How I Found My Funny
As you may or may not know, there are many different types of drag queens. Drag is not just one thing, just as entertainers are not just one thing. I’m a singer who happens to be a drag queen, but there are pageant queens, queens who are models, comedy queens, art house queens, dancing queens and just about everything you can think of.
For a long time, I’ve been in awe of comedy queens. Even among them, there are different subsets of comedy. Bianca Del Rio, for example, is an insult comic, specialising in hilariously scathing put downs, but there are other queens who specialise in all different types of comedy, all the way from glam, hilarious queens like Bianca to the classic pants dames we’ve known for years.
Comedy queens impress me so much because they always seem to be impossibly quick and always have something ready to say, even when something unexpected happens, their improvisational skills are incredible. Comedy is fast, you’ve got to get things in at the right moment or it doesn’t work. I can only dream of being that speedy! Timing is absolutely everything. To be a successful comic, you’ve got to be rather clever and have a very agile mind.
Another thing you’ve got to have is confidence. In abundance. If you deliver a joke and doubt it, the doubt can make it lose its effect, but if you deliver it confidently enough, a good joke is almost guaranteed a laugh. I always think comedians are rather brave and incredibly thick-skinned. There’s so much risk that a joke or a story might not work and the only way to know is to go out there on stage and try it. There’s even the possibility of it working one night then tanking the next night and to have that level of risk takes some balls to do day-to-day! Say what you want, if you think about these factors, comedians are bloody impressive!
The other thing that makes comedy so terrifying for me is that people seem to be quite easily offended these days. It often seems that people now actively look for something to be offended by, especially when certain jokes are thought of as ‘off limits’ now due to them not being exactly politically correct. There are, of course, certain comedians who have made playing with this concept into a career. The act of shocking an audience with something either disgusting or really offensive or inappropriate is where the comedy lies in this instance – there’s that moment of shock before the laugh sets in where you secretly wonder if you're allowed to laugh, but then, you’ll often find yourself enveloped in uncontrollable laughter. Jimmy Carr is a good example of this. I find him absolutely hilarious (and strangely attractive – he’s one of my secret crushes).
Because it’s so easy to get comedy wrong and also because people are so easily offended, plus the complications of not always knowing what crowd you’ll have from one night to the next, it’s hard to put a lot of comedy into my nights, as it’s mostly about the music, but I always get a ouch in there to get a good amount of giggles. I think that when people come to see a drag queen, they expect comedy. This is probably because, in the UK at least, many people’s only knowledge of drag queens is of funny queens and queens like you’d find in Blackpool and Benidorm or other seaside resorts. Drag and camp were often lighthearted and funny in years gone by as that was the depiction of ‘gay’ in entertainment before we were allowed to be shown as actual fully developed humans rather than just stereotyped-to-death comic relief.
So, my knowledge of comedy, as someone on the outside of it, was that it was tough, risky and took great confidence. I was confident in the things I was good at and was good at getting the occasional laugh, but the idea of actually delivering a monologue off the cuff or actually being funny in any great degree terrified me. It was so far out of my comfort zone, I hadn’t really done much of it and it was a daunting prospect. I considered writing a script for a monologue, but that seemed to suck all the fun out of it. Clearly, I’d just have to either scrap it or to not be funny.
I then watched a video where Cher talked about how she goes about doing her monologues. She has a few stories that she comes back to when she feels like it, but doesn’t actually write a set-in-stone monologue and just goes with it, adding drops of comedy into her accounts of memories, which are obviously easy to recount as she lived them. I decided to experiment with this technique – and it seems to have done the trick.
The other thing I’ve decided is that if I’m going to heartlessly mock anyone for a laugh, I’m going to start with myself. If you can’t read yourself, how the hell are you gonna read somebody else, right? And let’s face it, I’m a six and a half foot man, built like a rugby player, in a huge wig, kilo of makeup and a sequin gown – It’s not like I’m short of material to make funny! Plus, when you’re laughing at yourself, you’re much less likely to offend someone! Plus, going with Cher’s advice about pulling out funny and interesting stories from your own past, I’ve got tons of ridiculous stories from my past – most not suitable to put in print, that’s for sure, but plenty to laugh at! Plus, if you say it funnily enough, people might just think it’s a throwaway piece of completely fabricated comedy, so it’s a way of telling a story that may or may not be true – They’ll never know! (It’s also great for covering up an embarrassing story, as if you joke about it in the right way, they’ll end up thinking it’s not actually true!)
Basically, I learned not to take myself too seriously and have a laugh at myself sometimes. And, strangely, when I learned how to do that, the lighter mood carried into the rest of my life too! Generally just being a little more light-hearted and not taking things to heart as much suddenly made me feel, emotionally, so much more at ease. Obviously, I’m not saying to eliminate all capacity for taking things seriously – far from it, but being serious ALL the time and fixating on things or taking too much personally is absolutely exhausting – especially when it’s things beyond your control. Someone I’m very close to spends all her time taking everything that goes wrong to heart, even something falling over in the kitchen or something in the fridge going out of date or the dog pooping on the rug – This keeps her so busy, she’s forgotten how to chill out and everything gets to her. Don’t make this mistake. I see how exhausting it is. All this shit that doesn’t matter just, frankly, doesn’t matter.
The other thing about being able to laugh at yourself is that it diffuses anything people may want to say about you that’s negative. You’re never going to manage to please all the people all the time, so you need to accept that you can’t and just concentrate on the people that matter. As someone who’d suffered with confidence and sometimes still does, negative comments would sometimes get to me, but now that I’ve learned to laugh at myself, anything anyone has to say that’s negative suddenly seems pretty irrelevant. Other people’s opinions of me are none of my business, unless it’s nice. Besides, if I don’t take myself so seriously, people have got to try that much harder to actually offend me. Good luck with that! Newsflash: I know I’m a curvy gal, I know I’m a man in a dress and I know I’m not perfect. I’ve never claimed to be the best at anything, except for being myself. So, if you have something negative to say that’s covered by any of those categories, I KNOW!
It’s actually quite liberating to be self-deprecating sometimes. When I did my first monologue at the dinner show, I told of how it’s my ‘Cher-aversary’ in that a year ago that very night, I was watching her live in Manchester and that I adored the part with the elephant and the following part was inspired by that - “…but due to budgetary concerns, I’ll be playing the role of the elephant tonight.”
Then there was the ‘wardrobe malfunction’ in the Act 1 finale that I talked about in a funny piece a couple of weeks ago. There was no escaping that it happened, so I decided to just own it and work it into the comedy monologue at the start of Act 2. The great thing was, this was a story that everyone had witnessed first hand, so it was personal and funny to them. Owning it took away from it being a mistake and turned into a fun part of the show as well as teaching “…this is why you don’t buy tuck tape from a pound shop.” And to remember “…before every show, you have to make your balls promise to behave or there’ll be no treats before bed.”
So, there’s the lesson I learned fairly recently – and what an impact it’s made! The pressure has been released and I feel much more able to do what I need to do rather than waste time fixating on things I don’t need to worry about. “Don’t borrow trouble” as a good friend of mine would say.
So, have you had a similar realisation? What effect did it have on you? Tell us about a simple realisation that improved your life in the comments and remember…. In a world where you can be anything – Be kind. And don’t forget to smile. Who knows whose day it’ll brighten up. And always, stay safe, stay sane and stay…. Vidalicious!
