I'm a Joke and So Are You by Robin Ince

Author:Robin Ince
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

It’s hard to surface feeling gleeful from that. Obviously, it is a favourite of Morrissey.

I once wrote a gloomy, self-mocking blog about why I felt it was necessary to resign from stand-up. At this point a journalist contacted me and asked if I would do an interview for a glossy magazine that was more aftershave adverts than content. He had seen in the blog many doubts and fears that rang true with him, too. Unfortunately he got me on a good day, so the interview was not interesting enough to appear. Our coffee-shop conversations were timed terribly, as I had returned home and, rather than feeling exhausted in a Brisbane hotel 10,000 miles away, as I had been when I wrote the original resignation blog, I could only give the journalist a light froth of cheery thoughts, and of sometimes feeling a tad miserable when staring at dressing-room light bulbs. It was too mundane for print. The ‘real me’ lacked melodrama, agony and anxiety. I was the happiest I had been in a long while, and so could not believe that I had possibly been wretched.

Brendon Burns is a comedian and a wrestling fan, producing podcasts and live shows with his professional wrestler pal, Colt Cabana. I don’t know if he has ever seen the Monty Python sketch in which Colin ‘Bomber’ Harris, played by Graham Chapman, goes into the wrestling ring to try and defeat himself. I think he would enjoy it. Brendon found himself in a similar battle with himself, though one that ended up in a clinic, rather than with an ovation at the Hollywood Bowl.

He experienced a premature mid-life crisis when, in his late thirties, he battled with what he saw as the contradictions between his loud, booze-filled and drug-fuelled rebel comic pose and his quieter, thoughtful, more caring role as a dad with responsibilities. Each night at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, the two personalities would duel. The drama of the act was balanced on who would win: the sober one or the raging id?

At the end of the first run of his show, Brendon Versus Burnsy, he collapsed sobbing and it was clear that an hour a night in front of a paying audience was not going to be enough therapy to sort out this particular psychological issue. Dealing with the issue would go on to become a trilogy of monologues spread over two years, but it didn’t conclude even then. Near the end of the worst of the feud between himself, Brendon/Burnsy found himself taking magic mushrooms, caterwauling and climbing towards the big-top rafters of the Glastonbury Festival cabaret tent.

A documentary was made of Brendon’s highest highs, including the moment at Glastonbury that was his tipping point, but the producers decided it might have been to Brendon’s detriment if it saw the light of day, and it remains a locked-up curio, the secret footage of a mind at the end of its tether. Whilst Brendon fell for the mythic image of the rebel outsider

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