#also just the language used in this song is so like viscerally funny and yet oof ouch my heart cuz like you like this person so much you- | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mirrorforevers · 4 years

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the wrong side of the bed • damon albarn/reader

smut with feelings, i guess. sorry if is this is too long – this prompt excited me too much. i hope you guys like daft punk - though this is not a songfic, but you’ll get why - and i promise i’ll write something not involving sadness and alcohol someday. this is unbeta’ed, and english is not my first language, so have mercy

thank you so much for the music teacher prompt, anon! hope you enjoy it x also, just in case you haven’t read my graham/reader fic yet, here it is too.

tw: unprotected drunk sex

word count: 4.477

Music has been a very important escape mechanism for you recently. Your job has been hellish, and getting your degree has also been a chore - in the midst of so many deadlines and professional disappointments what has been a light for you is Damon Albarn, your newly divorced music teacher who is old enough to be your dad.

You detail these little “buts” as a mantra whenever the subject is him, whether in internal monologues or when you talk about him with your close friends. You never really believed in relationships between two people of very different ages, and you felt like you needed to remember those details whenever you could to keep that completely carefree crush from becoming something you couldn't control.

You started taking classes with him every Saturday after you were cast on your city’s production of a musical. You knew it was a very small step for a career in the industry, but it was very significant for you. You were exhausted from any activity that involved learning given how tired you were from college, but learning music with Damon was definitely something that you didn't even place in the same mental category. It was with him that you vented about how your week was, how you missed your parents who lived absurdly far away from you, it was with him that you shared the small victories of the day-to-day that were too insignificant even to share with your longtime friends. Which is funny, since this symbolic relationship was built in a matter of 2 months. Damon, in the beginning, was very reserved and “gray”, and it was amazing how in a matter of such a short time he shown himself to be someone so energetic, observant and empathetic; although a little bit of a control freak sometimes. When the wild waves of life seemed to take you everywhere at the same time and left you lost, despite so little time in your life, Damon became a constant.

And it worries you.

What are you going to do when the money to pay for his classes runs out? Certainly, although significant, what you had seemed to be was, above all, a friendship of convenience. You were very different people, with very different aspirations, and especially at very different points in life. As much as you liked each other *as friends* and considered yourselves people you wanted close by, Damon had a well-lived life to sustain. He would not have time much less willpower to listen to your complaints and insecurities in a context that did not involve an exchange relationship. At least, that's what you thought.

Saturday was also one of the two days you could wake up late, so in addition to having a rare time for your leisure, you were able to rest at least a little more than normal. That particular morning, you noticed that there were two missed calls from Maggie on your cell phone. Maggie was one of the producers of the musical. She used to bring you very decisive and very good news. If she called you, you did whatever it took to answer her right away. An unbelievable wave of anxiety takes over you. “Hello, Mags, you called?” You say, excited, but very nervous. Dealing with people who have your dreams constantly in their hands is somewhat stressful. You bite your nails.

“Hey, Y/N, yes. Um. You okay?”

“Yeah, thanks for asking. What happened?” You notice that Maggie's tone is different. The funny thing is that everyone is always so apathetic in the artistic world, and Maggie was the only person you knew so far that showed any kind emotion.

“So… you were dropped.”

Ah.

“I’m-I’m sorry?”

“You… were dropped. We made some changes here and there and you won’t be on our show anymore. If anything changes again, we’ll call. I promise.”

“Thank you. Bye.”

“Good luck, kid.”

Um.

Your stomach drops, and for a moment you feel like you've been punched. Maybe you've been wrong all along.

My God. My God. My God.

You feel like your entire world has collapsed around you. There aren't even reasons for you to keep going to class. All that effort and money spent... are now in the trash.

Artists spend a lot of time investing in themselves. You always have to become better. Faster. Learn techniques. Reinvent yourself. Stay beautiful. And you don't believe that in your first real experience in this world... that happened. Most likely a friend of the director took your place.

My God.

You swallow the tears, after all, you told everyone you knew that you knew how this world worked and you wouldn't be shaken if something like this happened. No one is watching you right now - but you still feel that you would disappoint them if you cried.

But you couldn’t smile anymore. Nothing could take away your expression of shock and uncertainty.

Not even funny posts on Reddit. Not even funny memes sent by your friends in the morning.

Nor the message from Damon confirming the class of the day.

I won't be able to go today ☹, you type, and you erase it.

Hey, I got dropped from the musical. you type, and you erase it.

How are you doing? Definitely not.

I’ll be there! 😅 You hit send.

Hope we finally figure out that bloody solo, he replies.

You do not answer.

You change your clothes, without your motivational playlist playing in the background this time. The beginning of a great plan going on in your life was no longer there. You didn't even pick up your headphones and the subway ride was completely silent, except for the ambient sound.

You arrive at school, and Damon welcomes you with the usual tight hug, and wide smile. You give a yellow smile in response, and he immediately realizes that something is out of place. “Is everything okay?” His expression quickly changes to one of concern. Your stomach drops even lower. Maybe it hit the ground by now.

“I…”

You don't want it to end. Your dream ended, but not this, too. This cannot end. “Can we try another song today? One not from the musical?” You ask, exasperated.

“Uh… I mean-”

“Please?”

"Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed today?" He laughs nervously. “But... the musical’s why you’re here. I’m confused--”

“I know, but pretty please?” You insist, cringing by now to keep from crying.

“Um. Sure – but did something happen? Tell me. I’m-I’m here to help.”

“I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. Please.” You feel your voice weaken more and more. You don’t wanna cry, though your eyes are already burning. “Please, Damon.”

“Right. Okay.” He says, raising his hands in defeat. He starts collecting his material.

“What are you doing?”

“No class today. Something clearly happened and we need to talk it out.”

“I-I got sacked. But there’s no need to…”

“I got it. C’mon. I’m not a monster, I won’t charge you for talking it out. All we’ve worked for… fucking cunts.” There’s the visceral side of him. “You gotta tell me how it happened.”

“Okay.”

He only leaves your two chairs in place.

After you two sit, he starts. “This happens quite a lot in this world. And every student reacts the same.” Though this sounds a little too insensitive, you imagine it’s the truth, and his tone does the job of conveying his compassion. “Did they call you? Or did you find out through somewhere else, like Patti LuPone?”

“Huh. At least they called me. They just straight up told me I’m no longer in the cast.” You say, totally not comforted by that. But it would be even worse if you found out by other means. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“Don’t let your spirit be broken by that – you’re really talented, and I don’t like paying compliments. You know that.”

“Talent is not enough sometimes. That’s also something you’ve said to me before.”

He goes silent, and you start apologizing in the same instant.

“No, no, you didn’t hurt my feelings.” He interrupts you. “That’s true. But you’re really young, I shouldn’t have said that to you. Shit like that happens all the time. We learn a lot from it and you have your entire life ahead of you. That was… limited of me.”

“I know I’m almost getting my degree, and there’s other things for me to do… but fuck. I-- I really wanted that. You know how much.”

“I do. I also know exactly how you’re feeling now. We’re always so excited when this kind of thing happens. We plan our entire lives based on that one fragile and uncertain plan, and then boom, it’s gone. We always count on the fact that we’ll eventually have to decide between our career and something else when the choice comes, but what do we do when it doesn’t come? I know how that feels. Also--”

He grabs his guitar. You roll your eyes. “Don’t tell me you have a song for that.”

“I don’t.” he answers. “But I do have a story to tell you.”

For the next two hours, he tells you all about a very ambitious audiovisual plan that he tried to engage in his early 30s. Among countless questions and answers, Damon Albarn showed you through his history how very determined he really was. He goes into the most minute details about the ideas he had for a film and several concept albums for a virtual band that, in your opinion, sounds like something very innovative and, at the same time, incredibly palatable to the mainstream. You thought that the band he was part of when he was even younger was already very wronged because, from what you heard from the demos, they were really incredible, but the fact that such a project didn't go ahead ... just proved to you more and more that talent sometimes really wasn’t enough. Just when you thought you couldn't admire that man more.

“So, believe me when I say I know how that feels.” Goddamn. He looks at his clock, and almost jumps at how the time flied. “Bloody hell, I have another student in like, 5 minutes.”

“God, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. This is a tale very few people know about. I’m glad I shared it with you.”

“…That had potential. Don’t give up on it.”

“Don’t give up on your plans either. I really mean it when I say you’re talented as fuck.”

You couldn’t help but smile through the dried tears and puffy eyes. You say your rushed goodbyes. But before can you leave the room, he holds your arm. “Wait. I know it’s hard, but don’t spend the rest of the day thinking about it. Do you want to do something tonight?”

“Uhhh��what you have in mind?” You can’t believe your ears.

“I don’t know. Do you drink?”

“More than I should.”

“Perfect. So I know a place we can go. Any preference of hours?”

“After 7 pm, I guess?”

“Works for me. I’ll send you the address soon then.” He says. You stand still, frozen, still processing what just happened. He’s blinking as if he just told you how’s the weather outside. “Now you can go.”

“O-kay. See you in a few hours then, Damon.”

“See you in a few hours, Y/N.”

You tried to hide your excitement, in vain. You smiled like an idiot.

This was one of the scenarios of your daydreams when you were walking around, talking quietly to yourself. Damon Albarn, your newly divorced music teacher who is old enough to be your father, just asked you out. You don't care if it was pity. After such disappointment, you allow yourself to create a little more of that stupid, inconsequential hope that your life would take an exciting turn for the first time.

He sends you the address a few hours after your class/conversation, when you were starting to get ready to meet him. It was a pub that you already knew well, and had visited with some friends in the past. You choose a dress that has become your “uniform” recently, for valuing your body type well and for translating your style in a way that is both stylish and very comfortable. When you finish getting ready, you take a deep breath. There is a world of difference between what you wanted to happen and what you think will happen. But you do not care.

The tragic call you received in the morning barely crosses your mind on your way to the pub.

Upon arriving, you find Damon - always so punctual - sitting in the corner of the lounge fiddling with his cell phone while he takes a few sips of a drink that you have no idea what it is made of. You never took him for a complex drink guy. He is really full of surprises. You feel slightly self-conscious out of a sudden, stomach churning in anticipation. He raises his eyes, and his gaze meets yours. His usual welcoming smile makes all your worries go away. You couldn’t help but smile wide too.

