(NSFW) Why write about difficult subjects? + AUDIO

In which I pre-emptively cancel myself so nobody else gets the pleasure.

Yes, a double whammy. I’ve had this post in my drafts for a while, so I thought now is a good time to beam it out. It is a fitting preamble for my next Substack project… comedy.

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By the way, NSFW means NOT SAFE FOR WORK, as in, please do not show your boss this email unless you work somewhere cool and they have a sense of humour.

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A lot of writing these days is safe.

Mine could be too.

I could write some very fluffy, comfortable stories about eating yoghurt and peeling oranges and meeting new people from different backgrounds and talking to them in a cafe in a patronising tone and probably earn myself a favourable newspaper review calling it ‘brave’ but that would bore me.

Why?

Because I’m hardwired for novelty.

I know what peeling oranges and eating yoghurt and meeting new people is like.

I like to imagine my readers do too.

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So, if a lot of writing is safe, what’s out there in the beyond?

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Unlike ChatGPT, I don’t want to collect all human experience and blend it into some warm grey goop. I prefer to be more deliberate with my idea mixing.

I prefer to discriminate.

But don’t worry, this is the good kind of discrimination.

This is the kind of idea discriminatin that gives stories a shape.

The goal is to break stereotypes.

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Take poetry for example.

When I tell someone I am a poet, I am often met with a look of utter dismay, as the person suddenly remembers the last poet they met. Pale, miserable, and with a black-purple haircut that looks like it was evolved as a defense mechanism against the evils of shampoo, the modern spoken word poet is a sinewy thing reminiscent of a nervous system sneezed out of its original body, given a strong artisanal coffee it pretends to like for artistic reasons, and kicked backwards through a thrift store.

And it is indeed, a nervous system.

(You can have that pun, spoken word poets, I’m done using it now)

Just kidding, if you take it I will write scathing rhymes about you.

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The modern poet as an archetype is a thing that the modern reader doesn’t seem to want to be near. I’ve done the poetry circuits, and I’ve met a great many types of people, but the public perception still seems to be:

Poet = Miserable = Tedious

And I never liked that.

And upsettingly, it is reinforced by the way some poetry events go. Maybe it’s the location. Poets, being broke, often use spare rooms in pubs for their group therapy sessions where they talk slowly and sadly about their recent divorce. You know who else goes to pubs? Giddy, drunken people celebrating their recent divorce. This, of course, is a recipe for uncomfortable encounters.

Perhaps the serious poets need an even safer ‘safe space’ to talk in.

Or perhaps poetry itself is in some way, devoid of humour.

Am I a freak for wanting to crack jokes in poems?

I don’t think so.

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I studied Poetry at uni, getting solid Firsts the whole way through because I’m just so handsome and intelligent and handsome and my beard is nice, but I did sometimes bend the rules. I remember submitting one poem and being told “This is closer to stand-up comedy, isn’t it Phillip?” and they were right, it was.

But it did rhyme.

It was a poem about how I lost three pounds at the gym, buying a chocolate bar.

It wasn’t a good joke, but it was an okay poem.

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Soon enough I realised serious poems about physics weren’t enough to keep me going. I wanted to tell jokes.

I did my first stand-up poetry gig at my university’s Arts Bar, where in 2015 I told what is now a prophetic joke about freedom of speech in the Arts.

That joke was four minutes of deliberate silence at the end of my ten minute set. It took three of those four minutes for anyone in the audience to get the joke, and I did it because I wanted to scare the crap out of myself. My worst fear back then was freezing in front of the audience.

So what did I do to beat it?

I purposefully froze in front of the audience.

Stage fright died that night, leaving behind the widow of anxiety, who also died.

The poem is called ON FREEDOM and if you’ve read WBTH, you’ve seen the paperback version hidden amongst the On-Series; a blackout poem made out of an old, pre-substack blog post I had written about going to uni.

I wonder how the judges of SPSFC3 will feel about it. It’s an experimental one, but I think it makes a valid, vaguely sci-fi point. That being;

censorship does not remove an idea from the world, it transfigures it, it mutilates it.

And that idea of censorship is an inherently sci-fi one.

Because to censor is to go back in mental-time and alter something.

It is time travel.

To rewrite history.

It’s also gaslighting.

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So, after all this thinking and philosophising about comedy and poetry and the Arts and where I was in this vast undulating landscape of words and ideas, I came up with an equation that has served me in my poetry comedy career since.

Poetry + Novelty + Comedy = Fun

The novelty part is very important.

I wanted to be a comedy poet, but I also wanted to tackle the subjects I felt were being silently shunned by the open mics. I have a tremendous respect for people who can get on stage and cover topics darker than ‘my girlfriend left’ whilst making the poem engaging, clever, and accessible.

It is a privilege to walk into a free event and hear a long poem about a tragedy that not only is well-written, but which effects you.

I wanted to do that, in a funny way.

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But not everyone will get it.

My first experience of being heckled was after I read a brief poem about an imaginary working class activist who secretly wanted to sleep with the rich politician he claimed to hate so much. I thought it spoke of something deeper than what a lot of political poetry was getting at, that under all the software of ideology and gender and voting and favourite movies, we are still animals.

But, alas, someone barked VOTE LABOUR in the middle of it.

To which I replied,

“I was going to, but now you’ve annoyed me, so I won’t.”

This, was pre-Brexit, so I like to imagine that guy thinks it was his yelping that shifted the scales. In truth, I missed voting day because I was playing Minecraft.

(For my American readers, a Tory is a member of our conservative party here in the UK. Some people liken them to your Republicans, but I have no idea).

So, some poetry nights are a bit serious. Even the ones that start out with comedy people slowly devolve back to a game of whose ex was worst.

And increasingly, I felt like I didn’t fit in.

I’d already heard chants of “All Tories are Evil!” and “White men in Tophats ruined the world!” (real quotes) in poetry evenings, and I didn’t like that.

I am a white man who owns a tophat. I look good in it, and I’ve not ruined much. Maybe that meal I burned that time, but not much else. I certainly didn’t take part in the industrial revolution or slavery, I was born a few years too late, unless you count sweatshops, which I also wasn’t involved in, unless you want to draw a wiggly, drunken line between me working in Primark at 17 and them owning a sweatshop or two. But I didn’t know at the time, I was too busy gaslighting my sexist manager into thinking a cat was stuck in the air vents (a story for another time).

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And I know some Tories. Some of them are decent people who just so happened to have voted for Brexit because they thought it was a good idea at the time or their finger slipped. Fair enough.

So I don’t like the broad sweeps that modern poets take at people. I don’t like broad sweeps in general unless they are played for comedic effect.

Example: My description of the modern poet above. We all know that not every poet is like that, but we probably have seen at least one. And that’s where the humour comes in. That, and in the description itself.

There’s a satirical element to pretending to be grumpier than I actually am.

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Dark comedy really pleases me. I know it doesn’t please everyone, but it’s a rare treat to hear something this deranged put across so eloquently.

Remember, this post is NSFW.

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That’s the sort of unhinged storytelling I love, and which I love writing myself. You’ll be seeing more of it soon.

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What jokes do you like?