#part-time comic

I love watching movies while travelling. When you’re locked into an eight to thirteen-hour plane or bus ride it’s easy to lock into watching things that you wouldn’t normally have the patience for. 

I was recently in Australia, and thanks to the limited selection on the planes I was taking I was able to catch a bizarre double-feature: Toni Erdmann and Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Both are comedies. Neither is funny. 

Of the two, Toni Erdmann is the one that’s not supposed to be funny. It tells the story of a German retiree who is estranged from his daughter, who works for an oil company in Bucharest. When his dog dies he flies to where she works and visits her. It’s awkward and weird. What makes it worse is that Winfried (the dad) is a notorious prankster, often donning a pair of fake teeth and trying to convince people he’s someone else. He is never, not once, funny.

The movie is over three hours long. It is, at times, painful. It’s also profoundly human and kind of beautiful. The movie sits in Winfried’s bad jokes. It stews in the awkwardness, the furtive glances, the deep need of everyone involved to be anywhere else than where they are, and in doing so it reveals just how much effort people put into propriety. It reveals the horror residing just under the social contract by showing someone breaking it, badly.

You can glimpse a similar horror in Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Another hugely popular but critically reviled movie from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions. The movie has become a punchline of its own by now, synonymous with Wal-Mart bargain bins and dumb comedy. Watching it after years of studiously ignoring it, I was surprised; it was better than I thought it would be. Kevin James is a hugely charismatic actor, and his enormous eyes let a whole host of emotions play across his face. Paul Blart, as a character, is remarkably well-realized as a result, and I was surprised by how much character work actually went into making Blart seem real.

He is also not funny.

All of the jokes in Paul Blart hinge on one thing: Paul is a nice guy and everyone in the world hates him. His boss shits on him constantly. Bully Steve Rannazzisi rips on him, letting loose the only verbal jokes in the entire movie. Otherwise, all the big laughs come from physical comedy, as Blart is put into headlocks (by a woman haha), slips, falls, and crashes into things.  

I stopped watching the movie when Blart gets accidentally drunk and starts hitting on the (woefully out of his league but predictably intrigued) love interest of the movie, Jayma Mays, revealing that he’s not really such a nice guy after all. Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery noted in their Worst Idea of All Time podcast that Sandler’s Grown Ups 2 had a vicious, ugly worldview, where the weak are to be punished at every turn and the only thing separating the bullies from the good guys is... well, that the good guys are the good guys, i.e. the ones the movie is about. Paul Blart: Mall Cop is similar in this regard. We’re supposed to think Paul Blart is a good guy because he’s bullied, but we’re also expected to laugh every time he is bullied. The movie has no idea what’s funny other than being cruel; it assumes we are as cruel as it is. 

Both movies, to my mind, reveal the horror of the failed joke. They reveal the pathetic desire of the comic to be laughed at, and the lengths we’ll go not to acknowledge that. Toni Erdmann uses that to tell a story about becoming real, as the father and daughter figure out how to actually relate (hint: the dad isn’t in the right!), while Paul Blart wants you to laugh at the fat man falling down. One reveals the horror implicit in the world, the other wills the world to be horrible. 

Toni Erdmann is the anti-comic who knows how to wield discomfort like a scalpel, forcing the audience to examine themselves. Paul Blart is the shock comic who gets mad at the audience for not laughing, who was probably already mad at the audience for... something?

I always thought I was a good writer. Okay, I still do – but performing stand-up comedy really showed me how much I had to learn about writing, and how much I still have to learn.

Most forms of writing happen in your own head. You hear your voice in your own cranium, and you craft a through-line as you write, looking ahead to how the sentence you’re writing now is going to contribute to the final product.

When you’re writing stand-up comedy, however, you have to write for other people – and as good a job as you think you did staring at your notebook or computer screen, your audience was always only really yourself.

Stand-up comedy is a test; it tests whether your writing works. That doesn’t mean if it’s grammatical, or if it makes a point. Stand-up tests whether or not your writing reaches an audience, and meets them where they are. When I realized that, I realized I had to focus on writing in different ways.

Clarity:

Stand-up needs to be clear. Obviously, that means when you say something, it needs to be obvious what you mean. If your audience is confused by your set-up, or worse, your punchline, they will not laugh. They’ll spend the time they should be laughing puzzling over what you meant. Even if they eventually get it right, even if they agree that the idea is kind of funny, the moment is lost forever.

However, not just your meaning has to be clear; one of the most surprising things I learned by taking to the stage is if the audience isn’t sure who you are, they will not laugh at your jokes. That’s why so many comedians open their act with self-deprecating jokes – they’re showing that they’re likeable, approachable, and not arrogant, but also they’re informing the audience who they are.

I noticed when performing that people would treat my set completely differently based on what I wore. I tried wearing a blazer once, just for kicks, and any material I did about feeling anxious or worried about my life direction didn’t do as well. It was far easier to sell that material when wearing a hoodie. Anything you say that doesn’t match what the audience thinks of you is a challenge, and a challenge they’re going to reckon with before they start listening further.

I’m not far enough into a comedy career to be certain what my character is on stage, but one thing is obvious: whatever my character is, it can’t be ambiguous. The audience needs to make a fast decision about who you are, and why you’re funny. If they can’t do that, they won’t laugh.

I realized this is basically true of all writing. You need to signal who you are as a writer, and you need to make it plain, or else your readers will spend part of their reading time trying to figure out who you are, rather than reading what you wrote.

