Happy Birthday to a Cake
Celebrating the One Year Anniversary to my experimental comedy special with a new mini workshop / forum
Greetings from Paris. I have not taken many photos, which makes me feel very special.
How to Bake a Cake in the Digital Age came out one year ago. On May 8th I’m hosting a little online forum called Let Them Eat Questions (webinar makes me throw up in my mouth) on the spiritual and logistical gymnastics of making comedy as an interdisciplinary artist. You can register here and submit any questions you like beforehand—I’m making it cheap for those who want to watch live & participate.
This bitch was nearly eight years in the making. Not that I didn’t finish other things in the meantime (including a book) but time stretches out when you’re constantly inching several things forward at once. It doesn’t feel like making progress, seeing other people shoot out finished works like smooth turds, but you never know what their creative diet is. Your arch nemesis puts out a book a year—meanwhile they’re privately tearing their hair out over an unfinished film or painting or wishing they had a fun comedy act like you do. Whenever I give a talk at an art school, I make sure to only show projects that took long time to complete. The pressure MFA students put themselves under to develop a gallery-ready, institutional grant-bait cohesive practice in two years is stupid and bad and there’s rarely a gentler way of putting it. Even when I look through my own “completed” projects, I realize they’re not even complete, they just came to a resting place. Or I had the discipline to ask someone to tell me to stop. Stand up comedy is long and it’s never really finished. A special is just a point on a spectrum where you had the discipline to tell someone to tell you to stop. A lot of the things I make come from sitting on something stupid for years and years until it becomes what it needs to be. (my next comedy show is based on a series of photographs I took in 2018). I call it cooking. Which is different from the kind of cooking people do that makes other people say let her cook!!! This cooking is low and private and goes unnoticed for a long time. Stand up is a way of doing this publicly. And it’s fun.
Like most eldritch autodidacts, I do a lot of consulting work. During my last writing workshop I got more questions about comedy and my comedy special than usual and I found myself finally cross-pollinating my advice instead of trying to keep different forms of guidance in different lanes. Lucy Sante has an excellent post about the origins of genres in writing and the attendant denigration of the generalist. TLDR: over the course of the 20th century, the specialization of labor bled into the arts and other creative endeavors, much to our detriment. Sure, the aisles at Barnes&Noble are organized, but our hearts aren’t free.
I hope you’ll come! I’m tuning in from France and miss you already!
REGISTER FOR LET THEM EAT QUESTIONS
`