The most common question I see here on Twitter is if I have any advice on being a comedian. I have never given any but I will. It is said that you must write what you have experienced, that great comedy comes from truth, or from tragedy. All of this is nonsense. I am crushed by the time, gone and irrevocable, that these 300 pages have cost me. But here are a couple of stand-up tips. I am not sure if this can be done by the novice, but if I could go back and do stand-up differently, I would. The big problem, oddly enough, when a comedian performs, are the laughs. Stand-up comedy, as it is customarily produced, is a craft and not an art. Here is the reason. The stand-up comedian must create a ...
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Related posts tagged 'Stand-up comedy'
I had stopped doing standup because it had stopped being fun, and the reason it stopped being fun was it was harder to write — and this is before the internet — it was harder to write new stuff. It had gotten so crazy. Like if I went to the club and tried out a bit, the next day it could be like “Oh I saw Eddie was onstage at the so-and-so and he said yada yada” and I’d be like “Man, I ain’t even finished that bit yet!” And it’d be people talking about it: “What’d you think of that new joke?” And it was like “What the f*ck?” And this was years ago it started, so it was like “ Maybe I’ll take a little break from stand-up.” And then the break got longer, then the whole Def Jam thing started wi...
I think one of the best things that's ever happened to my stand up is the podcast because now I no longer have any motivation to send a "message" in a joke form. I just want my shit to be funny. If I can make points and be funny at the same time, awesome. I'm all for it, but most importantly it has to be interesting and funny to me. I can explore ideas until the end of time on the podcast and never need it to be funny, but for me as a fan at least, the comedy that I truly enjoy is the comedy that makes me laugh the most. In the past comics didn't have something like a podcast where they could go into great depth about a fuck load of different subjects, so to get their ideas across and expres...
Question: I worked as a PA at a show of yours in Toronto. You were doing two shows that night and during the break a girl came to the stage door and when you came out she said (in front of half a dozen other fans, and myself who was holding the door for you) that she lived nearby and wanted to have sex with you before the next show started. You laughed and said thank you, and when you came back inside you told me this never happens. That was a few years ago. Does it happen a lot now?
Answer: haha. i remember that. are you female? Because the funny thing is I remember there was a young working woman standing there with a walkie on her hip as this kind of desperate (not uncute) young girls i...
The best part is standing on the stage with your comedy being able to turn a passive audience into an unruly mob. The worst part of standup comedy is the insane pressure on the spine and lower back from standing up for so many hundreds of hours.
It's a tough question.
What we're talking about here is comics who are way too undeveloped on stage to be where they're at in their careers. The same thing happened with some of the roasts. It elevated features into headliners. That doesn't hurt standup, that just exposes audiences to standup who are less developed than they'd normally be exposed to.
On one hand, though, people leave those shows thinking the whole art form isn't that great. So that does hurt the perception of standup.
On the other hand, those people bring in new audiences to shows. People who would normally never have seen anything. And they'll then be fans of the craft and many will see other shows. So that's really grea...
Related posts tagged 'Comedy theory'
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Related posts tagged 'Comedy theory'
That whole punching-down thing — I absolutely cannot stand people who say that. “Punch up. Punch up.” That has got to be the most boring thing you could ever do onstage. It’s yelling into an echo chamber. What’s so fucking funny to me is that what’s really going on is never brought up. Who donates to the president and who pays for the advertising on all these big news networks? That’s shit people should be upset about. But instead, if you do a fucking feminist joke in a strip mall you make the news. So that’s just a load of shit.
Smarmy people who aren’t funny say that. Comedy is a pastime. The pastime is making fun of something you’re not supposed to make fun of because that gives you a me...
Believe it or not, this is something I think about a lot. I have often wondered if there's a way to teach being funny or comedy, and George Stephanopoulos actually got me wound up enough at one point that we were going to contact, I think his name was Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia, and we were gonna go in there, and I was going to teach a course on comedy. Because I know a lot about it, but I just don't know if it's teachable. I'm still wrestling with the idea if you can teach someone to be funny.
I think that comedy, at its most basic level, is making light of unpleasant things. That’s how we deal with life. I think that the myth that comedy and depression are linked, and that any artist has to be unhappy to create, is a very dangerous myth that I think has hurt a lot of people. When Robin Williams died, I did a few interviews about that, because people were reaching out to the comedy community and asking people how they felt and their personal stories. A lot of people wanted to draw a link between comedians and depression and suicide, and I think that’s a really terrible myth. Anybody can be depressed in any walk of life. It just seems strange when comedians are depressed, because t...
I think the big problem with the internet when it comes to comedy is it requires too much content, and supply and demand does not work with comedy. And success goes to the ones that give the most content, but the content would be, there'll be a precise algorithm between amounts and mediocrity of content. So that's how I think the internet demands too much input of a comedian. And the successful ones will be the worst ones. I'm doing JASH, a video podcast, which is like a tv show that is only on the computer. And it's about time there was a place to put tv shows other than the TV, I've always said!
A lot of it is bragging. It used to drive me crazy when I knew that a stand-up’s agenda was about showing how smart they were. The last character you want to be is a guy who’s smarter than the audience. But there’s some hole inside that these stand-ups have to fill. It has nothing to do with making people laugh.
Stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it — the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it? Don’t have a fucking desk! You just want little drops of subversion. Letterman in the ‘80s would be 90 percent a great talk show and then 10 percent subversion. If you get to 30 percent subversion, you’re in Andy Kaufman land. If you get to 70 percent, you’re a guy on the streets screaming at people. What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people? It’s absurd.
I don't do movies because I think generally the size of that content does not lend itself to great comedy; it lends itself to people saying, "Hey, I made a movie." To me, the funniest things are shorter, so I think TV series or comedians in cars, I think I have a better chance of making you laugh.
I did swear a little bit in the beginning and then I didn't like how easy it was. It felt like cheating, so I stopped.
You want to have a joke every six to nine seconds. I’m not one of those people who thinks ‘it was better in my day’ or any of that horse shit. When I go on The Tonight Show now, I don’t even sit down and talk. I just go out there, I do stand-up, and then I leave. Here’s Jay Leno. Here’s a bunch of jokes. Thank you and good night. I’ve never been narcissistic enough to think that people want to see me. I always feel like they want to see the product I produce.
If you ask yourself, `Is there anything I can do to get a laugh?’ you can find a lot of things.
And usually they’re things that other people have found. But if you take something that’s never going to work and you go, `Wow, I wonder if there’s any way I can get somebody to laugh at this?’ it’s a great challenge.
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