Looking back at old stuff can be interesting, and sometimes scary. My comedy career really started in mid 2015, but there were precursors. In 2008 I decided I would like to try doing stand-up just once, I did it, I got laughs & I walked away happy ticking stand-up off my bucket list.
5 years later I thought I'd like to try something different so I went back, did it, got laughs and was happy. To get stage time when I wanted to I needed to enter the national raw comedy contest, much to my surprise I got through to the semi-finals but no more. I happily walked away for 2 years.
Early 2015 I decided to go back, had my first complete flop but after a couple of months licking my wounds came back & started gigging on a regular basis. As this coincided with my world falling apart, the material from April to July had an incredibly variable quality.
All the above was before I decided I could no longer avoid transitioning. Recently I reviewed the videos of those first few presentations for an idea I've had. Looking back at the videos of those shows and seeing this strange bearded person in cargo pants is difficult, but the quality of those first two sets surprised me. I didn't have the technique I've picked up over the last 3 years but for a newbie it was very good. It sure as hell was different to the stuff in early 2015 and much better too.
Going further back I wrote a parody in 1992 of Object Oriented Cobol that ended up having references to it in multiple places on the Internet for over a decade. Luckily that's died down but for a long while it was quite difficult to deal with. I have recently embraced and resurrected that parody.
Part of coming to terms with my past has involved examining it & although formal involvement in comedy wasn't a major part pre-transition it was an increasingly important part in the last months leading up to me transitioning. I still can't work out if it was a part of becoming ready to transition or a last ditch attempt to not transition but either way it was there & deeply involved in my mental processes.
Hopefully the title of this post is "Memories of past jokes" in French.
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