Episode 12: Silly Love Songs with Jenna Kim Jones

Ways to connect with Jenna~
instagram.com/jennakimjones
couplefriendspodcast.com
twitter.com/jennakimjones

You're listening to the Love Tidbits Podcast, where you'll discover a small, tasty, delightful, bite-sized tidbit of love. I'm your host, LeAnn Austin 

Hey y'all, welcome to Love Tidbits, episode #12: Silly Love Songs with Jenna Kim Jones 

I love observing and connecting with other humans, especially noting how they feel and implement love into their life.

We have the amazing Jenna Kim Jones sharing some beautiful love insights with us today. So Jenna, why don't you briefly introduce yourself. 

Jenna: Hello!  Well thank you so much for having me, LeAnn. You are such a great friend and I'm thrilled to be here and I'm excited about your podcast. So I'm happy to be here.

I am a professional stand-up comedian. I've been doing comedy for 10 years. I live in Georgia, and I've only lived in Georgia for four and a half years, but I love it. I'm trying to make it my home. I'm like, I don't want to go anywhere. It's fabulous. I have three kids, I'm married, and that's pretty much...Oh, and I podcast, I also podcast. So, yeah, I have a great career, and a great family, and you know, every day is just a journey. I'm just plugging along. Like everybody else. 

LeAnn: I love that. Yes, we're all living the dream, right?  Awesome. Alright, well I've got three questions for you today, and the first one is: How do you incorporate love into your business and/or your life?

Jenna: Okay. This is a great question. I am a comedian. Okay, and I love being a comedian. So I'll just start right then. I did not know I would be a comedian. It was not a life goal of mine. I fell into it after college and I felt like I found my love language. That is my jokes are my love language. I think sometimes people get an idea about comedy because a lot of times it's kind of edgy, or maybe it can feel mean-spirited, but I try to make sure that my comedy is fun and light. And do I make fun of things? Absolutely. But my intention is never to hurt anybody.  My intention is literally just to point stuff out and have a great time.  So like I said, jokes are my love language. If I'm teasing you, if I'm making jokes around you, you know, I've got you back. 

LeAnn: Well, I've been able to go to one of your shows and it was amazing, the best. And I love that you do make it fun and light and so good. Awesome. 

Jenna: Well, that's sort of, I just don't like to, I think comedy sometimes gets a, people get the idea like, oh, you're going to make fun of me, or you're going to, you know, step into places I don't want to hear about or whatever it might be.

Maybe I'm not expressing that well, but the idea is I try to just make it fun. Life is supposed to be fun. Life is really hard for a lot of people. Life is challenging, but I think it's important regardless of what's going on to have a little bit of fun. 

LeAnn: Yes. Totally agree. I love it. 

Jenna: Oh and sorry, I could just talk forever. LeAnn, you invited the wrong person on your podcast. Okay,  I don't want to not say this, I took some notes so that I wouldn't forget because I just had a baby like seven months ago and I'm still in that like foggy brain space. So I do have some notes. So, I have a podcast as well. I said that already, and it's called Couple Friends and I do it with my husband and he is hilarious and he's wonderful. And I will, this is so corny to say, but he really is the love of my life. Um, I hate myself for saying it, but he is, okay. 

And to the point where let's get real, I told him if I die early in some horrible tragedy, I can't have you remarrying anyone. Okay, because I'm just going to be way too jealous. I'm going to have to come back and haunt you. It's a whole thing. So we just got to hope that life is long together. But we do a podcast together, and it's purely dedicated to just being silly and lighthearted and fun. We do not take on the world's problems in our podcasts. We like to think we are a break from the world's problems. And, I think when people listen to that, you can tell that we're just here to like spread the love.

LeAnn: I so, so, so agree with that because I love listening to your podcast and listening to you and Al, and learning all these fascinating things like today when I listened, I heard that Al plays volleyball. I had no clue that he does that. So it is, I love that it's just fun and loving and light and oh, you guys are just beautiful examples of, of doing that. So thank you. Alright, so number two: what is something you love about you and why? 

Jenna: Ooh, these, this is a hard one. Cause you know I just want to be self-deprecating all the time, but, that's just what I like to do.  But I do, I will say that I do like an adventure, so not like put me up in the sky and throw me out of an airplane kind of adventure. No, no, no, no. I'm a huge baby. I don't want to do that. That scares me. I don't even like roller coasters. That's not the adventure I'm talking about. 

I'm talking like, I like a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of a, like, can I pull this off? Will I be able to pull this off? I don't know. For example, I mentioned already that I had a baby and I had a little bit of work that I needed to do after I had the baby. So it was only two months after he was born. I was like, can I go do this work? Can I take my three children on an airplane by myself? With the two month old. Sure. Why not? And we did, and we flew and we had a great, uh, it wasn't really a vacation, but I got to do a little bit of work. I got to have my kids with me.

