POOR YORICK

“I Also Write Serious” — Why Are Comedy Writers So Serious?

Or are they just joking?

I used to know a comedy writer who worked for the BBC in the 1990s. I didn’t know him well, but well enough to drink with. We had a few good nights out together during 1995 when I briefly lived in London, and it always struck me how utterly serious he was.

I thought comedy writers would be cracking jokes all over the place, having bar staff in stitches from dawn to dust. On the contrary, it was like going out with my dad: incredibly reserved and humble. Almost to the point of shy.

I don’t know why I assumed this. He was a comedy writer, not a stand-up. Yes, he wrote for stand-ups, but he wasn’t one himself, and had no talent for performance. In fact, he hated performing full stop. And dreaded the meetings and writing sessions he had to attend. Preferring instead to sit in his bedsit, writing on his own.

That was where I met him. In the corridor of our cramped block in Crouch End. He had locked himself out, so I said he could wait at mine until the landlord came with a spare key. We waited a while, then went to the pub that was conveniently located next door, until Mr. Sheen came with a key.

We became fairly good friends, and regularly ended up in the boozer if we had nothing to do. I enjoyed his company as he didn’t bring attention to himself. I mean, yes, he was a BBC comedy writer, but so what, this was London. Everyone was famous to some degree. Or so they thought!

He wrote comedy, but that was just his job. His main passion was literature — Beckett, Joyce, Behan, O’Brien in particular. He wasn’t Irish — he was from Dunfermline in Scotland — but he loved the dark Irish humour, and had initially set out to be a novelist.

He’d had a book published in 1989 under the pseudonym Mick Finnegan called Away Days, about a runaway Scottish kid coming to London.

Written when he was 17, it was in part influenced by the Bronski Beat song Smalltown Boy, in which a boy dreams of escaping the cloying family atmosphere of small town Scotland.

Remember it?

The book didn’t sell that well, and actually went out of print (yes, that used to happen), so he decided to follow in his hero’s footsteps, and went to London.

There, he worked on a follow-up to Away Days, called Back in the Day. A loose sequel where we meet up with the hero twenty years later. It sold a bit better, but then the publisher dropped him, as they were going for “a lighter approach to comedy,” they told him.

So he became a comedy writer.

After he was dropped, he ended up as a painter and decorator. It was boring work, but it paid well — cash!— and in the evenings he worked on novels and comedy ideas.

On one job, his client was a BBC comedy producer, who happened to be from Dunfermline as well. They got talking, my friend showed him some of his work, and things went from there.

‘Just like that,’ he told me. ‘One minute, I’m painting window frames, the next I’m working for the BBC.’

During our drinking sessions, which were pretty heavy, he always reminded me that if his publisher hadn’t dropped him, he would have never become a painter, would have never met the BBC producer, and almost certainly wouldn’t have started writing comedy.

‘I’m not even funny,’ he told me. ‘In fact, I’m pretty miserable — I only do it to cheer myself up.’ Then he laughed.

We lost touch soon after when I moved away, but I’ll never forget that line.

I only do it to cheer myself up!

I think a lot of writers are like that. I read a lot of funny stuff here on Medium, then a few weeks later their name pops up again. Except this time, the subject is deadly serious: Death, divorce, drug addiction, alcoholism, insanity. You name it, it’s there!

All writers are serious. All writers are funny. And I challenge anyone to find a writer who isn’t. You’ve got to be serious to create comedy, because the best comedy comes out of real life. Which, for most people, is a serious business.

You’ve got to live, eat, work, protect your kids, and then somewhere along the line, you’ve got to go through that terrible (and serious) process of dying.

And if that isn’t serious, I don’t know what is.

Thanks for being funny and serious. For more comedy: