My First Stand-Up Gig and the Mechanics of Telling Jokes

Me performing in the Garden Lobby of Scottish Parliament (13th December 2016)

"Gordon Wallace, from South Lanarkshire, is set to perform a routine about his autism, science and art. He said: “The workshops have been a great opportunity to meet new people and learn about what different people find funny. You need to be able to process audience’s reactions and social cues in order to perform. I have learned these things.”" - Andrew Learmonth (from The National (10th December 2016))

People who know me (and regular readers of this blog) will know that I have a thing for comedy. I mean, you could find a joke in almost every post I have ever made. I'm a regular viewer of comedy on TV and I read a lot of literature (which is mostly made up of manga, admittedly). And I write a bit as well, with much of it comedic in nature. So it won't be a surprise that I have occasionally thought about performing comedy ... to an audience.

So when an opportunity to do just that suddenly came along, I jumped at it like that!

It was September 2016. I was visiting a "coffee group" organised by The National Autistic Society. A while earlier I was on a panel choosing the coordinator of these groups and the woman who got the job invited me to take part in one she was overseeing. It was there that another attendee talked about a "comedy workshop" NAS was setting up. I was intrigued. NAS has started a comedy club. I got to see this....

But before I continue, you may be asking why? 

Why did The National Autistic Society create a comedy workshop?

"We designed the workshops to challenge stereotypes after research found that 73 per cent of autistic people in Scotland said that the public considers them to be ‘anti-social’, and 80 per cent feel they are judged as being ‘shy’." - Facebook post from The National Autistic Society Scotland (14th December 2016)

There is a stereotype that autism makes "sufferers" unwilling to engage with the activities of other people. They prefer to stay in "a world of their own" isolated from everyone else, doing insular activities, like building models or play video games. To many "lazy-thinking" folk, this is seen as a travesty. Humans a social creatures who crave company. To them, autism is like solidarity confinement.

Judging from events in 2016, the same thing can be said for many neurotypicals. 

But autistic people? No. Many of them do want to interact with others, make friends, play football and other stuff, but you neurotypicals (for many years) never gave them the opportunity to do so. You never had that patience and time to learn how to deal with our involuntary "ticks." A lot of parents, nurses and carers do. And also, video games have become very multi-player since 1990, so all that anti-game propaganda you heard is no longer true. Have you guys ever heard of  Minecraft or Pokémon Go? That latter one was in the news a while ago. Try believing that "all gamers are loners" lie after reading what happened.

In other words, (if given the chance) autistic people can be sociable and creative like any neurotypical person. So how can NAS prove this in a very public way? What activity is there that can be done by anyone, involves creativity, taps in their obsessive nature, and requires a good social brain to pull of successfully.

 “Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible; he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.” - Frank Goble

So, been creative means (occasionally) been silly.

"When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth." - George Bernard Shaw

 A joke can be as scrutinised as any form of art to find hidden meanings. 

Hidden meanings only special knowledge could reveal. 

The kind of knowledge an obsessive can have.

"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those who I love, I can: all of them make me laugh." - W. H. Auden

Laughter is a social glue. 

Members of the same social group find the same things funny. 

But making jokes that'll span multiple groups is the real challenge.

"A joke goes a great way in the country. I have known one last pretty well for seven years." - Sydney Smith

A good joke has power. 

The power to be a viral meme. 

A meme that can survive ages.

A lot of people don't realise is that telling jokes involves a lot of intelligence, especially telling jokes that actually make a lot of people laugh. It involves social knowledge as well as regular general knowledge and logical thinking. Plus a lot of empathy (telling successfully funny jokes involve knowing what the audience knows, otherwise they don't get it.). As empathy is the thing most people think autistic people lack, if they realised the truths I just said a moment ago, they would think that autistic people can't do comedy.

And so, to prove their point (and to have some entertainment for their Scotland branch's 20th birthday) NAS decided to make a group of autistic adults create and perform their own stand-up comedy routines in front of an audience in Edinburgh.

The workshop took place in Glasgow (in an office block so recently-built that it has embedded touchscreen tablets to control the lifts) and were chaired by award-winning comedians Janey Godley and her daughter Ashley Storrie. They were the perfect leaders for this project. Janey and Ashley no stranger to the subject of politics. If you are familiar with their work, you agree that they will find what I said about neurotypicals in 2016 earlier up their alley. So they have no trouble getting us to perform material in front of politicians. Also, they are no stranger to autism. Janey's husband and Ashley herself are autistic, giving them a lot of material on the subject (which I can testify). This also made proceedings very informal. There wasn't a rigid "week one we do this, week two we do that" structure. We were all free to do whatever we wanted, like such creative workshops should be.

