The Frequent Statement

“It must be harder to write clean material?” is an almost cliched statement I get from people        quite often  when I mention to them that I work clean which means no cussing and no sexual jokes.  On occasion a more enlightened individual will correct someone when they make the statement and say, “It shows talent “ which is a true statement.”

It does take more talent and imagination to create material that isn’t vulgar.  As a creative person I didn’t give much thought to the idea of creativity being unusual.  It wasn’t until I started watching psychologist Jordan Peterson’s YouTube videos where he spoke about the  characteristics of creative people.  In his videos he stated creativity is unusual because it’s genetic and it runs very deep.  He gave the example that in the arts, most people catch up to where everybody else has already been.  Meaning that most people imitate creative people who have a new and unique style, in my case comedy.  If Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor were vulgar, imitators are vulgar and if Sam Kinison yells, imitators yell.  The reason imitators imitate is because they’re not even here emotionally, they’re living in the subconscious  or as Carl Jung put it, they’re part of the non-individuated and subconscious herd.

Peterson mentioned a personality test that his organization created called, “Understand Myself.”  It’s based on the Big Five Aspect Scale of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Neurotic-ism, and Openness.  I took the test and I was surprised with the results because I learned something about myself that was important, it reported that with my personality characteristics and I was probably creative and academically I’d be average.  Correct on both findings.  

It helped me to realize that in many cases creative people are freaks, which I’d felt all of my life.  I’d ask myself why  my material is more original and clean compared to other comedians I performed with.  That test helped me realize that I’m more creative than them.

There’s another aspect to creativity that’s even more interesting, it’s the idea, as the famous psychologist Carl Jung found, is the idea of attaining personality or as he put it, individuating and breaking off from the herd.  This is a very solitary and painful process that very few people do in their life, but when a person’s bearable pain becomes unbearable he will see his need to change his life because of unknown potentials he may have and want to develop.

In my case I went to a psychologist for five years and I’m pretty sure I did attain personality because some of the aspects are being an original and being able to use abstract reasoning, which leads to much deeper thinking.  Becoming a true individual allows for autonomous thought because one is not living in the subconscious.  With autonomous thought one becomes able to use his talents to their fullest extent.  Without autonomous thought one is, as Erich Fromm stated in his book The Art of Loving, an automaton, unable to think differently than the herd he surrounds himself with.

In conclusion, may your bearable suffering become unbearable so you decide to change your life.

And remember, please tip your wait staff on your way out.

-The 99 Cent Comedian