“Hello there. A stark contrast to this morning’s Y/N.” He notes, looking you up and down after you two share a tight hug, that smile still there.

“My plan tonight is to forget everything that happened before we talked, okay? Just let me forget about the call!” You answer, playfully, trying to pretend you weren't in the least ... affected ... by the way he received you.

And the time you spend together goes as usual. It’s amazing how there’s no space for awkward silences between you two. To one thing you tell him, he brings you three more things to tell, and vice-versa. You two just… click. You make each other laugh, and even if things don’t go the way you daydream about, which is totally okay, given that he’s twice your age and you’re not sure if you can handle the implications that age difference has, you’re glad to call him a good friend. He’s amazing, and you’re having a great time with him.

By your fourth beer and his fifth fancy drink, your conversation enters a territory that hasn’t been truly explored by you two yet. His romantic past. You only knew he was divorced because he mentioned it very vaguely one day, nothing else. You didn’t know why, who was her, or when. But apparently, he was about to tell you.

“We were both really… young… and didn’t have a clue of what we were doing with our lives. She was a musician too, Justine. Not anymore.”

“Because of what happened between you two?” You ask, the beers gradually taking the indiscretion filters out of you.

“Maybe. I don’t know. She seemed tired of everything. She wanted a life I’m not sure I would be able to live. I also pressured her a lot, I tried to create a version of her that somehow fitted all my expectations and, long story short, we weren’t right for each other. But I still think she’s incredible. I still admire her a lot. Not sure how she feels about me though.”

“Are you still in love with her?”

“Oh, no. There’s a big difference in admiring someone and being in love with them, kid.”

After that sentence of his, for the first time that night, an uncomfortable silence hangs between you - Instant Crush, by Daft Punk, almost ironically, starts playing on the pub's speakers. You feel like you're in a movie.

You're still a kid, aren't you?

“Definitely.” You finally answer him, finishing 70% of the bottle in a few gulps. You become a bit more lightheaded after that, and your eyes start to struggle to focus. You try to hide how slurred your voice wants to sound. “I confess I still don’t know how to really differentiate between the two.”

“Oh yeah?” His wistful tone gives place to one of amusement. “You never told me about your exes. Feel free to.”

“This is not about them.”

He turns to you, after a one-sided staring competition with his own cup. His voice is calm, and somehow even deeper, when he asks you: “Then who is this about?”

You gulp. The cramped space you were sitting on somehow feels even smaller. And hotter. You feel drops of sweat sliding on your belly. You’re sitting by his side, not in front of him, and that interaction feels almost… primal. You two are trapped by a huge table in a corner very few people can see.

“I think I need to go to the loo.”

He lets you, and you feel his eyes following you to the restroom.

My God. My God. My God.

You take a much longer time to do everything than you really need while reflecting on the dialogue you just had. You feel the ground is starting to spin, and the desire to sleep on literally any place grow. You’re drunk. And confused. And anxious.

You spend some good minutes staring at your own face in the mirror before you return to your table. He’s still in the moment, judging by the contemplative look on his face. This is the point of no return.

This is no movie – this is a fucking RPG.

“It was full,” you justify.

“Yeah, it’s always pretty crowded in there.”

That goddamn awkward silence again. You try to talk at the same time, but he wins.

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Yeah.” You clear your throat. “It’s… about a guy. He’s a…current… thing. Not from the past.”

“Right.” His tone is serious, more teacher-like than he has even acted while actually teaching you.

“I met him through an ad. I was looking for music teachers in my area and I found him. He had a fair price.” He was now smiling in disbelief, shaking his head. You’re both tipsy and you don’t care if your words are slurred anymore.

“And?”

“I have classes with him every Saturday. It’s the event of the bloody week for me. I can’t believe I’m saying that now because at first he seemed quite intimidating and not open to any meaningful interaction. Like, all frowns and monosyllabic answers and all.” You steal his drink, and he’s not even bothered. “We talk a lot, and even though we talk every day I somehow always thought he didn’t give a fuck about me when we were out of class. That he only saw me as a student, not as a friend, you know? I think about that chap every single day too. He’s handsome--like. Fuck. And he pays attention to everything I say. He’s always so nice to me, he makes me feel welcome. A part of… something.” You take a few more sips, and he gently takes the drink out of your hand, mouthing an ‘enough’. “He’s old enough to be my dad and I feel guilty for thinking of him that way. He invited me for drinks when my world fell so I could get my mind out of the shambles my life’s in and I almost died because I’m madly in love with him for a while now, but I don’t want to ruin everything. I don’t know what to do now. People shouldn’t start things thinking of how they’re going to end, but, you know?”

“They should, though. He’s indeed too old for you. And your life isn’t in shambles.”

“But…”

“Everything sounds pretty lovely in theory, but, he’s probably thinking that he’s going to slow you down in a way. You’ve got too much life to live. He’s probably really tired of everything he’s already lived.”

“But I love him. He makes me laugh! I don’t wanna have children.” You whine.

He muffles a laugh. “It’s not that-“

”Please take me home tonight.” You plead; your tone more serious now. “I know what I’m doing, I know where I am. Just please take me home.”

“Y/N…”

“Please, Damon. If you don’t feel the same then fine, call me an Uber and I’ll get over it.”

That triggers something in him, apparently, and he kisses you deeply and intensely. His hands caress your back and the whole kiss, though a little disjointed because of the state you’re both in, is full of affection and love. His lips taste of strawberry vodka, and your mind is spinning.

When your lips part, you stare at each other for a while, thousands upon thousands of thoughts per second, unsaid. “Are you sure you wanna come with me?” He asks, kissing your hand.

“Yes. I am.”

After he fumbles with his keys, you’re finally in his apartment – it’s surprisingly nice and tidy. Judging by how carefree he’s with his looks, you imagined that characteristic would overflow to other aspects of his life.

From the Uber drive home to his door, his hand never left yours.

He locks the door, and you stand staring intently at each other, sizing each other up like men before a fight. This time, you start the kiss, with a little less hurry than before. But the desire is still burning hot on both of you.

“Do you have any idea of what you’re doing to me?”, he murmurs, discarding his jacket while he does his best to not break the kiss. You take this as a signal to start taking off your clothes too, starting by kicking off your shoes. It has become a choreography of sorts - his hands grasp your buttocks and pulls you closer after you’re done with them, drawing a gasp from you.

“I wanted you for so long.” You reply, your hands exploring his body below the fine fabric of his shirt. You motion to take it away from him, and he lets you, completely entranced by how red your lips look from everything it went through. He guides you to his sofa, quickly adjusting it so it’s comfortable enough and serves as a bed for both of you.

He lies down first, eagerly waiting for you to stay on top of him. You finally do, and you feel like a goddess from the way he looks at your body. You take off your dress, and now you’re almost fully exposed to him. You have no bra on, and his hands immediately travel to your breasts, fingers running tantalizingly over your nipples to get them stiff and erect before he pinches them between his fingers, smiling at the whimper his actions elicit. You start bucking your hips on the rough fabric of his trousers, and you feel him harden below you. “God, you’re… something else.” he whispers, and you respond with another whimper, biting back a full on moan when your clit hits the perfect spot. You separate your legs a little further so you can feel him better, drawing a groan from him. He takes this a signal to take his jeans off, eyes not leaving your hips.

Now that a distance of an entire layer is shortened between you, the contact is even more intimate, and the bulge of his cock straining against his underwear is driving you mad. You’re aching for him. He brushes against you and your moan is higher than you expected, and you immediately cover your mouth in order not to wake up his neighbors. As he feels the wet heat of you around his painfully hard cock, he takes your hand out of your lips, grip then tightening on your hips as he pushes you down right on to him. Your moan is even louder. “Let them hear.”

“Fuck-Damon-I’m getting so close--” As if you just gave him a command, his hands now grab the flesh of your inner thighs, massaging them further and further up until he reaches the center of your arousal, and the sound you make when he pulls your panties to the side and runs his finger between your folds while still grinding against you is somewhere between a whine and a whimper. “Fuck, you’re so wet,” he says, voice rough from how excruciatingly aroused he is. “Come for me, baby.” Your clit was more exposed now, pressed more tightly against him and you whine in relief when your orgasm finally floods through your body.

Before you could fully recover, he finally frees himself from his underwear and, with your help, effortlessly aligns himself with your (quite ready) entrance. You bury your head in his neck the moment he enters you in one swift motion and your moans are almost like cries by now - the overstimulation is driving you insane. You take his face on your hands and give him a passionate kiss while he gradually picks up a merciless pace inside of you, the more heated the kiss becomes the more shamelessly you ride his cock. “Shit,” he mutters, massaging your breasts in an almost desperate way. It’s too much - you’re almost becoming one.

You could tell by how frantically he fucked you now that he wasn’t going to last much longer. His thrusts were becoming irregular and you were so close once again. His head falls forward, buried in between your neck and shoulder - his cock twitches inside of you and his movements become staccato, his mouth curving into a beautiful ‘o’ shape as he comes inside of you. His movements stop before you could reach your second one, but the entire situation you were on was so arousing to you that just by touching yourself while still feeling him inside was enough. Not letting you alone in this, one of his hands focus on one of your nipples while the other one is below yours, providing pressure above your clit. And like that, you come undone a second time, head above his shoulders.

For a few minutes, your panting was the only thing that could be heard inside of the apartment.

“Thank you. You were amazing. ’s been quite a long time.” He notes with a tender kiss on your forehead. After a while, and with much reluctance, he slides out of you, and gets up to fetch a warm, wet cloth and carefully clean you both, finally collapsing next to you with a groan.

“It was everything I expected.” You confess, smiling.

“Did you… think about me like that when you…?”

“Of course. But let’s save this talk for another Saturday.”

#damon albarn #graham coxon #alex james #dave rowntree #blur #britpop #fic #prompt #au #smut #damon x reader #damon albarn x reader

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officerjennie · 4 years

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Tag Game: Personal Questions I guess?

