Some Thoughts on Identity

Sorry for the lack of content. I have been ill for over three weeks now, stuck at home with my (incredibly gloomy) thoughts. The best I can say is, I’ve had a lot of time for reading.

Today I started reading a short story by Roberto Bolaño, which I have read probably twice before. In the story, the first person narrator submits short stories to competitions under various pseudonyms. I began to think how nice it would be to change one’s name and start a new career as a writer, free from all the controversy and dubious ‘baggage’ one may have acquired from being a minor public figure. You could refuse to ever do public appearances, and deal with all correspondence in writing. In fact this is what happens in a Paul Auster novel I also started rereading, but got bored with. You’d create a sense of mystique, like a less rubbish Banksy, but in reality it would be for the practical purpose of not being associated with your former public transgressions against the ideology of the day.

Well anyway. As I was thinking this, I suddenly realised I had already done something similar in my real life many years ago. It was when I decided to try standup comedy. I was unemployed, lost, and totally miserable. One day I decided to join a local tennis club. The idea was to do one nice thing for myself, to puncture the endless blank days of lonely introspection. It cost £150, which at the time was an enormous sum for me. Not just that, but tennis clubs were an indulgence for ultra middle-class people with money, not weird loners with nothing.

But the tennis club was fun. In hindsight, it seems almost idyllic. I was young and everything still worked, and I got much better at tennis than I had ever been. That, indeed, is one of the central features of playing a lot of tennis. Chatting in the clubhouse one day, one of the regulars mentioned that he was a standup comedian. I had never met anyone who did standup comedy. I had watched it on the TV as a child, but that was the closest I’d ever got. Yet I’d always been obsessed with ‘being funny’. At school my sole aim was making the class laugh. Sometimes even the teachers. This started as early as age ten, and never wavered till I escaped that brutal detention camp known as secondary school (my only relief being the many sitcoms I watched in the evenings, instead of doing homework).

Hence, I found myself replying to my tennis friend that I thought I could do standup. I was somewhat surprised at my own words. I had always told myself that going onstage was something I could never do. Yet here I was, claiming I fancied myself a comedian. This led to me writing some jokes and showing them to him. He actually rated one of two of them, and suddenly the previously impossible seemed possible. Maybe this was something I could actually do.

My friend explained that the best way to start was to do a comedy course. I have barely ever spoken about this course, because it felt like a slightly embarrassing origin story. I’m not sure why. It’s not like there are any shortcuts in standup. Even with some talent, one has to suffer for years, as ‘bombing’ (or, perhaps more fittingly, ‘dying’) is a perpetual hazard for any comic, with the possible exception of a famous comedian performing for their own audience. Though even then it is not unheard of.

So I went to do the comedy course. It was in Camden, in a dingy pub, during a hot May that seemed far less oppressive than the heatwaves we get now (due either to climate change or the delusions of nostalgia). What now strikes me as extremely odd is that I used a made-up name, not just for my onstage persona, but from the first moment of the class, never telling my real name to anyone. Essentially I don’t think ‘Nick Dixon’ could have managed to do this course at the time. He was someone who could never bring himself to get onstage. He only wanted to be a writer of some kind, and knew he was not a performer. His life also felt like it had run into a dead end and was basically over. Thus he had to become someone else in order to carry on, and not just carry on but take this huge leap.

I stuck with the name for quite a long time. I suppose it was actually only a few months, but I did a lot of gigs in that time, and it felt like longer. Eventually I realised I didn’t want to keep the name going, and was able to just be me again. Though a completely different me who had broken through this barrier and was able to do things I never would have believed.

There followed more than a decade of performing onstage. Sharing a bill at the Comedy Store with people like Michael McIntyre (and doing well), appearing on TV, and doing shows in mad places like Dubai for fairly decent sums of money, especially given where I began, terrified of spending £150.

There were other perks, like a new ability to date very attractive women who assumed I was the person they saw onstage being funny and confident in front of hundreds of people. And I suppose I was that person, technically, but he only came out by force of necessity. You simply have to be relaxed, confident and ‘in the moment’ onstage to succeed, so I was. But in all the time I did standup, it never really translated into the offstage me, who remained in some ways the one who could never have got onstage in the first place. It might have been less misleading to have kept the pseudonym after all.

Looking back, I am astonished that I did any of this. Particularly making up an identity, like the protagonist of a postmodern novel. At the same time, I shouldn’t be surprised at all, since I find myself contemplating, if only in daydreams, doing the same thing again.

It could be the nature of a slightly drawn-out illness, which makes one feel like a prisoner staring through bars at all the free people, able to do whatever they want (like eat food) and take it all for granted. This has exaggerated my already solitary, outsider perspective to where I can’t quite see the point of anything I normally do. Politics suddenly appears to be people shouting at each other about nothing. Though the problems remain serious, they naturally look smaller when one is drifting far away from the world.

Losing, for now, the few external points of reference in my life has also exposed the deadening emptiness that has been there for a while, barely kept at bay by work. I could see myself doing a Reginald Perrin (one of the many sitcoms I watched during my school years), faking my own death by running into the sea. I am disturbed to find the character was just two years older than I am now.

One is stuck with oneself. This seems to be the problem (as Eckhart Tolle noted before he achieved enlightenment, which sounds nice). Exacerbated by solitude and illness, in my case, and stultifying routine in Reggie’s. If I get through this I will have to do things differently, though I’m not sure what or how. Unlike the protagonist of Billy Joel’s ‘My Life’, I can’t jack in the job and start doing standup comedy—I’ve already used up that one.

Maybe I could do it in reverse. Change my name and get a normal job, always denying any resemblance to ‘Nick Dixon’ and any controversial statements he may have made. Looking back at that strange summer when I started standup, I wouldn’t put it past me.