When comedians fail on stage they are said to “die”. Mark Watson is a comedian – chiefly known for having staged 24-hour-long marathon gigs and for appearances on panel shows such as Taskmaster and Mock the Week – so he has experienced these “mortifications”, a term he applies here to analysis of eight personal setbacks.
It’s axiomatic that only successful people write books about being a failure, and I thought at the outset that Watson was underplaying his hand. There’s no mention in Mortification of his first-class degree from Cambridge or his 260,000 Twitter followers. He also downplays the success of his seven novels. These have psychological themes and Watson has, in recent years, opened up about his anxieties and neuroses in various podcasts (Mortification itself began life as an audio book), so he can be credited with having anticipated, rather than exploited, the booming self-help genre.
His tales of mortification are well told. He makes jokes constantly, almost abstractedly, like a percussionist tapping on the arm of a chair when they talk to you. They didn’t all make me laugh, but quite a lot did. I liked the response of his chemistry teacher father to the young Watson’s question about whether his dead hamster would go to heaven: “I shouldn’t have thought so, no.” In general, the darker this book is, the better.
A couple of his early mortifications don’t seem very deadly. As a boy chorister, he can’t reach a high note in a performance because his voice is breaking – surely the natural denouement of that activity. But the scenes become much heavier. Watson, who is now 43, had “large life issues” in his 30s, his constant busy-ness becoming “camouflage for a human falling apart”. He speaks of tortured, anxiety-ridden sleeplessness, the night “just draining out of the sky”. He alludes in passing to an affair, divorce, of being a “couple of text messages away from ending things”, but he concentrates on the professional implications of his malaise.
Touring some major venues that he can’t fill, an “inner civil war” develops; he feels a fraud. Appearances on certain panel shows bring this out, and there is a clammy, nightmarish quality to his recollection of jokes being appropriated by bigger names, a comic sally quelled by a glaring rival. On one programme, participants “laugh out loud into thin air” when the recording finishes, to create their own canned laughter. When studio audiences witness this, “you can see a little bit of their hearts dying”.
We learn a lot about the comedy business. Apparently, comedians doing corporate gigs are booked into hotel rooms until midnight, “resembling Cinderella in this regard, ceasing to exist after their performance”. There is a harrowing story of appearing on Celebrity Storage Hunters (“the saddest three words in the game”). On Celebrity Island With Bear Grylls, Watson tried – and failed – to survive a month on a tiny island off Panama. Having lost three stone, he was sent home early. He recalls working on a promising film project for four years. Suddenly, a silence fell. “I never heard a word from the people involved in the film again.” Yes, these are tales from a particularly capricious world, but the “ego wrestle” of a showbiz career is increasingly relatable, given the insecurity of any modern workplace.
The lessons he draws? They are modestly presented; Watson rejects the guru role. The standard punchline of celebrity confessionals – “Things used to be wrong, now they’re right” – is absent. He likes the idea that life is more of a dance than a series of victories and defeats; he commends the adage “What people think of you is none of your business”. Another theme is that you can’t control what happens to your output. The maxim associated (slightly inaccurately, as Watson notes) with the film Field of Dreams is “build it and they will come”. Watson’s variation: “Build it… and they might come.”
Mortification has real cumulative force. I’m 61, and it spoke powerfully to me, but I commend it particularly to any young competitive person who feels life is a race in which they are beginning to fall behind.
• Mortification: Eight Deaths and Life After Them by Mark Watson is published by Phoenix (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
