On Sensitivity
It doesn’t just mean being sweet or sappy
When you think of the word “sensitive”, what image enters your mind? It’s probably some young guy, wearing dark clothes and a scarf, thoughtfully jotting down poetry into his journal in the middle of a cafe. You imagine someone who is sweet, and most likely a little bit sad. The overriding image is one of sentimentality.
This is the stereotype, and I think it’s completely wrong. Sensitive people can be like this, but a lot of the sensitive people I’ve met (myself included) aren’t overwhelmingly sweet or sappy. They’re prickly and easily irritated. They’re not lovingly looking at the world with a sense of wonder. Instead, they’re always a little bit on edge. The emotions most cultivated by their sensitivity are annoyance and aggravation. “Sensitive” is how you would describe someone who is emotional, but it can also be how you would describe the way your skin feels when you have a rash.
Now, I’m fully willing to admit that this might all be selection bias. Most of the sensitive people I’ve spent time with have been comedians, who are notoriously peevish. But I think that peevishness isn’t their default setting, nor is it the result of working in an industry that’s uniquely challenging. I believe it comes from a lifetime of noticing all of the tiny little details going on around them. And instead of building up a tolerance to this stuff, they gradually get worn down by it. This is why they feel compelled to get on stage and risk embarrassment or failure. They have to find out if anyone else is seeing things the way they’re seeing them, even if it’s just on a subconscious level. If the audience laughs, they’ll know they’re not alone in this. Laughter from an audience can be a lifeline.
One of my favorite examples of this is Jerry Seinfeld’s old joke about cotton balls. The premise is that men never use cotton balls, and women can never seem to have enough of them.
Think about the origin of this joke. What was the germ of the idea that turned into a bit Jerry eventually did on The Tonight Show? I like to imagine a young Jerry over at a girl’s apartment, going to use her bathroom, and being flabbergasted by the amount of cotton balls she has. “What the hell does she need all of these for?” he thinks to himself before going back out to see her. But once they start talking again, it’s apparent his mood has shifted. He’s a little more annoyed than he was before he went into the bathroom. He can’t stop thinking about the cotton balls. It bothers him so much that he has to write about it in his joke book the next day, and take it to the stage to share that night. He just can’t let it go.
Does this sound like a normal, well-adjusted person to you? No. But to me, it fits perfectly with the profile of a sensitive person, bothered so much by something so incredibly small that they simply need to share it with strangers to see if anyone can relate.
There are examples of these kinds of jokes all over the comedy landscape. What’s great about them is that the way they’re delivered varies from comic to comic, but the point of view is all the same. A small, everyday annoyance impacts a comedian so much that they have to get it out of their head and put it on stage.
There’s Bo Burnham singing about the annoyance of Pringles cans during the closing song of his special Make Happy. I see that and I imagine him on his couch, all 6’7 of him, limbs jutting out at odd angles, struggling in vain to get the last few Pringles at the bottom of the can, so unbelievably frustrated and cursing the executives of the Pringles company for creating such an un-ergonomic delivery mechanism for their chips. It pisses him off so much he has to write a song about it.
There’s Gary Gulman’s joke about the way people point at the toppings when they order at Chipotle. It’s one of those jokes that’s so good that, as a comedian, it makes you angry. You genuinely get mad at yourself for not thinking of it first. I saw him do this live at New York Comedy Club when the joke was in its early stages and I was blown away by how much I related to it. I absolutely know Gulman was standing in line at Chipotle, fuming over the way the person in front of him was pointing at the corn. It was probably the angriest he was that entire day. He’s completely incensed by such a small gesture, something people do all the time without even realizing they’re doing it. And of course, when it was his turn, I’m sure he smiled and placed his order and acted like nothing was wrong. Nobody had any clue about the rage that was bubbling up inside of him.
Notice the reason Gulman gives for why he’d never be able to work at Chipotle. “I’m so sensitive.”
