It’s probably no surprise that books by comedians of various forms have better insights on failure than most of the other books I read.
H. Jon Benjamin went so far as to call his book, Failure Is An Option.
He describes failures as “a viable prescription for a better life” and declares failure as his “prevailing life force.”
And none of it sounds fun.
It makes me think that failure is how we stay honest, but humor is how we stay sane.
Just, for the record here - we are celebrating an understanding of the concept of failure and the role it plays, but not denying it of any tragic OR comedic essence.
Failure and humor go hand in hand. As he puts it,
“This is my unique talent: to successfully muck up any plan. It stems from a complex that comes from my taking pleasure in hurting myself, and others, simultaneously. A real Freudian one man band.”
Not exactly fun, see?
But - failure is an inevitable part of life. It’s an inevitable part of trying.
Failure is the resistance by the world, in our faces, that we learn from.
So failure is as much a part of practice as it is performance.
I don’t think we get used to it. Or even comfortable with it. The suck is always there, every time, and the more success you have, the more sucky the failures get, too.
Failing small still sucks, but failing big sucks harder. It’s a paradox like that.
The experience of it, at all scales, is human. You can’t escape it, neither can anyone else, and you can only hope to avoid the worst of it from time to time.
Failure is just always there waiting to sneak up behind us and mess things up.
I know it doesn’t make me feel better, in the moment, to know it’s coming.
Again.
And I also know admitting it’s a part of the experience feels better than ignoring its existence, so I’ll keep seeking out these stories.
Practice means pattern recognition to avoid some future failures. Performing is the reminder, as a high-wire act, that we’ll never escape all failures, so long as we’re alive.
That’s the honest truth.
It’s the same for everyone - so individually we can do our best to making peace with it. It’s the less permanent cousin of dying.
The way Benjamin keeps it as honest as he makes it funny is what counts here. And I can think of no higher purpose than that reminder.
ps. my favorite failure of this book was his repeated attempts to correspond with academics to help back up ideas, who pretty much all eventually turn on him in some way, and then he just publishes the correspondence to both take up space and highlight the experience. Brilliant. And so so funny.
