I have started telling people “I read a lot of essays now” which is true, but it is also true specifically now. Partly because of Substack but also, I want to read essays and write essays.
I feel like Ritchie in The Bear when he starts to work harder and takes himself more seriously and he starts saying “I wear suits now”.
“I am a writer now” (Even if I write and don’t often press publish, I write)
I am reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays by Joan Didion. They feel like a snapshot of an era, but not a generic snapshot, a picture of highly specific detail taken by a discerning and skilled photographer.
One of my favourite essays so far is On Keeping A Notebook.
I have carried notebooks for comedy for decades. I may well have been a ‘carrying notebooks for comedy’ type of guy before I was knowingly a comedy kind of guy.
Joan Didion’s notebooks contain snippets of conversation and phrases she likes- and mine do too! Maybe rather than a somewhat dour comedian I am a proper writer?! (“I’m a writer now”)
I scribbled down and then told several people about a phrase I heard in Bristol. I walked into an almost empty restaurant. At a table of 6 or 8 people having a lunch gathering one was obviously holding court. As I walked in the door he paused until people looked back at him and then said “...anyway, it turned out they were Buddhists…”
It got a massive laugh. I know massive laughs, I have heard other acts getting them for years… I count some of the funniest people in the world as actual friends (and some as former friends- interesting times) I know the sound of a big laugh landing, so trust me when I tell you that “anyway, it turned out they were Buddhists” was a HUGE line.
The mystery for me is what preceded it. I consider it a personal failure that I cannot reverse engineer it.
Did the set up involve a group of people who were Buddhists doing non-buddhist behaviour? What might that be? If it was just debauchery or bacchanalian stuff would that have got the big laugh like this did? Is the reputation of Buddhists that square?
This predates the Dalai Lama’s weirdness where he got a kid to suck his tongue (it feels like a fever dream, but it was a thing in 2023). I think prior to that the Dalai had a waft of historic homophobia about him, but like Obama, he was forgiven for it for being (apparently) a Good Guy, but I don't think any of us took the DL for having a ‘getting tongue-sucked by juveniles’ kink.
I have deeply ruminated on, “it turned out they were Buddhists…” for years.
I have attempted to guess the preceding chat, I have played mental games replacing words- as if I can improve on it. The hubris!
“Anyway, it turned out they were Catholics…” could be 1980s Belfast or Glasgow.
“Anyway it turned out they were Muslims…” could get one cancelled, (or killed! The ultimate form of cancel culture. Which remember, we are repeatedly told by people with all the Correct Views, doesn’t exist! Yet Salman Rushdie and the Batley Grammar School teacher may disagree.)
“It turned out they were Seventh Day Adventists…” Too niche.
I have had to resign myself to never knowing, which may well be a Buddhist exercise in itself.
My Notebook nowadays is a Note on my phone. I have one note that says at the top “New Stuff” and I top it up. I put funny things that have occurred to me in it from the top, and if a New Material night allows me on for 10 minutes I can glance at the New Stuff note and try and turn that soup of half ideas and memorable phrases into new standup comedy.
If I scroll down far enough on my New Stuff note I should find material that is now Good Stuff and ultimately some Old Stuff because I don’t diligently delete it.
“Just so you know, we are never really low on apples” Is in my phone notes. It is a sentence my wife said to me when I bought a massive bag of apples. I am convinced that phrase will never leave my head. I picture myself a demented loon in a care home aged 90 but in lucid moments saying “I mean how? How can we never be low on apples?” and then returning to gibbering about how I built the place back in the 1960s and I had a pet Alsatian dog then don’t you know?
I have experimented with “just so you know, we are never really low on apples” in standup and still not found a way of doing it I am pleased with.
It has something of the “my wife” about it and I have always been resistant to “my wife” sort of material. You know the stuff I mean, where a male comic has a bossy, domineering or never-pleased wife and gives the impression they hate each other. When I see an act who has jokes like that I think “you should break up because you clearly aren’t making each other happy”. Occasionally a comedian with those ‘my wife’ jokes updates them to “my ex-wife” but more often they just carry on doing them and only admit to their separation when moaning in the dressing room.
Surely there is an elegant way to make fun of “just so you know, we are never really low on apples…”
She may have been buying apples, and only apples.
Perhaps it is an affair with a grocer that I uncovered by doing a big supermarket shop?
Or, have we actually got an apple tree? We have a tiny garden but I don’t go in it much, perhaps there’s a fruit and veg section I am hitherto unaware of?
Anyway, on a recent food shop I did not buy apples. Can you believe this, we were low on apples. Pass me that notebook.
Turns out I am a notebook person too. Except being neurodivergent, my notes are not all in one place. Post-it notes, notes on my phone, inside an actual notebook, my diary, and screenshots which I send to myself on Microsoft Teams while working, to scratch the itch of sharing funny things I've read without annoying my colleagues. We have a Buddhist temple round the corner from us in Runcorn. (it's actually been converted from the pub featured in the series Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps). I often walk past the monks while they're out and about and wonder where they get all of their orange accessories to keep them warm over their robes.