Some Thoughts on the Premise and Title

So, here we are. One of the first decisions we had to make was what to call the show, then what to call ourselves as a group. We decided upon 'How to be Awesome at Everything' and WMDcomedy respectively. There was some thought behind both, and a long list of far worse suggestions, again, in both.


The show then, HTBA, was an effort, on our part, and on the suggestion of Ben, to avoid the usual pitfall of the cynical pessimistic comedian and to write a derth of material that highlights life's problems but hopefully also helps you to solve them as an individual. Isn't airplane food crappy, suddenly becomes, how to be awesome at eating that crappy airplane food. Of course it's little more than a simple ruse, it's just a simple disguise, but at least it gave us a starting off point around which to write and edit our material.


Thinking about the title and the different ways it could be perceived also lead me to think that it could potentially exist as a send up of the self-help proclamations in a lot of books. With so much advice about how to lose weight, attract the opposite sex or make more money. It seems to only follow that one author would come out with their book and declare, 'This is it. The only book you need to be perfect in every way'. Even writing it, I can't really imagine that there isn't a tagline on one of these books that could sound just like that. That's not really what our show is. Which isn't helpful, or informative of me to say. I'm just saying, that's what our show could be about. But it's not.


To my mind, my part in HTBA is about finding out what makes you happy and trying new things. That sounds washy and lame. But the reason that I like the title 'how to be awesome at everything', is because it appeals to my ambition to tirelessly collect hobbies and interests until I'm really a jack of all trades (master of none). I think it's fair to say that I caught this ambition from a little known Danny DeVito film that I watched half an hour of, on daytime TV one time called 'Renaissance man'. In it, DeVito, who plays an English teacher at a army barracks or something, is speaking to one of his students about Leonardo DaVinci. He tells him, 'Leonardo DaVinci was not only a great painter, thinker and inventor, but that he could also, standing with two feet together, jump clear above a grown man's head. He was a true renaissance man.' And seeing it, I remember thinking, that's what I want, that's how I want to be remembered, that's who I want to be, Danny DeVito. And I've been trying ever since.

By the way, I got this picture from this great blog