Hey again, friend!
Jessie Kanelos Weiner came back on Draw Me Anything this morning. That makes her my only three-time guest, which I announced live and then immediately wondered aloud whether we still had anything to talk about. (We did. We talked for 45 minutes and I never once got to the drawing I’d prepared.)
(Watch the full replay above.)
Jessie is an illustrator, an author, a Substacker and a stand-up comedian, and she does all of it from Paris, where she has lived for 18 years. She writes La Vie en Watercolor, she wrote the book Thinking in Watercolor, she runs painting retreats, she teaches at an art school, and she has a kid who fences.
The UN of audiences…
Last month, in Paris, Jessie very kindly got me a spot at Coucou Comedy, one of the English-speaking clubs over there. We got coffee the morning of the show and I was, by my own admission, terrified. Not of the audience. Of the faux pas. I don’t know the minutiae of a Paris room.
Jessie says the thing that unites that room is wanting to hear someone talk badly about the French. The great unifier.
She also says Paris audiences are more generous than American ones. She performed in the States for the first time last year and found you really have to beg people for their attention. In Paris, a lot of them have never seen live stand-up before and don’t know what the rules are. There are no rules yet. There is, however, a strong influence from French clown culture, which has apparently produced a number of what she called disenfranchised clowns who have found their way to stand-up.
I pointed out that that is just what comedians are.
Lean into the fun…
Jessie was going through her mum’s old papers and found a Christmas letter from when she was four or five. The recap of her year was: Jessie likes to cut up things and paste them together.
