How Not To Film A Comedy Special

Looking on, it seems that the time of me producing all my comedy specials entirely on my own is behind me. There have been three in all. Each of which have taught me much about how I prefer standup comedy to be captured, the lessons from which will hopefully provide much ammunition for me to pedantically bother the unfortunate soul that ends up being contracted to produce my next. I’ve also begun looking into producing and directing those of friends, and occasionally giving advice on the matter to those that are thinking of following a similar path themselves. In the interest of this, I thought it might be of use to collect my thoughts on the matter.

Make sure the show is done. That it is as good as you can imagine it being under your care. This will be more difficult the earlier you are in your career, both for reasons of craft, but mostly because refining a show requires an audience to perform said show to, and such things are hard to come by. Or were for me at least. I would recommend picking up another job and saving some money to put into “promotion,” so that you may perform your entire hour to a crowd of at least 20 people, at least 20 times. Free food is a particularly good lure. Pizza tends to be most economical, but depending on your location, tacos are also a viable option.

Much of Monsoon Season was worked out to crowds promised a free entry comedy show, with free tacos served beforehand. Many left before the show began. In hindsight, serving during an intermission in the show might have served me better.

In the choice of location, it should be a city or town where there are at least 70 people who are somewhat excited to see you. If this will be your first special, in which case such circumstances become unlikely, 70 people who are excited, just in general, will do. Even if you are capable of selling in excess of 500 seats or so in your location of choice, shows shot in a smaller room lend themselves better to capturing the intimacy of the live experience.

There is no need for the best cameras money can rent. As of the time of this writing, however, there is a need for something more than an entry-level offering. But if you rent your equipment for the evening, which you undoubtedly should, it is safe to assume that if a professional rental house carries the camera, it’s good enough for a single-location shoot whose end product will be watched almost entirely on phone screens.

DO NOT light the stage with a flat anaemic wash of white light. Shadows are good. They create separation from you and everything else in the frame. They draw the watchers eye to where they are supposed to look.

DO NOT allow there to be meaningless Edison bulbs, HMIs, and other bulb-based paraphernalia littering the frame behind you. A comedy special consists of a single setup, in which whatever else is on stage with you is 40% of your production design. Choose these items wisely.

The remaining 60% of your production design is what you will be wearing. Also known as wardrobe. Make sure this is something that enhances your stage persona and expresses your personality in some way. If that means at this moment your wardrobe is a neutral-coloured T-shirt and trousers, please take 2-3 more years to develop more of a persona and personality before filming your comedy special.

Hire the best crew you can afford. Always pay for a professional sound person. I was once told that you can skimp on every other department, even camera, because at least bad camerawork can be mistaken for a creative choice. Bad sound is bad sound. Pay what you need to pay for it.

Even if budget allows for paying an editor, I would recommend to sit on their shoulder through the entire post-production regardless. At which point, you might as well do it yourself. The edit determines the timing of the finished piece, and if you are a comedian of any competence you will understand the importance of this inherently. The type of editing a comedy special requires is simple, and a skill set that is a couple of hours of YouTube away.

After it is done, get people to see it in any way you know. If you are earlier in your career and someone somehow offers to pay you money to put it behind a paywall of any sort, say no. The possibility of a touring audience does leagues more to ensure your career as a working performer than a one-off check ever will.

This will be how your work will be recorded and remembered. Take it seriously.

That is all.

P.S. - Beware of sweat patches.

On Futility

About a month has passed since I gained my permanent residence in the UK. A week or so later, I quit the job my previous visa was bonding me to. For some context, I have done comedy for just shy of a decade now, during the latter half of which it has become something of a career. At the same time, I was employed by various meaningless tech companies, which provided me with ample and stable income; and more importantly, legal residency in a country in which I could feasibly pursue that which I actually wanted to spend my time doing.

In honest reflection, it is safe to state that this year has been both the best and most difficult of my professional life. For more context, this was my last year in which I would be bonded to the Skilled Worker visa for my legal residence in this country, and the year that it became realistic that I might make a comfortable living doing comedy. My previous company asked relatively little of me, and so I was planning on coasting through, but a performance-improvement-plan which parleyed into a layoff complicated matters somewhat.

