My Worst Day as a Professional Comedy Blogger
It all started here. I woke up around noon after many hours drifting in and out of REM sleep in search of post ideas. I decided I was going to make a comedy Tumblr my career four months ago, but things have been turbulent, and this post sent me over the edge. I wrote it after having a dream where I posted a simple ligma balls joke before pointing and laughing at a sigma male, who was breathing heavily in the doorway across the room. It felt noteworthy to me that his face was hilariously small, so I included a picture of Charlie Kirk. The sigma male was not Charlie Kirk within my dream, however I lack the Photoshop skills to recreate him and there are plenty of Charlie Kirk “small face” images available online already.
I drafted the post while in my bed still, but I waited for a short while before posting. I always research what tags will be the most effective and schedule things to post around when Tumblr is most active, which is usually around 5PM EST. It took me hours to find the perfect tags. Tags like #comedy, #satire, and #joke are cesspools, no one actually uses those. It just doesn’t make sense to me. So many people love Tumblr for its comedy, and yet not a single person actually follows those tags. They just expect the funny jokes to arrive in front of them organically, without an algorithm. #shitpost is a little more reasonable per Tumblr’s culture, but few people follow that even still. At the same time, I feel it’s important to still utilize these tags, so they are often the last five of the ten tags I use, as only the top five actually appear for people that follow a tag. The additional five appear in the search results, and anything more than that gets the entire post suppressed. I often check every single tag after my posts have been published to confirm that they appear correctly. Sometimes, they are suppressed for simply having more than five tags. Tumblr is a confusing machine, and every day, I curse myself for being too stupid to understand it.
Over the course of the day, I drafted several more posts, but none of them felt nearly as good as the sigma balls joke. My daydreams about certain posts reflect the quality of them. Every time I come up with a really good post, I have profound visions about it being reblogged thousands of times as people send me countless asks. They tell me that I’m underrated, they question why they hadn’t found me until now, they shower me in compliments about how funny and clever I am. I end up being interviewed by several Youtube essayists and reach stardom beyond the Tumblr sphere. This is what I saw when I thought about the sigma balls post, set to be published at 5PM. As I ate my breakfast-lunch of coffee and the leftover whiskey from the previous night, I asked myself some very important questions. Once I was internet famous, not just Tumblr famous, would I remain humble and stay on Tumblr as a comedy blog? Or would this be simply a step towards something greater, such as a podcast?
At 3:46PM, I couldn’t take it anymore. I hit “post” early. This was a mistake, perhaps the worst mistake I’ve made since I started attempting to make Tumblr comedy my career. 3PM is not when Tumblr is most active. 4PM is within the appropriate time range, but 3PM is too early.
Some part of me knew that I was making a mistake, but I didn’t have the words to describe it yet. I quickly checked the tags and found that it was where I expected it to be, so I simply sat on my office chair-couch to wait. After five minutes, I hadn’t received a single notification. Things started to feel bleak. Many of the tags I posted in moved very quickly. I refreshed them every minute and watched in horror as my hilarious post was pushed off the screen. With each passing minute, I realized that this joke that I so lovingly crafted was never that funny to begin with. I remembered that I’m not funny, in fact I have never been funny. Nobody laughed at my jokes in high school, let alone middle school. Elementary school was the peak, and I’ve been chasing this high ever since—a high that can never be reached again.
I tossed and turned, bawling over how unfunny and stupid and ugly I am. Every time my post fails to receive notes, it reminds me of how much I hate myself. I hate myself so fucking much. I know I’ll never make it far in life and there’s no one to blame but myself. I am a complete, utter failure. Eventually, I left the basement and went outside to the trash cans. I stuck my head in the trash can and told myself, “You’re a trash girl, Natalie. You are a trash-eating trash girl who deserves to eat trash because of how awful you are.” And I cried back to myself, “Yes, I know I am a trash girl! I know I must eat trash!” However, my step-father came outside and asked what I was doing midway through attempting to rip open one of the bags. He reminded me not to rip open the trash bags, as it would make a mess when the garbage men came to take our trash away, so I ran back inside bawling my eyes out before he could speak to me again.
I took a screenshot of my post moments before the mental anguish began. If this post was going to go anywhere, it would’ve happened within those first five minutes. Ten minutes is pushing it, and after that, it’s past the point of no return. I eventually deleted the post, ashamed of my failure. By the time I finished having my breakdown an hour later, I still had received no notes. Leaving it up would remind me of my miserable uphill battle each time I check to see whether my blog has finally gained any attention or not. Despite posting for four months straight, at least one post every single day, I have only gained six followers, four of which have been bots. Because I deleted the sigma balls post, this is the first day I have not posted something comedic on this blog since beginning this career. Instead, I share my story with the hopes that I will be supported. Attempting to make Tumblr a career is not easy and neither is comedy. Perhaps if people know how difficult this is, they would appreciate me more. All I have ever wanted is to make my first grade class laugh so much that they pay me for it. If my story touches you in some way, please follow me and support my work so that I may have value as a person again. Thank you.
