Trying Too Hard! Too Much! Overkill!
Ever felt a trifle nervous on a new job? Told yourself, “Just act normal”? Or worse: “Be funny”?
If so, you must read: “I Am So Funny”. “My brief and wondrous career at The Daily Show,” Lauren Weedman writes, “consisted of making jokes about the Amish and trying to get Jon Stewart to love me.”
Jon Stewart didn’t come to love her.
I’ve become quite a devotee of The Daily Show during the recent campaign. Resolved to write for them or Saturday Night Live in one of my upcoming lifetimes. Weedman, though, did it exactly the way I fear I’d do it: by being so overwrought that she was alarming. But the trip was worth the story, at least if you’re the reader and not her.
It’s an excerpt from her book A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body: Tales from a Life of Cringe.
It’s killer funny. And a cautionary tale about trying way too hard.
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Categories: courage, fear, strategy