I procured another job within a month, and therein another visa, at what turned out to be a great personal cost. I chose tech as my industry of choice to support myself because 10 years ago it was a genuinely good deal regarding the lifestyle afforded for the level of effort required. Given that you could acquire the niche and troublesome skillset required to participate of course. But times have changed, and so had my circumstances. My final company was the first truly large company I had worked for, my prior employers being a string of small to medium “startups”. My first foray into the belly of the beast of a high-level capitalist enterprise. It was, of course, fucking miserable.

But after 200 applications, it was the only job I got, and I needed a job because I needed a visa. And so on. I made wholehearted attempts to combat said misery of course, and it is in these attempts that the *Futility* of the title refers.

I think despite working in tech, an industry that I did not care for nor ideologically align with, I was able to avoid much of the malaise of this situation by working from home as much and as often as possible. Being a purely technical worker allowed for this more than if my position required in-person interaction of course. But for some reason, most likely due to some self-serving aim, many companies, including my former, had made being back in the office mandatory. Which suffice to say did not agree with my constitution.

Many hours were spent hiding from fluorescent overheads in darkened bathroom stalls waiting for the day to be over. All while still finishing my quota of work for the day. And in combination, my comedy career had very wonderfully blossomed off the back of a project released in March. Which had my evenings used for meetings with many important and interesting people in America, discussing the very things that I had schemed so many tireless years to make a reality. It was, however, more work.

By June or so, I had worked my way into a state of perpetual exhaustion, running on not fumes but their residue. A situation which I did not take lying down. I employed the entire plethora of modern holistic tools available to me: therapy, meditation, long-distance running, and worst of all, a true testament to the extent of my desperation: yoga.

It is not that all this did not help. It kept me afloat. But not much more. As it turns out, you can’t meditate your way out of hating your job. And if you depend on your job for your legal residency status, or in other cases; your only hope of shelter, the feeding of your child; you have no option but to keep it. Hate it or not.

Much of the culture of wellness or *self-care* in a modern context places the onus on the individual to take care of themselves. But when placed in a context that is actively harmful to one’s physical and mental wellbeing, such actions are more akin to self-defence.

For large stretches my days often looked as such:

- wake ‘round 6 or so

- get ready begin running to yoga class at 7

- yoga class 7-8

- run to work before 9

- work 9-6

- run back home by 7

- meditate 7-8

- shower, dread, and sleep

A couple times a month I’d have a gig in the evening on top of all this nonsense.

And it kept me sane. But nothing more. All this self-work enabled me to continue to be a productive cog. Albeit, one that had been diligently plotting their escape.

And upon my resignation, much of this weight has lifted. I’m still doing most of that stuff. Except the yoga. And it is helping. Faster than I thought. I am slowly coming back to myself. Waking up, the days are luxuriantly full of time, and I am often at a loss for what to do with it all. I try to justify myself in leaning on the concept of fairness; everything that goes around comes around and all that. It feels as though this year I have given my toll, paid my pound of flesh, in the hopes of whatever is to come. With the awareness that I am in an unprecedentedly fortunate position, I will endeavour to not half-ass it.

Idiots just like you and I: AI and the people that make it

I have always had a bad habit of judging a thing by the character of the people that enjoy it.

But as of late, nothing is irking me quite as much as the scourge of AI nonsense that seems to have gripped our collective consciousness. Of course, there are many good and decent people who enjoy it and find use in it, but the people who seem to be the most bullish about it carry a worrying degree of overlap with those convinced that cryptocurrencies would replace the entire existing monetary system. These are, in my estimation, amongst the worst of us, and anything they stand in such ardent support of should be approached with suspicion at the very least—ideally, with a strong degree of openness to derision.

To use the moniker Artificial Intelligence for the recent proliferation of the little language-based internet toys in increasingly common use is a misnomer, to put it kindly. I absolutely abhor a fact and am loath to include any at all in anything I do, but given my (albeit reluctant) near-decade-long experience as a software engineer, please forgive my impending use of a few. AI, as it has been touted in many a wonderful sci-fi novel, is an entirely different creature from the simple probabilistic mechanisms that dictate the results of current LLM-based “AI” products. An argument can be made that it is a mere extension of deep learning protocols that have been around since the 1970s and have been the core of many day-to-day technologies for decades now. The feeling that these “AI” products (ChatGPT, Gemini, and other names—the products of musings by an advertising department seemingly based on what a celebrity off their meds might consider naming their child) represent a new, cutting-edge technology is little more than a flurry of marketing on the edge of propaganda. Last I was aware, life-changing, paradigm-shifting innovations have generally not needed to be so incessantly forced down people’s throats to gain popularity.

