by Started with genuine, earnest intentions. Ended somewhere considerably sillier. No notes.
Sat down this morning with genuinely earnest intentions to write something properly serious for once, a considered, thoughtful piece about a subject I actually care about deeply, no jokes, no bit, simply honest, direct commentary the way I occasionally tell myself I should attempt more often given how relentlessly comedic most of my usual output tends to be. I lasted, by my own honest accounting, roughly one and a half paragraphs before the whole thing collapsed sideways into a joke I genuinely could not resist making, and from that point on the piece simply refused to stay serious no matter how hard I tried steering it back.
I think there is something genuinely worth examining in why that keeps happening, since this is far from the first time I have set out with sincere intentions and ended up somewhere considerably sillier than planned. My honest theory, turning it over properly for the first time in this diary entry, is that comedy has simply become my actual default register for processing difficult or complicated subjects, the way some people default to careful analysis or others default to pure emotional description. Jokes are, for me, apparently the first tool I reach for when trying to make sense of something genuinely complicated, which means any piece I approach with the explicit goal of avoiding jokes entirely is, in some sense, fighting against my own actual thinking process rather than simply choosing a different stylistic register.
That is not, I want to be clear, an excuse for laziness or an unwillingness to occasionally attempt something more straightforwardly serious. I do think there is real value in being able to write plainly and directly when a subject genuinely calls for it, and I have watched colleagues whose work I deeply admire manage exactly that kind of tonal range considerably more successfully than I currently do. But I think today taught me something useful about not fighting my own instincts quite so hard when they keep pulling reliably in the same direction, and instead perhaps working with that instinct more deliberately rather than treating every comedic detour as an accidental failure of my original serious intent.
The piece that eventually emerged, several hours and one entirely abandoned serious draft later, ended up being, if I am honest, considerably better than the earnest version I originally set out to write, sharper, more specific, and genuinely more effective at actually making the underlying point I had wanted to make in the first place, simply delivered through a comedic frame rather than a straightforwardly serious one. My editor read it this afternoon and said, with what I choose to interpret as genuine approval rather than simple relief that I had produced something publishable at all, that this was exactly the kind of piece she had actually wanted from me, even though it looked nothing like what either of us had originally discussed.
I think the lesson here, such as it is, is less about comedy being inherently superior to sincerity as a mode of address, and more about the genuine value of noticing, honestly, which specific tools actually work for you rather than forcing yourself into a register that sounds, on paper, more serious or more impressive but that does not actually match how your own mind genuinely processes the material you are working with.
Tomorrow I might try the serious piece again, properly, with slightly more deliberate effort to actually hold the line this time. Or I might simply accept that comedy is where my actual thinking lives and stop fighting it quite so hard. I genuinely do not know which approach I will land on, and I am, for the moment, entirely comfortable with that particular uncertainty.
I mentioned this whole internal debate to my editor properly, beyond just her brief note of approval on the finished piece, and she offered a genuinely useful distinction I have been turning over since: the goal, in her view, was never really sincerity versus comedy as two opposing modes, but rather honesty versus performance, and comedy, done properly, is simply one legitimate route to genuine honesty rather than an automatic retreat from it. The pieces that fail, in her experience reading considerably more writers than just me over the years, are not the ones that choose comedy over sincerity or vice versa, but the ones that choose performance over honesty regardless of which specific register they happen to be performing in.
That distinction has genuinely reframed how I am thinking about today’s whole ordeal, less as a failure to write seriously and more as a successful avoidance of writing performatively, which are, on reflection, two rather different things that I had been quietly conflating all afternoon without fully realising it. I suspect I will keep testing that distinction against my own future work going forward, watching for the difference between a joke that serves genuine honesty and a joke that simply serves as a comfortable escape hatch from doing the harder, more exposing work a subject genuinely deserves.
It has left me wanting, if I am honest, to go back and reread some of my own older pieces with that exact distinction in mind, curious how many of them would hold up as genuinely honest comedy versus how many were simply comfortable performance dressed in a joke’s clothing. That is a slightly uncomfortable exercise to set myself, and I am not entirely sure I want to know the answer, but I think it is probably the kind of uncomfortable self-assessment that makes for better work eventually, even if it stings a little going through the actual archive properly.
More from this author at Vivienne Pratfall, prat.uk.
