The Comedian's Quiet Tuesday

A stand-up comedian who by his mid-forties had reached the point in his career where his tours sold out large theatres in three countries had, for twenty-two years, a private weekly ritual. Every Tuesday night, whenever he was not on the road, he would take the train to one of two or three very small clubs in his home city — the kind of clubs that seat forty people, half of them there because their friend is on the lineup — and try, on an unannounced fifteen-minute slot, five brand-new jokes.

The rules he had set himself for these Tuesdays were rigid. The jokes had to be new; nothing he had ever said on stage before. He had to try five. He had to accept, cheerfully, that most of them would not work. He had to keep a small notebook in his coat pocket and write down, immediately after, the exact moment each joke had gone wrong: a word that had been redundant, a beat that had been too long, a premise the audience had refused to grant. He was not allowed to walk off the stage angry.

For twenty-two years, on almost every Tuesday, this had produced the same result. Two of the five jokes were embarrassing. Two were mediocre. One was interesting. Over the year, about fifty interesting jokes accumulated. Of those fifty, five or six survived rewriting and became, six months later, part of his touring set. Everything he was famous for — every big set piece his audiences quoted back to him at signings — had come out of a Tuesday. Not one of the famous jokes had been written at his desk.

He said, in a conversation with a younger comic that was eventually broadcast, that the whole edifice of his career rested on his willingness to be unfunny for fifteen minutes a week in front of forty people who would forget him by breakfast. The reason most successful comics his age stopped writing genuinely new material, he said, was not that they had run out of ideas. It was that they had become too famous to bomb without embarrassment, and they had, without noticing, quietly stopped visiting rooms where bombing was survivable. Their acts, over years, calcified. His Tuesdays kept his act soft.

There is a general form of this problem in every mature career. At some point in your thirties or forties, if you have done reasonably well, you find that you no longer have any place in your professional life in which you are allowed to be bad at what you do. Everywhere you go, you are the person people expect to be good. The result is not more competence. The result, over five or ten years, is a slow drying-out — a career that is coasting on the last thing you learned in the last room where you were still allowed to fail.

The remedy is to keep, somewhere in your week, a small Tuesday. A club of forty. A blog nobody reads. A drawing class in which you are the worst student. A monthly amateur match against people twenty years younger and, if you are lucky, twenty years better. The point is not the room. The point is to be, for one evening a week, cheerfully unfunny in front of forty strangers. It is the only reliable way, past a certain age, to stay funny for anyone else.