P. Kirby’s Reviews > So, Anyway... > Status Update

If you want to understand how the Python group operated, you need to grasp one essential fact: like Graham and I, Michael and Terry and Eric were primarily writers, not performers. So we never argued about the casting. If we had been actors at heart, we would, of course, have been fighting for the best roles.

...the story of an actor who, pausing by a fishmonger's while doing his shopping one morning, and surveying the fish lying on the slab, with their open mouths and dead eyes, suddenly exclaims, "Oh my God? I've got a matinee today!"

True story. Matinee audiences are...odd, weird energy.

Your thoughts follow your mood. Anxiety produces anxious thoughts; sadness begets sad thoughts; anger, angry thoughts; so aim to be in a relaxed, playful mood when you try to be funny.

Writing and performing in these six shows taught me an important creative principle: the more anxious you feel, the less creative you are. Your mind ceases to play and be expansive. Fear causes your thinking to contract, to play safe, and this forces you into stereotypical thinking.

And I learned that when you stop concentrating on avoiding mistakes, you relax a bit, and consequently...you actually make fewer.

Its absence from televisions screens in Weston-super-Mare alarmed my parents (even though they could still hear me every week on I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again). Dad therefore wrote me a letter asking me if I had ever considered applying for a job in the personnel department of Marks & Spencer.

Quite recently I went to see a well-known American stand-up comedian at an arena in San Jose and the audience cheered every joke. They hardly laughed, they just cheered, and punched the air triumphantly. And it occurred to me what a clever young man he was. He had come up with comedy for people with no sense of humor.

The most surprising thing that you begin to learn from audiences is just how much you can get away with. All sorts of mistakes and accidents and horrendous confusions will be happily accepted by the paying public: they will assume they missed something, or that they were being a bit thick, or that the accident was always intended to happen.

I also discovered that I couldn't abide paintings with plump angels with spindly trumpets serenading even plumper ladies with wispy underwear, and that most of the most of the more schematic modern art left me unaffected and puzzled, in a dissatisfying way.

So far as the dancing was concerned, my work needed work. This was the only choreography in the show that involved non-professional dancers so I had high hopes that there would be a couple of basket cases to keep me company. No such luck. The other actors had all clearly done this sort of thing before.
LOL. This is so me. I'm just happy if I'm facing in the right direction when the music stops.