Well, my therapist thought my joke^[1] was funny.

That made me feel a whole lot better. He found it so funny that he couldn’t imagine anyone not finding it funny. Now granted, he’s my therapist, so that part might have been hyperbole, but his laughter was genuine.

So, phew. I had been doubting my funniness ever since I told it in class and there was dead silence apart from a supportive noise from Felicity. I had thought the joke was quite good, but then it fell flat, and that made me doubt my very sense of humour.

But now, I feel safe in assuming that everyone was just way too tired, hot, and distracted to get it, and that if I show up next Tuesday with jokes I think are good, odds are they are.

And speaking of showing up with jokes… meh. Still haven’t written any. I know I come up with stuff constantly, but I still haven’t installed the patch to my brain that would divert these jokes into something more permanent than a temporary amusement.

I know I can get there. I just have to cross the distance between “I don’t want to slow down” to “Wow, I can’t wait to bring this awesome joke to class!”.

Still, I will resist the whole “sitting down to write jokes” things for as long as I can. The very act of trying to be creative works in the opposite direction of creativity. One of the great paradoxes of art is that you have to focus in order to get thinds done, but being creative requires an unfocused mind open to inspiration.

That’s why a lot of artists of whatever medium suck at meeting deadlines. The deadline is a focusing tool, and perfectly reasonable from the point of view of whoever’s waiting for your art. But some part of the artist’s mind understands that creativity requires an unfocused mind, and so they can only do their art when the deadline has past and things are comfortably unfocused once more.

Myself, I have no problem with deadlines. Sometimes I even enjoy them precisely because they give me something to focus on. I suffer from a grand lack of focus and a small bit of help is welcome when it comes time to Get Thing Done.

More than a little, though… that’s where trouble starts.

Like, right now, I really don’t want to sit down and write jokes. At all. I know it may come to that, but I really don’t want to do it. It seems so artificial and alien and strange for me. For me, jokes have always been spontaneous. Or at the very least, the ideas have been spontaneous.

When I was writing skits, I didn’t exactly have a deadline, but I had the idea written down beforehand. Then I wrote the motherfucker. And some of them are damned good.

So maybe I just need to repackage joke writing as skit writing. Or bit writing. When I wrote those list-style bits for video ages ago (the “What not to say” bits), I had to pick a topic and riff on it. That’s not very different from writing jokes.

So as long as I approach it as something fun, I can probably handle joke writing.

I’m glad I could talk myself through that.

One thing that came up during… wait for it… therapy was this feeling I have that taking in advice and instruction about creative endeavors is somehow an intrusion of something dead and artificial into something alive and natural in me.

And through that discussion, where my therapist pressed me on why that was (so awesome to have someone do that for me), I figured out that for my whole life, my creativity has been mine. Something I used to amuse myself, feel better about things, and cope with the unfortunate realities of life.

Every comedy writer worth their Simpsons dolls started out telling jokes to themselves.

The world of art owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the loneliness of children.

And because my creativity has always been my own almost exclusively, it is also a major part of my inner refuge. And when you are a lonely person with a deep and profound mistrust of people, the number one rule of your inner refuge is that you are alone in it.

It becomes something profoundly person and incredibly private, and to try to open that up and put stuff into it directly is bound to provoke a primal response. In this case, the response is : “Fuck you! Get out of here! Ow, ow, you’re hurting me!”.

It really does make me feel a very physical sort of psychic pain. Like a headache.

So if I want to learn to learn from others even on the creative level (obviously, I absorb knowledge from them just fine), I will have to negotiate with that part of my mind. Talk it down from the tree where it sits like a terrified cat, all a-bristle and ready to claw anything that comes near.

Definitely not a situation where I can solve via the time-honoured BFI (brute force and ignorance) method. It’s a good method and highly effective in some situations.

Sometimes you let the thief pick the lock. And other times, you’re in a hurry, so the barbarian just rips the door it off its hinges. Both get the job done.

But some things are immune to force. Like me, in a sense. Nobody can force me to do something I have decided not to do. I have tremendous won’t-power. So I have to be very careful not to set up situations where I am, in essence, in a contest of wills with myself. Nobody wins in that situation.

So sometimes, I bludgeon the emotions that are holding me back with a sledgehammer of raw rage at my cage, and other times, I pull a couch up to the tree and ask the cat if it wants to talk about its feelings.

You have to be flexible.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.