The tyranny of the template

Paul F. Tompkins: "This is what I do, and it goes like this, and then you start trying to just refill that template over and over again, and you’re like, I hate doing comedy!'"

Rose Matafeo on Paul F. Tompkins’ “Peanut Brittle”:

“I attribute most of my comedy and taste in style to this routine. I learned so much about rhythm from Tompkins. Great stand-up requires an equal balance of strong performance and strong writing. When you see the perfect alchemy of those, it feels like actual magic. I love Tompkins for all the reasons I love comedy: He makes the obscure or niche into something relatable with stupid voices, shouting, and celebration of shared human experience. That’s comedy, baby.”

Such a glorious bit. Shows how if you go deep enough into a silly premise, you can achieve absurd gold.

In this interview with Jesse David Fox, PFT gets super honest about therapy, taking a break from standup, the biz, etc. Also, there’s a great breakdown of his superb "Peanut Brittle" bit.

PFT on being okay with failure:

Honestly, the biggest lesson for me was being okay with that failure because I’ve always had a perfectionist’s streak, a control problem, and it would bum me out when things that I wanted to do, things that I would put onstage in a show, didn’t work. When there are a lot of moving parts and if a thing did not get pulled off properly, it made me mad. It made me mad to have to rely on other people in that way. It made me mad that I wasn’t able to communicate the thing that I wanted to communicate adequately enough. It made me mad that I only had one shot at it, and I couldn’t do it again, and it didn’t work the way I wanted it to work. So doing characters and doing improv — that’s the whole thing that’s built into it: Sometimes it’s not going to work, and you have to be okay with it and move on to the next thing. Not only do you have to move on in the moment, but after it’s done, you have to shake it off and take what you can from it as a learning experience and apply it to the next time you do it…

On joking about heavy topics:

There’s nothing like when you hear a laughter of recognition about a heavy thing. It is so cathartic.

On how he comes up with material:

I have to sit and think, What has been sticking in my mind? What is a thing that has happened? What is a thing that I’ve observed? I have to let myself be open to it not being a perfect comedy idea.

Photo: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Contour RA/Contour RA by Getty Images.

On “the tyranny of the template”:

There’s a thing that I call “the tyranny of the template,” which is when you think you’ve figured out, This is what I do, and it goes like this, and then you start trying to just refill that template over and over again, and you’re like, “I hate doing comedy!” I’m putting myself in a box, and that’s why I’m angry at it — but I’m in control of the box! I’m the one who’s building the box, and so it can be whatever I want it to be. But I have to remind myself of it because when you get into a groove with a template, you’re like, This is great! Then after a while, when you’ve kind of learned that thing, it becomes boring, and you don’t want to do it anymore. I have to be vigilant about that because I can talk myself into thinking, I don’t like doing this thing anymore — when in reality, I don’t like the way I’m doing it right now.

On fighting bitterness:

The real thing you have to fight against, though, is bitterness because that’s the end. That’s the absolute end. It feels bad, it looks bad, it’s terrible. For me, I have to be really vigilant because I have friends that I can trust, and we can blow off steam, but I have to be very mindful of, like, Am I doing this too much? Am I taking too much delight in this person’s downfall? That’s not about any one person — like, if somebody didn’t get what they wanted, it’s like, Am I too happy about that? Or, Am I too much enjoying shit-talking behind somebody’s back because I’m jealous of what they have? If it used to be, That should be me, now it’s more like, Well, that was never gonna be me, so I might as well make fun of this person.

The full interview.