One of my favourite comedians is a fairly unknown Glaswegian man who goes by the name of Limmy. He’s fairly famous in Scotland, less so in the rest of the UK, and I imagine he falls somewhere between unknown and maximally niche to the rest of the world. However, he’s one of my favourites because he’s kind of the full package, for me. I don’t mean that in a weird, inappropriate way — hear me out. His humour ultimately revolves around a kind of absurd storytelling. When you hear something like that, along with the fact I earlier used the words “maximally niche”, you would be forgiven for thinking he was some hauty, intellectual type that is only funny in a very specific, academic way. No, his humour is surprisingly down to earth, which makes the title of his autobiography an apt description of himself. Of course, that’s not the title because he intended to describe himself. It refers to an ongoing Twitter joke he has, wherein upon the death of any public figure, he tells his half a million followers that he met them at a charity do once, and that they were surprisingly down to earth, and very funny. He does it without fail for anybody famous enough, and he has a large enough following that it occasionally gets picked up by news outlets and broadcast morosely in serious contexts. This is the kind of thing he finds hilarious. So he decided to name his autobiography for the joke, as a morbid reference. Of course, he will die some day, and here he is naming his autobiography after a joke centred on the deaths of public figures. When he dies, the title of his autobiography will both harken back to this absurd joke of his while genuinely being true of him. That’s the kind of humour the guy operates with.
Perhaps that excessively long opening paragraph won’t convince you that he’s worth checking out. If so, fair enough. I’ll move on. Another part of Limmy’s appeal is his apparent lack of a personal filter. Of course, he has boundaries when it comes to private information and anything in connection with his family, but when it comes to his personality or thoughts, he is as forthcoming as it gets. A lot of us go through life eminently unsure of what we’re doing; we feel lost and lonely in our lostness. The condition isn’t helped because the default stance required to survive in our culture is to pretend to know what you’re doing, so we all end up suffering an illusory effect: everyone else seems to have it figured out, but because we know our own minds, we know we don’t. It’s people like Limmy who are our saving graces. They come out with it straight: they are clueless, everyone else is clueless, we’re all winging it, and we’re not always very good at winging it. This is what makes the autobiography worth reading. Its “raison d’etre” was meant to be to talk about mental health stuff, and it kind of does, but I submit that it is strongest for the fact that it shows you a normal guy who has fucked up, succeeded, fucked up some more, and is just plugging away at it. He’s like any of us (except, of course, with a better knack for weaving a funny story), and that makes us feel less alone.
The best parts of the autobiography, therefore, are the parts where he talks about feeling weird, different, like a fuck-up, but also when these are juxtaposed with the normal facts of life like getting a job, having sexual or romantic troubles (and successes), not getting on with your flatmate, and trying not to become destitute. Ironically, I think the part most worthy of negative criticism is probably when he is talking directly about mental health stuff — the reason the book was asked to be written in the first place. There’s a bit where he talks about going off antidepressants cold turkey, but he doesn’t really dwell on why this might not be such a good idea, and how some people end up dying thinking they can suddenly go off their mental health medication. He doesn’t advocate doing it, but he talks about it in a fairly neutral way, like there’s no real danger to it.
Outside of that, however, I think the book’s great. It reads like a chronological collection of anecdotes surrounding the theme of being a bit of a weirdo, and sometimes that’s just what we need: a reminder that other people are as wonky as we are.