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The new tour programme arrived at lunchtime, always an exciting moment in the year (and this time I didn’t spot an error in it the first time I flicked through). I will be sending out the limited edition copies to the kind people who donated money as soon as possible (which might not be that soon). In a sense it’s two programmes this year, as the front 14 pages are for Happy Now? and the back six (turned upside down so it works in both directions) are for the Twelve Shows of Herring, which terrifyingly begin a fortnight from today! Though I am also excited about it too. I have eight weeks to get Happy Now? into a shape that I am happy to show to a paying audience (though will have to play it to a few people paying discount amounts first), but then have a few months to keep working on it. In the past Edinburgh has felt like a deadline and though the show continues to change after that I am not really working on it in the months that follow (apart from on stage), but it’s quite cool to realise that the Leicester Square date will just be a premiere and then I have time to mould the show further. There’s a chance that the first performance will serve as a final chapter to the 12 shows, commentating on that challenge a bit, whereas the tour show will have to work in isolation. I doubt the shows will be massively different, but you never know.
I had the energy to do some work on Happy Now? today (as well as writing a Metro article about having sex with robots, which might be something that features in the show as well). What I like about taking on a subject for a show is that it forces you to think about something with a focus you don’t usually do. We usually bowl around thinking we know what love, death or happiness are, but when you stop and consider subjects like this, even for a little while, you discover obvious truths that may have escaped you or just hovered around in the periphery of your brain but not zoomed into focus. Given people generally want to be happy, many of us have quite a simplistic view of it. We pursue something that gives us instantaneous happiness or that we think will: like sex, drink, drugs, fame, because these things can give us the high almost instantaneously. But however much these things actually fail to bring about anything more than fleeting joy, we can keep pursuing them for years. Even though we are constantly told that these fleeting things are not really what brings us happiness. We still doggedly try.
We pursue happiness, which is a mistake in itself. Happiness can’t be hunted down like a bewildered and terrified fox. Happiness is a shy ghost that will visit us when the conditions are right, but if we go chasing after it in a van, with a terrified hippy and a talking dog, it’s going to run for the hills. The only ghosts you will find that way are janitors in masks trying to keep you away from the Uranium mine. It’s thrilling to catch them out, but ultimately disappointing because they are not real ghosts. Real ghosts are more elusive. Remember ghosts are a metaphor for happiness there. But you will probably also be happy if you find a real ghost. Unless it’s the type of ghost that eats your face (or even your crisps like the one in Amsterdam).
And possibly happiness is not a state that we can hope to be in for more than a fleeting time anyway. It’s a temporary reward our body gives us to steer us towards wanting to eat and reproduce and be safe. That’s necessarily fleeting, because if we were ever satisfied by getting those things then we wouldn’t bother eating or having sex again. Perhaps we are really searching for a purpose or meaning to our life.
Having kids conveniently gives you a purpose, whilst at the same time meaning you can forget about your own ambitions and transfer them to the next generation. But at least the feelings are real. I have chased fame and success, only to see that these prizes are largely hollow. And that they can’t make you happy because at whatever level you’re at there’s something or someone else higher up to aspire to. "Oooh look at me, I’ve made it, I’m friends with Elton John!†Really, you’re friends with an old man. Where are your friends from school or college or work? This hasn’t validated you. You just look strange.
Anyway, so far, so the conclusion to a Jim Carrey film, but the realisation that happiness and purpose are too different things and that purpose (whilst still possibly illusory) is much more important to long-term contentment is interesting if obvious.
I still haven’t really managed to formulate much of this into stand up and tonight in Balham at a free fringe fundraiser I had intended to plod through the vague stuff I have, but largely chickened out because there was a huge crowd who I felt deserved something a bit slicker for their Friday night out. But I did try a bit and the bit about the voice in my head warning me of the dangers to my daughter is really taking shape, and the robot sex bit went OK too.
