embracing sincerity
if you cannot handle me when i am being sincere about mundane tasks and my special interests, you do not deserve me when i crack a silly joke
i had this thought today, and the more i turned it around in my mind, the more i realized that i had a lot to say about it.
now, i realize for a lot of people, it is the other way around: humor on the outside, sincerity on the inside. but i do not have the soul of an entertainer, or a jester. and as a result, i have often felt like a humorless disappointment to others. so for years, i've tried to reverse that. you gotta like me as a person first before i will make jokes.
this isn’t a new realization for me. my ability to stomach irony poisoning, and everything being coated in multiple layers of jokes, has been low for a very long time. like, i survived the 2000s and the 2010s. i am not doing that shit again.
when i was 19 or so, i realized how much i couldn’t stand it all. i hated being reduced to a joke! i couldn’t talk about anything important to me without it being turned into a bit against my will, or being made fun of because no one else knew what to say.
so i decided: no more funny drawings, off-the-cuff jokes, whatever. i avoided making humor a part of my public-facing presence. when i was younger, i definitely went too far, lmfao. i was openly resentful of the fact that audiences and random-passersby connect easier to silly, lighthearted things, instead of the art that i poured my heart into but couldn’t get anyone to look at. the open resentment and frustration was not exactly a good look. because of course it’s easier to connect to strangers with a joke; it’s an icebreaker! that’s not a bad thing.
but it’s just another way that i feel at odds with the world around me. i feel like a wet blanket in a world of clowns. like, this might sound like a weird tangent, but recently i was watching Gravis’s recent video on a weird teleprompter, and at the beginning of the video he says:
just being on the Internet means you’re going to eventually become a professional stand-up comic. like, everybody knows these fuckin terms for comedy. everybody knows what a bit is, everybody knows what it means to workshop a joke, because we’re all convinced that if we tell the funniest zinger, that we’ll somehow make a whole bunch of money and friends and whatnot off it. it’s a nightmare world that we’ve made for ourselves
now, that is specifically in the context of “content creation” being such a widespread aspiration in our modern era. god damn, though, did i grimly chuckle and go “ha hah. yeah.” when i heard that. because i have felt that temptation, that pressure to perform; if i am funny online, then i will get a bigger audience and more eyes on my work, and that means more money!
i can’t do it, though. rather, i don’t want to. i don’t want to make jokes in hopes that people will like me, or throw a dollar into my tip jar. engage with me sincerely! i know that’s the harder option, i know in my heart that it’s a big ask. hell, i feel like this post is gonna be hard to read for a lot of folks. but it’s important to me! it’s a core part of my existence, and i have to be true to myself.