Tagged on main by @not-dead-not-yet-itachi - tagging no one cause I’m lame :p

Zodiac Sign? Aquarius

Height? 5′2 or 5′3

Favourite colour? Dark purple, dark blue, dark red, or black

Do you have any siblings? I have an older brother, but we don’t talk anymore x)

What is your go-to morning drink? Tea, which is my go-to anytime drink. Used to be cold sweet tea but now it’s hot sweet tea with a dash of milk

What do you wear daily? Tank top, blue jeans, sometimes an over shirt. Since it’s winter I’m always wearing my grandma shawl because I’m an old lady at heart.

What is your first language? Do you speak more than one? English is my first language. I also know bits of French and German, and studied Japanese for several years.

What was the last album you bought? The last song? Beyonce's Lemonade (years ago), which I regret because I accidentally got the censored version :(

Name a few things that bring you comfort: The smell of peppermint oil, listening to rain hit the window or roof, how soft my cat is and how much she clearly adores me, fresh tea, wax melters and soft lamp light at night, the sound of Gregorian chants and Tibetan throat singing.

What grosses you out? The name of the stuff that comes out of people’s noses. It grosses me out to the point of gagging just hearing what it’s called. And I hate it when people jokingly say it in front of me while knowing this, because it’s a visceral, full-bodied reaction, gagging over it, that I can’t stop.

What is a sound you like? What is a sound you dislike? The sound of heavy thunderstorms, which I fall asleep to every night. I hate the sound of nails raking across any surface, it physically hurts to hear.

What have you done for yourself lately? Allowed myself to talk to a few friends about some issues I’ve been having, instead of bottling it all up.

3 positive things: I finally got a new comforter so I’m warm at night instead of shivering like crazy, I finally finished a very belated birthday gift for a very very good fraand, and every single day I’m reminded of how happy my cat is here away from the people who purposely pissed her off cause they thought it was funny.

#tag meme #jennie talks #thanks for the tag!!

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peepingtoad · 5 years

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Anonymous Fanmail // always accepting

Good evening (or day) to you anon! Let me say first off how touching it was to see this message pop up earlier on! I know my activity has been spotty as hell lately, with inspiration being flaky and my attention span even more so--so it really is encouraging to hear that the little I've managed to do in the past couple of months is still well received.

From reading your message it seems like you have a great handle on writing and vocabulary, but I also know that English really can be a bastard of a language whenever it deviates from the standard. So I can only commend your commitment to gaining even more understanding.

So to answer your question, under the cut are some of the authors/works that have influenced me most. I’ve not really had a chance to make my way through my huge reading list, or read much for a couple years now, so I’ll just mention some of the ones that really stuck in my mind:

Darren Shan

I really must start with Darren Shan, because for a teen author his descriptions of monsters and violence still are some of the most viscerally gross and visual I've ever read. So you can imagine what it was like reading him as a 9/10 year old! I don't get to show it very often on Jiraiya, but I really do love to write a bit of nasty gore where I can. This probably shows more when I'm writing certain toad stomach themed jutsu scenes... but yeah. This author really inspired me as a kid, and fantasy-horror for young adults is still a genre I'd love to write one day (if I ever come up with a solid original idea, that is)! Which leads me on to--

Stephen King

Who, honestly, I haven't really kept up to date with. The novels I read by him were his classics: Carrie, Misery, Pet Sematary... which I think were all written before I was born, now that I think about it. I know he can be a little long-winded for some, but I really appreciate how he builds up tension and works with multiple threads at a time. His are some of the few books that actually made me scared in my teens, his psychological horror is great, and he doesn’t shy away from a sex scene, even if they’re usually horrible. I always love an author who goes into nitty-gritty, not necessarily pleasant detail.

J.R.R.R.R.R.R.R.R.R.R. Tolkien

A predictable one, I'm sure! But I've definitely drawn influence from the sheer world-building of Middle Earth, which has inspired worlds for my own OCs, but in regards to fandom has made me want to delve a little deeper into areas the canon leaves unexplained (it really is my goal to one day fill in all the blanks in Jiraiya's life, working with what little we were given and the messy timeline). And while Tolkien's characters can be a little wooden and overly functional at times, the true joy I find in his works is the sprawling descriptions of nature and the world, and how well-linked all of the characters/figures of the past are to each other. Also I feel it's an unpopular opinion, but I absolutely adore the songs/poems. Every one of them. Especially 'The Ent and the Entwife'.

Richard Adams

Most known for Watership Down, and his style again contains lots of beautiful nature imagery (with a very strong environmentalist lean). It's a pretty traumatic story, as anyone who has seen the animated film from the late 70's will recall, but what the book offers on top of that is a whole mythology that the animals believe in, world-building, animal characters that are both intelligent and believably still animals, gorgeous descriptions of the English countryside... yeah. It's one of my all time favourites! I’ve yet to bring myself to read The Plague Dogs, however, because I know it will upset me a whole lot.

Whoever the hell wrote 'The Soddit' and 'Bored of the Rings'

Yes, seriously. I'm a sucker for a good spoof, and these made me laugh out loud. I recall many terrible euphemisms. Not to be read with a critical mind whatsoever :’) they are kinda trash, but I really enjoy content that doesn’t take itself very seriously.

Terry Pratchett

Count this as a relatively new inspiration--I'm an absolute newbie when it comes to Pratchett, if I'm honest, which is ridiculous because it’s right up my alley. I’ve only fully read Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman), read halfway through a few of the standalone Discworlds, and watched several of the animated and BBC series adaptations, but I’m definitely inspired. It's just really daunting to know where to start with the main body of Discworld in particular. But I think after spending my childhood enjoying comedic fantasy in general (I also thank the Fable trilogy of games for that), it was only natural that I found his tongue-in-cheek, conversational to the point of being mundane, playing with tropes style a perfect fit for me. All of that, with some pretty immense world-building in too! It’s great to see such a loved world that is written in such a light, funny way (from what I’ve read), especially since I do my best to let humour inject itself into my writing wherever possible.

Oscar Wilde

And more specifically, The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is just peak gothic sexy decadence, I assure you. And it's one of my all time favourites... again, for gorgeous descriptions, but it's more sensory than physical. And of course, high-key gay subtext. And did I mention it's sexy? Not in the obvious way, just in a 'this level of indulgent description of luxuries and hedonism is downright slutty' kind of way. If you want obvious sexy though, definitely check out the film starring Ben Barnes too!

Anaïs Nin

Ok look, so in answer to one of your other questions, I do indeed read fanfic. Not as much now as I used to or would like to, but I certainly do. And Anaïs Nin is one of the few well known erotic writers I’ve read that I think is better than the best fanfiction stuff I’ve read. Because honestly, lots of them are dudes (sorry Jiraiya) and it’s just... nah. I’ve always thought that the erotic writing in decent fanfic tended to be high tier for somebody not paid to do it. Anyway, when it comes to Nin the writing is beautifully sensual, but I’ll warn you for questionable content at times--and I mean triggering content. I think that a lot of her erotic short stories were commissioned by others, so I don’t judge her, but there is also a lot of symbolism within the taboo so... that’s my warning about that.

John Keats

Time for a poet, and one of my favourites is this guy. Pretty much covering the Romantic/Gothic cusp, all the poems I remember reading by him were long, indulgent, sensual and low-key filthy. I can’t really say much other than read Keats! ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ is a favourite!

Seamus Heaney

My favourites are ‘Death Of a Naturalist’ and ‘Blackberry-Picking’. Get that gross, kinda visceral nature imagery. Nice.

Wilfred Owen

Mostly studied him in college, which I enjoyed a lot, but I ended up revisiting his war poetry when I started writing Jiraiya. Something about the way he questions patriotism and feels for the ‘enemy’ related a lot to him for me, and the poems themselves are so tragic they really spark up your empathy.

... As for songwriters? Hmm. Lyrically, I always enjoy pretty gloomy stuff. Nick Cave, The Cure, Placebo, Depeche Mode. A lot of it very spooky and sad-romantic. I definitely have a type :’) a definite favourite is also Björk, both for her surreal lyrics, and the crazy stuff she can do with her voice also helps!

I’m honestly struggling to think of more off the top of my head, because I know I have read and enjoyed more books/poetry than this. Sadly I’ve been too preoccupied with other things to branch out into more world literature, but it’s something I want to make an effort to do--especially Chinese and Japanese literature, some of which are on my current book pile. But these are some of the few that came straight to mind for me, and are probably my biggest influences. Hope you enjoyed my lengthy rambling nonetheless. And again, thank you so much for your kind message! It really lifted my spirits <3

#{long post}#{fanmail}#{ooc}

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admittedlynotspartacus · 7 years

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2017 Best Picture Nominees Ranked

This year in film, Colin Farrell ate a bunch of Big Macs for The Lobster and then slimmed out for Fantastic Beasts, only to be replaced at the end by Johnny Depp; Natalie Portman cried in close-up for two hours; Patrick Stewart played the year's second scariest white supremacist; and Paul Dano rode a flatulent Daniel Radcliffe across the sea. Of course, none of these are nominated for Best Picture, because the Academy still consists of a bunch of old white guys who were alive during the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals, yet still gifted La La Land more nominations than Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg COMBINED. However, moving on... here are the 9 films nominated for Best Picture ranked in my oh-so-humble opinion from "You can probably skip this" to "Run out and see this immediately."

