Not-so-lazy Comedians

Having a day off as a comic is more of a dilemma  than one who is not involved in that end of the industry might expect.

I have several friends with jobs requiring traditional hours of employ, five days a week, that look at what they perceive to be my three 20-30 minute windows of work and laugh in my face whenever I describe myself as ‘working hard at the moment’. The irony is, I sometimes find myself getting jealous at the absolute nature of their downtime…evenings and weekends where work is the furthest thing from their minds.

As a self-employed professional comedian, physiologically speaking, the effort expended in this job can be a constant ongoing process with no definite breaks or rest periods…time not spent gigging or travelling to gigs (which, to be fair, is most Sundays to Wednesdays for me) is spent writing that years Edinburgh show, coming up with / trying to come up with new ideas, booking / confirming gigs, chasing gigs and thinking about all the other things I COULD be doing to further my career.

Time spent not doing that stuff can tend to be spent (in my case) worrying about the fact that you aren’t doing that stuff as much as you should.

Being a comedian means that you are ABSOLUTELY in control of your professional future (as much as is possible within an unquantifiable ceiling of comic development) and whilst that can be considered an incredible freedom, it’s also a burden of responsibility. A socially healthy brain will recognise that if things don’t work out to the extent they COULD do for you, there is no-one else to really blame. And that can be a fairly stressful day to day existence.

Combine that with the fact that on a gig-day, I am aware all day long that I have a gig that night. By this I mean a kind of low level sensory awareness that is there from the moment I wake up, some kind of internal physiological preparation for what is to come…this feeling isn’t relieved until after the gig, where it translates into a temporary euphoria (provided everything has gone as it should!!) which lasts for about 45 minutes in my case, and is then replaced by a kind of nothing.

I know this is specific to me, but I’m sure other comics feel similar (maybe not to such extremities) and this can be construed as the body and mind, literally, working all day long.

I personally think the thing to do is to isolate a certain day in the diary where, as a comic, you don’t think about work in the slightest. Again easier said than done.

It’s actually quite hard to have a ‘fuck all’ day without feeling the guilt of a self-employed person’s inner boss berating the unworthiness of this decision. I've lost count of the times my inner boss's self important onologue has completely ruined an otherwise enjoyable xbox session.

Minor rant …I guess the point I’m making is having defined periods of relaxation is a luxury not afforded to doing this job…however when you love the job you do, I guess time off is less important…