Ordinary People Memes
Born in Ohio, Jay Shingle could not be restricted to being described as simply a comic performer. With a contemporary approach, Shingle is breaking barriers, a ‘new wave’ comedian if you like, who is moulding a new route within the comedic arts. Comedy is taking a different direction and Shingle is a pioneer, vying to bridge the gap between comedic performance and the arts. We decided to catch up with Jay to ask those burning questions around his modern approach to the world of comedy, art, music and beyond.
Who or what influences your comedy and performance? Where do you find your inspiration?
In terms of other comedy performers, I am heavily influenced by the work of Andy Kaufman, Tim Heidecker of Tim & Eric, and Gregg Turkington (Neil Hamburger). I think each has taken their comedy into the realm of “the art of reality” in their respective decades--going in and out of characters & experimenting with identity, staging elaborate public ruses & manipulating the press, using comedy performance & creation to examine what it is itself, and holding an unwavering commitment to absurdity. While I borrow from some of the structures & perspectives that these performers employ, I also think it is important to understand how these can apply in a modern, progressive world. In all his brilliance, Andy Kaufman didn’t always treat his audiences or collaborators in the best ways--in fact the very point of his Tony Clifton character was to embody the worst human being possible, and he acted as just that. I’d like to think that I borrow the good components of some of their past work: the mystery, the harmless/playful deception & redirection, the focus on premeditation & concept-driven comedy, and the obsession with challenging the artform’s structural expectations. I am also very heavily influenced by the artist Sol LeWitt, often called “the father of conceptual art.” Sol believed that the work of the mind was mightier than the work of the hand. He thought the concept drove the art, and that the presentation was a “perfunctory affair.” I have been described as “high concept,” and I will gladly own that title. I do love live performance for the visceral experience and sharing with others, but I place a heavy emphasis on bit-building that happens on my own off the stage.
How do you go about planning and creating your stand up?
As is apparent when you see my live set or a video of it, I make heavy use of props. A lot of the planning/creating for my live act comes from walking miles and miles in search of items left out for free on curbs & lawns. I recently moved to Seattle, but I was in Portland for about five years, and there the city is known for heavy use of the “free pile,” where I can find lots of good stuff set out for the taking. I coined my process “object-first comedy,” where I focus on the way an object looks or feels, knowing I want to use it on stage, and then writing the bit to incorporate it after I’ve already decided to take it based on shape, color, ridiculousness of seeing it on a stand up stage, etc. I also think I rely a lot on the deconstruction & rebuilding of words; I like to play with linguistic ambiguity and embody it in misunderstanding or confusion about certain words or concepts that we generally accept as understood by adults. I think the adult vs. child element is also very strong in my act. I am still obsessed with a book I read in my early 20s called The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann. It was a sociological treatise of sorts from the 60s that gave a metaphysical picture of reality as heavily socially constructed, and I took it to mean that I should be suspicious of the descriptor “objective” or “objectively.” In other words, we only believe comedy is what it is by virtue of a majority of people within a culture socially agreeing as to what it is. I try to chip away at the cracks in this when I create my act, and I always keep it in my mind as a guiding light. I want to emphasize that my focus here is on structural expectations and not content expectations--”challenging the status quo” excuse to be hateful is a total misuse of this concept, it’s lazy, and it actually has been done already, so it isn’t really innovative.
It is clear to see from your performance and social media that your work fits the realms of artistry. Would you consider yourself an artist, a comedian, or both?
It’s funny, I was just having a conversation with another comedian about this who is also a musician and artist in other disciplines like I am. We both expressed the strangeness we encounter sometimes from other “hard comedy comedians” who are fully invested in stand up and nothing else. They are often suspicious of artists in comedy or comedians who are also doing other things, as if you must be fully in or not at all. I loathe “comedy jocks” who will never miss an opportunity to tell you to “get your reps in”--*sighs*. I think the comedy world and artworld are arbitrarily separate, and I do consider myself both a comedian and an artist. I have consistently put together shows in basements, living rooms, and alternative art spaces alongside other performance artists, bands, visual artists, poets, etc in an attempt to to bridge the gap a little bit. I used to call myself a “comedy-slanted performance artist,” and I suppose that still works. Dance and music were my first loves, as I started tap dancing at age 5 and playing drums at age 10. I bring both of those disciplines into my act now, and I think humorously applying artistic skills is where live comedy is headed, or there is at least a sect of hybrid acts emerging on a bigger scale, and I’d like to think I have invested in the future going the route that I have.
