The easiest level of comedy, I think, is to be the "funny one" in any group. I think most people have a sense of humor. This will not be controversial but different people find different things rewarding. For athletic kids, it is the praise they get from winning a game or scoring a goal. For smart kids, it is the praise of a good grade. For good-looking kids, it is awesome sex and free cheese fries. For funny kids, it is getting others to laugh.
I remember reading jokes out of Reader's Digest and then repeating them back to a woman who cut my hair when I was a kid. I liked remembering them word for word. When the Comedy Channel (later Comedy Central) came along, they showed clips of comedians doing bits all day long. This is where I realized that word choice, inflection, cadence and a host of other factors went into making a joke funny. My cousin still marvels that I memorized whole stand up routines when we were kids. I mean, other kids knew baseball stats, I knew Larry Miller's five stages of drinking.
Like so many other things I owe in life to my childhood best friend, Kirbie introduced me to Monty Python in elementary school. To this day, an absurdist joke still kills me. Also, jokes taken way too far until they pass from funny to unfunny and back to funny again. I saw my first Saturday Night Live in middle school and went to see Dennis Miller perform a year later. Comedy movies, comedy TV, stand up, improv, I was exposed to all these things early on. I remember seeing Furman's improv troupe the same year I saw Dennis Miller. And I still remember someone suggesting a movie title "Apocalypse Never" and one of the performers doing a McCauley Culkin imitation (trust me, at the time, huge) "Why oh why won't the apocalypse come?" And the audience loved it.
I set out to be the funny guy in my group of friends. But then I realized I don't like hanging around with not funny people. So I got a group of funny friends to hang around. We all made each other better (or in some cases, raunchier...I remember poor Bob getting in trouble when his mother found a story about two of our teachers rubbing their penises together). To this day, I would prefer having funny friends to friends who just find me funny.
When my friend, John, said he wanted to start up an improv troupe, I volunteered. Mostly, I wanted to be better friends with the people who also volunteered. It wasn't until a magical dude from Minnesota moved to Greenville that we actually got started. His name is Todd and he is a very talented improv performer who taught us quite a bit about the craft. All of us were considered funny people but I know I had never focused it into a performance before.
Lots of people say improv is too intimidating to do but they are really just scared of performing in front of people I think. Once you know the basics, and if you have any sense of humor, improv is relatively easy. Short form games, in particular, are designed to deliver a quick laugh. If your brain doesn't freeze up around other people, you can do short form improv.
Long form improv is, I would say, the next hardest thing to do. In successful long form, you can't just be a funny person who doesn't freeze up. You have to understand the fundamentals of improv and/or be in a group where you know and trust each other implicitly. Having seen long form several times at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York and now with the KCIC in Kansas City, I have seen long form that goes nowhere and reeks of flop sweat as well as long form that has me laughing like an idiot. It is a dangerous tight rope that some people can walk with the greatest of ease. I think, at my best, and surrounded by talented cast mates I can achieve funny long term improv (maybe). This is the highest level to which I have climbed.
[For an example of funny long form, watch the Upright Citizen Brigade's Assssscat! on Netflix]
I think comedic acting is probably on a parallel track to improv. With films and TV, you get to retry lines or tweak things that don't quite work. Without the live setting, you have a powerful safety net. Some comedic actors are hired because the director knows they will liven up a shitty script with some riffing. I feel like the acting muscle is the important one for comedic actors. I feel like (and I may be wrong) you can take being the funny one in your group and achieve huge stardom if you learn how to be an actor as well. A lot of comedic actors have training in improv, which has to help. Bill Murray had no scripted lines for these scenes...
The caveat to that is improv acting. Like Christopher Guest movies or Curb Your Enthusiasm, you create an outline of a plot and then craft your character within those parameters. Again, I think acting skills are required, but not as much as improv skills. I think improv takes the funny person in a group and makes them performers.
The hardest type of comedy, in my opinion, is writing comedy/stand up. In stand up, there is a performance aspect that makes it harder than just standing up and reading jokes. I don't think acting classes or improv can help you be a stand up. Thick skin and the willingness to fail are integral to stand up. Improv is neat because you can't really fail. If a bit doesn't work, guess what? You are never doing it again so who cares? With stand up, if a bit works, it becomes part of the act. And you will be doing that bit over and over again.