When you write in your own head, you think who you are is obvious. It’s not. And that’s why stand-up is a great test.

 Write Good; Don’t Write Bad

The hard truth is most writing is bad – even if you’re a good writer. We all know drafts are important, and that it takes hard work to write well, but the time limit of stand-up means every word had better well be doing something.

I have a joke about cheating on my girlfriend with food. This is because one time she was out of town for a weekend, and I ate like I was trying to kill myself. I figured there was something adulterous about that, and I told the story on stage.

People seemed to like it – a close friend tells me it’s her favourite bit – but nobody would really laugh. I realized at some point I was being amusing, relatable, and even authentic, but not funny.

One day in the shower I was thinking about that bit and hit on a new way to say everything I needed to say in one joke: “My girlfriend leaves for the weekend, and instantly, I’m on the phone with Dominos: ‘Yeah, she’s gone, come over. I want you.’”

It’s much funnier than the long story I was telling and accomplishes the same thing in just a few words. Of course, the original story was true – but who cares? This new version is efficient and much, much funnier.

The thing is, I knew right away that it was better – but I also knew that the old version wouldn’t work, even as I was writing it. I tried it on-stage, because you have to, but deep down I knew it wasn’t there yet.

I’m on thin ice giving advice about comedy. 

Beyond the basics for first-timers, like “you get five minutes, maybe three depending on the venue” or “when they flash the light at you, that means you have one minute left,” I’m not qualified to offer much other than “if you want to, do it.” But there is one piece of advice I do feel comfortable handing out:

Get over deciding people aren’t funny as soon as possible. 

I say “as soon as possible” because you’re going to do it. Everybody does. When you enter a scene, any scene, you start making decisions about who you like, who you don’t like, and where you fit in this whole mess. It’s a way of interpreting the lay of the land and developing a sense of identity in it. 

You’re going to go to an open mic and start picking your favourites - and you’re also going to pick the ones who “shouldn’t be there.” And it’s going to feel great. 

That’s the kicker - it feels really good to decide that someone isn’t worthy of being on stage, because it implicitly means that you’re better than they are. Even if you don’t really think so, even if you say “I don’t mean that I think I’m great or anything,” just being able to exercise that judgement is the cheapest ego boost around. 

But, like most cheap boosts, it’s not good for you. 

When you start, you go to open mics. You see a wide range of performances from a wide range of people you’ve never seen before. Some you will like, some you won’t like. That’s fine. But what you don’t realize right away is that open mics don’t indicate much; good comics might try stuff that isn’t working, new comics may be doing the best version of the set they’ve been doing for three months. One night, especially at an open mic, does not give a good sense of the development that happens outside of those five minutes on stage. 

Stick with it, and you start seeing people going up, again and again. You get a better sense of where they’re coming from and where they’re going. People get better before your eyes - sometimes the people you least expected to push through. And you realize you have off nights - off nights where someone might have see you and say “they’re not funny.” 

It’s a truism that comedy attracts fragile egos, and fragile egos like to judge. It’s easy to see someone bomb once and write that person off FOREVER. 

That’s bad medicine.

To clarify, it’s okay to be critical. It’s fair to say “he’s muddying the punchline” or “she’s using the same joke structure over and over, and should change it up.” But when you start, you make character judgments because those are the tools you have at hand, and because the problem you’re trying to solve is “do I deserve to be here?” The answer to that question is “sure! Why not?” But it also applies to everyone else. 

Also: it’s easy to see why someone you don’t like isn’t funny. But it’s way harder to figure out why they ARE funny - even if they step on the punch, even if you disagree with their point of view. If you can figure out why they work as opposed to why they don’t work, you have more tools in your kit.

I love comedy. This is both new and old. I was a kid in the wake of the comedy boom, and I loved watching all the comedy shows produced during that time: Evening at the Improv, Two Drink Minimum, and especially the footage from the Just For Laughs specials. At the age of twelve, I wanted to be a comedian. 

That was not true from ages 13-33.

A little over a year ago, I took a class in how to do stand-up. I’d been listening to podcasts for some time, and was rediscovering my love of the form through the comedy specials and albums of the last ten years, when a friend of mine took a class through Instant Theatre. It was 100 bucks for four two hour workshop classes - not so much a class as a relatively low-pressure way to try doing comedy for the first time. 

Look. It’s cliché to say “I was hooked.” But I discovered a love of performance and making people laugh that felt like coming full circle. I could speculate why, but I won’t. At least not right now. 

There was one problem: somewhere in the past twenty years, I became a goddamn adult. Do you see the problem here?

Comedy is, or has been, a young person’s game. If you DO comedy, you’re supposed to be out every night, grinding it out, getting good and living, breathing, and eating comedy. I can’t do that.

I have a girlfriend who is for all intents and purposes my wife. I love her, and for some reason she likes having me around in the evenings. I am finishing a PhD. That matters to me. I do not have the ability to drop everything to do one thing I love, because frankly, I love lots of things. Comedy is important to me, but it is not the only thing that is important to me. And I reject the idea that just because I don’t do it full-time, I’m not doing it at all. 

So I’m faced with a question: how do I do comedy, get better at comedy, when I can only get on stage once or twice a week?  

This website is part of my answer. Because even though I only get so much stage time, I think about stand-up all the time. You can go up every night, do the same jokes, and not get funnier - I’ve seen it. So how do you make sure you improve every time you perform?

Here, I will be thinking about my stand-up, testing new approaches, and inviting you to help me get funny.