‘My work always comes from somewhere else’:

Pip Adam on not liking theatre, scrutinising comedy and questioning realism.

 

My son tells me he has started reading my book. ‘Oh,’ I say, realising quite abruptly that I hadn’t expected him to do so. ‘I like the way it’s a play,’ he says.

For the last year I’ve been talking to artists about what makes them laugh for my podcast Better off Read. I love making my podcast. I love listening over and over again to voices. The soundwaves I watch and edit have become my happiest place. It’s a profound experience to listen to words out of their context, at a distance from the bodies that created them. Recently I was listening to Jo Randerson and me talking on stage at an event last year. It’s a split-second moment: Jo says, ‘Pip loves theatre’. It’s an in-joke between us and possibly we are the only people who hear the playful counter-fact in the way we do. The sarcasm of the comment raises a laugh from the audience, but maybe they are laughing at the fact that I hate being on stage, that my body makes strange shapes when people are looking at me. Maybe they are laughing because Jo’s delivery of the comment gives them permission to release some of the tension my discomfort raises. But to me – and possibly Jo – this throwaway line recalls many conversations with me saying things like ‘I don’t get theatre,’ or ‘I don’t like theatre,’ or ‘I could never do theatre,’ and Jo saying, ‘Are you sure?’

My son is correct, of course. The first third of my book, it appears, and to my surprise, is like a play. The book is called Audition. I keep saying to people it’s meant in the sense of a synonym for ‘hearing’. But of course, the book is an appeal in the form of a performance. The role it wants is that of conversation-mate: it wants to be in dialogue with a reader’s own thoughts and experiences. It wants to perform a reality that isn’t here in the hope this experiment will open up the tiniest creak of a possibility. This performance doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s in rehearsal with Samuel Beckett, James Kelman, Andrea Lawlor, Jordy Rosenberg and the rest of the touring troupe I hold in my head and heart. The beep-beep of their work is the sonar I hear in my body as I write – ‘warmer, warmer, warmer, cold’.

 

 

The reason I start talking to people about what makes them laugh is because I’m interested in what comedy, especially live stand-up comedy, solicits from the body – the immediate and spontaneous noise it draws from a crowd. The laugh; the palpable discomfort at the absence of the laugh in the space where the laugh should be; or the presence of a laugh where it shouldn’t be. There is something incredibly profound about an art form able to make a group of people give themselves up. Crack through whatever personalities we build around our inner selves. This real-life effect of an imagined and created performance astounds me every time I experience it.

I figured these performances of ‘joke’ must have some deep relationship with the ‘real’ world to elicit this effect. Some shared agreement about the ‘real’ world seemed necessary for comedy to work, because so much of comedy relies on a surprise subversion or mistaken understanding of the ‘real’ world: ‘I was wondering why the Frisbee was getting bigger, and then it hit me’.

In the relationship between stand-up and the ‘real’ I recognised a possible explanation for the move of my own work further and further from realism. It flummoxes me how this has happened. I have theories; I’ve said things when people ask. But I’ve never been able to fully get at what I’m up to. Or perhaps what the work is up to. My work always comes from somewhere else – I feel a lot more like a ‘host’ than a creator.

And as my work took this turn, I saw quite starkly how strange that term ‘realism’ was. That my work felt more real to my experience of being here when it included women who ate with octopuses or doubled in the night or grew and grew. I realised that realism, like all writing, is a manufactured thing, not a mirror or a reflection of our world. It has its quirks and style and patterns and somehow, somewhere, someone powerful told us it was real.

I don’t want to make a claim for imagined worlds simply as a better mirror for our one. My favourite works present new worlds free from the structures of this world. But escape seems almost impossible. Of course, we are all new worlds – none of us experiences the ‘here’ exactly the same. Yet our world is the place from which we read and where we have learned how to be, all of us carbon-based and oxygen-breathing.

As I watched more and more comedy, and read more and more about the psychology at play when we laugh, and talked to more and more people about what they found funny, I couldn’t help wondering if there was an explanation to be found in the way actors and comedians use their bodies and their life experience to create imagined worlds that create a bodily response in an audience. That there might be something in the relationship between comedy and the ‘real’ world that could explain why my imagined worlds felt closer to my lived experience than when I put on the costumes of realism.