9. HACKSAW RIDGE

Director: Mel Gibson Starring: Andrew Garfield, Vince Vaughn & Hugo Weaving The Plot: Mel Gibson uses the inspirational story of a religious man who refuses to carry a weapon into battle as an excuse to make the most violent movie since Passion of the Christ. Thoughts: Gibson executes the battle scenes effectively, and Andrew Garfield turns in a good-but-not-great performance, but there's no real maturation as a director here. He paints with broad colors a story that could've had tremendous power had there been more nuance. There was more to explore with this character's relationship to God, but it's largely eschewed for Old Hollywood beats and brouhaha. Overall, a fairly mediocre war movie, but this time with Jesus. Nominations: 6 (including Picture, Director, and Actor) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86%

8. LA LA LAND

Director: Damien Chazelle Starring: Emma Stone & Ryan Gosling The Plot: Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are adorable, talented, and wonderful and you love them... right? Thoughts: The entire gimmick of this Hollywood throwback musical is that it is a Hollywood throwback musical. It's in CinemaScope, everything looks Technicolor, and most of the numbers are filmed head-to-toe in one shot. It's technically proficient work by a clearly talented filmmaker, yet there is so little joy (and talent for singing and dancing) on display in the musical moments that it's hard to even understand the point. Ryan Gosling's too-cool-for-school hoofing and Emma Stone's whispery vocals are nothing compared to Gene and Debbie, Astaire and Rodgers, or even Judy and Mickey. And because there are so few songs, most of the film is occupied by textbook rom-com beats (however charmingly acted). See it for the instrumental score, which is on full display in the film's final ten minutes. Nominations: 14 (including Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Original Screenplay) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

7. FENCES

Director: Denzel Washington Starring: Denzel Washington & Viola Davis The Plot: Dude says he's gonna build a fence, but mostly just acts like a shithead. Thoughts: Your enjoyment of this film is going to be largely based on how you handle the "stagey" factor. Denzel has effectively shot the classic play, rarely opening it up beyond the backyard set. In this way, it bears resemblance to the films of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or Glengarry Glen Ross, but he lacks the directorial panache of Nichols and Foley, so the scenes often operate all on the same level with little dynamic change. For me, this got exhausting for 2 and a half hours, and the text (which remains beautiful poetry by the late great August Wilson) could've used trims, particularly when we see in Denzel's face the suffering of Troy so clearly that he doesn't need to talk about it much. Such is the power of the close-up, and even though it captures two phenomenal screen performances by Denzel and Viola, it ultimately robs the play of the power it would yield were we just watching them do it onstage. Nominations: 4 (Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress & Adapted Screenplay) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94%

6. LION

Director: Garth Davis Starring: Dev Patel, Sunny Pawar & Nicole Kidman The Plot: Young boy separated from his mother has no interest in finding her until he becomes rugged Dev Patel, is mildly insulted at a party, and has access to Google Earth. Thoughts: The first hour of Lion is among the most beautifully shot pieces of cinema this year. Sunny Pawar is a magnetic protagonist, and Garth Davis and cinematographer Greig Fraser find a visual language for the story of a young boy who is separated from his family and tossed into an overwhelming world that is both epically Dickensian and visceral. It's unfortunate that the moment he grows up into Dev Patel (in a very game performance), much of the film's engagement is lost and we are subjected to long scenes of Patel staring at a computer screen that oftentimes come across as advertisements for Google Earth. Still, if you don't weep like a baby at the ending, I doubt you have a soul. Nominations: 6 (including Picture, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress & Adapted Screenplay) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86%

5. HIDDEN FIGURES

Director: Theodore Melfi Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae & Kevin Costner The Plot: Nasty women get shit done. Thoughts: The most conventional of the Best Picture nominees gets its power from two key elements - that it's a story we don't really know, and that it's about three black women. It's a refreshingly old-fashioned American film about unlikely heroes that tells the familiar story of the space race from a surprising angle. And so, through familiar beats, the film is able to make an epic story personal, while also hitting the nerve of a country currently knee-deep in issues of race relations. Nominations: 3 (Picture, Supporting Actress & Adapted Screenplay) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%

4. HELL OR HIGH WATER

Director: David Mackenzie Starring: Chris Pine, Ben Foster & Jeff Bridges The Plot: Proof that everyone is getting screwed over by banks, including bank robbers. Thoughts: A tense chase movie set against the backdrop of an economically-paralyzed Texas, David Mackenzie’s “Western” transcends our 21st century understanding of the genre (loud gunfights, chases, and anachronistic music) without tipping its hat too hard to the classics. Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay is dynamite, featuring three principal characters brimming with emotion and trading dialogue that feels both true to life and wonderfully cinematic. It’s these characters and their dualities that give the film its epic scope. And this is to say nothing of the final sequence, which finds a power in silence of which most films only dream. In a summer full of duds, this was the one to see. Nominations: 4 (including Picture, Supporting Actor & Original Screenplay) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 98%

3. ARRIVAL

Director: Denis Villeneuve Starring: Amy Adams The Plot: In which Amy Adams can talk to aliens, but still can't win an Oscar. Thoughts: Denis Villeneuve, of Sicario and Prisoners note, is one of the best contemporary filmmakers at creating a feeling of dread and anxiety. The opening sequences of his latest (shot beautifully by cinematographer Bradford Young) play with a kind of hypnotic, slow-burn tension that’s seldom seen in movies these days, let alone a big blockbuster like this one. Anchoring it all is Amy Adams, proving once again to be one of our greatest actresses. Her interactions with the truly alien-looking aliens, through a rectangular glass window on the other side of a room filled with white haze, are the centerpieces of a film which flirts with timely notions of global unity and boasts a few twists and turns as well. When it starts dealing out reveals, it becomes less and less effective, but the overall vision and feel of the film, grounded by Adams’ performance, make it something to behold. Nominations: 8 (including Picture, Director & Adapted Screenplay) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94%

2. MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

Director: Kenneth Lonergan Starring: Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges & Michelle Williams The Plot: Casey Affleck could learn some chill from his ginger nephew. Thoughts: The latest in the line of the “Boston grief drama” is among the most depressing things you’ll see this year. It’s also one of the funniest. Kenneth Lonergan has always walked the line of humor and heartache with painstaking accuracy, but never as well as he does in this masterful work. His picture of life is one where a never-ending litany of stupidities is ever present. Just because you’re dealing with the death of a loved one doesn’t mean you stop getting bad cell reception, stubbing your toe, or forgetting where you parked the car. It’s a tricky balancing act, one that major Hollywood movies eschew altogether, presumably because they don’t trust an audience to be able to parcel out what’s funny and what’s tragic. But in Manchester, the two emotions trade off, sometimes coinciding, to remarkable effect. And nowhere is this more embodied than in a grade-A performance by Casey Affleck; it’s one of those performances that is so perfectly realized you really feel like you know the guy; you understand the whirlwind of grief and anger that exists within him and how he’s masked it with a detached veneer. The acting overall is tremendous; Lucas Hedges is phenomenal in a breakout performance, and Michelle Williams makes the most of her limited screen-time. Lonergan and co. so fully commit to this truthful vision of a world wherein nobody gets an easy pass; sometimes you can beat it, and sometimes you just can’t. Nominations: 6 (Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress & Original Screenplay) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

1. MOONLIGHT

Director: Barry Jenkins Starring: Trevante Rhodes, Andre Holland, Janelle Monae, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali The Plot: It's black gay Boyhood. Thoughts: It is absolutely baffling as to how this movie, based on a Tarell Alvin McCraney play, featuring not a single white actor, and focusing on the maturation of a gay protagonist, ever got made. But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg of the miracle that is Moonlight. It’s one of those movies that is so utterly transporting, so richly detailed, and so very very real that even though one knows painstaking work went into it, it feels as though it emerged fully-realized from a collective consciousness and fell into our laps right when we needed it most. The film begins in the familiar territory of hip-hop mythology - there’s a role model drug dealer and junkie mom, for instance - and yet it soon becomes clear we are being presented with the cliches and tropes of this type of film to shatter them and ultimately come back around to say, “Look at these people. They’re human. They’ve always been and always will.” There is beauty in nearly every moment, from the stunning cinematography (the scene in the water… the cooking) to the subtle score, to its performances (Alex Hibbert’s, Ashton Sanders’, and Trevante Rhodes’ collective turn as Chiron is staggering, and Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali will surely be recognized come Oscar time). It’s all in service of a singular vision - one that isn’t easy to pin down or put into words, but one that will surely stay with me for a long, long time.

But alas...

#oscars #oscars2017 #moonlight #lalaland #manchesterbythesea #hiddenfigures #hellorhighwater #hacksawridge #arrival #fences #damienchazelle #ryangosling #emmastone #barryjenkins #amyadams #academyawards

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notangislist-blog · 6 years

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Remembering Carlin

George Carlin played at my house as a child. Both my liberal arts educated artists, meh-on-government parents loved him, and I loved him. Mornings, I bombed down the hills of San Francisco, 45mph on a bike, weaving through Market Street traffic, throwing up the finger to honking cars. Later, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue comedy, take a comedy class, and bring up Carlin. I told the teacher that I wanted to rant like him, and she said, "You can't be George Carlin. You're a woman and have to act a certain way. You don't know the crowds. Look, you're just a smiley girl. You've got to be careful. " I replied, "I know I'm not old and white and a man, but I can take what I've learned from him." And gave the "Bitch, you don't know, me," face. Her trauma resurfaced in her body, a shudder, a knowing look, perhaps wanting to protect me from something that had happened to her or maybe recognizing part of herself in me. Then she said, "Maybe times have changed."

The female comics in the room let out an exhale.

Saying, but not not saying, times have not changed.

Yet, here we are, being seen. Defiance comes in many forms.

Expectations sometimes shift. And Carlin shifted many.

The last recorded interview from Carlin, conducted by Jay Dixit, Friday, June 13th, 2008 from Psychology Today.

The Interview

What follows are edited highlights. They represent a little over half of the interview.

