The Infinite Tedium of Perfection.

A critique of Everybody's Live and Dying For Sex. And my friends.

The new John Mulaney series Everybody’s Live recently ended on Netflix and despite LOVING it, I want to talk about its flaws. Because it’s the opposite of a curate’s egg - where the curate’s egg is ruined by the flaws, I think I love it more for them.

I love it like I love my friends. It’s not perfect; sometimes it can be a bit dull or irritating and it’s incredibly annoying that it refuses to learn from its mistakes (Hi friends!) But you can’t pick which parts of somebody’s character you hang out with, so you have to learn to love all the bits of them. If they’re entertaining but a bit flakey you still love them. Or they’re thought-provoking but have a habit of falling asleep in bars (actually she’s stopped doing that these days). It’s like the Go-Betweens song “Spirit” goes:

“You’re one thing greater than all the things you are together.”

I used to love to separate and categorise and deconstruct. But I no longer spend hours agonising and re-ordering lists of top ten albums and films (and boys), as if at some point I really was going to have to choose between them. There’s something freeing about accepting the untangleable mush of everything.

And every episode of Everybody’s Live had SOMETHING in it that made me laugh my arse off. Sometimes it was one very early joke, sometimes a long sketch. And it felt like all the problems with the show were worth it for those big laughs. The opening monologues were especially funny. A few weeks in, he did a a series of jokes about the shortcomings of the show (“it seems like a talk show from a movie - where nothing’s quite right - even the title”) and I was belly laughing. Hang on, that’s a bit mad. Do I prefer the show to have boring incoherent bits so I can build up to really laugh about him acknowledging that later? What’s with that?

Don’t get me wrong - I like the things I consume to be good. Great, even. But is there something about the three-leggedness of a dog that makes it more loveable? Is it like the way celebrity faces are starting to be unnervingly similar. Is it a bit… boring and cold to be all shiny and symmetrical? In the hunt for connection and authenticity, do I want stumbles and wrinkles (oh god AI is going to work that out and start serving it to me, isn’t it)? Do I love fuck-ups despite them being fuck-ups or because they’re fuck-ups? I know I want surprises and depth and weirdness. Maybe my system can’t handle all highlights all the time. It certainly doesn’t react well to constant adrenaline. Rollercoasters are not my bag. I’d generally rather hold the bags. Maybe I like a slow burn.

Which brings me onto Dying For Sex. It’s on Disney+ (I know, look at me with all my subscriptions; SOMEONE’S earning). Even though I think it’s pretty perfect as a programme, it’s about something real and messy. So real and messy, we’re all terrified of looking at it head on. It’s based on a real story and is a dramatised but unsanitised exploration of death, dying, cancer, sex and child abuse and despite that; it’s really funny. Because the truth is, life is funny. There’s humour everywhere. I speak as someone who literally looks for the humour in everything, not only in my job, but as a very necessary way of coping with life. We shouldn’t be filtering the humour out of anything, however dark it is. Maybe we should expect less and accept more. I keep thinking about a scene in it where Molly (played by Michelle Williams) is very close to death and her mother and best friend are arguing in front of her.

“Is this real or a hallucination? I hope it’s real!” she says, in a dazed but delighted way.

Being close to death renders her totally enraptured with any bit of life she’s presented with, however uncomfortable or boring it might normally be. What a lesson! Who needs rollercoasters when this is what real life does.

One of the other stars of Dying For Sex, Jenny Slate, was interviewed on a podcast about the show and asked what she hoped people would take away from it. I rewound her answer three times it spoke to me so hard.

“I think my wish is always that people allow themselves to believe in the idea that feelings can be simultaneous. And that harder things don’t cancel out the more positive things, and that the positive feelings aren’t there to rescue us from things that are difficult, but that the mixture is really where truth lies. And that it’s really worth it”.

I think it’s easy for us all to be scared of emotions - especially the negative ones. Will we be able to cope with the biggest, baddest ones when they come? I know me, I’m pretty soft. It doesn’t SEEM like I’ll be OK. But we need to accept that while life keeps happening to us, we’re going to feel all the feelings. Not only that, but we’re going to feel lots of them at the same time. Think about it, how many times have you had one single pure emotion? It’s nearly always tinged with something else. Joy and fear, boredom and dread, It’s what life is, isn’t it. Everything, everywhere all at once, as they say.

For someone who’s just been told I’m #28 Rising In Comedy, this isn’t especially funny. So to make up for it, here is a list of stupid real life things I’ve done:

1. Blown on an ipod to try and turn it off.

2. Looked for the charger for my glasses.

3. Sieved a tin of sweetcorn into a drawer.

4. Poured a can of Tango over my head to combat the heat at a sports day (hello wasps!)

5. Felt like a pervert watching a candle flame die when I held a lid over it.

The last one was this morning.