Envy
Bitter middle aged failure fails at being bitter (at least has "middle aged" part locked down)
At some point during the show I experienced an emotion I rarely feel. It was jealousy. I had honestly never been jealous of another comedian …there were lots of friends and acquaintances of mine I’d started out with who had been much more successful than me… but I didn’t ever feel like I was in competition with them because they are so different to me, and the choices they have made are theirs and not mine. And there were also people whose talents far outstripped mine, who produced work I thought I’d never be capable of in my life… but I didn’t want to be them, because I could never be them. But watching Ricky I felt myself thinking, ‘This is the kind of thing I used to do. And all these people in this massive room are loving it. Whereas in the dying days of my stand-up career, I was reviewed as if I didn’t know what I was doing, and found myself playing to fifteen people in Dundee.’ I hadn’t minded not being popular when I’d thought that what I did could never be popular, but seeing something not dissimilar to what I might do being enjoyed by 500 people, already sold on the strangest bits by virtue of Ricky’s celebrity, was bewildering. - Stewart Lee - “How I Escaped My Certain Fate”
Yesterday on LinkedIn, I saw a humblebrag post from someone about the 600,000 subscribers they have on Substack. I have 107,000 and I love and value each and everyone of you. If I felt envy, it was only for the merest millisecond. If I was going to write something with broad appeal, it certainly wouldn’t be this. I write this for me. I write this as an escape route for the ideas that writhe around in my head lest they gnaw their way through my cranium one muggy summer’s night. Sure I want people to read it but I don’t write it for you. I do find myself thinking: “Oh, a post on that topic might be really popular”. But then I stop myself. I google it and find that someone has already written everything I want to say on the topic but better. What would be the point? So I just wait for the idea pressure to start building again. It always does.
A friend asked if I had any paid-for subscribers. Now don’t tell Substack but I have no intention of ever charging for this. Not only would it mean that I would need to clean up my abysmal proof reading but also I would then be financially beholden to you. You would have paid for something and I might decide that I should write things that more people will pay for. Which is not my mission here. What I write here gives me the mental space not to blow up the things that actually make me money*. And that is RoI enough.
Which comes back to envy. I have been envious of others in the past. Especially when I wasn’t doing so well and their success seemed unearned in my eyes. I do still get the occasional twinge. The green-eyed trouser snake crawling up my leg, ready to sink its venomous fangs into my femoral artery. But I have largely replaced the useless feeling of envy with the far more productive psychopathology of kleptomania.
The question has shifted from “Why does this person have this (when I don’t)?” to “What can I steal?” Even shallow, derivative hacks have something - be it a twist in presentation or at the very least a certain brazen charm. Someone described themselves to me as a “polymath”. That implies a depth of knowledge and I barely count as a paddling pool in most domains. “Fox” is better. But even that is too high brow. I am a pilferer and a pickpocket. You better not leave any loose concepts or theories lying around because I’ll have ‘em.
But in service of what? As some of you may have noticed, I have stolen a lot of schtick from Stewart Lee. The outrageous lying. The deliberately confrontational approach to the audience. The instinct that if things are going badly then the key thing is to somehow find a way to make them worse. But I was, er, inspired I guess by his spiel on jealousy noted above. If people are more conventionally successful than you then either you learn from them or you decide that their goals are not your goals. At the risk of falling into the most vapid kind of self-help jargon, be the best you that you can be. Lee is only downhearted when he sees someone being a better Stewart Lee than him. And that would be a monumental bummer. This means that I will only steal material if I can do things with it that the originators would never dream of doing because my approach is so mind-boggingly stupid.
This is perhaps where the line between art and entertainment emerges. The entertainer wants to be liked. The artist wants their vision realized, damn you all. So while my work may look like a series of dad jokes glued together with dated pop culture references, it is art, actually.
Or perhaps that’s just another lie.
*”Yeah, Hi Matt, I’m not sure exactly how Lil Jon relates to next month’s revenue forecasts, can you give us some context here please?”
"But even that is too high brow. I am a pilferer and a pickpocket. You better not leave any loose concepts or theories lying around because I’ll have ‘em."
This is why I call myself a magpie. See a shiny (intellectual or artistic), take it, try to make it my own, rinse, repeat.