How do you think about comedy and self-expression? Expressing what’s within vs. looking at the outside world and making observations? Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one’s chest, to sing one’s song. So that element is present in all art. And comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts—it’s a vulgar art, it’s one of the people’s arts, it’s the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form—it’s certainly artistry. So self-expression is the key to even standing up and saying, "Hey, listen to me." Self-expression can be based on looking at the world and making observations about it or not. Comedy can also be based on describing one’s inner self—doing anecdotes, talking about your own fears. Woody Allen taps into a lot of self-analysis in his comedy. But I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. I think self-expression is present at all times, and whether or not you’re talking about the outside world or your responses to it depends on the moment and the subject. Do you go around observing and trying to collect funny things? Or do you just live your life and then say how you feel about what you happen to have seen? I’m 71, and I’ve been doing this for a little over 50 years, doing it at a fairly visible level for 40. By this time it’s all second nature. It’s all a machine that works a certain way: the observations, the immediate evaluation of the observation, and then the mental filing of it, or writing it down on a piece of paper. I’ve often described the way a 20-year-old versus, say, a 60- or a 70-year-old, the way it works. A 20-year-old has a limited amount of data they’ve experienced, either seeing or listening to the world. At 70 it’s a much richer storage area, the matrix inside is more textured, and has more contours to it. So, observations made by a 20-year-old are compared against a data set that is incomplete. Observations made by a 60-year-old are compared against a much richer data set. And the observations have more resonance, they’re richer. So if I write something down, some observation—I see something on television that reminds me of something I wanted to say already—the first time I write it, the first time I hear it, it makes an impression. The first time I write it down, it makes a second impression, a deeper path. Every time I look at that piece of paper, until I file it in my file, each time, the path gets a little richer and deeper so that these things are all in there. Now at this age, I have a network of knowledge and data and observations and feelings and values and evaluations I have in me that do things automatically. And then when I sit down to consciously write, that's when I bring the craftsmanship. That's when I pull everything together and say, how I can best express that? And then as you write, you find more, 'cause the mind is looking for further connections. And these things just flow into your head and you write them. And the writing is the really wonderful part. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job is to just notice them and bring them to life. Do you think that the richness you described comes from just being able to access more experiences, having information on file? Or is it judgment? Well, that's true, too. The machine that does all this learns what it is you want—it learns what it is that serves your purpose and it begins to tailor the synthesis. It synthesizes these observations and these comparisons. Comedy’s all about comparisons and contrasts and congruities and incongruities and heightenings and understatement and exaggeration. The mind has all of that stuff built in, and it learns which ones pay off the best for you. It's probably related to the pleasure center. You get so much pleasure finding good observations and finding which things are the richest things you can say, that probably the brain remembers how that happened and learns to provide the best stuff. Maybe you have a little silent editor in there. You talked about how comedy's all about incongruities, contrasts, exaggeration. Do you think about those techniques or those principles of humor consciously? It happens automatically. Sometimes there’s a conscious heightening, you'll recognize you've just chosen an image to make a point. Then your mind will just suddenly throw something at you that's stronger—a heightening, to raise the stakes, a stronger word, a more visceral image, something that lights up the imagination, much better than the original thought. So you’re aware that you’re heightening and exaggerating further but you don't use the word exaggeration or anything like that. All that stuff is just happening. And sometimes, afterward, I’ll look at something and say, “If I were giving a comedy lecture, that would be a good example.” I often think in those terms. Do you think there are any downsides to having gotten to the point where you are, where all of this is happening automatically? Or are there some advantages a 20-year-old would have? Well, I would imagine there are some that I can’t put my finger on because I don't remember what it was like. I was a different man. I don't know—the advantage that a 20 year old would have would be more longevity to look forward to. You talked about how wonderful it is, this feeling of writing. So what is your process like? I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I'm not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder. Most of the note-taking happens while I’m watching television. Because the world is undifferentiated on the television set. You may be watching the news channel, but it’s going to cover the breadth of American life and the human experience. It's gonna go from suicide bombings to frivolous consumer goods. It's a broad window on the world, and a lot of things are already established in my mind as things I say, things that I'm interested in, things that are fodder for my machine. And when I see something that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it's a further exaggeration and a further addition, or an exception—if it plays into furthering my purpose, I jot it down. When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can't use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it. And that stuck with me. And what's your filing system? There’s a large segment of it devoted to language, which is a love of mine. And a rich area for my work talking about how we talk. One of the files is called “The Way We Talk.” And it's about certain voguish words that come into style and remain there. But then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles. There's one that says "Crime." There's "Crime" and there's "Law," there’s "Sex" and there’s "Race." And there’s "Humans"—that’s obviously a big folder with a lot of smaller folders in it, it’s about the human race and the human species and experiences and observations I have about that, or data that I've found about it. You know, 6 million people stepped on land mines this year. Those things interest me.