Another example is Ellen Degeneres’s joke from her latest special, Relatable, about waiters not writing down your order. This is something that really bothers her. Again, imagining the origin story for this joke is almost as funny as the joke itself. Just the idea of her and her wife Portia out to dinner with some celebrity couple like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, or John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, and three out of the four of them are all laughing and having a great time, talking about how fantastic it is to be famous, meanwhile Ellen is just sitting there and can’t help but interject with “Did you guys notice how the waiter didn’t write down our order? Who the hell does he think he is?” And the table goes silent for a moment before someone quickly changes the subject. She knows that nobody at the table cared, but maybe an audience at a comedy club would.
From Jerry to Bo to Gary to Ellen, four different jokes, four different delivery styles, all from the same genesis. Something incredibly small got stuck in their craw to such a degree that they felt compelled to write about it. And they all did something singular with it, each joke with its own unique value. I saw a clip from some podcast recently (I wish I could find it to share here but all of my searches came up empty) where Bill Burr talks about different comedy styles, and how he can’t really hate on any of them, even if they’re nothing like his own or what he prefers to see in stand-up. His reasoning is that the particular style a comedian uses, whether it’s observational, deadpan, one liners, act outs, or music, is how they deal with what he calls “the pain of noticing.” He more than anyone knows how it feels to be annoyed by small things (I forced my wife to watch his joke about how every relationship has “The person that does the dishes, and the person that ‘let’s them soak.’”), so if he sees another comedian getting that annoyance off their chest, he can’t be mad at the method they’re using. He’s just happy to see they’re not holding it in and are able to turn it into art.
That “pain of noticing” line really jumped out to me when I heard it. I believe that’s the foundation for all of these jokes, and for sensitive personality types in general. For whatever reason, a person is born with an antenna that is more tuned in to life’s minutiae, and they get overwhelmed by the volume of it. As a result, they need to engage in some kind of creative process to exorcise it from their souls, otherwise it would eat them alive. People don’t decide to become artists and then develop sensitivity. They’re born sensitive and then become artists as a way to deal with it. The sensitivity is built in a priori, independent of any other action.
Pivoting from comedy to songwriting, I think Taylor Swift’s song “Seven” perfectly illustrates the sort of innate attunement to emotions and small details that artists are born with. It’s a song about how it feels to be a young kid spending time with your best friend. But the below lyrics are what stood out to me the most:
I’ve been meaning to tell you
I think your house is haunted
Your dad is always mad
And that must be why
Again, let’s imagine the origin story here. Taylor Swift is a young kid, over at a friend’s house. Because she’s Taylor Swift and was born with an obscenely perceptive emotional radar, she can tell the vibes in the house are bad. But since she’s just a kid, the only explanation she can come up with is that the house is haunted. However, something inside of her knows that there’s a connection between the bad vibes and the dad’s terrible mood. As listeners, we can tell that the dad is abusive or emotionally turbulent in some way. But, within the context of the song, Taylor is too young to make the literal connection, so she creates a metaphorical one instead. We’re seeing the inner life of a precocious genius at work. No wonder she eventually went on to write literally hundreds of songs that people love. But it all starts with those extra sensitive perceptive powers that she, for whatever reason, came into this world with.
Sometimes I wonder why I work so diligently on this Substack. It takes up a decent chunk of my time and my mental space, but it doesn’t have a lot of subscribers or generate any income. But, for whatever reason, I feel compelled to keep going with it. I’ve previously rationalized it as some kind of latent Millennial narcissism, but deep down I know it’s more than that. I’m a victim of the same affliction that I’ve described above. Small things get to me, and I feel compelled to get them off my chest. I used to do it with stand-up, but I no longer have that outlet, so now I use this Substack instead. Even if only a small handful of people read it, and most of those people already know me personally, I still think it’s worth it. Any time I stand up from the computer after finishing an essay, I feel lighter. I’m able to move through my day in a better mood and be more of service to those around me. If it takes some extra work on my part to end up in that mental space, I think that’s a fair trade. It certainly beats sitting around all day, constantly making mountains out of molehills, preoccupied with the amount of cotton balls someone has in their bathroom.