The particular popularity of LLMs like ChatGPT or generative models like DALL·E (i.e., the one that does the “draw me a BDSM dungeon in the style of Monet” idiocy), I believe, has far less to do with their utility or potential for sentience (which I would surmise is negligible at best) and more to do with the fact that they appeal to our inherent narcissism as a species. The only thing they have achieved anew is a pale mimicry of what people can do, or more precisely the way we might speak, and the only things they are better than people at are the things that none of us ever wanted to do in the first place.

The few places where AI is truly useful to any meaningful extent can be counted amongst the most menial and degrading tasks humanity has ever been subject to: the writing of cover letters, recommendation letters, meaningless emails, and other forms of verbal garbage that never needed to exist in the first place. To its credit, it did come in momentary use when I needed to generate a fake script for a one-man show to trick Sri Lanka’s censor board into granting me a license to perform—but that is a tale for another occasion.

Generative AI and the various LLMs available to us currently provide a genuine utility in producing ceremonial garbage words that no one really wants to read but that the world, as the powers that be have made it, necessitates to get through life. I am grateful to never have to write a visa letter again, and if the entirety of what I saw of this technology was a little startup named something infuriating like lettr.ai, I would not be nearly so troubled.

On the fears of it replacing those in the creative industries: they only carry validity because of the stupidity of many of those in the positions to make decisions in said industries. Record label heads and studio executives of yore, while money-minded at their core, were at the very least people of taste. But as they are slowly replaced by tech people, and as those industries begin to operate like tech companies—focusing purely on profitability in the absence of any artistic direction—they will settle for something passable produced by an AI rather than something perfect made by a person who devoted their life and livelihood to their chosen craft. But I hold out faith that there will always be people wanting to make really good things, and people who will want good things to be made. And if so, the only real consequence of AI on the creative industries is that it will require those of us in them to become more unique, more dissenting, more singular in our work—in a word, better. The only ones of us at risk are those who are underdeveloped in their craft to begin with. And if we are being honest, most of them weren’t getting much work to begin with.

Despite my luddidical tendencies, I would love few things more than a set of technologies that remove the need for the useless and the mundane and give me more time to do the things that give me meaning. But this incarnation of AI is surely not it. In my experience in life and in the workplace this is little more than a souped-up google search with less accurate results and many times more consequences.

In defence of tourists over travellers

I am currently in the midst of planning a trip to Sri Lanka. The place that most that know me would call my home, where I was born, and (with now surprising contentment) spent the majority of my childhood and adolescnece. But I cannot help being overcome by the feeling that I will be returning as a Tourist. The reasons for which I am currently parsing through with professional aid but in the meantime feel it is pertinent to note-

Tourists seem to be catching a particularly bad rap as of late. Particularly in comparison to their outwardly more enlightened, self-appointedly superior counterparts, the Travellers; a collective I would place near the top of my list of undesirable characters, wedged tightly between real estate agents and men who deemed it suitable to purchase their first skateboard over the age of thirty.

Being aware that these distinctions are largely of my own creation, allow me to elaborate:

To me, Tourists tend towards a simultaneously loud yet discrete lot, benignly attempting to escape the drudgery of their day-to-day for the time allotted by their captors (read: employers) to a place whom history has been particularly unkind to, in the hopes of temporarily being treated to some dignity, some comfort, and if their funds allow, some third-world luxury. To enjoy the simple pleasures of a meal by the sea, a cocktail overlooking a blood-stained sunset, and fellating their lover behind a bush growing at the foot of a coconut tree. Then continuing on their journey, often in a herd, shepherded by an exasperated local tour guide, to often be returned by bus directly to the foot of the airport for their journey home. To which they will return completely unchanged, but hopefully at least a bit recharged.

Travellers however, carry the outward appearance of a more bedraggled, bohemian, even humble nature. And believe themselves to be as such, where-in lies my issue with their existence.

On the family holidays of my childhood, I recall the indifference of tourists to us, and in hindsight appreciate it immensely. They came, they lounged, they paid, they left. As opposed to the troubling habit of Travellers to stick around, after having “fallen in love” with a country after a short few weeks there. With places as with people, if anyone claims to fall in love with anything within a few weeks of coming into contact with it, that says a lot more about them than the object of their fickle affections. Upon sticking around, many tend to open businesses of their own, often (in the case of Sri Lanka at least) taking advantage of lax immigration and business regulations to siphon money that would otherwise go into the local community into their own coffers.

