I was never cool.

I don’t have a cool bone in my body.

I wouldn’t know the zeitgeist if it came up and bit me in a trendy place.

Recently, I’ve noticed that a lot of things that being me genuine joy and inspiration, have been derided in wider media circles as being cringe or losery-loser type things.

Joy is not cool. It’s too wide-eyed and open-hearted. When you wear your emotions on your sleeve, you’re a target. It’s so much easier to tear something down than build it up (test this out for yourself on some curtains).

There’s a certain virulent strain of cool that defines itself not by what it is but by what it is NOT. I hate that shit.

That’s why I love improv. Improv is decidedly not cool.

It relies too much on trust and optimism, support and empathy. It never stood a chance.

And if you wear a cool leather jacket on stage, it really constricts your movements and severely limits your space work.

Those are the main reasons.

And here’s another:

Comedy is for the loser.

The audience roots for the underdog.

The more you strive to be funny or clever or witty, the less the audience will think you’re any of those things.

This is a good little rule to know. Because often on stage, people act like they would in real life. They try to build themselves up by denigrating others.

And the more someone does that to you, the stronger you get.

I once asked a bunch of middle managers at a Fortune 500 company to mime a tug-of-war. Three minutes later they were still there, feet locked, knees bent, pulling and sweating. Some of them had taken their jackets off due to the effort.

No one was willing to lose. And so the scene stretched on and on, unchanging.

At the end I asked:

Why didn’t you make the choice to lose? Do you think winning had anything to do with the size of your muscles or the strength of your will power?