And there's "America," and America is a major category, of course. It breaks down into the culture, and the culture breaks down into further things. It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls—it's just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let's see, if I say "asshole” and “minister," I then can find what I want find. What's the process of going from something that's true about the world—observing it—to actually making people laugh? I begin with the knowledge that my audience knows me thoroughly. I know the things they will trust coming from me, and I know they'll allow me to do exposition that’s necessary to set the stage for the piece of material. The funny—that’s part of the genetic package. The genetic marker for language came through my family. My grandfather, whom I didn’t know, was a New York City policeman. I did not know him. During his adult life, he wrote out Shakespeare’s tragedies longhand just for the joy it gave him. And he asked questions about language at his dinner table, my mother told me. My mother had a great love of language, and a great gift for language. The Irish have a genetic tradition, it seems, an affinity for language and expression. And so I got that. The Irish say: "You don’t lick it off the rocks, kid." It comes in the blood. So, I have that and I don’t have to do anything about it. As Noel Coward said, “All I ever had was a talent to amuse.” I have a talent to amuse and I have a way of finding the joke, a way of expressing things through exaggeration, interesting images, whatever goes in, whatever the parts are that go into making these things work. I try to come in through the side door. One of the voguish terms, which is so repellant to me, “thinking outside the box.” To settle for that kind of language is embarrassing. But that's a very useful picture. I try to come in through the side door, the side window, to come in from a direction they’re not expecting, to see something in a different way. That's the job that I give myself. So, how can I talk about something eminently familiar to them, on my terms, in a new way, that engages their imagination? The jokes come. You don’t look for them. It’s all automatic, and, I think, genetic. My father was an after dinner speaker, was a great raconteur. He was an ad salesman for space in newspapers during the 1930s, when that was the primary medium of advertising, and my mother was in advertising her whole life. They both were very funny, and they both were very gifted verbally. So, those things come to you automatically. It's like being a child prodigy with the violin or the piano. It's not something you try for or you have to do too much about except work at it. And that's what I try to do. How is it that you find things that are unexpected? I don’t know. But I want to add an element I overlooked. Psychology. We're talking about a magazine called Psychology Today. As a child, my father was gone. I had no grandparents; they were all dead. Had no real cousins to play with, and I didn’t give a shit, frankly. I experienced my life in a very happy way, but, what I want to say to you is, I was alone as a child. My father was dead. My mother left him when I was 2 months old and he died when I was 8 years old. He drank too much and he was a bully and she had the courage to take two boys, one of them two months old and one of them 5 years old and to leave him in 1937 and get back into the business world and get a job and raise us through the end of the Depression and through the Second World War. She did a great job, but she was at work until 7 or 7:30 at night many nights. So I spent a lot of time on my own. In the house or out around the neighborhood or sneaking in the subway, going down to 42nd street, traveling around Manhattan Island, learning it as a youngster. And I experienced that—because psychologists ask you not if something's good or bad, but how do you experience it—I experienced that as freedom, independence, autonomy. And I was brought up on that feeling. That’s what made me, I think, able to quit school, and go out and try to start my life and career early, because I had that strength. And my mother had that strength. I witnessed it. I mean, what she did was she took us away from him and saved us. So, those qualities of being alone like that fostered in me a need for adult approval and attention. Now they say that it's kind of a common cliché that comedians just want attention. But it's an element that's very important. The job is called "look at me." That's the name of this job. “Look at me. Ain't I smart? Ain't I cute? Ain't I clever?" I needed to be—not the center of attention—but I needed to be able to attract attention when I wanted it, through my stunts and my fooling around physically with faces or postures or voices I would do. Then it became funny the things I would say, and I became more of a wit than simply a mimic and a clown. And so, those things were all important in this. The fact that I didn’t finish school left me with a lifelong need to prove that I’m smart, prove it to myself, maybe to the world. “Ain't I smart, ain't I cute, ain't I clever.” “Listen to me, listen to what I got to say.” So, those things are important elements in the drive behind all of this. You made an analogy to playing the violin. I wanted to ask you about mastery. You’ve been doing this for, as you said, over 50 years, and it seems like you've only gotten better with time. So I'm wondering what you think has enabled you to do that. Is it like playing the violin? Is it just practice? Is it getting good feedback? Is it—you know, what is it that allows you to hone your craft? The feedback that I’ve gotten has been through the success of the career. That’s a reinforcing factor. I say: Oh, that works, oh that’s what I do, I see. I think with anything you do over a long period of time, you should be getting better at it. I'm talking about craft, art, or drive that comes from inside. What is your philosophy about physical performance? You walk around a lot, you make a lot of gestures. It’s just second nature, you don’t think about it at all. And I don’t pace as much on stage as I used to, maybe it’s my age, I don’t know. I don't feel limited physically, in that respect, but it's just something I’ve grown into. Were you always making people laugh, sort of automatically, just because of your personality? Yeah. As I was describing, this is a job for a showoff. In those 8 years of grammar school that I had—the 9th year was kind of a it was a Irish catholic Christian brothers, and it was a much more brutal setting than these lovely nuns we had. So I think of those 8 years as my education. I got the work very easily, I didn’t have any trouble grasping the work, and so I had time to clown, time to signal to my buddy, make a face, make a fart under the arm, I was a bit of a class clown, I was a neighborhood cut-up. I eventually started doing routines when I was about 14, 15 16. I would do routines on the street corner for my buddies on the stoop. My mother wanted me to finish high school, go to college, be an advertising man, be a businessman like the men at her office whom she admired. But she couldn’t stop this other machine that was revving up. I had an 8th grade graduation from the grammar school—it was the only graduation I ever had. And in 9th grade, while I was at that school, I had a Brother, one of the brothers who taught, his name was Brother Conrad. My mother had said to me, now George, I didn't get you a graduation present, and this was June 1951, this was now the fall of 1951, when I'm in first year of high school. She said, “I didn't get you a graduation present, so you be thinking about what you might want.” Brother Conrad was telling the class one day that because he had a clergyman's discount rate, he could get cameras for people. Then he mentioned tape recorders and man, the bell went off in my head! Tape recorders at that time were virtually unknown to the average person. They may have heard about them here or there. They were not consumer items. She bought me a tape recorder, a Webcor. And that became a tool for me to put some of these verbal impulses to work. I began to produce little radio shows on it at home by using the phonograph. Playing a record on the phonograph, like playing the Dragnet theme. Dun da dun dun. Dun da dun dun duuun. Then I would fade the phonograph down and I would come in and I would do my make-believe announcer. I did newscasts, I did sports. A lot of the things that I ventured into professionally in my first stage of comedy I was doing on that tape recorder. I recorded a whole half hour of story—it was like a vignette, like a series of vignettes, a drama, about my neighborhood. And guess what: I made fun of authority figures. So my mother—in spite what she wanted me to do for her, to be a great reflection on her, go to college and be a businessman—she knew this was something I needed. And she got that for me, and it helped accelerate the beginnings of my putting this dream together that I had. I was 14 when I got that tape recorder. They were the size of a Buick. They were not little handy things. And she was smart enough to get me one. That's an important part of my development. Can you remember the first joke you ever told? No. But I do remember the first time I ever made my mother laugh. And unfortunately, it’s lost on me what it was I said. But I noticed the moment, I knew something had happened, this was when I was very young. My mother laughed fairly frequently. But I knew the difference between her social laugh and her really spontaneous laugh when she was caught off guard—which is the key to laugher, being off guard. And I said something to her, and I saw that in her and it registered with me. And it made the point. I wouldn’t have remembered it as well as I do if it hadn’t meant a lot to me. It was a kind of a little mark along the way, a little badge of honor. It meant I had said something witty. I didn’t clown, I wasn’t making a face or standing in a funny angle. I had said something witty. I had probably turned some situation around, exaggerated one element, and made a joke. I want to talk about the transformation that you did in the 60s when you went from what you once termed the “middle-American comic” to this different persona—it was much more subversive. How did that happen and why did that happen? I was always swimming against the tide. I was always out of step. Not only did I quit school, but I got kicked out of three schools along the way. I eventually got asked to leave the air force a year early—it wasn’t dishonorable, but it was a general discharge, which is a step down—because I did not shape up, I didn’t like authority, I had three court-martials. I was kicked off the alter boys, I was kicked off the choirboys, I was kicked out of the boy scouts, I was kicked out of summer camp. I never fit and I didn’t like conforming. And sometimes it just broke through the membrane, and I was out. By the end of the 60s, all of my friends, the musician friends of mine, had gone through a transition in their dress, and especially in their music, and what I noticed was that all of these great artists—Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, Joan Baez—all of these people were using their art to express themselves politically and socially. And I was not. I was still doing people-pleasing. I was 30, and I resonated much more truly with the 20-year-olds. I was more in line with them than I was with these people I was entertaining in nightclubs. I began to notice that. I began to be affected by it, and along the way, the judicious use of some mescaline and some LSD managed to accelerate the process. It gave me more of an insight into how false the world was I was settling for, and to see that there was something much richer and better and more authentic. And those changes happened, they just—they happened naturally and organically. It took about 2 years for the total changeover to occur. My beard got a little longer, the hair got a little longer, the clothing changed, and then I suddenly found myself being as—the best combination of both, this person I really was who was kind of out of step, antiauthoritarian, who also had these skills and talents that he was honing to express himself. And so I started expressing those feelings. In what way did the mescaline and LSD give you the insight and the confidence to make this transformation? What role did the drugs play? Well, It was just passive, I don’t know. See, I had always been a marijuana smoker, a pretty heavy user of marijuana, all these years I’m talking about when I was in this other world of mainstream television, nightclubs. So marijuana is a hallucinogen and it is also a value-changing drug, as are acid and mescaline. They are hallucinogens and they are value-changing drugs. They alter, assist in shifting one’s perspective on the world which usually is informed by your values. And so I had already, my body, my mind, and myself—I already had a kind of a thick layer of this out-of-stepness. And so I was already across that street. And I just hadn’t, you know, bought a house on that side yet. So, the LSD was a much stronger experience, and the mescaline, and I don’t know what they did or how they did it, I just know that going through that gave me the confidence in these changes I was feeling, in this direction, this metamorphosis, I was in the middle of. I gained confidence in it and I took strength from it, feeling that I was right that I was really on the right path, that I was being true to myself. And that was what counted to me, to be true to myself—my mother had always said that. To thine—Shakespeare—“To thine own self be true.” She loved quoting the classics, and she quoted Emerson or Shakespeare or whoever it was she thought was appropriate for her lesson. And to thine own self be true. And I just—I just had to be who I felt like I was, not who I had led them to believe I was. So after that transformation, to what extent is the persona that you have on stage—to what extent is it your real personality? I know you’re making jokes and some of that involves exaggeration, but do you feel that you’re acting angrier, more bitter, more caustic on stage? Or are you just being yourself as accurately as possible? I’ve addressed this before when the question is asked more bluntly: Are you an angry man? What are you angry about; what are you so angry about? I don’t live an angry life, not an angry person. I rarely lose my temper, can’t remember the last time, never had a physical fight in my life, don’t carry grudges, don’t carry resentment either. Very very lucky in those respects. But I feel a very strong alienation and dissatisfaction from my groups. Abraham Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group. When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt comfortable there; I don’t belong to that. So, when he says the “local group,” I take that as meaning a lot of things: the local social clubs or fraternal orders, or lodges or associations or clubs of any kind, things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt different and outside. Now, I also extended that, once again in retrospect, as I examined my feelings. I don’t really identify with America, I don’t really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don’t really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don’t. All the definitions are there, but I don’t really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices. But even if I am a cynic, they say if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist—that’s what’s underneath. That’s the little flicker of flame, has a little life in it, the idealist: I would love to be able to entertain that side of me, but it doesn’t work like that. I don’t see what’s in it yet, I mean I just like it out here. I’m not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans’ choices—and on stage those feelings sometimes are exaggerated for a theatric stage—you’re on a stage you have an audience of 2500 or 3000 people: you need to project the feelings, the emotions it’s heightened, and people mistake it for a personal anger but it’s more dissatisfaction, disappointment and contempt for these things we’ve settled for. So it sounds like it is your true personality, but it’s heightened for the stage. It is my true personality, but it’s not an angry personality. Anger is a handy term and boy words are tricky, as we know. What one man perceives as anger, another person—in my case the deliverer of material—is, “Don’t you see it, don’t you see how badly you’re doing?” It’s like shaking a child—which you’re not supposed to do. So let me latch onto that feeling. You’re grabbing somebody and you’re saying, “Don’t you see it?” But if you really don’t care about America, then why are you doing it? Why are you on stage? Is it just because you want to express yourself? Do you hope you can influence people in some way? You’ve hit on the contradiction, and it’s one I don’t understand the resolution to, if there is one. Sometimes people say, do I try to make audiences think? I say: No no no, because that really would be the kiss of death. But what I want them to know is that I’m thinking. It’s part of that showoff and dropout syndrome. I think I need to show them that I have brought myself to a cleverer, smarter spot than they have. In doing so, “Can’t you see this? can’t you see?” And a lot of them do. I get amazing things said to me. And they’re frequent enough that I know these things are multiplied by those who have never encountered you. One person who says, “You really changed my outlook on things or the way I view X Y or Z,” for everyone who says that to you, there are a thousand, ten thousand who’ll never get to tell you that. There are people who take something away form what I do, and I know that and it pleases me and I am proud of that. And it means the student is a bit of a teacher. But yeah, of course I care. Of course I care. My daughter has pinned me on that. She says of course you care, can’t you hear it? And I say yeah yeah yeah, but they gotta prove it to me first. Show me you care people and then I’ll let some of it out; right now I just want to scold you a little bit. So how would you say that you feel towards people? You say on the one hand you are sort of contemptuous but on the other hand you want their approval in some way? Is that not a contradiction? Yeah, it sounds like it has the makings of a contradiction; I guess by definition it does. I am contemptuous of the mass. That’s the thing I need to explain. One on one with people, I have great capacity and great compassion. I don’t like standing around 20 minutes talking to somebody, but when I see individuals, I see their individual beauty. I’m aware of the potential—and I don’t mean this happened every time I meet someone—but when I see people, I sort of see the potential for the whole species. When you look in their eyes, you can see a hologram of the human species and you kind of know what we could have been. It’s the group behavior that I’m talking about on stage. Let’s switch gears a little bit and let me ask you about religion. I mean you were talking about it decades ago. Now, atheism and religion bashing have gone mainstream: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. You were way ahead of the curve. What’s it like hearing them saying many of the things you said in the 1970s? I’ve read some of the books you’ve mentioned and some of the reasons of existence and God and what a bad name religion has given God. I just kind of do this, I just keep moving along. I don’t really judge it… I reserve my evaluations and judgments for the parts that I do, the lines I add. I don’t think about myself in the larger world very much. Richard Dawkins did use an excerpt of mine for a chapter heading. I noticed that. It’s nice. Not to overdo this thing, but when you’re a dropout and the culture accepts you and begins to quote and they teach some of your stuff in communications class and communications law and I hear this all the time and professors ask to use things in their textbooks, this is kind of my honorary baccalaureate. When these things happen I think good, well, there’s a little thumb on my chest, feather in my cap. I notice those things, and I feel good about what I’ve chosen and how I do it. As Lily Tomlin once said, and I am going to get this wrong so it’s a paraphrase, she said to be considered a success in a mediocre culture doesn’t say a lot for you. You were central in the Supreme Court case in which justices affirmed the government's right to regulate your “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” act on the public airwaves. How do you think about the role of vulgarity in your humor? I used to point out that when I was a little boy in the 40s, I was told to look up to and admire solders and sailors, policemen, firemen, and athletes, were objects of childhood hero worship. We all know how they talk. So apparently these words do not corrupt morally. This was the thing I couldn’t put together. I use the words because I’m from that ethos. I’m from the street in New York, hung around in a tough neighborhood. It was common to curse, you make your point. It’s a very effective language. I try not to overdo it. It’s never to shock. I know where it fits, it’s never to shock. There’s no shock value left in words. Humor is based on surprise, and surprise is a milder way of saying shock. It’s surprise that makes the joke. What’s the funniest bit you’ve ever heard? Sometimes jokes have a wonderful logic to them. I’ll give you one that, even to people that don’t mind mild cursing, bothers some people—especially women. Short joke. The wonderful thing about it is the logic of the joke, the ingenuity. Father and son, little son are out on the back porch, passing the day, father says to son, “Do you have perhaps any questions for me about sex?” And he says, “Well, yeah Dad, what is that hairy area on Mommy?” And the father says, “Well, that’s her vulva.” And the boy says, “Well then what’s a cunt?” And the father says, “That’s rest of Mommy.” And that joke strikes a nerve, hits a chord—men who’ve been divorced more than twice really like that. It makes beautiful use of that man’s thought. To arrive at that distinction—to take it from the real to the figurative. From cunt as a sexual part to cunt as a term of derision for women, just as men are called assholes by certain women—and they deserve it. It’s funny how we use words. The fact that a mean woman is called a cunt and a mean man is called a prick. I have a long thing I’d like to write someday about language and the way we address each other. How has your comedy changed over the years? You know for a guy who didn’t do homework, the thing that’s happened is this: that 6th grade showoff that kid who had to sing a song at meetings, who won the medal at camp for being funniest guy at amateur night 5 years in a row. He didn’t do his homework then. I didn’t do book reports, but now what’s happened is that showoff has a partner who does his homework and the left/right brain are allied, united, now in a way they weren’t. I’m using my organizational ability, and my writing ability which is careful process, informed by art, but still a craft of putting things together, I’ve somehow become more integrated. I do my homework now but I stand up and show off. So I got both, I got the best of both sixth grade worlds. You asked me to remind you to tell me about Arthur Koestler. That was another impact. I was doing nightclub comedy down in the Village. I was down there in ’63, ’64, and my friend told me about Arthur Koestler’s book about the act of creation and it had a section on humor. He was talking about the creative process. There was an illustration on the panel that showed a triptych. On the left panel, there were these names of artistic pursuits. There were poets, painter, composer. And one of them was jester. I was only interested in the jester. What he said about each of these, he said these individuals on the left hand side can transcend the panels of the triptych by creative growth. The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a thinking jester who thinks poetically. I didn’t see that and say, “That’s what I am going to do,” but I guess it made an impression on me. I was never afraid to grow and change. I never was afraid of reversing my field on people, and I just think I’ve become a touch of each of those second and third descriptions and I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting imagery which I guess is a poetic touch. And I like the fact that most of my things are based on solid ideas, things I’ve thought about in a new way for me, things for which I have said “Well, what about this? Suppose you look at it this way? How about that?” And then you heighten and exaggerate that, because comedy’s all about heightening and exaggerating. And anyways I guess I was impressed that there was another thing from my early life that probably at least influenced me to some level. It sounds like you think of yourself much more as a writer than a performer—is that true? How do you think about performing? It’s my primary delivery system. I used to, in my early years, when I would do an interview I was always proud to tell the writer that I wrote my own material, if they asked me or even if they didn’t. I wanted to be distinguished from the ones who didn’t do that, and I was proud of it, so I would say I am a comedian who writes his own material. And then at some point, I discovered what I really had become was a writer who performs his own material. This was a really important distinction for me to notice—it happened way after the fact. I’m a writer. I think of myself as a writer. First of all, I’m an entertainer; I’m in the vulgar arts. I travel around talking and saying things and entertaining, but it’s in service of my art and it’s informed by that. So I get to write for two destinations. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision. And computers changed my life, the fact that you can move text as easily as you can move text, and say, “Wait a minute, these two things belong together, these two things go together, page 2 and page 5: similar ideas, put ’em together!” But the person who is most a part of me is the performer, is the standup, the guy who says, “Hey look at me, listen to this!” I do that because that’s what I do, I love doing it. And I love the feeling I get in my gut when I’m watching on the computer screen that is close to being realized the way I would like it to be. the feeling I get in my gut is “Wait’ll they hear this, wait’ll I tell them this, I can’t wait to tell them!” It’s like the guy on the end of the bench: “Put me in coach, put me in!” They call to me, I can tell which ones are pregnant, which ones need to be moved up to a higher level of readiness, and it’s because I can’t wait to say them, I can’t wait to share them with people. You know, you get 2500 people, acting as a single organism: the audience is a single organism and it’s you and it. And to have that feeling of mastery up there—it’s an assertion of power: here I am, I have the microphone, you came here for this express purpose. You’re sitting not in tables at nightclubs with waiters and glasses, you’re seated all facing forward in order to enjoy this and here I am, and wait till you hear this! There’s nothing like it in my experience that I could aspire to. It has as much a payoff as writing, which has a big payoff. So, sitting in front of a computer, “Wait till they hear this, this is great material.” What’s the difference between that and actually standing on stage hearing the audience roaring with laughter? The difference is, at the computer you can stop, think back, think forward, look around, turn the page as it were, you can see the whole world all at once. On stage you’re only in a single moment ever—your mind can hear what you just said. This is a funny thing that happens for me: when I’m up there doing something I’ve memorized perfectly, and it has pauses in it—and of course the laughs are all the pauses. As you’re going along, you’re thinking of what you’re saying, you want to give it the proper vocal values, so you are kind of thinking about it, not reaching for the words, but kind of thinking about them. You’re also aware of the echo of what you just said, and whether it worked or not, and what that might mean. It’s all part of the trigonometry, I guess. And then there is the faint anticipation of what comes next. It’s like the feeling of conducting an orchestra. It’s like conducting an orchestra, this group of people who already like you, predisposed to appreciate you, at your service, at you’re command, and you’re just waving the baton and bringing them in, leading them forward and it’s just a nice kind of feeling. Let me ask you about your influence—how do you feel that you have influenced other comedians? I hear that from some of them, who say, “I wouldn’t be doing this were it not for you.” I talked to a very prominent name in comedy today who wanted to pay me some kind compliments about the recent HBO show, he hasn’t been able to catch up with me, I won’t mention him, but everybody would know his name. He said also in passing, “You know, I wouldn’t be doing this without you.” There have been people, who, I don’t know, because I came along at a certain time. Richard Pryor and I went through our changes at the same time, he became prominent at the same time. I had this kind of reemergence. I’m sure Richard Pryor would hear those things. I’m sure Woody Allen hears those things. I don’t take them as singular to me. But I know they’re true when I’m told, I realized I could be myself, could talk about this and that and not be afraid; I’m sure all artists hear similar things, especially ones who have lasted a while.

