Being Happy is Death to Comedy…?

I have a problem. A problem that I had never foreseen being an issue:

I AM HAPPY.

Up until now any comedy writing I had done had been linked to the fact I had been single for so long, yet now I am an in a happy relationship I have found I am stuck for material. No wonder the funniest comedians of the past tended to be depressed alcoholics, they had a wealth of tragedy to draw on for their humour; I am so blocked!!

Now I will say I wouldn’t change my boyfriend for the world, and I do love being in a relationship but I wish I could think of things to write about! My loser-in-love material doesn’t really work when I have been sat holding hands with a boy in the audience throughout the first half of the show.

I was feeling a bit down and artistically stifled until the other day when an interesting thing occurred to me after the third gig of the week: there had been a unusual amount of female acts at these gigs (normally comedy open mics are full of men, generally talking about their ‘members’ with pint in hand) and every single one of these ladies had her own take on being single and a looser – my take was that musicals had clouded my view on relationships. So we (lady comics in a sweeping judgement of the open mic circuit) are actually all doing the same material. This made me think:

IT IS TOO EASY.

Talking about why you’re a looser in life and love is just too easy and should be a given if you are a stand-up comic. So actually although I feel blocked and unable to do my old material, perhaps this is a chance to actually think outside the box a bit and come up with some reasonable material that may actually push me forward as a stand-up rather than just a comedienne trying to get boys laughing at them because they never had much luck with the opposite sex growing up. Which is totally what I was doing.

Any comediennes out there reading this and getting cross at me thinking, “well it’s okay for you Miss Happy, I really am a single loser” I am sorry if I offend, I was one of you for 7 years and it really was the fault of Judy Garland, Doris Day and Gene Kelly. I even spent 20K training in musical theatre and mixing with boys that also loved Judy Garland Doris Day and Gene Kelly but ironically they didn’t have any problem finding boyfriends. £450 and a comedy course later I have met someone very nice (who even won’t mind if I make him watch a musical or two, as long as he has time to get to Selhurst) so I clearly was just barking up the wrong trees for a long time. Yes, I made an analogy there in which I was a dog; maybe I haven’t lost all the self-deprecation after all.