What is the drive which keeps comedians performing? Night after night, year after year, getting up there – at some point there has to be a motivation greater than proving you are funny, even for the most neurotic act. Watch the appreciative laugh the veteran comedian encounters just by stepping onto the stage. Of course, a comedian who turns professional always needs first and foremost to earn a living, but when a comedian is up there their thoughts are never really on that night’s pay cheque, for in the room itself there are always problems to be solved and a battle to be won.
I ask the question in part because for me somewhere the motivation got lost. After twenty years on and off across various stages across various countries, in September 2022, I performed my solo show for the last time and – apart from an invitation to perform a gig in French last year – I haven’t been performing since. I miss it; I don’t miss it. Yet what I for sure don’t have now is the motivation to keep schlepping up there night after night; I sometimes think about going back to performing, but in the same way that I think that it’d be nice to visit the Orkney Islands.
As a comedy fan, I have always admired above all the veteran acts, the performers like Barry Humphries, Bob Monkhouse or Ken Dodd, who took their craft into the sixth and seven decades of performing careers; I genuinely find it a wonder of the world to see an octogenarian man who has retained the enthusiasm to do a show at the Leeds City Varieties Hall on a Saturday night. Presumably for these acts at some point the money was sufficient, even for a man of Dodd’s legendarily disorganized financial nature, to have long since jacked it in. Yet they keep going for the love of the game and unlike the overwhelming pathos of catching, say, a Legends Match of former professional footballers, seeing veteran comedians still out there almost elicits almost a sense of wonderment. Older comedians only seem to fit more exactly into their societal role.
For me, once I got married, the thought of spending three hours travelling across London to do a ten-minute slot proved less tempting. My own good gigs had proved to me that I could do it, and any ongoing remuneration wasn’t sufficient to keep me from stepping away. I also, frankly, began to feel more serious inside in a way less conducive to comedy; I found my parents’ ageing increasingly sobering, and entering middle age filled me with paralyzing existential terror as opposed to a desire to make light of it. Conversely, I also found myself asking whether I’d become too content to do comedy.
Still, many comedians I admire do keep going, and indeed remain at the top of their games. I asked the comedian Al Murray, a Twitter mate, what keeps him at it decades in and he ventured that live comedy afford him the chance to fully occupy the moment. I like that, and it relates again to ageing too; as time speeds up as you get older, the chance to be really present in the moment and your surroundings, night after night, almost seems like a cheat code to get more out of your years. For all the neurosis around the art form, this aspect of comedy as ‘being there’ has a touch of Zen. And of course, you notice your surroundings much more if you go somewhere new, and comedy is a profession where you can be in a different work place every night.