When I first decided to return to stand-up comedy after being away for 16 years, I thought the comeback itself was a story worth telling. I had spent roughly 20 years performing before walking away in 2009, so the idea was to document what it was like to start over again. The Comedian would follow me as I tried to figure out where I fit into a comedy world that had changed dramatically while I was gone. I liked the idea of showing everything: the uncertainty, the preparation, the mistakes and hopefully the eventual return to the stage.
The problem was that making a show about returning to comedy quickly became more work than actually returning to comedy. Every episode needed to be written, recorded, edited and assembled. I was creating illustrations and animation, finding old photographs and footage, recording narration and trying to turn all of it into something that felt like an actual episode rather than a collection of clips. Something that might take a few minutes to watch could take an enormous amount of time to produce.
Eventually I also had to admit something that was a little harder to accept: I wasn’t convinced the story was interesting enough to justify all that work. Returning to stand-up after 16 years is certainly interesting to me because I’m the person doing it. But that doesn’t automatically make every part of the journey interesting to everybody else. There is only so much footage of someone thinking about doing comedy, preparing to do comedy and talking about doing comedy before the obvious question becomes: Why don’t you just go do comedy?
That realization changed the way I looked at the whole project. Instead of spending weeks producing an episode explaining why I want to be funny again, I’d rather spend that time actually trying to be funny. For now, that means concentrating on shorter video, telling funny stories, talking about things I find ridiculous and using animation and illustrations when they actually add something to the joke. They’re simpler to make, they allow me to experiment, and most importantly, they put the comedy ahead of the story about the comedy.
So The Comedian isn’t necessarily dead. I’m just putting it on the shelf. Maybe after I’ve been back onstage for a while, there will actually be a better story to tell. Maybe I’ll return to the footage someday and discover that the interesting part wasn’t the comeback I was planning, it was what happened after I finally came back. Until then, I’m going to stop making a show about becoming a comedian again and concentrate on being one.
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