Creating funny
How do you write when your child is reading
The potato wants me to write something funny, but I’m not sure I can do it deliberately. At Lecoq I was terrible at clown - well, actually, I was great in the beginning, when we were just mucking around, but when it came time to actually make a clown piece I was shitter than shit. That is the art of the comedian, I suppose, why it’s the hardest art form (and why I think we did clown last at Lecoq). To be funny is one thing, but to actually create funny is another. We think the best stand-ups just get up there and are funny but it is an art refined looong. The mastery of timing and fluidity required is extreme, but more than anything, an extraordinary level self-knowledge. I was funny when I tried my guts out to be serious, because I didn’t realise how unserious I came across on the outside. It’s almost impossible to see how our person projects, the minute we walk on stage. The way we hold ourselves, the sense we give off. To know what that is, and play with it, is genius. Both in the Gladwellian hard-work sense of the word, but also innate.
The potato has shown interest in this writing, which has taken me by surprise. At nights she’s asked to read it in bed, and she’s approved, the harshest critic. She even laughed at my Shit Pearl which I didn’t see coming. I told her it was a boring one and that there was lots of swearing in it and she said ok bring it. It scares me a bit that she wants to read them, because I want to write real things, untempered, what’s really happening in my head. My mother was a mystery to me; she was present and open and loving, but I don’t think I got to see the real her. What was going on in her bathroom or behind the closet door - her private, adult world was kept out of reach. That was the way.
We’ve always lived with the potato right up inside us - weird thing to say but I won’t edit it - we’ve always had one bathroom, and lived in places with ZERO PRIVACY. Oh to take a shit in peace. Oh! She has seen it all - well, most things - by default. I think if I’d had my own bathroom I would have naturally changed my tampon in there rather than next to her while she’s brushing her hair. Or wept in there, or even just gazed at myself in the mirror there, relishing my independence. She has always been there, and having not had the opportunity to hide ourselves, we haven’t. I think that’s been a good thing. I hope.
She’s been part of our adult world, I suppose, since she was born: in a city not built for children, then as an only child in a little house, where there’s nowhere to hide, a bookshop … schlepped around in every part of our lives, at every dinner table. I don’t like the idea of her seeing me frightened, or unstable, or lost, or worried, but I’ve realised that no matter what, even if I try to hide it, she sees it anyway. She is wise. They all are. They know, like little me, exactly what’s going on behind the doors. Or even just that things are being hidden, which is worse.
Merde, this isn’t funny. And if I try now, she’ll just call me a Karen.
Incidentally, I asked her what I should call this blog she said:
Karen.
Or:
The Existential Karen.
I told her my theory last night: that all daughters think their mothers are Karens.
Deadpan, she said: No. Just you.
