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A Very Strange Thing to Say about a Very Strange Thing

From Joey Franklin’s “Essaying ‘The Thing'” in this month’s Writer’s Chronicle, which seeks, peculiarly, to understand “masters of the form” of the lyric essay by reading their work alongside Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”:

Like the Imagiste poet seeking algebraic complexity distilled into a single image, the lyric essayist seeks complexity in a single, short fragment. And like the Imagiste poet, the lyric essayist expects reader participation. David Shields practically quoted Pound [. . .] when he said that short-short prose reminded him “of algebraic equations or geometry proofs.” And in that same sentence, Shields alludes to reader participation when he also refers to short-shorts as “lab experiments or jigsaw puzzles or carom shots or very cruel jokes. They’re magic tricks, with meaning.” The reader is the Petri [sic] dish in which the lyric essay foments [. . .] or the unwitting butt of that cruel joke, pulled in briefly by the trickster only to be left sitting on the curb wondering what happened to his wallet. A successful lyric essay and a successful magic trick (and a successful Imagiste poem for that matter) depend in large measure on the same thing: the audience’s willingness to go along with the conceit, to ask “how did she do that?”

Has there ever been a more thorough argument of the lyric essay as showoff piece? For what else is the magic trick but a performance to passively watch, removed as we are from the stage and (more importantly) what’s behind it, what’s up the performer’s sleeve, only the wait for the tada that leaves us gape-mouthed in wonder?

Showoff pieces are great in art. “Flight of the Bumblebee”. Maria Bamford’s world geography bit. Andy’s Eight Elvises. But I’m not sure they’re great for the essay—especially if what one wants from the essay is Atwan’s proverbial mind at work. That there is two things: a(nother) mind, and the workings of that mind. If there’s any form of truth I want from NF it’s an honesty about its author’s mind’s workings, because where else am I going to get it?[*] But Franklin’s understanding of the lyric essay makes it rely on so much sleight-of-hand. Conceit has the same root as deceive. It means to take, to ensnare.

For the essay, lyric or otherwise, to see its reader as a petri dish or a butt is to expect not participation from her but duly granted object status. Abject status, even. It desires a rube-y audience to make go “Gee whiz!” I don’t think the essays Franklin’s reading operate like this, because why would a form so intimate and personal, so ripe for direct communication, want to treat its reader this way?

For my part, I want to leave readers full of words, not at a loss for them.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Is why I got so mad at that part of Jeannette Walls’s Glass Castle. It was her narrator-self intruding on her author-self with so obvious an after-the-fact fabrication of past thought, purely for the sake of good narratoring.↵

More Last Words on D’Agata and Facts

The Quarterly Conversation, as a quarterly, is late to the D’Agata/Fingal/facts conversation of Winter 2012 (my contributions were themselves already late), but one of the luxuries of being late is letting the NY daily/weekly blowhards have their short-sighted say, and then come later and sweep up all the mess.

Mark Lane—who is sharp, and the sort of critic of nonfiction everyone writing in the genre should be giddily excited to have working on it—does just such a service in his review of The Lifespan of a Fact. I was going to share this review as a Very Good Paragraph, but too much of it is quotable. Lane nails precisely how D’Agata, in About a Mountain, does such careful work relaying the extent and the mess of the factual record surrounding Yucca Mountain and Lee Presley’s suicide that, in Lane’s words, we “trust him to fabricate the right things.” What D’Agata also works really, really hard to show (emphasis because no one before Lane has bothered to point out how hard a job D’Agata does, preferring to pass off his approach to the factual record as lazy, as if finding a fact and reporting it as found takes either time or effort), Lane points out, is that the factual record is a thing we are fool to trust blindly:

Those we elect or appoint to act on our behalf decide that we, the general public, want comfort rather than truth. So they give us facts.

It would be naïve, as D’Agata knows, to suggest that in place of facts art gives us truth. But it at least makes the effort.

Here’s what Mark Lane’s win shows: quarterlies have a certain luxury anyone hoping to write criticism should drool over. Tortoise criticism, let’s call it. Because it’s great being the hare, rocketing yourself into the race, but smart criticism takes time. You have to do a lot more reading around the text your critiquing. The tortoise critic can read not just Lifespan but also About a Mountain and most importantly everyone’s blowhard hare-critic comments.

Well, speaking of being a blowhard: it’s called “having the last word”, Dave, and everyone knows it’s great. No need for this belabored tortoise-hare analogy.

Happy Tenth Anniversary, <em>The New Yinzer</em>

co-founding editor Jenn Meccariello Layman who showed me this story in Pittsburgh Magazine on The New Yinzer‘s 10-year anniversary celebration.

