Originally published by The Clifton Courier, August 26, 2020

Do you every watch stand up comedy and wonder if the stories they’re telling up there on the stage are true?

Lately, I’ve been finding myself wasting literal hours watching videos on my social media feed. One video ends but then another one pops up in its place and on and on and on it goes until it’s three hours past your bedtime and you can feel the inside of your eyelids. I do this and inevitably the social media gods serve me up an endless streams of loud, bitter women and their feminist comedy (which is weird, because social media platforms are supposed to have algorithms that predict the kind of stuff you like and feed you content that mirrors your way of seeing the world and they’re feeding snarky women jokes to me?!…*if you cold imagine the bad joke drum sound effect right now, that would be very helpful).

Anyway, so I find myself watching these snippets of stand up routines and some of them go into stories that sound very specific to them. Like, they talk about a set of wanky parents at their child’s school or one of their hot mess friends. They name them and mimic their mannerisms. And it makes me wonder that, surely, that person can’t be real. 

Because as bold and ballsy as these comedians may be, I don’t think anyone would be brazen enough to name and roast someone on a global comedy tour and not crumble when they ran into them at the school gate.

So these people are either given pseudonyms or these hilarious encounters are totally made up.  

I mean, that’s fine, I suppose if you’re watching these comedy acts and you don’t know the person up on stage. You can suspend belief and tell yourself that, yes, it’s possible for someone to deliver with the most hilarious, cutting comeback known to man spontaneously, when we all know the good comebacks don’t actually come to you until three days after the fact, when you’re ranting about the situation to yourself in the privacy of your car. You could pretend that they actually did run into a character so ridiculous down at the shops. You can believe that these intense parents actually exist.

But when you know the person, it’s uncomfortable. 

I once went with a group of friends to watch a comedian we knew. I thought he was a pretty funny guy until he started telling this story about a flatmate. He went into great detail about this flatmate’s characteristics and this bizarre scenario and we sat there horrified. 

Because we knew he didn’t have one of those flatmates. We knew he lived with his girlfriend. And so, knowing that fact, we made the reasonable assumption that this anecdote he was articulating was a complete fabrication. 

The whole act was just that; an act. 

And I guess that’s fine. It definitely would take more brainpower to invent a whole funny scenario and flesh out characters and all that jazz than just retelling something that happened to you. But knowing for sure that this story definitely wasn’t real sucked the humour out of the situation for me. I felt this overwhelming urge to call old mate out and alert the others that they were being fed lies. 

This is extremely annoying, because it forces me to apply the same standard to this column. Because while I don’t know every single person in town, I know many readers would be able to see right through any untruths I wrote here. 

So everything I write here has to be stone cold truth*.

* Plus, I’m a strong believer in honesty** being the best policy.

** I’m also a believer in replacing the word “honest” with Hon Hon***, because I have a friend with a last name we’ve adapted to gift him his infamous nickname Hon Hon. I recommend giving it a go some time.

*** I’m not sure whether he endorses this or not.

The problem with this is that, after so long doing this, I’m worried my subconscious is coercing me to do column-able things. Like, what if I was actually making myself into an awkward mess on purpose to generate content? Maybe I’m actually a sensible, competent person underneath it all but I’m secretly tricking myself into being the personification of a lead fart. 

I thought this today, when I ended an encounter with a new co-worker by saying, “I guess I’ll see you around… in this place… where we work together…” before trailing off and then just exiting the situation as my other co-workers laughed at my god-awful social interaction attempt.  

Like, this isn’t me bragging, I’m genuinely concerned, I have a degree in communication, and this is the kind of crap I pull?

I mean, I genuinely don’t know what I’d prefer: me gaslighting myself or me genuinely being… me. 

Ugh.