[Note: Jerry Seinfeld has since identified himself as the prominent comedian who spoke to George Carlin just before I did. "I called him to compliment him on his most recent special on HBO," writes Seinfeld in a New York Times op-ed. "Seventy years old and he cranks out another hour of great new stuff. He was in a hotel room in Las Vegas getting ready for his show. He was a monster." —JD]

Do you mentor other comedians? No. I’m not collegial, I don’t hang out. I’m soloist, I like my solitude, I don’t really hang around with comedians—this person I talked to today, I now have his phone number. I have maybe five phone numbers. I’m not in show business because I don’t have to go to the meetings, I’m just not a part of it, I don’t belong to it. When you “belong” to something. You want to think about that word, “belong.” People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don’t care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can’t quite pin down. Has your sense of humor helped you in other areas of your life, besides your career as a professional comedian? Meeting people? Making friends? Dealing with loss? I don’t know about any of those aspects. But I know that the art of not taking things seriously often bleeds over into the self, to not take yourself too seriously. You can tell from my answers that I take what I do very seriously, and I think about it. But I don’t really take myself that seriously. I know that I’ve accomplished a good deal. I was just nominated for this year’s Mark Twain prize at the Kennedy Center, so these things over the years mean, "Yeah, good job, George.” I don’t take myself very seriously, though, at least I don’t think so. I try to see the reality and not get carried away with the emotion. What’s the reality? What's going on here? What’s the ground floor? What’s the reality? Let’s look at the situation: "So he’s dead, she’s hurt, and you don’t feel good." OK, so let’s figure this out. I like to say two things in life that mean the most: genetics and luck. When you look at it realistically, genetics is luck too. Because you could have been born in some really terrible situation and never had a chance to realize yourself or see who you were. And so the luck of genetics and then after that, circumstances, those are the two guiding things. Knowing what to do about it, taking advantage of it, that’s fine, that's good, good for you. But still, those two elements mean everything.

My arm is getting tired here. The crook of my arm.

I guess I'm pretty much done. We've been talking for a long time and I really appreciate your taking all this time. Was there a good question you thought people should ask that never got asked?

No, because you covered some of the ones, as they came along. As I looked at the list yesterday, I thought the list gave me an opportunity for several places where I want, need to be heard—such as the anger thing, development, and the changes I went through in the late 60s. They were all in there so I feel good.

So the last question is: What are you working on now? I have a piece of material that I’m doing on stage these days. I'm in Las Vegas now. I do weekends here, I do four nights on weekends as part of my year of touring. I go mostly to concert halls and theaters, around 80 or 90 of 'em a year. But I come down here around three or four. So I’m down here. This piece of material called, “There’s Too Much Fucking Music,” which is my way of looking at… how much music there is, I guess. It’s just my way of looking at the world and saying something that people don’t notice and figuring out a new way. And it’s filled with exaggeration and stuff. I'm doing that on stage a little bit. I’m not giving myself any pressure. The lady in my life Sally Wade and I are waiting for our house to be finished remodeling. We’re in temporary quarters. It's kind of onerous. We’re lucky we found a place right down the street but the price we pay for being right down the street is that it’s not really suitable in terms of space and structure for our needs. So we’re really in combat duty. It’s been a tough time. Not so tough you can’t work it out, you know, but just enough so it’s broken some of my work habits. And I’m enjoying my break from them and I know where I have to go on the next book, I have a book that I'm going to start organizing the files, reorganizing, renaming, reclassifying, putting things together, taking things apart. And there’ll be another HBO show as these pieces on stage begin to take form. Is there anything else you want to add? No! And I really appreciate all the thought you’ve put into all these questions. Really, it’s the most complete interview I’ve ever done. Is it tomorrow yet? I think it is.

#george carlin #comedy #comedian #class #learnings

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What inspired you to get into comedy?

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What inspired you to get into comedy?

