Analogizing

So not much comedy to say, but a comedy discussion. First the day. MM and TPIR and FMW. Isn't it strange how every morning can be summarized with nine letters? Indeed. Sam was off today and we decided to go to the American Indian museum. Apparently the term is now American Indian, not Native American. I think we thought it was ok, but generally a disappointment. It was a small museum for the building it was in, since half was just open and two floors were gift shop and eatery. So there were really only four exhibits. Those were decent, but not exceptional, and I feel like they missed some of the interesting parts. Oh well. We returned home where I did little else for the rest of the day. I made pretty delicious eggplant parm for dinner. Other than that, nothing exciting, though I did find maybe some jokes that came up in conversation.

Anyway, I was thinking how it must seem weird for my three loyal readers to read my blog and see that I don't do very much comedy per se. So I thought I'd create an analogy. The problem with comedy is that you never really know what you have until you perform. And performances are so short, not to mention you're supposed to do some old stuff so they like your new stuff. So if I wrote five new minutes of "material" every day, I would just be frustrated since I could not try it out. The problem is that performance time is at such a premium.

To me, it's a lot like the following situation. Imagine you are learning math from a textbook. The chapter where they explain it is writing comedy, the problem sets are performing, and the feedback on problem sets is analyzing the performance. Now imagine that you can read the textbook as much as you want, but you're only allowed to do one problem a night. Well, you could read the textbook for eight hours a day, but you're not going to be learning much if you don't apply it. When you do the problem, you may know pretty much what is going, or something may trip you up, but that could depend on a misunderstanding, a misreading, you missing a concept, the problem being hard, any number of things. And the response you get is either 0, 1/2 credit, or correct. But 0 doesn't mean it was entirely wrong, you just thought about it the wrong way. 1/2 means room for improvement. But full credit doesn't mean you did it the best way. This is how I feel. I'm not going to sit and read the textbook all day, I'd just be frustrated. I wish there were constantly an audience for me to write for an hour, try out jokes, write for an hour, try out jokes. But I only get to do one problem a night, and I only learn a little bit of information about it. So, that's my analogy, hope you've enjoyed.