A Birthday on Valentine's? At least you're always guaranteed a card.
Embarrassed on birthdays & chasing rejection.
My birthday is on the 14th of February. The upside is you always get a card, the downside is you struggle to get anyone to go for a pint. Even when you’re in a relationship, you still have to think about someone else on the day you’re brought up to believe is “all about you”.
I held my 21st birthday party on the 28th of February, a cynical move to make sure people could not only attend, but afford to. With St Valentine’s Day comes an annual race for a dinner and and overnight stay where nobody wants to be left behind. The rush is propelled by economic “game theory” where everyone acts in anticipation of everyone else, creating a panic - when one person runs for the exit, everyone else follows suit. I have been single for the majority of my adult life and as such I also participated in this often fruitless exercise. Apart from a couple of brief stints renting, I lived with my family - my mum, dad, older brother and younger sister - until I was 26 and spent most birthdays at home. I’d ask my mum to make lamb curry and these were pretty satisfactory affairs for a disconsolate romantic like myself. I remember one year (when I had my own place) I chose not to see my family on my birthday because I had lined up a date and would be part of the human race that Valentine’s Day. Except I was stood up and spent it alone - I was so embarrassed I didn’t tell anyone.
My 30th was even less eventful and more painful. I went out to The Philippines at the tail-end of 29, with the bizarre aim of becoming a professional footballer. It was a bizarre aim because of my age and the fact I was nothing more than a decent amateur player. However, I signed a contract with the Filipino champions - Global FC, who were managed by ex-Rangers player Brian Reid at the time - and added “footballer” to the ever-growing list of jobs I had. I was living with a dear friend of mine from Scotland, an enterprising man called Paul Fox, whom I used to DJ with in Glasgow.
On the 14th of February 2013 Global FC had a game so at least I’d be busy that day, or so I thought. I didn’t make the matchday squad so settled for watching the game from the stand. At least I’d have a night-out to look forward to, Paul assuring me we would tear-up Manila in celebration of my birthday. When I got back to his apartment however, he looked at me with a manic grin and said “you know how it is Gardner! Cannae turn a date down on Valentine’s Day”. So I spent my 30th birthday with no family, no cards and now, no friend.
I get embarrassed when people wish me “Happy Birthday”, like I’ve done something spectacular by waking up on what is essentially just another day. I’ve always worked when possible and tried to get through the day with a minimum of fuss. As I’ve mentioned previously, my older brother Alexander has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and is non-verbal. Alexander and I shared a room for more than 20 years, his care primarily fell to my mum and dad, aided and abetted by my sister and I. One of the reasons I stayed at home for so long was to help with his care and when my Dad would come in to get Alexander up in the morning, I’d often pretend I was still asleep -but only when it was my birthday. That was the level I went to in order to avoid a sing-song.
The last few years however have been great and my girlfriend Marion is very thoughtful, buying me funny birthday cards featuring Nicola Sturgeon, Alan Partridge and Ted Hastings. Last year, for my 40th we went to Rio for the carnival and had an amazing time. I was quite excited to turn 40, it made me feel like an adult but there was a novelty to it, like I was just trying middle-age on for size. I was finally eligible to play for the Over 40’s team in Glasgow (shout-out to the ironically named Young Boys of Partick).
Today I’m 41 though, and that has more of a mundane feel to it. When my Dad was 40 my sister was born, the last of three children. When I was a child, being 40 meant you were old. Aged 40 you’d most definitely be expected to be married and have kids of your own. A mortgage. Life insurance. A job you’d been doing for a while. A growing pension. Maybe even a retirement plan bobbing around in the distance. You certainly wouldn’t be trying to make it as a comedian, would you?
