Originally posted on my old blog on September 29th 2019.

So, hi there. How are you?

It’s nice to see you.

Last week I asked people who follow my Twitter account to vote on something, I wanted opinions on what sort of comedy people wanted to see.

Overwhelmingly the answer was that people wanted more surreal and absurd comedy. Is that a reaction to these parlous times? I will leave that for someone far more educated than myself to worry about.

I am here to make stuff, and presumably, be silly.

It may have seemed like an odd question, but I do have my reasons. Long story short is that I was pondering what sort of comedy thing to do next.

I am attempting to come out of a fairly serious depressive episode, and I am trying to refocus on why I do things.

I used to love writing and performing funny stuff, but somewhere in the distant past, I managed to equate comedy with work in my head. This meant that I felt bad when I did not write, I felt bad when I wrote and it was not good enough. I felt even worse when I got rejections on the smaller and smaller amounts of work that I was submitting.

After all of the years feeling like that, and also writing to a non-existent brief in my head, I had a difficult relationship with writing.

I realise that I have been writing to a style that I thought would be popular, based on the work I had done on topical one-liners for mainly radio shows over the years.

Some of the things that I had written had been used, so that was what I should focus on.

It’s not though, is it? This isn’t my day job, but the problem is that I hate my day job, and deep down I still feel that I should be producing comedy for a living.

So I stopped enjoying it, and more importantly, I stopped making the sort of thing that I wanted to.

Out went odd, surreal and weirdly paced in favour of short and snappy. Pow, pow pow, that’s how to get quick laughs on a fast-paced topical radio show.

On top of this, I have started to realise that paying that much attention to the news also is not helping my mental state in the long run either. Double whammy.

Odd that, it seems that depressive people are not necessarily ill, they are just paying attention.

What does this mean for my future? It means me making stuff that I like, not necessarily stuff to ride on the coattails of some ephemeral success that I had in the past.

It might mean fewer things made, it might mean me doing different things.

I love audio comedy, you can do so much with spoken words and sound, so I am looking at making podcasts again. I love making the Bob videos, but there is so much work involved for one person. I write, perform, film, edit, design and so on each episode.

The more recent Dial-up Internet shows have not been received how I had hoped if I am honest, (see again I am worried about popularity) and due to other reasons, they have become much more difficult to make at the moment. This does not mean the end of them, not at all, just a shift in my focus to more audio production.

It is, after all, what I love myself and I am quite good at it. Although the sound on the last Dial-Up Internet show would demonstrate otherwise.

Or the Illuminati did not want you to hear what Adam had to say, which is more likely? Hmm?

The first one, yeah. It’s the first one.

Do I have a point? Only with judicious use of a sharp blade, and that sort of joke usually ends badly for me, so let’s not do that.

My point is simple, I lost my way somewhere over the last 48 years, and I had forgotten what I like to do and why. That is the uncomfortable truth of it.

I am gradually getting myself to accept that I need to change that if I want to hang around a bit longer.

I am immersing myself in more surreal humour, the kind that started my love of the craft in the first place, and I am thinking of making some things that are completely different.

Screw mainstream for a bit, I don’t feel like making my stuff fit in, for some imagined middle of the road market, that I would hate being part of if I were to make it successful.

I realise now, that if I had been more successful in making mainstream stuff, I would probably have been even unhappier than I am now.

Odd really.

We are complicated monkeys, aren’t we?

I suppose this means that I am reinventing myself to some people, what it really means is that I am getting less anxious about letting go and trusting my instincts of what I find funny.

No matter what I make some people will like it and some won’t. If you feel that I am stopping making what you like, sorry but I cannot keep doing this for other people.

I am going to look more at audio comedy, but also more written stuff on a website. Which website remains to be seen, but I suspect that I am going to have a look at setting up my blog again.

Domain name suggestions are more than welcome, although I suspect that it will not be named after Bob, as he is only one of the things that I will be making from here on in.

Be kind to each other, and let’s make the world a better place one sentence at a time.

Love, hugs & kisses

Trev.