Alex Kealy chats to Katerina Partolina Schwartz about his latest show, The Fear, and dissects this particular hour as well as his own writing process and how it relates to comedy.
Being hyperanalytical is a comedy superpower
What is the elevator pitch for your show?
There’s a sort of trope about comedians being either golfers or hyper-anxiety people and I’m definitely category two. I’m an overthinker, so that’s the personal element and then it’s trying to marry that in terms of some big ideas about fear and what our society’s relationship with that is sociologically and politically, and maybe a bit anthropologically about the purpose that fear operates in and is it all bad. I’m currently brewing some of that; I would say the recipe’s all chopped up, the ingredients are all chopped, but I’m still stewing exactly what the big takes are. So it might be, check in with me about the 3rd of August about that.
What has your writing process been like with this?
I’m still someone who kind of congeals jokes from just being in the world, I think it’s always like, “What do I care about and what interests me?” and that’ll spark an idea, and that might spark a funny thing about it, or even if it’s not funny, I’m like, “That’s an interesting thought, there must be a way to pivot this comedically.” I suppose a lot of things that are happening in my life where there are those moments of growth and transformation like getting married to someone and then looking ahead. So there’s more I’m thinking about different things on a personal level that I’ve felt before, carrying out an active commitment to someone else, which is a big step and it’s a really exciting step, and that’s an interesting terrain.
Over the years, you have tackled a number of big entities and questions in your shows. What entity are you ‘taking down’ this time?
It’s currently a bit more of a personal show basically. The entity at the moment I’m trying to tackle is my own self-doubt and anxiety, which I am/ will be connecting to larger political themes at the moment. I don’t expect that it’s going to be a show that’s fully critical of fear; an idea that I’m interested in is there are paradoxically, I think a lot of good things that exist in our society stem from fear as much as they do hope. You could argue, liberal democracy could be seen as a product of the fear of authoritarianism. Of course, hope is better than fear, but is there perhaps useful fear and useless fear; we don’t want the fear of the ‘other’, that’s bad. But the fear of, you know, a personal organization or groups that might seek to use arbitrary power on us, that’s a good fear to have. Some positives freedoms we have flow from a negative fear originally.
So just to clarify, are you almost metagaming and overanalysing your tendency for over analysis?
I think so, I mean hopefully it’s sort of an attempt to by shining a light on it. Being hyper analytical is a comedy superpower in the sense that - not something I have - I think most comedians have that. Observational comedy is like taking a thing that we all know and then analysing it to the point that you generate additional insight or knowledge on it in a way that when revealed to the audience is like, “Oh I didn’t realise that I also knew that.” I think observational, “I didn’t realise I already knew that” is what the laugh is in the audience. Obviously, you get bad observational comedy which is like, “Oh I already knew that,” which serves as recognition comedy. It’s the difference between like I don’t know - I won’t do a negative example - but sometimes it’s like, “Do you remember x?” I would say is bad observational comedy, whereas Michal McIntyre’s – I’m not saying he’s my favourite comedian in the world – but I'd say, you know, McIntyre's like Man Drawer bits or whatever or like a whole bunch of bits where it’s like, “Oh yeah we do do that, I didn’t realise I already knew that,” is the dream with observational comedy. So, the capacity to overanalyse situations to the point that you start generating that insight on stuff that we, it’s not taking things as read I suppose, so if you take something as read you’re unlikely to be able to generate some comedic insight from it. Questioning, that’s what comedic over analysis is in my mind.
How does this show relate to your other stand-up hours?
Well, you know there’ll be elements of it particularly connecting it to my 2019 show which is about rationality, and about how we’re all irrational and rationality is this after the fact excuse that we have for impulses. It’s a mix, on that, I don’t believe that we’re fully rational, so some of it is about that. Our tendency to undermine ourselves ( that’s the sort of personal stuff). I can see that that’s the show that I’d probably be most thinking about from my previous stuff.
What do you hope audiences take away from this show?
A critique I occasionally have had from even friends or whatever is like the, ‘Who is Alex Kealy?’ basically because sometimes in some shows maybe I’m a vehicle for whatever idea or joke I might have, but are you seeing me or is that the sort of person I am? And I’ve done nominally revealing material about myself in the past for sure that’s personal or spicy, but maybe done it at more of a distance in a sort of attempt to more directly connect with the audience. Maybe a greater connection to me than perhaps in previous shows.
