I saw comedian Daniel Kitson a few nights back. His raw honest approach is one I have a lot of time for, and makes for some deliciously uncomfortable moments. A lot of the second half of the show revolved around how he came to be hacking the head off a pig one New Year, something he wouldn’t have imagined that he’d ever do even ten minutes before he took cleaver in hand. It’s a hilarious and painful story about isolation and awkwardness and the laughter that he conjures with this heartfelt tale is a tribute not just to his skill as a storyteller but the willingness of the audience to embrace someone who acknowledges that life can be dark and difficult.
There’s something powerful and deeply interesting going on in a comedy performance. A group of people gather in a darkened room in the hope that someone facing them will change their state in a particular way. They come to laugh. And in laughing, they release tension. Let down barriers and allow themselves to recognise commonality with the comedian, who will often be confronting taboos in the way they talk. And because the audience laughs along with their fellow gig-goers, there’s a recognition that – different as we are, perplexing as we may find one another – we are alike in this.
I attended the show with a couple of friends, and my mother, who was staying with me for a few days. It was lovely to introduce mum to a couple of the people in my life I particularly value, and I thought a comedy show following a curry together would make for a good night. And it did. And it did more than that. And more than that, too.
The first half of the show was a celebration of the word ‘cunt’. Not one that I’m given to using in my mother’s presence, or with some other people. Interestingly, some of the women I love can’t get enough of the word ‘cunt’. I know more men who have a problem with the syllable than women. Though, certainly where mum is concerned, it has never been something we’ve talked about. Call me stick-in-the-mud, but the subject has just never come up.
What was lovely though, was how mum – now 70 – enjoyed the show just as much as anyone else there. We guffawed, winced, howled, slapped ourselves, and otherwise showed all the signs of people having an interesting time. We had a fine old time, one and all. And it was lovely to know that it was an experience I could share with mum without it being difficult. It was something we touched on when we talked about it. Being English, it wasn’t something we dwelled on, but mum’s take on it was “it wasn’t like I hadn’t heard the word before”, which was reasonable enough. And no more needed to be said.
Out of the stories that Kitson told, a theme emerged, and at some point it crystallised just as in a Richard Bandler seminar there’ll come a point when he comes out straight and makes it clear what he’s talking about. For Daniel it was his observation that people have a way of looking for ways in which those who stake a claim to a particular belief or ideology fall short of living it to the full. You’ll have seen the sort of thing: a confirmed two Big Macs a day diner pours scorn on a professed vegetarian because the latter has eaten honey, thereby exploiting bees and demonstrating monstrous hypocrisy. I’ve done it, though maybe not in that context, and I’m pretty confident in stating that you have, too.
As Kitson rightly expounded, it’s pretty much impossible to be faithful to a given belief system because the belief system hasn’t been constructed yet that can cope with the variety of human behaviour across time. Which some of you will have already noted is essentially another way of stating, as per Korzybski, that the map is not the territory. Only – believe me – it was a much more potent experience hearing it from a deeply funny man who’d worked it out for himself than quoted by some smartarse who encountered it in a set of seminar notes.
There are times when being able to draw attention to the inconsistencies of a worldview are useful. I remember as a child being taunted by a couple of older kids, using that debating style favoured by the under-tens of “you’re the odd one out because…” — at which point some character defect is helpfully pointed out, all the better for you to surmount it with the assistance of therapy in adulthood. Having been exposed to a good few rounds of this second rate version of provocative therapy (I suspect my accusers weren’t trained by Frank Farrelly), I reeled from their character dissection before reversing the discourse, telling them “I’m the odd one out because I’m not picking on someone”. At which point they shrugged their shoulders, got back onto their Chopper bikes, and rode away. Result. I suspect this response owed less to youthful NLP expertise than my love of Mad magazine’s regular feature Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.
But the feeling of one-upmanship I experienced there, however useful it was in turning the tables, is a solitary thing. It’s about boosting the individual, setting them apart. And that’s a small victory compared to the feeling of unity that comes from allowing a comedian, or whoever else, to dissolve a group’s barriers and reveal the commonality that we share through exposing the fundamental frailties that we have, each and every one of us.
