the design. He’s just finished the Punani album and that looks AMAZING.

I also got something AMAZING in the post today. Unbelievable and a complete surprise. I’d love to tell you what it is, but you’ll have to tune in to Ally and Herring’s Twitch of Fun on Thursday at 7.30pm (note new time). I am also planning to stream a watch along of Taskmaster at 9pm and Chris Evans and me spent a good part of the  afternoon setting up my laptop so I could broadcast from downstairs.

Weirdly our test broadcast, in which we were really just trying to work out how to get the chat stream on to the OBS system (before realising that you can’t do that on a Mac) got almost as many views as the snooker. Go figure. 

I might also live stream the last 30 minutes of the ebay auction in the afternoon on Thursday. I wonder if it will tip over the £1000 mark by then. 

Tonight we watched Hannah Gadsby’s Douglas. I like all her stuff but my favourite thing about her is her material about art. Generally speaking this is a lighter and more clownish show than Nanette, so there’s more silliness and less trauma, but she still has fun playing with the form and gets in some serious stuff too. The “big reveal” which I think it’s OK for me to reveal, as she is winking at it, is that she has autism. Afterwards my wife and I discussed whether I might be autistic too. I feel that I am not because I am so outgoing and sociable and unobsessive. My wife didn’t say anything and I was unable to read her expression so I don’t know what she thinks.

There is obviously more to autism than obsessive behaviour and it’s true I do a lot of comedy about attempting to complete near impossible tasks over months and years, but isn’t that just me making fun of human obsessiveness rather than being obsessive myself. You might say, but Rich you were doing CNPS and stone clearing before you even thought of doing any comedy around them and I’d say, shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Now leave me alone. I just want to be alone in my attic.

I think we’re all on the spectrum to some extent and although I am obsessed with flirting with mental illness in order to understand something about human nature I do not believe I have any serious issue. But then I would think that.

I don’t think I am autistic - I just took an online test to find out if I was and got 11 out of 30 which is close to “slight tendencies” but still in “common result”, so I think I have the usual insecurities and mild obsessions that most people have, whilst actually remaining able to be sociable (though certainly I often get panicked and upset at  gatherings - or used to as a younger man- and would have to escape) Maybe most people feel like this.

But my problems and issues are my own and though most comedians seem to have something pushing them towards this job I think that sadly for me (because I can’t get a show out of it or excuse my crappy behaviour on anything but myself) I think I like doing it because I like laughing and making people laugh.

My obsessions maybe are more about satirising the futility of life rather than getting into repetitive behaviour or at least demonstrating how it’s easy to get “religious” beliefs about anything, from seeing numberplates in a certain order to having to put a stone on a particular cairn to appease a god that (almost certainly) doesn’t exist.

Made me think for a sec though!