Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss was relatively unknown before a two-part special of his stand up shows were released on Netflix.
During one of those specials, Jigsaw, Sloss told a joke about relationships.
To date Sloss has ended at least 34,000 relationships and 93 marriages with Jigsaw — and that's a conservative estimate.
"If I was being realistic, I'd say about 50,000 break ups," the 28-year-old Scottish comedian Said "I still get emails every day from the website, and that's usually where all the divorces come through."
Sloss begins the joke by recalling the time when he was young when his father told him that there’s a perfect person for all of us, our missing piece.
Being seven, Sloss says he bought into the fantasy.
"And even though what he said sounded sweet and whatever, what it manifested into in my seven-year-old brain was this: 'If you are not with someone, you are broken. If you are not with someone, you are incomplete. If you are not with someone, you are not whole'.'"
Sloss says this belief isn't just something his father taught him, but something society is taught to believe as a whole.
"Every Disney princess has a prince, every prince has a princess," he says on stage, adding in that television shows and movies help feed the myth. That single people are incomplete and are only made whole by finding that special someone.
He says the myth leaves us feeling terrified of being alone as adults, causing many of us to end up with the wrong person. He refers to them as "the wrong jigsaw piece" that we try to jam into our jigsaws anyway.
"And we’ll force this f--king person into our lives because we’d much rather have something than nothing," he says.
Sloss admits some people may meet the "perfect person", but it doesn’t always last.
"Every relationship is perfect for three months, and here’s why," he says. "Cause after three months that’s when you realise nobody else is a jigsaw piece.
Everyone else on this planet is as deep and as complex and as individual as you, which means they’ve spent the past 20 or 30 years of their lives working on their own jigsaw puzzle in the same way you have been working on yours."
"You can’t suddenly expect them to give up everything they’ve achieved to suddenly fit into yours."
The joke continues, getting more and more poignant, but you get the drift.
It doesn’t take long to realise why this particular stand up routine has broken up so many relationships, and why that may not be a bad thing.
"The joke is 20 minutes long and it was never intended to break couples up," he tells The Daily Record. "It’s a love letter to single people, pointing out that most of the time being single is better than being in a relationship."
Sloss says he believes 80 percent of relationships are false.
"We raise children with Disney princes and princesses and when you become an adult and you’re not in a relationship you feel broken and a failure, so you force yourself into any relationship. "Turns out it resonates with people so much they’re dumping their partners," he says.
By the time Daniel first began telling the joke, he was claiming 500 broken relationships, including the cancelling of three engagements and the end of one 15-year-marriage, purely off the back of his live show.
After being on Netflix for a week, he told The Daily Record the number is more than 35,000 – and has since posted on social media raising that to "40,000+".
"And those are only the confirmed numbers, people who have messaged me, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was four times higher," he said.
One of the many fans who have tweeted him wrote, "I wanted to say you can add a divorce from a three-year emotionally abusive marriage to your list. I just finished watching your show and I was having doubts about whether or not I had made the right decision.
"However, the questions and situations you brought up confirmed that it’s OK to say that I deserve better."
The comedian talks about relationships and how many of us stay with someone and spend way too much time trying to make it work, when it should just work.
"They should love everything about you," he explains.
Then, the moment that ended thousands of relationships.
"If you're having trouble laughing at this joke it's because deep down you don't love the person you are with," he says.
"From the bottom of my heart I believe that 80% of the relationships in the world and therefore in this room are horsesh-t. A bunch of people who never learned how to love themselves so you employed someone else to do it.
"Prove me wrong."
Sloss admits that not all the feedback has been positive.
"A bloke came up to me in Edinburgh last year and said, ' You’re Daniel Sloss',"
"I hate you! I bought my girlfriend and her best friend tickets to your show and a week later she dumped me."
The joke goes for much longer, with Sloss going on to explain that while his dad was right to a point, the one thing he got was wrong was to assume that the centre of everyone's jigsaw puzzle isn't necessarily a 'perfect' partner.
It's about finding that one thing that makes you happy, and then letting the rest of your jigsaw naturally fit around it.
That could be a partner, or work, or children, or anything else.
Societies mistake is to assume that for everyone, that perfect centre piece is a person.
He then goes to the heart of what we all ultimately know -- that before we can find happiness in a relationship, before we can allow ourselves to be loved by someone who even has the potential to be our centre, we have to learn to love ourselves.
"There's nothing wrong with being single," he says. "There's nothing wrong with being alone. There's nothing wrong with talking time for yourself to work our who you are before you go out there and offer who you are if you don't know who you are."
So much wisdom for someone so young. So much comfort for those made to feel 'less than' for their single status.
Daniel Sloss is touring Australia in April and May 2020.
Details & tickets at https://danielsloss.com/tour/
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