What’s on my mind: Megan Nolan

The realities of comedy: 2%
This week involved two significant cultural encounters to do with comedy, so I have been reflecting on its place in my life and in the world. First, my boyfriend and I had the afternoon off work last Monday for Martin Luther King Day, and spent it at the cinema near our apartments seeing Is This Thing On? It’s a harmless, sappy film directed by Bradley Cooper, based on the life story of British standup John Bishop, who took up comedy almost accidentally while in the throes of a divorce. Will Arnett plays the befuddled new bachelor stumbling into open-mic slots, and Laura Dern, his wife. I love media about comedy, but I didn’t take to this movie – why are all the other comics so supportive and nice to the random, depressed, finance guy who literally walked in off the street, is bad and boring at comedy, and doesn’t seem to know you have to work to get better at it? My experience of comedians is that they all have very bad cocaine addictions and resent each other more than anything on earth. Then I listened to a This American Life podcast episode named “A Christian and a Muslim Walk into a Bar”, about comedians in Syria trying to figure out what they can legally joke about in public in a Bashar al-Assad political climate. This made me laugh aloud much more than the film did. One of these comedians, imprisoned in Dubai for three years, pored over a battered book called How To Be a Great Standup while inside; a pathetic and rousing image. In Hama, the government cancels their show because the material is an affront to family values. The comedians try to convey the specifics of their jokes, but allow that we listeners will have to learn Arabic to really appreciate it. These things translate badly, they say: jokes and poetry.

How much I love Ladies Night: 2%
I was actually listening to that podcast episode while walking through the snow to my friend Natasha Stagg’s apartment in the East Village, to meet her and our friend Audrey Wollen, both writers. Natasha said at the beginning of the year her resolution was to host a Ladies Night once a month, and Audrey said hers was to laugh more, so they were basically the same. As for me, although I abhor routine, I love tradition (by this I mean I don’t have a set time to wake up or eat meals, but I will insist on Christmas being the exact same each year). I like the idea of a standing date, especially with these busy women – interesting women I don’t see enough of. I was tremendously anxious before I met them, firmly in the January fug, that awful feeling of time slipping away and not being motivated or desirous enough to use it wisely. Afterwards, I felt regulated and content, endorphin-high from gossiping and nourished by Natasha’s exquisite girl-dinner spread of stone fruit and cheese and devilled eggs and crudités.

What’s my favourite animal: 2%
Since I met my boyfriend and started hanging out with his kids regularly, one thing I have noticed is this: the amount you talk and think about animals really changes between childhood and adulthood. Animals, like candy and the solar system, are things I feel fondly towards, but don’t think much about on a daily basis if I’m not around kids. “What is your favourite animal?” my boyfriend’s son asked me a few days ago. An otter, I told him, not fully paying attention. “Why is it your favourite animal?” he pressed, and I was forced to really think about it. I like the funny noise they make when they eat, I told him, and that they lie on their backs holding hands with each other when they sleep, and that they keep little rocks in their pockets pointlessly, just as ephemera, like humans do with trinkets. That’s what I like about otters. And what I like about my boyfriend’s kids is they make me think about things like this.

Poetry: 2%
I loved poetry as a child, and lost it as a distracted adult, but happily it has slowly become part of my life again. I’ve found myself giving my boyfriend poetry books as gifts three times now, partly because it’s more romantic than the hardback nonfiction I also give him about basketball and media moguls, and partly because I know he will be a patient and sensitive reader of it, having had his own momentous encounters. When he was in college his decision to leave the Mormon church was spurred by reading the Wallace Stevens poem Sunday Morning, as advised by his professor, the critic Wayne C Booth. Meanwhile, my father bought me a Faber 2026 diary for Christmas which provides a poem for each week – a manageable amount of the stuff for the easily intimidated.

Working on my new book: 92%
Whose inevitable and historically unprecedented badness, it feels, will not only lead to my professional and personal failure, but also, somehow, to my actual imprisonment. The less said of this, the better.