What superpower I’d pick.

I love the question of “what your superpower would be?” It is cool to think about being able to have heroic strength and be able to perform all these unbelievable feats. The first ones that come to mind are often flight, invisibility, super speed, super strength.

I actually just googled the different types of superpowers, and they were plentiful and far beyond the number I could list. However, my chosen superpower is not on this list at all.

This superpower of mine would probably even be my one wish if I got any wishes that had to be personal. (I would wish for a globally agreed-upon world utopia or something like that with any one wish). If the wish applied to only me, I would pick this particular superpower.

I would want to be fluent in every language. I think this is an absolutely unbelievable power. I think the ability to communicate and connect with anyone on earth, with nuance, in their most comfortable native tongue, would be an absolute superpower. Anyways, I like to imagine that included in the superpower of knowing every language would be fluency in the language of comedy. That would most certainly be my greatest wish.

I always say this, and it’s annoying. It’s something I derived from Chris Rock and then took further than what I’d heard about it. Chris Rock said that Dave Chappelle is the most fluent person in the language of comedy he’s ever seen.

That really lit up a huge light bulb for me. Comedy is a language. It’s timing, tone, patterns, grammar, creativity, yada yada. There are linguistic elements to comedy and a multitude of other factors that do not apply to other languages.

I started to use this concept to inform the process that lay ahead of me. An open mic night is like Spanish 101. Yo Hablo español (pronounce the H here). When you see a comedy special by some legend, it’s akin to a person who has mastered a language gently and is now presenting a book they’ve written. Books are hard to write in your native language, let alone in a language you’re just learning. That’s why comedians don’t develop overnight. It takes years, decades to make a great stand-up comedian. You can see this if you look at George Carlin's work 20 years in versus 35 years in. It takes a long time to master something, to learn your voice, to feel comfortable. The difficulty with stand-up is that you have to fail publicly for such a long time, which is of course the major obstacle toward learning a language. Nobody wants to make mistakes. But you have to, and for learning a language, you must do so publicly. For developing as a stand-up comedian, you have to go in front of people basically saying, “Hey, I’m the funny guy, watch me,” and then you’re terrible. You cannot speak the language you claim. And you won’t for a long time. But there will be strides. Mastery of anything is difficult; getting good at things you care about creates the unique obstacle of needing to be bad at something you like. This means your taste is developed but your ability to execute is nowhere near your taste. That gap is torturous, but to excel you have to thicken your skin, show up consistently, and fail up. Every day.