Yes, the walls of my hovel are lined with forewords. Stern Plastic Owl has five forewords in it. People don't generally see books, even funny ones, as performance but that's exactly what mine is. Stand-up and funny books come from a similar internal reservoir though. Which is freeing rather than limiting if you look at it the right way instead of trying to look spontaneous, I can show my workings and signpost the graft if I want to. In books, you aren't quite allowed that illusion because the reader knows you're sitting at a desk, pouring literary science and hope into getting things right. Stand-up is often well-crafted but it has a loose vibe that's supposed to sound spontaneous. My page persona wears a suit and looks like an Aubrey Beardsley illustration or maybe a bit like one of those Nagel paintings from the '80s, but I secretly write in my pants and a fez, a crescent of testicle peeking playfully out. Well, you can do live comedy in your pyjamas too, but only if it works with your stage persona. The highest form of human activity is the shenanigan.Īside from generally being unable to hear the booing, what other benefits does writing prose comedy have over performing live comedy? There are little bridging tendons - recurring characters and phrases - that connect the pieces together. I usually post early drafts to my blog and I sometimes get the finished pieces into magazines, but their natural habitat is really a book. There's just something magical about the format of 800 words about basically anything but trying to make it into something original. It's fun!Īs to why? Well, I've been writing short pieces like these for years. There's usually a single joke at the core of each piece, which I lean into or subvert or just play around with. Short essays and stories with a bit of a cheeky wink to them, like you'd see in old essay collections by S. What is it about? And why have you squeezed out such a thing? Image shows from L to R: Robert Wringham, Gabriel Featherstone. I am Robert Wringham as you well know, and I have made a book. While David Sedaris is the reigning champ of humour writing today, Wringham's equivalent essays distinguish themselves by being shorter and more savage, and far, far sillier. His latest collection, Stern Plastic Owl, is out now and it includes some wonderful "nonecdotes" from his self-confessed idle life as well as a side-splitting rumination on the private life of H G Wells. He rubbed shoulders with Simon Munnery and Stewart Lee for a book about Cluub Zarathustra, and lent his humorous tone to a pair of well-received anti-self-help books called Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves. He was shortlisted for Canada's Leacock Medal for Humour and two of his books are published by Go Faster Stripe, that niche producer of rarified and high-minded comedy. Robert Wringham is a lesser known, off-the-beaten track sort of humourist but his credentials are impressive. Then rage guit on G Rank Plesioth or whatever and play the newer games that have more fair hitboxes, smoother controls and what not (although they also lose some of what made the series great, some item gathering and pre-mission preparation becomes inconsequential and unnecessary etc.).Comedian and long-term admirer Gabriel Featherstone talks to humourist Robert Wringham about his latest book, Stern Plastic Owl. It's like people proclaiming you need to use a right hand claw nowadays to have constant access to both the right stick and the face buttons or something, that's just silly overkill and not something you need (or need elite controllers and back paddles to replace the face buttons to do this that way, lol). Maybe you won't speedrun the monsters like an expert Japanese player that way, "wasting" 0.5 seconds for that camera turning instead of dpsing all day every day (although at that skill level you wouldn't need the claw still anyway, you could play it blindfolded and know exactly what the monster is about to do and how you should counter it instinctively anyway, lol, I really dunno why people proclaim the claw was ever something you need to play), but you won't get carpal tunnel. Have fun, ignore the claw stuff and just play handling it like a human, you don't need constant camera control in the game, the camera recenter button is more than enough after you get into it, you'll just adjust character direction for a split second, recenter the camera to look where you want, then carry on to the original direction you wanted to go and/or adjust based on what the monster is doing.
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