Well, it has been a week since I heard back about how acting just does not seem realistic for me. I was up all night with the anxiety of thinking that maybe I wasted all of my years in medicine when I could have been acting, just years of potential gone just to be failing at both dreams.
And I was drinking excessively every night since (only managing to finally go sober last night), even as I also visited an open mic standup show and performed karaoke afterward. But at karaoke that night, I sang songs using my head voice that used to intimidate me, and received flattery and praise for every bit of it. This led me to think that maybe I am not as challenged by this anymore. And having watched so many people that night try very amateur's level standup comedy, I began looking up the comedians that I most liked, especially their early stuff, to see what they were like at the start.
Jim Carrey used two specific methods to really set himself apart as far as I could tell from watching some of his stuff, and both methods involved his unique physicality. First, he kicked off a given set using his hypermobile joints to get attention, calling attention to the fact that it was just a cheap trick, then doing it again in an even more exaggerated way. Then he did impressions with his face, made his face contort into a given celebrity. I cannot to the latter, but the former, the big unique physical moves, those are very much in my wheelhouse. And given that I have not been living the comedian lifestyle for the past decade, my workouts and stretching have presumably made my range in these areas greater than Jim's. I still need to research, but it does not appear that anyone else has taken bits like that any further. What if I had actual jokes that incorporated the movements? And true to my own comedic style, what if I downplayed them out loud even as I exaggerated them?
Then we have Steve Martin. Here is a comedian who wrote one of the greatest comedy movies of all time, Three Amigos! and who continues to excel in writing simple yet clever comedy. His early standup, and these were in the early 1970s, it consisted largely of very silly stupid jokes, jokes that I might have thought to use, except that he did it first, so I cannot use them. And the other half of his routine was him playing banjo, sometimes interspersed with a little joke about playing the banjo. His card tricks were similarly just dumb funny things. He made great use of props, one of which would be how he messed up the banjo microphone positioning. These were little things that took moments but helped to set a light tone.
I have watched some standup comedy through the years, but not as much as most other forms of comedy, in part because I do not particularly adore standup comedy. Jerry Seinfeld is regarded by most standup comedians as the absolute best in the business, but I never cared for his approach. This is because he uses words. Just words. As I look at putting together a routine, I do not think I would have a chance as a genius word sayer. But as someone who uses their full body to tell a story? Does voices? Sings? Contorts their body to adapt to my words? This could be my niche.
It looks like many of the comedy festivals of the year have already occurred, or are about to occur. This gives me at least a few months to prepare my routine. Perhaps I am overestimating my abilities here, assuming that I will be the best from the start. But to some degree, I will just be reworking demonstrated skills and talents into a new environment. Surely I am not being pompous in thinking that if I play it right, I can achieve what I am looking to achieve. And of course, as I was writing this, I found a casting call for undiscovered comedy that is targeting those who used to have dreams of doing comedy, but then had to do life instead. So I suppose that I will be writing toward that now.
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