I’ve sat paralysed at my laptop for some time now, trying to work out what this week’s newsletter will be about. Truth is, I’ve been a little thrown off balance by the fact that this recent entry, about people who say “You couldn’t make such-and-such any more,” has become the most-read of these things I’ve ever written, in nearly four years of writing this newsletter. It’s steadily grown from its early days as a sort of creative lockdown diary, and has a much bigger readership now, but it’s still rare that one specific entry punches out and resonates on a wider level, and I don’t really know what to do about it.

We live in a world dictated by algorithms that encourage us to repeat our successes – when you find something that works, you do it over and over again until you’ve built a solid audience that knows what you’re about. I find this way of working really difficult, and it doesn’t come naturally to me. Usually once I’ve explored an idea, the last thing I want to do is to explore it again. Sometimes that’s because, having explored it, it’s manifestly apparent that it wasn’t that good an idea in the first place. Other times it’s because it was a good idea, but my brain then thinks “Well I’ve done it now, so why do it again? Surely it’ll just be less good?” This dilemma is the comedian’s constant battle, if you’re the kind of comedian who overthinks everything rather than just getting on with things, as I am.

One of the first ideas I had that went properly viral was a sketch in which I pretended to be the members of the Fellowship of the Ring making awkward small talk while hiking. It did well enough that I decided to make a followup about the cast of Star Wars making awkward small talk while flying through space. It died on its arse. This may well have been simply because it just wasn’t as funny as the first sketch, but more likely it’s because it had the whiff of inauthenticity to it – there’s a difference between someone going “Here’s a funny idea I had, hope you like it” and someone going “Here’s more of that idea you liked, hope you like it again” and audiences are smart enough to pick up on it.

I’m currently wading through the same dilemma again over on Youtube, where another sketch recently did decent enough numbers that a few commenters said they’d like to see more of it. I’m now trying to work out if it’s possible to revisit that idea in a way that gives those people more of what they liked while also feeling like it expands on the idea and interests me without feeling cynical or obviously contrived. We’ll see how that goes.

So, what with this being territory I’m habitually uncomfortable in, after lots of you seemed to enjoy that newsletter, I thought to myself “Oh I’m glad people liked that. Now I wonder if I should write about something similar in my next one to give people more of what they enjoyed, or if that’s going to come across as forced?” And underneath that thought was another one, far more insipid and pleading – “Please don’t make me write about culture war nonsense any more than I have to.”

The other thing the internet loves, even more than repeatability, is outrage. People love reading their own opinions reflected back at them, especially if there is some implied judgment or criticism of a group they dislike or disagree with. As you can tell from what I wrote about the “You couldn’t make that nowadays” brigade, I enjoy this kind of groupthink as much as the next person. I’m exhausted by the people who think that the march of societal progress is somehow getting in the way of their being able to enjoy the things they once enjoyed.

I recently came across a hilarious Telegraph article that bemoaned the fact that the creep of wokeism in advertising meant that the Milk Tray Man could no longer be enjoyed as a James Bond-esque female sexual fantasy, but would in today’s online culture of snowflakes and woketards probably be branded a predator. I find the idea that anyone ever enjoyed the Milk Tray Man as a sexual fantasy on a par with James Bond just as funny as the idea that anyone now thinks he should be MeToo’d and consigned to the bin of history.

“Tonight, darling, I want us to do the Milk Tray Man,” she whispers in his ear, hand squeezing his thigh. His eyes go wide, his expression freezes. “You be the Milk Tray Man and I’ll be the virginal maiden waiting for you to climb up my fire escape with your chocolate box.” Everyone else at the prestigious awards dinner goes silent and turns to look at them. “That’s sick!” Someone shouts. “We were going to give you an award, but now we’re going to take one away – a net loss of two awards to punish you for your sick peccadilloes, which have no place in our modern society!” I just can’t see it. What next? “In her youth, my wife would dream ceaselessly about fucking the Pillsbury Doughboy, but I suppose now that makes her a paedophile. Is none of our culture sacred any more?”

I think most people’s opinion on the Milk Tray Man is simply that he is a cat burglar from an old advert who brought people chocolate, and beyond that I don’t think people think about him that often, actually, and journalists needn’t tie themselves in knots about the cultural cost of our having moved on from such icons. (The article also said that we had lost crucial building blocks of our culture because we couldn’t celebrate booze and fags any more, and that it was funny when adverts used to objectify women because we all got the joke, but I simply don’t have time for all this).

The thing is, the ongoing polarisation of culture is endlessly entertaining stuff, but I don’t really want to lend that stuff more power than it warrants by talking about it all the time. The internet is desperate for us to spend all our time and energy talking about all the things we hate about each other, and resent about each other, and all the ways in which we think the other team is stupid. The fact that we spend all our time doing that only riles them up even more. Years ago, when a man called Count Dankula received a criminal charge for teaching his dog to do a Nazi salute, the wonderful comedian Michael Brunstrom had a very pithy response to the people who went on to claim that this was a violation of Count Dankula’s freedom of speech. “Nobody is attacking your freedom of speech to say nice things,” he said.

I realise that this, too, plays into the popular characterisation of a particular social group that a lot of us in comedy belong to. Those of us who think freedom of speech is, on the whole, actually doing quite well at the moment, are all namby-bamby woke lib cucks who just want everyone to be kind all the time and say things like “Good afternoon, m’lord” and can’t take a good old fashioned joke, like when you trick your dog into practising hate speech.

