The Indigo Hole
Added 2017-06-02 06:38:12 +0000 UTCOne of the most enjoyable things about writing for SBS Comedy is learning new things.
Having a deadline for jokes is basically the only way I am productive - I need someone else to be relying on me to get that drive to create out of the realm of amorphous and inspired into actual utility.
I mistrust inspiration as a source for creativity, because it's unreliable. It alternates between being a fountain of new work, and the grating feeling of trying to gather a cup of water by scraping condensation off a small window.
While it's my primary source of income, I need to have deadlines to enable me to tap that fountain with a pump, and produce regular content on demand.
Being given a topic and a time that I need to have funny things done means also that I can reach beyond what's already in my head to find humour in new things.
This week it was New Age science, and the (is it a religion?) belief in otherworldly powers, evolved humans and Indigo children. I'm wary of making fun of other people's beliefs (interestingly enough, it's something Buddhist philosophy articulates as useless and self-defeating, and I have internalised that), so I didn't want to go in all hard-skeptic, cynical and snarky. On the other hand, both comedy and word-count limits rely on condensing, simplifying, and trivialising content - so it was a difficult line to walk.
Bits of it are very appealing, and it clearly helps a lot of its proponents feel good, and do good for others. All the nice stuff is nice. And there's definitely more in the universe than we know, so to acknowledge that is probably worthwhile even if to pretend to know things for certain that you only feel in amorphous inarticulate ways is probably futile. But equally it much of it seems quite self indulgent, self congratulatory and occasionally predatory of people's need to feel special. I don't know, really.
On the bright side, now I know a lot more about something I didn't know about before, so that's good!
Chiz
A
