Am I as bad as this dude?

I recently went down this deep Youtube rabbithole. I discovered this Youtube channel called Hiding In My Room, and it's really simple. It's just a young man, named Daniel, basically complaining about his life into his camera. It's probably the laziest, most low production value Youtube channel I have seen ever, but I was hooked and I watched almost all his videos. He complains about living in Japan, living in England, being in Malaysia, about being single, about being married, about being divorced, about all his relationships, about his then wife, about missing his ex-wife, about having wasted his 20s, about catching Chlamydia, and the only common factor for all his problems is himself. He is soft spoken, and doesn't yell or anything in his videos, and he says he avoids confrontation, and I believe this is true, because I can see it but he is obviously lazy, unmotivated, entitled, inconsiderate, spoilt by an easy life and some people have said that he might be a sociopath. And idiots like me are just hooked on his videos. What is he going to do next? Is he really like this? Who is the real Daniel? I want to know! But he's also not getting millions of views. Most of his videos get somewhere from 15K to 25K views.

 

He was interviewed by another Youtuber called Elvis The Alien, and I think he let his guard down and seemed totally honest in that interview, even revealing information that could hurt his viewership - like admitting that he wasn't really homeless like he claimed in some of his videos, and revealing that he actually exaggerates his feelings in his videos to play up the drama and get views. I think maybe he did this because he is lonely and wanted to be friends with Elvis The Alien. He seems like an intelligent guy, who realizes he has some serious personality flaws but he also knows these flaws are what intrigues his audiences and he's kind of stuck. He told Elvis The Alien he wants to be liked, but he's stuck doing these videos. And I believe him.

He's hurt a lot of people in his life, and it's easy to hate him. He's a douche and he brought all his problems on himself, for sure. But I also see his point of view a bit. Because I think the things he admits to doing and thinking, as messed up, entitled, and hypocritical as they are, are his honest thoughts and feelings. He wouldn't be less of a douche if he thought those things but didn't say it. As weird and as sociopathic as it is, there's some journalistic integrity there.

And he got me thinking about my comedy and all the stuff I put out in public. I have always felt that the interesting things in life are the ugly bits nobody talks about. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are sad, and because they are so seldom explored in conversations, they almost always interesting. My wife is the opposite, she only wants to put out the most beautiful stuff - vivid pictures of breakfast and flowers, and vacation photos of us standing in front of landmarks. Very often, I talk about my wife or my son in my comedy, or social media posts. The topic of being a parent, being a spouse, living with someone from a different gender or from a different generation, the conversations we have, the miscommunications and misunderstandings, our differences, all these fascinate me to no end. I looked at my jokes the other day, and about a third of them feature my wife and about a third of them feature my son. They say you write about what you know and my wife and son are pretty much all I ever think about and I can't fill an hour with the positive things. How boring would that be?

But watching Daniel, who has ruined his marriage and his relationships and to some extent, his life with what he shares on Youtube, I do wonder if I am ruining my relationships with my wife and my son. I've talked to my son about it briefly and he just brushes it off as nonsense and he says he doesn't care about my jokes because they're just jokes. I hope he's right and doesn't regret it later. In the past, my wife has often asked me to not do one joke or another that she is in. I guess, I could change the joke and instead of saying it's my wife, I say it's my friend, but if the joke is about men and women, it doesn't really work. It would be weird. It raises questions, and is too distracting. Who is this "friend", and why is she so central in my life? Also, my wife and I have totally different senses of humour. She doesn't find any of my jokes funny. If she says one of my jokes is funny, it is because she heard me telling it at a show and saw other people laughing. Every single time I have tried a joke on my wife outside of a show, she has said it's not funny. And often, those jokes end up getting laughs on stage. So I have simplified my writing process by excluding her from it. It really doesn't help when you're about to go on stage and try a joke for the first time to be carrying the burden of having a loved one tell you it will fail. I'd much rather hit the stage with an empty mind. But then, sometimes my wife doesn't want me to tell a joke because she feels she'll look bad in it. And I agree, if she looks bad in it, I really don't need to do that joke. But often, I feel she's being too sensitive about it. I have one joke where I mention she yells at me over the phone. She doesn't like that joke because to her acquaintances, she never yells. But all her friends know she does. And more importantly, I feel that everybody yells now and then. That joke isn't about her yelling, but it is about how ridiculous it is that Whatsapp wants me to give them a good rating after I'd been yelled at during a Whatsapp call. But to her, that's a wife joke, so she disapproves of that joke, but I disagree with her and I still perform it.

So am I different from Daniel, the guy who pawns his relationships for content? I would like to think I am, but I'm also not entirely sure. I don't think people think badly of my wife for yelling because I feel like everybody yells at their spouse now and then and everybody knows this, so they don't really focus on that.

Apart from that, my wife also disapproves of many of my jokes that doesn't mention her. She disapproves of any jokes that have words that are negative like death, dying, AIDS, disability or anything she feels is a "dark topic", and I can't really work with such a limited vocabulary, because I'm not the most animated performer, so words are all I have.

So I don't know. Am I wrong to leave my wife and son out of my writing process? Do they need to be involved in censorship?