Rob Gilroy: Making A Stand #2

Despite bluntly stating how unqualified I was for this position last week; I’m back. If you ask me they’re fools for doing it but don’t let on.

Like most comedians, I have a Twitter account. We all do these days. It’s like colour TVs in the 60s or syphilis on board trawler boats. If you don’t have a Twitter account as a comedian, then you’re nothing. Well, you’re not nothing – that would imply that by ignoring social media you have rendered yourself as non-existent which opens up a whole can of existential worms that I’m not really qualified (or bothered) to deal with. What I’m saying is; the belief seems to be that if your comedy remains un-Twitted then you’re missing out on a wealth of exposure. Like Katie Price in a dark room. That might just be wishful thinking.

I joined Twitter nearly four years ago for the same reason most people do – I didn’t know what the hell it was. Early descriptions of it suggested it was like receiving a text message from your favourite celebrities. I tend to struggle getting replies from people that occasionally invite me out to the pub when I behave as it is, so I had no intention of being snubbed by the likes of Jane Middlemiss or that bloke that used to be in Neighbours once upon a time. I joined out of curiosity and far from it killing my cat – which is actually alive and well – it did stoke my fires of interest. (Apologies for the mixed metaphors but I tend to work from the position that if you use enough of them, they conceal how little content there is.)

So I stayed, occasionally checking back to see what Stephen Fry was up to or what colour socks Rob Brydon was wearing and suddenly I realised – I should probably write something. Joining Twitter just to read it is a bit like being invited to a party and spending the evening looking at the soft furnishings – which I’ve also done but I can tell you is not quite as fun – so I started ‘Tweeting’ as the kids are wont to say. At first it was about how little I had tweeted, and then it became about how each tweet was a thinly veiled attempt to up the number of tweets I had twittered. But with each new post I became increasingly hooked on writing nonsense to an audience of three – one was a graphic designer from Canada and two were girls who seemed to want to find a man, any man, they weren’t too fussy but when you give yourself the Twitter handle of @cumOnBigBoi83 then you’re sort of admitting you’ve got a very lax open door policy.

I carried on tweeting every day, most of it utter rubbish but then I found – and here is, in my opinion, the most useful aspect of Twitter to a comedian – that I became hooked on condensing every joke or utterance into 140 characters. Now as someone who likes to write a lot of jokes that is a great discipline to have. One of my major loves of joke writing is taking a joke way past the point of funny into the mundane, which I find hilarious but other seem not to. I think that explains a lot about me. Nevertheless with Twitter I was exercising my comedy muscles daily and having to constantly rework and rewrite jokes to fit that small rectangular box – I sincerely recommend it to anyone wanting to get better at joke writing. That and avoid my rule about making jokes long and mundane.

However, over the last year or so I have found myself falling out of love with Twitter and the main reason for this is because it’s seen as such a good outlet for comedians. The things I write, by and large, are not ‘jokes’ per se (lets skip past the fact I used ‘per se’ like a nob) they’re more like silly little comments or observations. I only make this distinction because there are a great many joke writers on Twitter who churn out brilliant puns and beautifully crafted one-liners at an impressive rate, and with whom I cannot possibly compete. This is what brings me to my inner quandary – Twitter, for me, started as a bit of fun to impress no one but, over the last couple of years, I’ve been very fortunate to see my follower count rise to around 400. Not a massive amount by most standards, certainly not big enough to increase the odds of bumping into them in Wicks, which is probably for the best because some of them are a little unhinged, but enough to feel like some people are reading what I write.

As soon as I saw those numbers go up I was suddenly hit with a wealth of responsibility I didn’t feel good enough to live up to. I found myself not writing certain things for fear that it wasn’t funny, second guessing who was going to read what and agonising over phrasings to the point where the joke would loose all humour. It was a very strange feeling. And couple with the fact that everywhere these days is the idea of social media being the perfect outlet for comedians, writers, artists – and every creative person under the sun (except spoon benders; they’ve had their day) Twitter started to feel more like work. With every tweet I wrote or reply I sent I started to feel like it should all be leading to something but I didn’t know what. I wouldn’t put bits of my act on there because it would be like giving it away for free, so what was I putting up and what did it say about me? In the end I didn’t know the answer, so I withdrew from it.

Not too long ago, I had a similar feeling toward performing stand up. The idea of having to progress and develop scared me because it felt like something I had to keep monitoring. When I first started it was all about writing things that made me laugh and seeing if they made other people laugh too. But somewhere along the line it started to feel like there was a right way and a wrong way. This is not something I wish on any comic or Twitter-er and probably says more about my inability to cope under pressure then it does about anything else, but I wanted to write it down because I think it’s worth bearing in mind. I’m only now starting to get back into the swing of things – both onstage and online – just trying to do what I enjoy and what makes me laugh. I have tried to avoid thinking about things like exposure or progression because, as much as I want to do well and succeed, the main thing I want is to keep doing funny things and enjoying it. And if I’m not enjoying it then it’s not worth doing.

All that said, if you do want to follow Rob on Twitter you can find him at @RobGilroy or his alter ego, Jerry Bucham, at @JerryBucham – it’s a simple as that really.