Written by Chloe Fimiano (@chloefimiano.freak on IG)
“Beauty is short-lived tyranny” is something Socrates once said – and then someone repeated it on a podcast and that is how it trickled into my brain. It’s true though isn’t it? To be young and conventionally beautiful feels like being handed a blank check, especially in the digital age.
Now – with the tik-tokification of stand-up comedy, I fear there are large swaths of burgeoning comedians growing more and more discouraged by the shiny new packaging of an art-form that was once fueled by cocaine, freaks, and dark sketchy rooms.
For the sake of everyone’s time – I’ll forgo the age-old debate of whether or not hot people can be funny. Hot people are here to stay, and as much as I actively try to avoid friendships with the symmetrically blessed – some of them have grown on me. I even consider some of them close personal friends, and much to my chagrin, funny is funny, even coming from their stupid, genetically blessed faces. But at times I find myself wanting to ask them – Why can’t being funny be our thing? Just us freaks.
Speaking on behalf of every millennial who was called an “old soul” in high school – if you don’t know – being an “old soul” was a formal diagnosis for certain students in the mid-aughts. To qualify you had to be so palpably unpopular that your teachers pulled you aside and vowed that adulthood would be the promised land in which you and your fellow misfits will finally rule and be praised for your quirkiness and intellect.
For many of us who fell into this subculture – humor became the get-out-of-jail-free pass we kept in our back pockets to protect ourselves from the crime that was being uncool. Before we ever went to an open mic we learned to roast, we understood timing, and we learned to play offense in every conversation – an intro to crowdwork. The desperate need for comedic relief became the sturdy foundation we now attempt to build a standup career on. Then, when we finally stumbled into our first open-mic and handed another lunatic 5 dollars for 5 minutes we were blessed with a brief wave of optimism.
For a moment we believed that all the discomfort and awkwardness that came with just being alive in our own skin might find a home in the artform that is stand-up comedy. Only to be soon foiled by the dark overlord that is The Algorithm. (Algorithm if you’re listening I love you and I don’t mean any of this.) After polling my fellow comics, comedy in the digital age seems to be summed up this way: Just like trying to get a bartender’s attention at a trendy bar, it really helps if you’re hot, but eventually you will get served.
In other words: “Don’t worry, it’ll be better when you’re older. Sure, the popular kids are killing it now – but think of how good you’ll be at the craft of standup comedy in ten years.” (Sorry the last sentence is actually just my personal TM mantra I paid ten-thousand dollars for.)
So here we are yet again, we, the less shiny, clinging to the belief system, still, that one day we will be seen the way we always wanted to be. I mean in all honesty, I’m not convinced this internet thing is going to last; personally, I’m going to wait until Al Gore puts the kibosh on the whole “world wide web” thing and keep telling jokes in the meantime.
Another, more chicken-soup for the soul solution is perhaps we change a narrative we’ve been holding onto for too long. Instead of doing what our underpaid teachers encouraged us to do all those years ago, which was essentially rooting for the demise of the beautiful and popular, we just focus on ourselves and the stories only we can tell.
