Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

It's an audiobook that's just "bits" Seinfeld wrote in his notebook over 50+ years of standup.

More interesting than the book, to me, were my friend's comments about standup which led me to get the book. Basically: my friend says standup is one of the most perfectly empirical human activities, with the tightest and most unfakeable feedback loop. You get on stage, you say stuff, people either laugh or they don't. And in a non-social setting the laughter is hard to fake either way: if a bit doesn't work then the audience won't laugh whether they like you or not, and if a bit really works they'll laugh even if they don't want to. Says Seinfeld: "The special, special thing about standup is the sound that tells you for sure that you reached them."

That's the first feedback loop; the second is the night-after-night workshopping of your material. Every night you add new bits and cut bits that didn't land and tweak the wording of bits that aren't quite there yet. This is the dream scenario for deliberate practice: you get feedback and lots of opportunities to revise each part of your performance, and then get feedback again and keep working on it until you improve. This comes up a little in the book, too: after Seinfeld the sitcom ended, Jerry wanted to get back on stage, but he'd already retired all his previous material. So he's hanging out with Chris Rock and Chris says "well, at least you know there's only one way to do it," which is "back to tiny clubs with flimsy stuff, night after night, month after month, and it takes however long it takes."

And I can't help feeling jealous of that: I wish literally-any of my endeavours had that kind of feedback cycle to them. I feel like I (largely) stagnated as a writer many years ago, and that's partly because there's nothing like this feedback loop built-in to writing, though I'm trying now to develop a personal version of it.

As for Seinfeld himself: I don't know, I don't find him that funny, but on some level I understand that it's much harder to write standup material than I can imagine as someone who has never tried to do it. He succeeded relatively quickly -- within a year of graduating college he had an appearance on an HBO special, and within five years he was on the Johnny Carson show -- and I get the vague sense his worldview and sensibility is shaped by that: "you know, I showed up, I worked every day, I got super famous, but I just love what I do, I'd do it even if I never got paid a cent." Maybe true!, but easier to say when it hasn't been tested. That said, people other than himself say he's truly hard-working, writes every single day, etc -- what do I know?, it's hard to really know anything about celebrities unless you're personally in their world I think, otherwise it's easy to be misled by their personal PR.