I loved it!

It was my highlight of the week for two months. Everyone had a ball. On our final workshop/rehearsal for the gig we had pizza and had a mind map game on the room's whiteboard involving the The Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis (Ashley may have been one of the first people to ever thought up of the fan theory back in the very early-2000s). I was challenged to link Pokémon to it (I did reveal to the group about my History of Pokémon I've been working on here.). I somewhat succeeded by linking  it (loosely) through The Simpsons (Pikachu (along with Bender) appeared in a sleep-deprived endued hallucination Bart has in class in episode "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade"). There is a picture of me in front of this whiteboard. Janey or Ashley have it. It was a great experience for all of us.

“I’ve really enjoyed the comedy workshops and I wish there were more opportunities for autistic people to meet up and actually do things. I feel like I can be myself, it’s somewhere that I fit in,” - Donna Holland, Quoted from The National article

She performed along with Ashley on stage that night (I think. Her bit was filmed, but I know she was a bit hesitant to perform live, so I can't relay on my memory on whether she performed live that night or not. Someone reading this will correct me.)

Along with Richard (and his math-based puns), Mark (with Ashley as two wizards), Ronan (the movie quote machine (in the early workshops)), Brenn (who nearly died of laughter during the workshops due to asthma), Damian (the procrastinator), and Frank (A cheeky Charlie), we made a lot of people (and ourselves) laugh (especially Brenn).

I was the "middle act." The middle of a comedy bill is usually the home for the more thought-provoking acts, like me. My bit was.... 

Wait. It's my bit, I have rights to it, so I can just reconstruct the whole thing here....

But this reconstruction is not accurate. 

Because it was a subject close to my heart I mostly improvised through it.

(I walk on stage. For a few seconds pretended the microphone was off by moving my mouth quietly.)

Good evening everyone.

Obsession.... (whisper) by Calvin Klein.

It's something we are all familiar with. The tendency of us to be obsessed over a single narrow subject, like trains, Patrick Thistle, Disney movies or (in my case for the past few years, as evident in what I'm wearing) Pokémon.

But obsessions can change. Things can happen that can change one's obsession.

When I was about 11 years old my class in primary school was taken out to a trip to the local public library. It was something we did every few weeks. And each time we did, we all took out a book of our choice. I tended to pick books that were highly illustrated. I had an eye for that, been a keen artist at the time. 

I didn’t much cared for the text. I didn’t mostly bother to read them in the conventional sense. 

Your taking to a kid who didn’t read the speech bubbles in the Beano.

On one of those visits I discovered this book....

The Visual Dictionary of Everyday Things

It's an odd book, I admit, but this book changed my life.

Before I found this book when I drew the world I just drew it. I didn't "study it."

But when I opened up this book I saw this....

(I open the book at "bicycle".)

“All these bits make up a bicycle?” Wow!

And it's not just bikes....

(I flick through the book at select pages.)

There's lawnmowers, umbrellas, cameras, chairs, batteries....

(The pages covering the subject of "batteries" was covered up with this....)

[This took a while to make.]

... even a two-piece suit....

(When I open at "Suit" paper cut-outs of Venomoths fell out the book.)

Ah! Moths have gotten at it. Well, the book's 25 years old. What did you expect?

To keep a long story short, soon after finding this book I wanted to make my own version of this book. But I was not able to take this book home, so (for the first time ever) I had to do my own research. Through it I bonded with my engineer dad and years later, thanks to that book, 

when I went to high school I choose to study science as well as art. 

And I have become a better person because of it.

Thank you, and good night.

(Walk off stage.)

After the performance I gave out (from an inside suit jacket pocket) the "moths" that fell out, like business cards. I signed and dated the back of them so anyone who got one has a note of who drew it and when they got it.

This is a British Standard Venomoth

Can you guess why?

The whole routine proved to be poignant, as a week before I was in Parliament my father died. By luck, I was visiting him and had the book with me, so I was able to perform it for him hours before his soul became a moth. And been an engineer it didn't take long to spot why I called the moths that fell out the book "British Standard Venomoths."

That last month of 2016 turned out to be a happy and sad moth in my life.

(Booo!)

Oh, come on!!!