How Standup Is Similar to Gothic Architecture

Psychotechnology

SubscribeSign in

How Standup Is Similar to Gothic Architecture<br>Reflections on my 2024 trip to barcelona

Sasha Putilin<br>Jul 29, 2026

Share

My 2024 trip to Barcelona turned out to be one of the most interesting of my life.<br>My trips usually follow a long-familiar script: stay in an Airbnb or a hotel, walk around the city, taste the local cuisine. To be thorough, I check both the tourist attractions and the bumfuck end of the town — to understand the city in both of its incarnations. None of this is bad, but repeated for the umpteenth time, this template gets old. You never run into any dog-headed people, and people everywhere satisfy their basic needs in roughly the same ways.<br>Before Barcelona, I had radically deviated from this template only twice. The first time, in the winter of 2019/2020, I spent two weeks over the New Year’s sailing on the Canary island in a lovely Russian-speaking company. The second time was two years later, when I spent three months learning Serbo-Croatian and then traveled through the four Balkan countries where the language is spoken — Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbian. Knowing even a bit of language helped me immerse myself in the local culture and get into stories I wouldn’t get speaking English.<br>And now, in 2024 — Barcelona. I came there to stay in a group house of neurotech enthusiasts who originally started living together to facilitate productive collaboration. The living together part didn’t go quite smoothly and the group house pretty much disbanded. But the two people who’d invited me were still living there.<br>In Barcelona I stumbled upon an expat English-language comedy club — The Comedy Clubhouse. I ended up performing my stand up there practically every day. I’d taken up stand up that year of 2024, six months before my trip. But in all those months, I’d actually performed it on stage only ten times. In three weeks in Barcelona I doubled that amount, performing ten times more. This leveled up my comedy skills — but the most important thing turned out standup changing the way a city felt.<br>This post is a translation of my older 2024 post from my Russian blog. I wrote the introduction above two months before publishing the original version. The logic of the narrative suggested that what should come next was something about my standup.<br>But for those two whole months I’d hit a creative block every time I tried to figure out what exactly I should write about standup — and how to explain why this trip turned out so unusual. For two months I kept putting the post off: writing travel notes around a city for yet another time is something I’ve learned to do — there are a couple dozen of these on my Russian blog. But writing about standup? Not so much.<br>Carl Jung wrote about Animas and Animuses. The Anima is the feminine part of a man’s psyche, the Animus is the masculine part of a roman’s. These are internal generalised gender archetypes people navigate by in their lives — consciously or unconsciously. A woman preening in front of a mirror is often orienting toward her Animus; a man trying to make an impression, toward his Anima. You could say the Anima and Animus are one’s inner woman and inner man.<br>I think writers have something like this too — a generalised archetype of a person they write for, an inner reader.<br>My inner reader kept gnawing at me from inside: “Sasha, why on earth are you going to write about standup? What’s the point of making one art form about another art form? Ask yourself — isn’t this just intellectual masturbation you’re about to engage in? Especially considering that your standup is itself a refined remix of observations about the culture around you. Film critics at least write about other people’s films — you’re trying to write about your own standup. And anyway, you record videos of your sets, so just post the videos — let your readers be viewers for a minute, for fuck’s sake!”<br>And of course I’m going to put a video to this post. Here it is! (As a heads up, the subtitles in the second part are kind of messed up)

As for having a good answer to why write about standup — I don’t seem to have one. “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard,” and all that.<br>Going on stage and trying to be a little funnier than you were last time takes considerable tensing of one’s personality muscles. Laughter is one of those human reactions that’s hard to fake, just like hashes in a blockchain.<br>You walk out on stage, the spotlights blind you, you can barely make out the audience’s faces, and you’re left one-on-one with your demons jokes. Often, though not always, you manage to set off a cascade of biochemical reactions in the bodies of highly evolved primates — a cascade that ends with them cackling loudly, baring their teeth. And for some reason this brings you satisfaction. Every performance is a little quest, a miniature hero’s journey: descending into hell going up on the...