I worked as a DJ aged 17 and spent my formative years traipsing round Glasgow’s licensed venues 4 nights a week.. At 21, after graduating from University (they should have given me a degree in nightclubs) I got a job at Setanta Sports, working as a tv producer. Aged 27 I moved to London and worked as a tv presenter on the shopping channels before my flight of fantasy to Manila to play football at 29. I was retired aged 30 through lack of ability and took a job in sales for a manufacturing company in Scotland. I worked as a commission-only sales executive and began building high performing sales teams and by the time I was 33 I had completed a Masters in Business Administration (MBA), bought a flat and paid off my debt. I had become an adult. Just two years later, I was in the midst of an existential crisis. Or a breakdown. Or both. I was a workaholic, which is just a way of disguising how lonely I was. I was deeply unhappy but couldn’t find a way of telling anyone, I couldn’t even admit it to myself because I didn’t know. That’s the thing about unhappiness, you don’t know you’re unhappy until you start to move away from it.
So aged 36 I sold my flat, paid off my newly accumulated debt (spending is linked to depression apparently and I had a lot of debt) and quit my job. I started doing comedy, met my girlfriend and became much happier and more fulfilled. It’s easy to say you need to have a few shit birthdays in order to have a few good ones, but that doesn’t do anyone’s struggles any justice. Life can be unexpectedly brutal, and just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you haven’t. In my experience, your biggest hope is buried with your deepest fear so it can be hard to make a distinction between the two.
However you spend your birthday, I hope you keep going.
I had originally written another couple of pages worth of material discussing the pursuit of rejection in comedy. Not only are you seeking the laughter of strangers, you are brushing up against the threat of rejection on stage. But you’re also chasing rejection whenever you email promoters or bookers to ask for gigs. Often you’ll never hear from them, which in many ways is much worse than a straight knock-back because you can internalise the rejection a hundred times over rather than accept the fact most people will never read your email and if they do, that comedy is subjective and they just don’t find you funny or suitable for their gig. And that doesn’t mean you’re not funny.
The world is changing and most of our communication is now digital and one of the downsides is the over-intellectualisation of simple things. A lot of promoters / comedians who run gigs now ask you to fill out a Google form so they can sift through the applications which is fair enough and rooted in sensibility - one promoter in London told me he gets more than 500 applications each month for a gig he runs in Camden - it’s a great gig in a lovely room and to give you an idea of how competitive it is, all the spots on offer are unpaid.
The google forms all follow the same sort of format, asking you how many gigs you’ve done, a link to a recent performance, then a description of your comedy style (which I think is redundant given you’ve just asked for a video) then a section for any notable achievements - competitions you’ve won, reviews or quotes from more famous comedians or number of social media followers. Like most comedians, I have a blurb saved in my phone, as a note or a WhatsApp to myself and it gets copied and pasted a few times a day whenever I see a gig offer posted on a Facebook comedy forum or instagram.
One promoter posted his google form to a Facebook comedy forum in London, asking people to apply for spots at the night he runs. Within an hour he updated the post berating everyone for not removing the superfluous spaces from his google form which was a result of people - including me - copying and pasting their bios into the form. He said we should “read the form properly if you really want to get booked”. He then turned the comments off so nobody could reply.
Whilst this can be really frustrating it’s all part of the pursuit. Although I must admit I can become consumed by what I perceive to be the injustice of it all. I’ve been promised a weekend worth of gigs at big comedy clubs and then heard nothing for months thereafter. Sometimes I use the angst to spur me on and have channelled it productively, other times I’ve wallowed in self-pity and felt the world was against me.
The best part of sharing this with you is that it’s helped me realise it’s pretty inconsequential in the grand-scheme of things and the world isn’t against me, I probably just need to ask a bit more and try to be a little less sensitive. Easier said than done, but definitely do-able.
“James Gardner, Scottish Indian Comedian with 20m+ views online. Over 300 gigs, regular paid weekend work at comedy clubs in Scotland, including The Stand, Comedy Cabaret & Glee. I’ve beaten the gong at the Comedy Store, beaten the Blackout at UTC & made the final of Backyard Comedy Knockout and have over 70,000 followers across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok”