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53 and three quarters today!
Usually after a couple of months off exercise it takes me a while to get back into the swing of things and the first couple of runs are little more than brisk walks. I thought it would be even worse this time round because a) I’ve had surgery b) I’ve had chemo and c) I have hardly even walked anywhere for 7 or 8 weeks.
But somehow I’ve bounced back and I did a slow, but easy 4k run this morning, half of it uphill and I felt fine all the way. My diet has been unusually good over the last month or so and maybe that’s why this didn’t feel like a strain. Or most likely I died on the steep hill and the rest of the run was just the dream my mind created as my brain ceased functioning.
I listened to this week’s RHLSTP guest
Pippa Evans’ Improv Your Life on audio book as I ran and considered how much of my own work is improvised now. Like most of it. And even the stuff that is scripted is improvised to begin with (I made a start on the new series of Relativity later and noticed how the characters were sort of devising their own lines, even though I’d started out with a small plan for this scene). It’s a very good book both for creativity and self-improvement. I am still a shy person in real life and there have already been loads of good tips for using the stuff I do at work in social situations. It made me think about jokes and why I don’t like them. To be fair, I like it when someone says something funny, even if it’s in a joke format. What I don’t like is when people tell jokes that they’ve learned, that they didn’t even come up with. It’s because it’s not real humour. It’s a cheat really isn’t it? Someone who can’t make you laugh on their own learns some lines that they’ve heard someone else, and they usually don’t even wait until an apt time to recite the lines. It’s just “Here’s a joke….” I was never good at remembering jokes (The only one that I can ever recall is “What’s brown and taps at your window? A poo on stilts) and why most of the jokes I’ve written wouldn’t work outside the context of a stand up show.
Learned jokes are a substitute for being able to be funny (and they usually aren’t even very funny anyway. I much prefer my daughter’s attempts at jokes to any real joke, because she starts a joke without knowing what will happen next. She’s improvising and it’s usually nonsense, but it’s her pure nonsense and it’s better than some boring man in a pub (or occasionally stand up on TV) parroting something contrived and unoriginal, that anyone who has spent any time loving comedy will be able to guess, even if they haven’t heard this particular joke.
A stand up show is a contrivance too, of course, but one created by an expert, with their own observations (in most cases) and their own spin and the ability to surprise. And usually to do more than set up punchline (though a few really skilled comics can still make that sort of joke work, but it’s usually down to their own personality or angle being incorporated). A humourless person learning jokes in order to appear to have a sense of humour is more offensive to me, as a comedian, because they think through this forgery that they can compete with me.
It felt good to have exercised and to have made a start on the sitcom. I am hoping I can write this over the next few weeks rather than having to cram it all in at the last minute, but luckily my life has provided lots of inspiration this year.
To top off a positive day we also went out for a very late lunch/early dinner at an actual restaurant (in the garden) and enjoyed the unusual experience of going on date. It was still all weird and Covid restricty, but it felt like the first step out of the darkness.
And tonight I returned to Self-Playing snooker with a display of terrible play, awful commentary and very exciting contests.
Listen here