Which means it was just more than 10 years ago that I was working a PR job at an arts center in Pittsburgh and I ran into Jenn one night at a White Stripes concert at the 31st Street Pub, a venue smaller than some exurban garages about which last I knew anything had strippers during happy hour. I “Wanted To Start A Magazine In Town And Call It The New Yinzer,” I’d kept telling people, but I had no idea how to go about it. Jenn, too, was restless and eager. So we started it online and we published our friends and we made new friends who submitted stuff to us or showed up at our happy hours (namely Seth Madej, who graciously went on co-edit for a time), and after five months in the winter and spring of 2002 we had our 10th issue up.[1] And so we threw a little 10th-issue anniversary celebration at the newly opened ModernFormations Gallery in Bloomfield.

It’s fitting, then, that the 10-year anniversary‘s also being held at ModernFormations. Technically, if you consult the archives[2] (as I had to), the real 10-year anniversary was back in January, but these new folks—none of whom I’ve ever met, but each of whom I admire and am grateful to—are throwing it September 20. If I were a richer man I’d fly up to be there.

The thing about Pittsburgh was (is, still, I hope) that wanting to do something that could change the landscape of an entire city was always in one’s reach, even at age 24. We got written up in the papers. We pissed some people off. It was a time and a place where you could launch something as small and blase as a Web site (in HTML, no less, using Notepad) and see the thing make waves in the city you’d come to adopt as your own.

I can’t believe it’s still around. I can’t believe it’s still around.

[[]]Jenn and I’d decided originally that to compete as best we could with the two (at the time, RIP InPittsburgh) alt-weeklies in town that we had to be a fortnightly publication. So we had a new issue up every 14 days. It was too rapid a pace in the end, and by that fall we’d become a monthly with no regrets.[[]]

[[]]My favorite issue remains , which in hindsight is very bros-y, but includes the that got me into graduate school, a review I was just thinking about the other day, and a comic by the guy who wrote Casey Affleck vehicle Lonesome Jim (2005, dir. Steve Buscemi).[[]]

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. s my co-founding editor Jenn Meccariello Layman who showed me this story in Pittsburgh Magazine on The New Yinzer‘s 10-year anniversary celebration.

    Which means it was just more than 10 years ago that I was working a PR job at an arts center in Pittsburgh and I ran into Jenn one night at a White Stripes concert at the 31st Street Pub, a venue smaller than some exurban garages about which last I knew anything had strippers during happy hour. I “Wanted To Start A Magazine In Town And Call It The New Yinzer,” I’d kept telling people, but I had no idea how to go about it. Jenn, too, was restless and eager. So we started it online and we published our friends and we made new friends who submitted stuff to us or showed up at our happy hours (namely Seth Madej, who graciously went on co-edit for a time), and after five months in the winter and spring of 2002 we had our 10th issue up.{{1}} And so we threw a little 10th-issue anniversary celebration at the newly opened ModernFormations Gallery in Bloomfield.

    It’s fitting, then, that the 10-year anniversary‘s also being held at ModernFormations. Technically, if you consult the archives{{2}} (as I had to), the real 10-year anniversary was back in January, but these new folks—none of whom I’ve ever met, but each of whom I admire and am grateful to—are throwing it September 20. If I were a richer man I’d fly up to be there.

    The thing about Pittsburgh was (is, still, I hope) that wanting to do something that could change the landscape of an entire city was always in one’s reach, even at age 24. We got written up in the papers. We pissed some people off. It was a time and a place where you could launch something as small and blase as a Web site (in HTML, no less, using Notepad) and see the thing make waves in the city you’d come to adopt as your own.

    I can’t believe it’s still around. I can’t believe it’s still around.

    [[]]Jenn and I’d decided originally that to compete as best we could with the two (at the time, RIP InPittsburgh) alt-weeklies in town that we had to be a fortnightly publication. So we had a new issue up every 14 days. It was too rapid a pace in the end, and by that fall we’d become a monthly with no regrets.[[]]

    [[]]My favorite issue remains , which in hindsight is very bros-y, but includes the that got me into graduate school, a review I was just thinking about the other day, and a comic by the guy who wrote Casey Affleck vehicle Lonesome Jim (2005, dir. Steve Buscemi)↵

  2. co-founding editor Jenn Meccariello Layman who showed me this story in Pittsburgh Magazine on The New Yinzer‘s 10-year anniversary celebration.

