Stay on target

At the start of this year, I set myself three comedic targets and am only likely to meet two of them with the days of 2014 now dwindling.

As Meatloaf once said, two out of three ain’t bad. At least, I’ve been informed that it was Meatloaf who said this, but I have never heard this particular song. My knowledge of Meatloaf’s back-catalogue is fairly limited to the greatest hits of his greatest hits, and his brief cameo in Rocky Horror. And don’t blow this all out of proportion on social media and claim that I’m slagging off Meatloaf, because I’m not. I do not wish to enter a public feud with Meatloaf, it would just be unnecessary.

Out of the three targets, it is the one of doing 200 gigs that I look set to fail. Mathematically, this could still be achieved if I were to do five gigs a day for the rest of the year.

I am currently on about 130 gigs for the year, which is roughly my annual average. However, I am including gigs that range in length from my phenomenal 20 seconds at the Comedy Store gong show, to the hour-long Fringe shows in this tally.

I was pinning a great amount on being able to do a good chunk of these during Edinburgh Fringe. But when Edinburgh came around, I actively did fewer gigs than I had booked to avoid exhausting myself or feel an urge to drink.

But what is the point of having targets if you’re always going to hit them? I don’t know what sort of an excuse this is, but I like it.

The second of my targets was to write 30 minutes of new stand-up material, and I probably have done this, even if I have dropped large sections of it. I wrote a massive amount for my Edinburgh show and didn’t have time for about half of it. I have achieved this goal, so there. I also said nothing about the 30 minutes of new material actually needing to be any good.

My other target was to write one new joke every day and put it on Twitter under #Joke365. I was regretting doing this by the 2^nd of January. Nevertheless, I have managed to keep it going even, if I have had to bend the rules slightly by letting me still eligible to write the previous day’s joke at 6am the next day before I properly wake-up.

The proportion of jokes that have actually made it into my set is probably much lower than the 10% that I thought would be decent.

The point behind all these targets, whether or not I actually achieved them, was to force me to improve as a comedian. I think I have done that over the past 12 months, but the year is not yet through and I may dramatically regress.