I found a video of Bridget Christie in gaffer tape antennae and swimming goggles performing A Ant as part of The Alternative Comedy Experience. While at first it may look like a thinly veiled comment on the ‘women aren’t funny’ trope, Christie’s routine somehow produces something new, apart from both the ‘real’ world and that of a human-sized ant who has taken a stand-up course – not to learn how to tell jokes but to learn how to stand up. This doesn’t depend on any clever special effects that suspend disbelief: at one point Christie struggles with her goggles and, completely in character, shouts, ‘I can’t see a thing in these.’ The success of this work doesn’t come from any desire to transport the audience to a world where an ant as we know it does stand-up. We’re always aware that Christie is under the bad ant costume, and that what she is doing has a hint of the ridiculous, an ant impersonation that fails. The shimmer caused by having to hold two things in our head at the same time builds, I think, a sense of discomfort, of the ‘not quite right’ – that might also, with different lighting and mood, lay the foundations for a jump scare. But in this case the relief from this build-up of nervous energy results in a laugh instead of a scream.

 

 

Psychologists Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren coined the phrase ‘benign violation’ which posits that ‘humour results when a person simultaneously recognises both that an ethical, social or physical norm has been violated and that this violation is not very offensive, reprehensible or upsetting’. Christie is an angry and unlikeable ant. The performance begins with her reprimanding the sound person for playing the song ‘Ant Music’ as she came on. ‘You’re ant-ist!’ she shouts, drawing an uncomfortable and deliberately tone-deaf comparison to racism and ableism. I’d argue the resulting laugh, like almost all the laughs of the performance come from a sense that an ethical, social and physical norm is being broken by a person pretending to be an ant. An ant, the tiniest thing, cannot hurt us. The woman dressed as an ant, obviously in performance, alerts us to the made-up nature of the anger.

The routine ends with one of my favourite performances of social chaos which makes visible the tenuous bond of politeness and obedience which hold society and reality together. Christie explains that as an ant she doesn’t recognise applause at the end of a performance and wants everyone to boo her instead. A lone person boos and after some back and forward with that person she says, ‘The other alternative is I can just go off to absolute silence’. And she leaves immediately and abruptly to the strangest mix of cheers and boos. Josie Long, acting as compere, comes on stage shaking her head, arms folded and says in mock disgust, ‘I feel like there’s no trust left in this room.’ This observation gets a huge laugh. Freud would call this release. ‘When the punch line comes,’ writes Giovanni Sabato in Scientific America, ‘the energy being extended to suppress inappropriate emotions, such as desire or hostility, is no longer needed and is released as laughter’.

 

 

What I recognised in Christie’s work is the breakdown of the false dichotomy of ‘real’ and ‘fantasy’. The leakage that happens between the things we agree as a society exist and the things that one person makes up and shares with society. The things we keep private and the things we share in the common.

I’m unhappy with any way of saying the ‘real world’ because there is so much power in deciding what is real and what is imagined. ‘The reasonable man’ gives me the fantods. Late in his leadership, Prime Minister John Key would often enlist the agreement of ‘any reasonable person’ when making a point – suggesting that anyone who disagreed was not. One of the things I find so refreshing and exciting about the absurd, like A Ant, is that it challenges the neutrality of reality. It calls often on dream logic, on deep instinctual reflexes that suggest reality is not so fixed. When a whole room reacts to a woman speaking as an ant it shows we must have some shared idea of what an ant would sound like despite the fact any ‘reasonable man’ would agree no one has heard an ant talk. Christie’s audience ‘reacts’ rather than laughs, because the absurd is not always aiming for a laugh. Unlike more conventional rhythms of humour, the absurd leaves space for personal reaction. When asked to boo in the face of the convention of clapping, one man boos. When the conventions of leaving the stage are broken, it’s every person for themselves.

It occurs to me that what I might be aiming for in a book like Audition is more akin to the absurd than it is to Science Fiction or Fantasy or Social Realism. While writing it I returned again and again to Samuel Beckett’s novels and perhaps leaned even more heavily on Not I and a particular interview with Billie Whitlaw.

This is why the book perhaps shares more with performance and theatre than with literature. One of my favourite definitions of the absurd is this: ‘Absurdity in art shows an inverted and contradictory version of reality that juxtaposes multiple realities in order to invite people to look at life differently’. I think this might be what I am hoping for, satiating is my desire to disrupt reality, or to make the world we take for granted strange. There is so much we have been made to think of as innate or natural: the economy, punishment, power. I am trying to create an atmosphere that makes it possible to question these systems, and this involves destabilising the reading experience.

One of my favourite books of the last few years is Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, a book that reinvents the memoir by using fantasy elements to tell the story of a real life. Like Christie’s work, this type of formal genius questions what we know. Its destabilisation makes us open in a similar way to comedy.

Judging my work against the idea of ‘benign violation’ helps me write about violent aspects of our society that allows them to be visible and at the centre of new conversations rather than ones that follow a particular rhythm. This balance is a hard one – destabilising without doing harm – but I think it is a helpful and productive way of beginning to talk about the things that feel harmful in our world.