    Which means it was just more than 10 years ago that I was working a PR job at an arts center in Pittsburgh and I ran into Jenn one night at a White Stripes concert at the 31st Street Pub, a venue smaller than some exurban garages about which last I knew anything had strippers during happy hour. I “Wanted To Start A Magazine In Town And Call It The New Yinzer,” I’d kept telling people, but I had no idea how to go about it. Jenn, too, was restless and eager. So we started it online and we published our friends and we made new friends who submitted stuff to us or showed up at our happy hours (namely Seth Madej, who graciously went on co-edit for a time), and after five months in the winter and spring of 2002 we had our 10th issue up.[1] And so we threw a little 10th-issue anniversary celebration at the newly opened ModernFormations Gallery in Bloomfield.

    It’s fitting, then, that the 10-year anniversary‘s also being held at ModernFormations. Technically, if you consult the archives{{2}} (as I had to), the real 10-year anniversary was back in January, but these new folks—none of whom I’ve ever met, but each of whom I admire and am grateful to—are throwing it September 20. If I were a richer man I’d fly up to be there.

    The thing about Pittsburgh was (is, still, I hope) that wanting to do something that could change the landscape of an entire city was always in one’s reach, even at age 24. We got written up in the papers. We pissed some people off. It was a time and a place where you could launch something as small and blase as a Web site (in HTML, no less, using Notepad) and see the thing make waves in the city you’d come to adopt as your own.

    I can’t believe it’s still around. I can’t believe it’s still around.

    [[]]Jenn and I’d decided originally that to compete as best we could with the two (at the time, RIP InPittsburgh) alt-weeklies in town that we had to be a fortnightly publication. So we had a new issue up every 14 days. It was too rapid a pace in the end, and by that fall we’d become a monthly with no regrets.[[]]

    [[]]My favorite issue remains , which in hindsight is very bros-y, but includes the that got me into graduate school, a review I was just thinking about the other day, and a comic by the guy who wrote Casey Affleck vehicle Lonesome Jim (2005, dir. Steve Buscemi)↵

Tig Notaro’s “I Have Cancer” Set Coming to This American Life

Just a quick post, because I just got this news, and it’s the second best news I got today. Which means the other news was super great, because this news? Jesus!

TIG NOTARO’S “I HAVE CANCER” SET’S COMING TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE!

For those not obsessively following standup news, a few weeks ago the very incredible Tig Notaro (you may know her as sexy lady cop “Tig” on The Sarah Silverman Program) did a set at Largo in LA that revealed she had Stage 2 breast cancer. She killed in ways that everyone who was there said were amazing, one-of-a-kind, and indescribable.

Here’s Louis CK, who was lucky enough to decide to do a surprise set at Largo that night, tweeting about it:

I’ve told people two things about this:

  1. I would pay Seinfeld-at-the-Kennedy-Center money to see a video of this set.
  2. That no fan-shot video of this set exists on YouTube is perfect and awesome and exactly why I think standup is important and should never be recorded for uploading to YouTube.

I’ve been torn, in other words. Now, it seems as though Notaro has sent audio to increasingly-big-friend-to-standups Ira Glass, and we’ll be hearing it on NPR very soon.

Thanks to the ever-swift Splitsider for breaking the news (to me).

More Prattle about Jokes and What’s Funny

I’ve been thinking a lot about this xkcd comic:

Short version: sex tarp is so much funnier than sex dungeon or (for God’s sake) sex party because it’s something we’ve never heard before. That is: either universally or for a certain portion of the comedy audience, laughter comes as the result of invention and novelty.

Long version: that’s not the whole story. I mean “sex sandbox” or “sex atrium” are equally unheard of and novel. But they’re also inaccurate, in that no one wants to have sex in a sandbox and there’s nothing even remotely sex-related about an atrium. Also, this is a sketchiness continuum, so neither of these has an adequate amount of unease. A tarp however, is so perfectly situated at the intersection of wetness-concepts and filth-concepts that it is precisely sketchy.

So we laugh at the accuracy.

So good comedy is about telling sudden truths succinctly.

Still not entirely satisfied. It’s not so much that “sex party” or “dungeon” is uninspired and inaccurate (perfectly normal and unsketchy people host sex parties, I imagine, plus they’re social events, whereas nobody else’ll be joining you two on that sick tarp), it’s I want to argue unintelligent, too. This is where talking about comedy gets dangerous and borders on snobbery and elitism.[1] Because I can envision a certain probable dialogue between two people:

A: How was your date last night?
B: Ugh. He said he wanted to take me back to his sex dungeon.
A: Wow, really?
B: He was the sketchiest guy ever.
A: Well….
B: What? He was.
A: I guess. But he could have offered to take you back to his sex tarp.
B: …
A: !!!
B: What?

“Sex tarp” (et al.) is a punchline that betrays its own weariness with everything that’s come before it. As a punchline it shows evidence of an act of striving. Maybe this has nothing to do with intelligence and is just bringing us back to novelty. But in the same way that, for jokes to be funny, punchlines need to catch us by surprise (hence Stop me if you’ve heard this one), things that want to be funny have to be smarter than we are.

