Dreams and Stand-Up Comedy

I have started dreaming again.

These few days, I have been waking up in the morning feeling groggy and confused, as if I had just finished an 8 hour Kdrama binge. Because in truth, I had emerged from the land of fantasy. My dreams have been very socially dramatic recently. It’s a bit hard to describe but there is always some sort of social conflict or I am always scheming something and it never works out. I wake up feeling like a loser. These dreams make me feel as if I had a sleepless night.

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I finished Trevor Noah’s memoir titled “Born a Crime” some weeks ago. I had not watched any of his stand-up comedies before but I knew of him because 1) a friend had shared about him on Instastories, and 2) my sister had the book and she has watched his stand-ups. The book was very well written. It was engagging and funny in every flip of a page. Trevor was telling the stories of his life, and even when he was describing a bleak situation, it never sounded too sad or dark. I devoured the book in 2 days, but never bothered to look up videos of his stand-ups.

This afternoon, when I was flipping through the newspaper, his name popped up in an article about stand-up comedy in Malaysia. I pulled out my phone and decided to look up that famous video, where he was talking about his mom being shot. He had written about it in his memoir so I was quite familiar with what happened. Somehow, Trevor managed to deliver this sombre incident with punches of humour, without it seeming like an unimportant incident too. I watched a few other short clips of his stand up and immediately decided he is now my favourite stand up comedian.

What’s different about his is that I can somehow feel sincerity from him. Unlike most standup comedians I was familiar with, he doesn’t need to use “sex” or “race” to make jokes. All he does is tell an authentic experience of himself in a funny and animated way. It really radiates from him, that humour is a philosophy of life.