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I first wanted to discuss this after I read Patton Oswald's Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, but I just finished Tina Fey's Bossypants and watched this speech by Louis C.K. from a George Carlin tribute, and I think I'm ready to look for patterns.
The problem with describing lightbulb moments is that lightbulbs don't turn out without fixtures, electrical systems, and power plants, but we don't have time to hear about all that stuff. This analogy may not be as obvious I think it is, so to put it another way: there do exist moments where you suddenly understand something you didn't before, and that understanding may have a lot to do with a specific situation or event, but it couldn't happen without groundwork going back years. But it's hard to recognize that groundwork, and there simply isn't time to share all of it. If you want to understand your lightbulb moment, you have to have the self awareness to identify what actually happened, your thought processes, and the factors that made it possible. If you want to share your understanding, you not only have to articulate all of that, but edit it down to a manageable size. This is hard.
Comedians seem pretty good at it, however. Fey and Oswald's books both autobiographical vignettes (C.K.'s speech is just one story). They are, in the best possible sense, a lot like blog posts: here's a thing that happened, with context as appropriate, and it's relevant to later posts in the sense that they're all part of my life, but I'm not going to try to create flow between them. They're all incredibly good at identifying and articulating these important moments and weaving in the context without bogging down the story. Their task is made easier by the fact that they can use humor to hold your interest during parts that are necessary but not inherently entertaining, but I think it's more than that. I think that the skills that make you a good comedian (and I liked all three of these people beforehand, that's why I read their books) overlap a great deal with the parts of emotional IQ that identify emotional growth.
My favorite part of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is Oswald's description of his first time as a headliner. He bombed. The owner yells at him, skips out on paying for his hotel room, and brings in a new comic who just tells jokes the audience can shout the punchline to for nights 2 and 3. You think it's a story of how he gets screwed over and how awful this club owner was, but then he wanders into a mall, watches some people try out for a commercial, and realizes his approach to comedy is completely wrong and he needs to change everything about his act. Louis C.K.'s story is also about realizing that he needed to throw out everything he'd done for the last 15 years and start again. It's an amazing thing to watch.
And even when they're wrong, they're so articulate you still learning something from it. Tina Fey has a section on photoshop, and that she doesn't think it's a problem, because only idiots think that picture of Sarah Palin in an America flag bikini holding a rifle are real. This is technically true, but not a counter argument to the concernthat photoshopping people to an impossible standard of beauty increases the pressure on women to fit an ever narrower standard of beauty (a pressure Fey describes quite accurately in other parts of the book). The more she talks, the clearer it becomes that for her, photoshop means she doesn't have to starve herself quite so much to get on magazine covers. My biggest annoyance watching Fey's semi-autobiographical TV show, 30 Rock, has always been that such an attractive person gets called ugly so often. Putting this chapter and 30 Rock together, you get a picture of a woman who recognizes the beauty standard that's ruining hollywood for women, and really wants to fight it in most places, but would also like to have a career, but doesn't want to compromise her principles, but could spread her principles so much more effectively if she had a bigger stage... etc. It's really interesting. I noticed a similar thing with Joan River's autobiography: the picture you get from it is clearly not the picture she wants you to have, but she's so articulate you get it anyway.
Fey also talks about fighting homophobes and then realizing that deep in her heart she thought gay sex was icky and her internal debate about whether or not to have a a second child. It's startingly honest. I also scared many fellow cyclists with how hard I was laughing during my commute.
The problem with describing lightbulb moments is that lightbulbs don't turn out without fixtures, electrical systems, and power plants, but we don't have time to hear about all that stuff. This analogy may not be as obvious I think it is, so to put it another way: there do exist moments where you suddenly understand something you didn't before, and that understanding may have a lot to do with a specific situation or event, but it couldn't happen without groundwork going back years. But it's hard to recognize that groundwork, and there simply isn't time to share all of it. If you want to understand your lightbulb moment, you have to have the self awareness to identify what actually happened, your thought processes, and the factors that made it possible. If you want to share your understanding, you not only have to articulate all of that, but edit it down to a manageable size. This is hard.
Comedians seem pretty good at it, however. Fey and Oswald's books both autobiographical vignettes (C.K.'s speech is just one story). They are, in the best possible sense, a lot like blog posts: here's a thing that happened, with context as appropriate, and it's relevant to later posts in the sense that they're all part of my life, but I'm not going to try to create flow between them. They're all incredibly good at identifying and articulating these important moments and weaving in the context without bogging down the story. Their task is made easier by the fact that they can use humor to hold your interest during parts that are necessary but not inherently entertaining, but I think it's more than that. I think that the skills that make you a good comedian (and I liked all three of these people beforehand, that's why I read their books) overlap a great deal with the parts of emotional IQ that identify emotional growth.
My favorite part of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is Oswald's description of his first time as a headliner. He bombed. The owner yells at him, skips out on paying for his hotel room, and brings in a new comic who just tells jokes the audience can shout the punchline to for nights 2 and 3. You think it's a story of how he gets screwed over and how awful this club owner was, but then he wanders into a mall, watches some people try out for a commercial, and realizes his approach to comedy is completely wrong and he needs to change everything about his act. Louis C.K.'s story is also about realizing that he needed to throw out everything he'd done for the last 15 years and start again. It's an amazing thing to watch.
And even when they're wrong, they're so articulate you still learning something from it. Tina Fey has a section on photoshop, and that she doesn't think it's a problem, because only idiots think that picture of Sarah Palin in an America flag bikini holding a rifle are real. This is technically true, but not a counter argument to the concernthat photoshopping people to an impossible standard of beauty increases the pressure on women to fit an ever narrower standard of beauty (a pressure Fey describes quite accurately in other parts of the book). The more she talks, the clearer it becomes that for her, photoshop means she doesn't have to starve herself quite so much to get on magazine covers. My biggest annoyance watching Fey's semi-autobiographical TV show, 30 Rock, has always been that such an attractive person gets called ugly so often. Putting this chapter and 30 Rock together, you get a picture of a woman who recognizes the beauty standard that's ruining hollywood for women, and really wants to fight it in most places, but would also like to have a career, but doesn't want to compromise her principles, but could spread her principles so much more effectively if she had a bigger stage... etc. It's really interesting. I noticed a similar thing with Joan River's autobiography: the picture you get from it is clearly not the picture she wants you to have, but she's so articulate you get it anyway.
Fey also talks about fighting homophobes and then realizing that deep in her heart she thought gay sex was icky and her internal debate about whether or not to have a a second child. It's startingly honest. I also scared many fellow cyclists with how hard I was laughing during my commute.