Louis CK is considered the king of the stand ups at the moment and for good reason. Besides being a very funny guy, he produces a new hour of material every year. Some comedians are still coasting on the hour of material they put together in the 1990s. I know people like Aziz Ansari feel the need to keep pace with CK and I think it raises the whole industry if everyone aspires to that kind of output. Let me tell you, there is nothing worse than seeing a comedian twice (three years apart) and hearing the exact same jokes (Zach Galifiniakis, looking at you). Bands don't stop with one album, comedians should have to keep producing, too.
But it is seriously hard to write funny things. Woody Allen's short stories make it look effortless (oh, just throw in some absurd references and you have a funny story) but they are difficult to emulate. And short stories have the advantage of being re-writable. Harder still, sketch comedy.
The reason I am writing this whole thing is because I saw a sketch group perform in KC last night. As a fan of comedy, I recognize that sketches are usually premises and then as many jokes squeezed from those premises as possible (if you can get to an ending, more power to you). If you have ever watched Saturday Night Live you know they have allowed all sorts of thin premises on air. Sketches that just wither and die because there is nothing to them are hard to watch. Last night, although the audience was into most of it, I sat through some truly thin sketches. Twerking for Tweakers was basically just the name and no real jokes. The opening bit about how pop songs can be repetitive was, again, just a premise and no real jokes. This happened again and again with a couple disagreeing about the definition of role-playing (some jarring vulgarity did provide a laugh in that one) and a "what if people in covered wagons had to take their vehicles to a modern mechanic?" premise yielding an ending where the group drew attention to how unfunny the bit was.
There were two sketches of the night that interested me. One was about a "good-guesser" who is really omnipotent. The premise was strong enough to carry a good sketch but then it fizzles out by adding another layer (bad guesser equals stupid) to the joke that wasn't needed. The last sketch of the night was my favorite. The idea was that there is a man who has a mental condition where he thinks days last 30 seconds. So he keeps coming in and out of the scene, eating breakfast, and going to bed. The scene escalates and escalates until there is just a frenzy of action on stage that is pretty funny. In my facebook post I referenced Slovin and Allen...their time machine bit is what the sketch reminded me of.
[Can't find a youtube clip of Slovin and Allen doing their own bit, just other people copying it...here is a funny Mr. Show sketch]
And yet, I would not call the sketch group I saw a bad sketch group. They obviously have talent. There were jokes in the performance. I just recognize how hard it is to write good sketch comedy. Think about it right now. Try to think of a premise not predicated on current events or pop culture (SNL's fall back). Try to think of an engine that can produce between 3 to five minutes of jokes before sputtering out. It is damn hard.
My friend, Dale, does an MST3k/Rifftrax kind of thing with bad movies. Ask anyone who has watched a shitty movie with me and they will agree, I can mock a movie with the best of them. But the trick of good movie mockery is to write down the jokes. I have watched the 1989 piece of shit movie Shotgun Jones more times than I have seen the Godfather and I there are still huge stretches that I can't comment on. Now, sitting beside Dale and watching it, I was cracking wise the whole time. Sit me in front of my laptop with a blank word document and a window showing the movie? I am useless.
It occurs to me, this is all about confidence in your comedy. I need immediate feedback to know whether or not an idea I have is funny. I need to know it is making people laugh, now. Writing a joke and then performing it, no matter the capacity, implies a confidence in your comedic ability. That's the hard thing about stand up, going up with material you think is funny and bombing with it. What makes you laugh in private might not translate to a group of strangers.
Likewise, hats off to people who write sketches, TV shows and comedy movies. If you'll notice, most are written by a group of writers who can bounce ideas off each other and refine them. Comedy alone in a vacuum is tough.
That was a long way of saying, thanks to all the people who make me laugh. Life is so much better with good comedy. If you are reading this and don't like comedy, go look for something that makes you laugh. Laughing is great.
Of course, I did get sidetracked picking videos for this by watching the Farting Preacher over and over.
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