Philip Patston is an ex-gay, ex-disabled, ex-vegetarian, ex-comedian about to perform at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival in May. RENEE LIANG speaks to him about how he invents himself.


RENEE: You call yourself a comedian, change consultant and social entrepreneur... how do those things all tie together? Can you be all of them at the same time?

PHILIP: Well it’s interesting you should ask because it’s one of the things I’m trying to do with this show. They are quite disparate roles and I do find it hard to be all at the same time. But they are what make me uniquely me, so this show is about pulling my more serious work into a comic context and seeing what happens.

R: Yes, I was looking at the description of your show and the mind was boggling a bit. The show is “part comedy routine, part motivational seminar, part leadership thingy, part poetry reading, part something else”! How will you put it all together? And what exactly is Constructive Creative Ironic Thinking ?

P: Hahaha that’s quite a question! Actually, I’m not quite sure, which is another exciting aspect to the show. I’ve got all this stuff I want to talk about – about how we relate to each other, our identity, wisdom, experience and expression – which I talk about in seminars and at conferences. So I’m looking forward to taking the piss out of myself on one hand, but also reminding people about some realities that we forget, like the fact that everyone has the possibility of ending up a bit like me because they could walk out of the show, be hit by a bus and fall in love with the bus driver who happens to be the same gender... which is probably an example of Constructive Creative Ironic Thinking!

R: Yes indeed! Your work is really quite engaging – it has a different feel to most stand up (for a start, it’s not stand up...). One of the things that hits me immediately is how you refuse to feel sorry for yourself, and you’re happy to take the piss out of anyone who wants to feel sorry. It’s more about recognising the issues and moving on from there.

You’ve had a packed life... did you come to this state of Zen easily, or did you have to drag yourself kicking and screaming?

P: I haven’t always been so Zen, believe me. In fact I was an angry young man once, an activist etc. But I did have an epiphany about 15 years ago when I realised my feelings changed when I thought about things differently.

That set me on a path of discovery about innate creativity and about how we are creating our reality every second and we don’t even realise it. So a lot of my work is about creating new paradigms. I’ve developed this thesis on experiential diversity, which is about how we can think about experience as unique and common, rather than these negative judgments we insist on making.

R: And from your work I realise that these ideas apply to everyone, not just the disabled or the visibly different.

P: No indeed, it’s everyone.

R: So acceptance is the first step, and then from there we can progress?

P: I think it’s somewhat less than acceptance actually. I think it’s about losing the expectation that life will be this or that. To me diversity is much more about what we don’t do – don’t judge, don’t assume, don’t expect, don’t stress. We really do need to get over ourselves!

R: Is this the underlying message of your show?

P: Maybe. I tend to try and make my shows about me more than other people. I actually don’t care what people do. But I think, yes, I have kind of gotten over myself. One of the things I’ll be doing is renouncing my labels – gay, disabled, vegetarian, kiwi, comedian (which is why I’ve added ex- to all of them) because I’m really not any of them anymore. I see them as roles I play sometimes, but I don’t identify with them these days.

It’s a lonely, yet liberating place to be...

R: In a way I think all of us play roles, everyday... some imposed by ourselves, some imposed from outside. One of the things I like about performance is how it reminds us that they are all just roles.

I know you’ve been working for years as a consultant for people interested in changing the way they see themselves... can you talk a bit about that?

P: My work in that area stems from a belief that in order to change the world you have to change yourself. It’s not really my idea. Therapists will tell you that you can’t change others, and Neale Donald Walsch talks about it in his books Conversations with God.

So as I come from a background in radical social action theory aka social work 101, it’s put me in good stead to think about how do you change the world by starting with how you change yourself with intent and inspire others to change. That’s where the WISE SPECIES™ Movement came about. It’s a model I dreamt up in the shower one morning.

It’s simple yet complex as all great things and people are. WISE is about awareness – of your experience (wisdom, identity, synergy) and expression. SPECIES is about targeting your expression so people experience you as much as possible, as you experience yourself – socially, physically, emotionally, culturally, intellectually, economically and spiritually. And that came about from my experience of people in the main thinking about and responding to me as if I was retarded just because I use a wheelchair.

R: A lot of great ideas come from the shower...

P: Indeed!

R: Those ideas you mention seem to have a lot in common with writing and acting.

P: Do they? See people tell me that all the time – my academic friends say, “oh yes there’s this and that theory about that...”

R: Yes, what gets me is how every discipline has ideas which are useful for someone else. So that’s why I like what you’re doing on Creative Momentum (a new organisation) – trying to collide ideas and minds.

P: Yes...I feel really lucky that I’ve had so much experience in different disciplines – business, education, social work, counseling, comedy, writing, poetry...

R: So do you perform poetry in this show as well?

P: Yes, it’s my “easy bit” where I don’t have to remember lines! Not that I remember lines anyway, but I can just relax as the structure is there.

I think it’s so funny, the difference between comedy and other performance. In comedy it only matters whether you get a laugh, but for anything else it’s about the work. I guess with this show I'm trying to make the work matter. I’ve been saying that this show’s a bit of a clincher – after it I’ll decide whether I keep on doing the “comedy thing”...

R: Why should comedy only be about the laugh? Maybe it’s another discipline due for a paradigm shift...

P: Well, yes, perhaps you’re right. There’s the old adage if a tree falls and no-one hears it, does it make a sound? So, if a comedian tells a joke and no-one laughs, is it still funny?

R: Well, it depends on why you’re telling the joke. Sometimes the internal laugh/cry is better than the external one... speaking from my own bias of course, I’m bad at jokes!

P: Actually I was watching a talk on TED.com – Dan Dannett was saying we’ve got it wrong. Babies are cute because we love them, not the other way around. Things are funny because we laugh, we don’t laugh because they’re innately funny.

R: What’s your online project, Creative Momentum about?

P: The intent of Creative Momentum is to build a virtual movement to explore creative diversity. We want to webcast local events to global audiences and build bridges between different disciplines (eg. commerce, culture and education), different communities and different ideas about creativity. In so doing we hope to discover similarities but not let that overshadow differences, rather blend with them – it’s about synergy.

R: Is it only virtual, or are there also plans to translate that into a real community?

P: Well, the local event we held on February 27 this year was a template for future events. What we’d like to see is February 27s happening all over the world and being loaded onto the site. For example, upcoming local projects like Metonymy09 are local, cross-disciplinary and a creative collision – if ideas like that are covered on the site, they could potentially reach more people.

I think people are a bit “over-virtualised” at the moment – I think we need a mix of real and virtual experience, and they need to be more integrated.

R: Yes, I couldn’t agree more! So I’d like to suggest that people integrate this virtual experience of you by going to see your show!