I had some help from my mom. Don't worry. I wasn't completely alone here. And for my husband, But, I had to fly by myself and those kinds of my husband always thinks I'm crazy, cause he'll say like, I don't know about you, you like see hard things and you're like, let's try it. Let's just see if we can do it. It'll be great, and I think that that's helped me in stand up. Especially with my career in comedy, because I, when I first started was terrified of it, like to a point where 24 hours before I knew I was going to go on stage, I would be filled with anxiety. I'd be terrified. I would, all I could think about was, I can't believe I'm going to go on stage and I would want to, and I would want to bail out. I would think to myself, like, just don't you could just not do it. You know, you could just not do it. But then I would say to myself, no no, do it, you have to do it. This is an adventure. This is a challenge. Do it. So I think in the end, it's paid off. I get to do shows now, I have comedy specials. I have a really good work-life balance with my kids. And, but it took a lot of those moments of like, this seems really hard and scary. I think I should do it. 

LeAnn: Ah, I love that, because for me it's almost like if I feel like I'm going to throw up, then that means I should go ahead and do it.

It's like adventurous, like, ah, that's awesome. 

It's horrible.  What am I doing? I'm doing it.  

I love that, what an awesome quality that you have. Alright. K, so before I ask you the last question, anything else you want to share and where can our audience go to find out more about you? 

Jenna: Oh, I love that, well, like I said, I'm a standup comedian and a podcaster, so I would love for you to check out my podcast. It's called Couple Friends. Like I said, it's like a break. We, Allen and I tease that, you know, Murder podcasts are really the most popular kind of podcast and people just love a good murder mystery. And I say, you can only take so much of that. Alright, so listen to your murder podcasts, and then listen to my podcast where you'll have a light happy time. No darkness. 

LeAnn: I love it. Yes. 

Jenna: So, listen to LeAnn for the Love Tidbits, and then come over to mine and it's called Couple Friends. You can find out all about it at couplefriendspodcast.com. And then of course, follow me on social media. My full name is @ Jenna Kim Jones, and that's where my handle is everywhere.

LeAnn: Okay, perfect, and we'll put that into the show notes as well. Yeah, go ahead. 

Jenna: I don't know when this is coming out LeAnn, is it coming out soon? Oh, nevermind then. Okay. 

LeAnn: Alright. Okay, so for the last question: what is your favorite question or quote about love? 

Jenna: Oh, okay. So full disclosure. I read this question and I went like, blank, crickets. I got nothing. What? I don't have any questions about love. Do I have a favorite quote about love? How do I know anything about love? So then I decided, okay, I'm going to do a little internet research. And for me, my first instinct was like, go to music, go to love songs, go to silly songs.

And then of course the comedian kicked in and I was like, oh, my favorite quote is of course Bon Jovi: you give love a bad name. No, no, no. Take out the sarcasm. Okay, what am I really going for here? So I realize, there's a song, Paul McCartney wrote it, popular song from a few decades back. And, it's called Silly Love Songs.

And the lyrics of that song, the beginning, very beginning says, "You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs. I look around me and I see it isn't so.  Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs and what's wrong with that?" So, not only do I have a quote here, there's a question, "What's wrong with that?"

Why can't we just love and love and love? Alright, so I really love that song and I love that whole sentiment, because I don't think you can ever, stop finding reasons to feel love or be loved or,  you know, find happiness in love or whatever it might be.  Sometimes you just like to listen to sad love songs, because that feels good to, you know, but what I'm really trying to say is I like the sentiment of that song.

And then I thought, you know, I wonder why Paul McCartney wrote this song. So I dug a little bit deeper. And the reason he wrote this song was, he felt that this, and this is just according to the internet, maybe it's not true. I'm going to go with it's true because it feels good to me and what I'm trying to say.

But apparently according to what I researched, he wrote the song as a rebuttal to people who were critical of his music.  People who had criticized him for writing what they called light-weight love songs.  There's an author who suggested that this song, Silly Love Songs was written because McCartney's like inviting people to have a little bit of a laugh and to be a little bit lighthearted and silly.

I love that, I all of a sudden went like this is a fabulous song and completely feels right to me, because as a comedian, I am often criticized, because of the material that I choose. I'm very lighthearted, very silly. I tease about my husband, my kids, my life. I've had comedians, oh, and I'm a very clean comedian.

I don't do edgy or blue comedy, and I've had people criticize me for that because they say, well, you don't go like deep enough into people's problems. Your life is too happy, sunshine.  You don't have any like real raw, meaty things that you talk about. And I thought, I always think like, but why do we need more of that?

And so I love this song. It actually has more meaning to me now because I go like, hey, why can't we just have lots of silly love songs? Why can't we just tell silly jokes? Why can't we just be a little bit lighthearted sometimes?  So that is my new favorite go-to about love. 

LeAnn: Jenna, I love that. And silly love songs.  Hmmm y'all, something to think about. Thank you. Thank you, Jenna, for sharing your tidbits of love with us.  Have a good one y'all and here's to love~

If you would like to become an expert at loving yourself, check out my Lovin Me Program at leannaustin.com