The Big Ask

Watching Monty Python for the first time at a party at the neighbour’s farm. A lot of info to get in. Being funny for love as a child. Tony Law, A Lost Show, Monkey Barrel, 15:00

I started out as a singer-songwriter. Some of my songs were funny, so I tried them out at a comedy club. I loved talking and getting laughs In Between the songs so much, I decided to see if I could do it without the guitar. So, one of the biggest inspirations for my getting into comedy was not wanting to carry an instrument around all the time. Myq Kaplan, All Killing Aside, Underbelly, Bristo Square, 21:15

I did it for a bet, no idea if I’ve won yet. Nick Page, Yes, That Nick Page, Apparently, Mash House, 16:50

Ricky Gervais’s vast fortune. Stanley Brooks, AAA Stand-up at Underbelly, Underbelly Cowgate, 18:20

I worked behind the bar at the Glee Club in Cardiff for a while, and thought I’d give it a go. Seeing Tom Wrigglesworth’s Open Return Letter To Richard Branson show made me want to do more story-led shows, though. Robin Morgan, Robin Morgan: Honeymoon, The Pear Tree, 16:00

Peter Kay. Never has anyone concealed the art so well – perhaps too well, even to the detriment of his being recognised as a real genius of the form. While making it seem like he’s just a confident chatterbox, his range is as good as any comic I’ve ever seen. He can communicate ideas with laser-beam precise language and dramatisation. He does a Nan going home early at a wedding party as ‘Yoda from Star Wars’, and for me it’s like someone broadcasting to you on your exact frequency – and the picture is so clear and precise it’s as if he literally formed it in your mind for you. No one would ever say it, but he’s also fantastically self-ironising and postmodern: he delivers one-liners at the top, and then dissects their cheesiness, thoroughly aware of the expectations people have about traditional comedy. When an act can literally change the way we talk about everyday life – and I think it is possible to talk about garlic bread, or biscuit dipping in terms of pre and post-Kay – then they achieved something quite special. Moon, Moon, Pleasance Attic, 21:30

The Doug Anthony All Stars. I idolised them when I was a kid in Australia, they were pure visceral subversive comedy anarchy. I knew all their material by heart. They showed me that if you don’t sweat you haven’t done a show. Last year I was lucky enough to meet my hero Tim Ferguson from DAAS, he is a bloody legend and inspired me to keep going. Nathan Lang, The Stuntman, Just The Tonic @ The Caves, 14:45

YouTube – Spending too much time binge watching stand-up specials and interviews with comedians meant the advice of ‘just do it and keep going’ stuck in my head so I have. Even though when I started I was dire at comedy I have kept trucking along and would hope I have now made it to the rank of acceptable. Struan Logan, Struan All Over the World, Counting House: Attic, 18:05

In 1995 my father gave my mother a Best of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band CD for her birthday. It was the first CD that we, as a family, owned. I was nine years old and the excitement was palpable. Three months later, when he gave her a CD player for Christmas, it reached fever pitch. I remember listening to it over and over again. I think the song Mr Apollo might still be the funniest thing I can think of, and I knew I wanted to do something like that. Douglas Walker, Douglas Walker Presents: Of Christmas Past, Underbelly Clover, 22:50

Margaret Cho, Chelsea Handler, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Tiffany Haddish, Natasha Leggero, Chelsea Peretti and any woman in comedy owning her voice as she conquers. Jake Howie, Read My Lips, Just the Tonic Caves, 21:30

Back in 2016 I was crowned winner of London’s “Not Another Drag Competition”. Before then I had never really performed in drag before. Every week of the competition we were set challenges, and one week we had to put together 15 minutes of material. I decided to do a stand-up routine where I performed a séance and contacted all my favourite dead celebrities, culminating with the spirit of Prince possessing a dildo, which I had to exorcise. Thoroughly. It was the first time I had tried stand-up, and it felt so natural and good, and the jokes just sort of spilled out of me. Oh – and people laughed! From that moment I was hooked. Georgia Tasda, Georgia Tasda Means Business, CC Blooms, 22:30

Jen Brister, after seeing here show many years ago and I thought if this is what comedy is I like it and I want to be friends with her! Ruth E. Cockburn, Love Letters From Blackpool, Summerhall, 14:40

Growing up, I assumed everyone could recite a two-hour Victoria Wood stand-up set or know every French and Saunders sketch, or every word of Blackadder. It’s only when I got older that I realised maybe I was a bit more into comedy than other people. I eventually got into doing stand-up because I’d moved back in with my parents for a bit and, to be honest, I just needed to get out of the house. Emmy Fyles, Live Your Best Life, Hanover Tap), 13:15

My drama teacher at school always gave me the comedy parts, saying I had great comic timing, and she really encouraged that. She t old me to watch people like French & Saunders, Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball so I could hone in on it. So Mrs Bray, along with the people she told me to watch, really inspired me to pursue comedy. Maisie Adam, Vague, Gilded Balloon 16:30

Ricardo Salami. A street performer I saw as a child who never knew he changed the course of my life forever. He since died, and I never got the chance to thank him. Hopefully he won’t mind that I took his name and carried it with me on my adventures. Mat Ricardo, Mat Ricardo vs The World, Las Vegas Room, City Cafe, 12:30

A video cassette of Eddie Izzard. And Don Ward, the owner of the Comedy Store in Mumbai, refusing to let me leave without an audition. I’d come to do an article on him opening his club in India in 2010. Anuvab Pal, Empire, Pleasance Courtyard, 19:00

My dad, the comedian Mac McDonald and one of the funniest people I know, took me and my sister around the comedy circuit with a cabaret comedy act when I was 10 years old and I never looked back. Naomi McDonald, Naomi McDonald: Stardumb, Fireside, 15:45

Josie Long and my grandma; people who pull you into a story you wouldn’t care to hear from anyone else Helen Duff, How Deep is Your Duff, The Hive, 21:00

> My late director, Frank McAnulty. I took an improv class at The Second City on a whim after seeing an online ad (they work!) and then got accepted into their conservatory. I presented a comedy song for our classes graduating sketch revue, and his excitement and investment in it (and in all of us) made me feel like I should continue with this comedy thing, even thought I still had no idea what it was. And now, many years later, that same song is in my musical comedy that I am bringing to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. So, thank you Frank! Anesti Danelis, Songs For A New World Order, Laughing Horse @ The Hanover Tap, 12:00

The seriousness of life Juliette Burton, Butterfly Effect, Gilded Balloon, 16:15

The worrying thing is I have absolutely no idea. I did sketches in s Ian Smith, Craft, Underbelly: Buttercup, 17:15

wful clients at my last desk job, John Pendal, We Are Family, Gilded Balloon Teviot, 17:30 A

A free CD that was on the front of Loaded magazine with clips of stand up on it. I remember the routines to this day. Brett Goldstein What Is Love Baby Don’t Hurt Me, Pleasance: Beneath, 19:00

Jack Daniels and Desperation. Garrett Millerick, Sunflower, Tron, 17:00

The man who mistook me for Reg D Hunter at a gig and then wet himself when he heard my Oldham accent. If it all fails I could be a tribute act Che Burnley, Elvis Was Racist?, Bar Basis, 21:30

Dave Chappelle and the Goon Show Pierre Novellie, See Novellie, Hear Novellie, Speak Novellie, Pleasance Courtyard, 19:15

comedian came to my uni to put on a comedy writing workshop and there was an open mic night at the end of it, and from then I was hooked. I bumped into that comedian who put on the workshop in Edinburgh a few years later, and I thanked her for getting me into comedy, and she said: ‘OK, well I probably got paid for it anyway” and walked away. Cool! David McIver, David McIver Is a Nice Little Man, 14:30 A

I’ve done lots of grown up jobs. I’ve run a successful business. But I’m rubbish with authority and I’m always distracting people from their work. There’s nothing else left for me to do. Plus, I saw Suzie Ruffell’s show a couple of years ago and she made it look do-able. Sam Fraser, Stand Up, Weather Girl!, Counting House, 19:45

A combination of Mike Leigh’s mid 70s TV films and the adverts at the back of The stage And TV Today Graham Fellows, Completely out of Character, Maggie’s Chamber @ The Free Sisters, 16:30

Intellectual bravado and physical cowardice. Lee Apsey, CSI: Crime Scene Improvisation, Underbelly, Bristo Square, 15:35

I grew up watching comedians like Frank Skinner, Lee Evans, Dave Allen, Spike Milligan etc. but it never crossed my mind that I could be a comedian until I worked at Up The Creek. I owe that place everything. Rich Wilson, Still Relevant, Sneaky Pete’s, 18:15

I had years of people telling me I was funny/weird and that I should try stand-up, but I had never really been exposed to it outside of TV. I had a break up that made me finally say fuck it and I went to do it. What a cliche! It was actually a weird feeling of relief finding comedy and when I looked out at that first crowd I realised it had been in my heart all along. Matthew Highton, Insufficient Memory, Heroes at Dragonfly, 20:40

interned at a radio station during college. The breakfast DJ is a stand up comedian called Bernard O’Shea. He suggested I do comedy, I batted it off and he organised a five minute support slot. I thad two weeks to write five minutes. Most of my first set was about my nan drinking hot tub water with a straw by accident and the IRA’s love of denim. I was so nervous and the adrenaline rush was amazing. I fell in love with comedy instantly and I’ve been chasing that same rush and never came close. Alison Spittle, Worrier Princess, Gilded Balloon Teviot, Balcony, 17:15 I

I wasn’t inspired, I was cursed. A witch I think. Terrible business. I thought it was a free potato, but it turned out it belong to her. John Luke Roberts, All I Wanna Do Is [FX: GUNSHOTS] With a [FX: GUN RELOADING] and [FX: CASH REGISTER] and Perform Some Comedy!, Assembly: Studio Five, 17:30

I just wanted to be Rowan Atkinson. He got to say all the funny things but other people wrote them for him. Seemed absolutely ideal. Kieran Hodgson, Kieran Hodgson: ’75, Pleasance Beneath, 20:15

It’s so uncool but it was actually my mum who encouraged me to start stand up. I was always writing funny stories as a kid and would do anything to avoid work and have a laugh at school and in subsequent jobs later on so she suggested I give stand up a go. I thought it sounded the worst idea ever but turns out she was right. Rachel Fairburn, The Wolf at the Door, Underbelly, Dexter, 21:30

I met an open mic comic and realised people were allowed to be bad at it Jez Watts, #1 Comedy Great Fun Best Show Jez Watts, The Three Sisters, 17:15

Published: 23 Aug 2018

Source: http://www.chortle.co.uk/features/2018/08/22/41023/what_inspired_you_to_get_into_comedy%3F

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