I would rather Sri Lanka be a country that would not have to depend on tourism at all for its survival, but that is not close to the case now, and likely will not be in my lifetime. There is a particular precarity to know that the state of your country almost unilaterally depends on how welcoming you are to the rest of the world. It does something to a people. Most commonly when meeting someone off the back of a recent sojourn to Sri Lanka, one of the first two things mentioned is “How nice the people are”...

-- Before I continue I would like to state, that I am entirely aware that these statements are made entirely in good faith and as an attempt to connect with me based on the knowledge that I am from the same place they visited. However, if one reserves their right to make lazy conversation, I reserve my right to remain an angry immigrant, but I digress --

... how kind, how accommodating, how hospitable. This is not by choice, but rather a coping mechanism. You wouldn’t compliment an assistant for being polite to their boss. When your financial stability depends on how special you make visitors feel, being nice to random foreigners is just a part of the gig. Add to that the post-colonial hangover given form by an island-wide preference for the less melanated among us, and you get what much of the world knows Sri Lankans as. Smiley, docile, subservient little people. Shit is patronising as hell. I find disparaging the people of a nation to be a sign of respect, and long for the day when Sri Lanka is spoken of in a context much like Germany’s, where “Sri Lankan Engineering” is revered as a mark of inherent quality and rigor, and “Sri Lankan People” are known as odd, precocious, and prone to genocidal tendencies if not kept a close enough eye on.

But at the very least, tourism in its conventional sense does provide a boon for the locals, particularly of rural areas, to make a living. Hotels in their building alone provide jobs for everyone from middle-class Colombo architects to manual labourers in the provinces, and consistent employment for many more after they start running. A hostel on the other hand, while being far more economical for its foreign consumers, does close to fuck all for anyone back home. In a Traveller’s search of an “authentic experience”, they often encroach on the haunts of those with exponentially less financial resources than them for the sake of trying on the costume of a different, poorer, but purer, life. And it’s fun because it is deliberate and temporary. Instability is not really instability if you’ve got a strong social security system and your parents’ house(s) in the country to go back to if your frivolity might go awry.

Tourists are, albeit begrudgingly, accepting of being ripped off. And I love that about them. I have grown weary of seeing tips from first-world 20-somethings on how to haggle down the price of goods in a street market an amount that is minuscule to themselves but makes a tangible difference to the life of the person they are haggling with. Yes, if you are foreign, and particularly if you are white, vendors in most developing countries will try to fuck you over. And it is your responsibility to let it happen. It is the very least you could do in exchange for the circumstances that made it so you could live for more than a month in their country for less than a days work in yours.

But what bothers me most tends to be the supposition of any significant enrichment of the soul occurring on any of these trips, be it by a Traveller or Tourist. The difference being that the latter often carry no notions nor illusions to this effect. It is my opinion that the process of being introduced to yourself happens through dealing with the realities of life, the pains of growing. Realities and pains which are unlikely to occur when you are leagues away from anyone that might hold you accountable for being the worst version of yourself, in a place no one knows your name but treats you as if you were their best friend. Having visited many places and lived in a good few, it seems to me that it is living in a place, and having to reconfigure yourself around its contours not relishing in it doing the same for you, that has any chance of growing the scope of what you know the world to be. It’s the reason I will likely always feel a tourist in Sri Lanka. I grew up there, but have never lived there as an adult. Never made memories, fond and regrettable, found the spot to meet and complain after work, where to get fucked up come the weekend and where to hide when I need hiding, that it will likely never completely be a part of my internal history. I currently have no plans of moving back as an adult, and no plans of changing those plans either.

In my time in the western world, which has encompassed the majority of my adult life, I’ve often heard a version of the phrase “I went travelling” to so-and-so far off place, but did not do the “usual tourist-y stuff”. “Tourist-y” often uttered with the same implied vitriol I might ascribe to “cringe-y” or “mass murder-y”. A strong emphasis placed on *getting to know the locals* as a way of growing more worldly and “finding oneself”. Most importantly, with no thought given as to if any of these locals have the slightest interest in knowing *you*. Forbid that the inhabitants of a developing country might have a purpose to exist outside being a conduit for the self-actualisation of a western middle class youth fresh off the back of an overpriced humanities degree.