But I really took Michael’s words to heart and I think there’s a lot of wisdom in them. By and large, fun as it is, I don’t really enjoy complaining about societal attitudes in comedy, or putting forward counter-arguments to complaints about wokeism and free speech. It’s just not what I think comedians are best at doing. I think comedy is best at making people’s lives slightly better, one audience at a time, rather than always being drawn into argument and conflict, and that’s where I try to put my energy. This weekend, Miranda and I saw a concert by the South African cellist Abel Selaocoe and the Aurora Orchestra, and were both reduced to gibbering wrecks by it. The final movement of his concerto was sung by the entire audience in unison, and it felt like ages since we’d seen any art that simply celebrated all that’s good about humanity, rather than cynically trying to exploit our tendency for division and judgment. I’d like to make and see comedy that does the same.

So all this is a long way of saying – thanks for the nice messages and comments about that post! I doubt this newsletter will become a place where I make a habit of talking about that kind of thing, or dividing the world into groups and pitting them against each other, not because I’m not a part of those groups or recognise the problems those groups exist to address, but simply because it’s not really what I’m most interested in doing.

Still, I am very grateful to all the new subscribers who signed up in the wake of that newsletter, so just to finish off I’ll give you a few quick facts about me so you know what it is you have signed up to:

1. I am currently in the early stages of drawing up plans to file a lawsuit against Bill Skarsgard because the voice he does in Nosferatu is a direct infringement of my intellectual rights. For many years I have been doing that exact voice as one of my trademark silly voices that I do around the home, and now when I do it it sounds like I’m doing a Bill Skarsgard impression, which I am not. I am in fact doing an impression of a funny Romanian troll. I will not rest until I am recognised as the voice’s true author.
2. I am a reformed hoarder. I used to bring old shit into my flat all the time – a pair of crutches, a walking stick with a funnel on it so you could piss into it, an old clown costume I found in a box by the side of the road that was almost certainly infested with lice. But I have had to give up this behaviour since moving in with my girlfriend, who has the same tendencies but taken to a greater extreme, so now I must set a model example. We are both making great progress – she recently managed to get rid of a plinth that had been sitting in the corner of the living room for 8 months “in case we ever need a plinth,” but in all this time we had never once put anything on top of it, which some might say should be the principal purpose of the plinth.
3. I have some sort of synaesthetic relationship with music, especially progressive rock, where when listening to it I often feel like I can eat it, hug it, pick it up like a handful of coins, or swim through the album covers. The realisation that the sensation I’m imagining in my head cannot actually be physically experienced causes me acute distress which can only be dispelled by reading a chronological list of my favourite albums of all time. Reading any list is a vital form of self-soothing, and this extends to the ingredients on the back of sandwich packets, which I find profoundly relaxing to read. At any given time, I am always reciting a list of something in my head.
4. When I get annoyed, my right shoulder starts swivelling round and round in a way that I am not cognisant of. I genuinely have no idea that I’m doing it, but when we’re walking along together my girlfriend can always tell when I’ve had an irritating thought because my shoulder has gone crazy. She can often read the signs even before I can. I have frequently watched myself back in films or live recordings and been absolutely appalled by the behaviour of my limbs. Deep down what I really want to be is a dancer, because that might be the closest I ever get to actually getting that “eat the music” feeling out of my head, but I know I never can because half the time my shoulder is out of control and I don’t even know why.

So what you’ve signed up for is the neurotic ramblings and creative logbook of that guy. If you like the sound of him, stick around, I hope you enjoy it here!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – I promised more Glasgow Comedy Festival recommendations and I am a man of my word. My show is on Tuesday (and you should come!), but over the next week you can also see shows from Joe Kent-Walters, The Mayor and his Daughter (directed by me!), Helen Bauer, Jin Hao Li, Sharon Wanjohi, Josie Long, Catherine Bohart, Rob Copland, Ben Pope, John Tothill and Fern Brady!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – I think this was Siblings performing a sketch about the most powerful scientist and wizard in the United Kingdom at John Norris’s An Hour To Kill show last week, which challenges performers to prepare a brand new act in just one hour. I love seeing what people come up with for it.

Book Of The Week – The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, because it was one of my favourite films of last year. Yes it is a children’s book, but Goodreads tells me I am currently one book behind schedule for my target this year, so I need to get some short ones under my belt. Nice book, though.

Album Of The Week – Curious Ruminant by Jethro Tull. Against all the odds, this is quite good. Other than Ian Anderson’s 2012 solo sequel to Thick As A Brick, Tull haven’t really done anything worth getting excited about in three decades now (1995’s Roots To Branches is really good, fight me). This has at least three songs on it I really like, and that’s huge for these guys.

Film Of The Week – The Last Showgirl. I thought this was absolutely brilliant. Maybe that’s just because I’ve been writing a lot around ideas of parenthood, sacrifice, creative risk and so on with my new show, so to see a show that digs into that stuff so brutally was a bit of a hammer blow. But I think it’s incredible and Pamela Anderson rewrites her entire career in one performance.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you think, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe I’d really appreciate it! Take care of yourselves until next time, and all the best,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS Nice that the sun’s back out, I’ve started running again. Shame about the water everywhere though, makes it really hard:

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