““We only believe comedy is what it is by virtue of a majority of people within a culture socially agreeing as to what it is. I try to chip away at the cracks in this when I create my act, and I always keep it in my mind as a guiding light.””
The Instagram page you founded @ordinarypeoplememes, is abstract but additionally captures the humour in the lives of ‘ordinary people’. What inspired you to create this page?There are two major sources of inspiration for Ordinary People Memes. The first is my upbringing. I grew up in the suburban Midwest, outside of Akron, Ohio through the 90s and 2000s. I will be 30 next week, and I think aging out of those years just enough has really allowed me to take an outside look and encapsulate a certain suburban sensibility tied to that region and time. Call them “the Bush years,” in the Midwest if you’d like. I think as social culture has progressed rapidly throughout the mid 2000 teens and onward, these “ordinary attitudes” are in stark contrast to the now, except that these people still do exist in certain regions today, and that leads to the second source of inspiration: I got a job writing penny ads for a scrappy, terribly run print media publication that sat on restaurant tables around the country. As you can suspect, the person who still believes in print media advertising (and it may still very well work for hyper small town life) are the types of people still living in this suburban delusion. I began writing for a lot of sole proprietorships like real estate agents, general contractors, insurance agents, plumbers, etc. and had to read their answers to our questionnaire, take their voice, see their awful websites, and push empty, meaningless platitudes about “customer service” and “good business.” I don’t mean to bring down the working class at all in this, I might add--I am a dishwasher myself struggling to make my passion a financial reality. I do mean to bring down the small minded & the blindly comfortable though, an existence that I grew up with but moved west to get away from, now seeing it from the outside. I think it seems abstract because we are sitting in this ambiguous time where the memes’ juxtaposition to the now is there but so is the current of reality feeding the memes. It’s almost a statement along the lines of “look how dated this seems to you (and maybe slightly nostalgic in some cases) but simultaneously is what loads and loads of people are actually still occupying their lives with.”
After watching your performance at the Helium Comedy Club, your stand up is again both abstract, but captures the humour in reality. Do live performances and #ordinarypeoplememes go hand in hand ?
I think my memes scratch a much different type of itch than my live performance, but I do think they are related. I guess my memes are a more honest manifestation of my observations, albeit abstractions. Rather than getting on a stand up stage and talking about this strange time warp of a time we live in, I’d rather voice it in an artistic product that is readable & shareable etc. I am not an avid meme consumer, and I never really have been. I think in that way, it is highly related to my comedy act, because I didn’t really have a sense of “rules” about memes or a definition of what they can and cannot be. While I think that the nature of memes allows for this definition to be so much more flexible than the definition of stand up, I’d like to think I have created “anti-memes” in a way that I explored “anti-comedy” with my act. I have done live meme reads at some of my shows, and even had audience members choose a voice to read them in. I would love to create some sort of play or live show surrounding the memes, or even a piece of video. That is definitely rattling up in my brain, but I am not sure what that would be yet.
How has growing up on Portland, Oregon effected your creative process?
I grew up in the Midwest in Ohio, but I have been in the Pacific Northwest for nearly 8 years now, Portland for 5. As I mentioned above, the availability of free items in Portland greatly affected my process and my ability to keep creating at a steady pace. I also think Portland and the NW in general is a good place for experimentation and informed risk-taking. Both Portland and Seattle offer a good opportunities-to-size ratio. Portland especially is full of folks in all disciplines putting on all sorts of shows, crossing artforms, genres, in unsuspecting venues, mostly with a decent modern moral compass and social awareness. In both music and comedy, I found the DIY scenes to be strong. Folks who tell you “Portland is dead” just didn’t know where to look. In Seattle, on the other hand, they might be right.
And last but not least, are you planning any tours in the upcoming future?
I have a handful of shows coming up at the end of this month of February and into March in Seattle and Portland, and I will be in the Bay Area in both San Francisco and Oakland the first week of May (I love Bay Area audiences!), so look out on my personal and meme instagrams for show announcements if you live in these cities. I have a couple friends producing comedy in the UK and in Europe, and they venture to guess that I would do well there. It is certainly on my horizon, but nothing planned yet!
courtesy ORDINARY PEOPLE MEMES
interview NATASHA DUNN
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