So we laugh when we’re innocuously outsmarted? I don’t know what it means for a joke to be smarter than a person. But if I believe (as I do, see the footnote) that one thing can’t be funnier than another thing, then that I can’t believe I believe such a thing (I mean it feels wrong on every level) means that I believe one person can be smarter than another person.[2] Thus, the same joke can be smarter than one audience member (who finds it funny) and not smarter than another audience member (who doesn’t).

Is this madness? One thing I know about myself is that I’m a sucker for things that make me feel smart. I’ve written repeatedly (and very recently) about how comedy operates outside intellect, so everything about the above feels inaccurate, if not outright wrong. Anybody willing to put in their 2 cents in the comments will be, collectively, my best friend. At issue: is it universally true that funny jokes are smarter than we are, or is this some personal comedy taste on my part?

UPDATE: Okay here’s a clearer example. This here is some of the worst bylined writing I’ve found online. Sorry Mr. Schlossman, but you’re not good at what you do. And while I can see you being humorous you’re not at all funny. And yet there’s Cory, moved and delighted enough by the piece to comment: “You’re hilarious!” Why don’t I find any of it funny?

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. And also irrelevant, because any earned laugh makes a thing funny, and I’m not sure I’m there quite yet, but I think “funny” is like “unique” in that either a thing has that quality or does not have it. If my aim is to get at what’s funny and why, it’s no good pointing out that one person or one joke is funnier than another, which means I need to revise my claim above. It’s not that “sex tarp” is funnier than “sex party”, it’s that it’s funny, and that “sex party” is not. And so my whole larger point with this footnote is that to get snobbish about comedy is a futile exercise, because once somebody laughs at what you can’t, your arguments about its humorlessness become wrong.↵
  2. I want it to be clear I’m trying to talk only about a kind of comedy intellect. Humor smarts. Not anything IQ-based or other such silliness.↵

Sad News Day: The Tuscaloosa News No Longer Endorsing Candidates

UPDATE: This post now readable in condensed letter-to-the-editor format.

The paper’s argument is this:

Giving our stamp of approval to individual candidates does little to engender trust in the public. In fact, it can undermine that trust.

…

The public is better served if it trusts The News to report fairly and freely on the candidates seeking office. It is better served if the opinion section identifies the important issues that affect the community and makes cogent arguments supporting the opinions expressed about those issues.

First: “cogent arguments” have never in the two years I’ve lived here been too heavy a concern for The News’s opinion page, at least not in the letters it allows to get printed.

But second, this is terrible news. The News “question[s] whether endorsements really function as a persuasive tool,” and thinks “it is hard for many people to believe that an organization can … urge people to cast their votes for an individual and at the same time present information critical about that individual.” In other words, The News is afraid of being called out for biased reporting, treating too favorably the candidates it eventually endorses.

I don’t think candidate endorsements have ever functioned as a persuasive tool, and no way are they functioning like this now. Given cable news, can the daily newspaper[1] really sway public opinion with one endorsement editorial printed just days before elections? What’s more worrisome, though, is that The News sees endorsement not as unpersuasive, but as a way of undermining the public’s trust.

This is a fairly new idea—that subjectivity and reporting to inform public opinion make for bad journalism—and if it weren’t Sunday morning I’d be able to better point out how it’s a radically conservative idea. It’s what’s made Fox News so successful that my father-in-law points to how carefully that network brings in voices from both sides of an issue as evidence for its fair and balanced approach. Which is madness. To believe in a “balanced approach” is to assert that every issue has not one or three or twenty stances worth exploring, but always precisely two. Pro- and Anti-. This is not just wrong, it’s often harmful to progress. After all, it’s been the belief in a “balanced approach” that has put Creationism in certain states’ biology classrooms.

Look, a newspaper is not the voice of the people, it’s a voice for the people. It’s the voice of the reporters it pays to do one job: find the stories and deliver the facts without the manic pace and need for caught eyeballs that is cable news’s bread and butter. It’s a voice the public has always had the option to ignore. An endorsement in a newspaper, then, is not the kingmaking move The News thinks it is, so much as a place to weigh the facts months of reporting have unearthed (because most of us don’t have the time to do this tough but vital job). It’s a place for a newspaper to be an informed authority. This isn’t arrogant or presumptive, it’s called being responsible.

Here’s the problem: we no longer live in a time when authorities are given due respect. A woman spends her entire career studying the changes in the climate, say, and the public responds to her warnings about global warming by asking for a second opinion. It need never be an informed opinion, just a second one that argues the opposite point. But if you believe, as I do, in the power of expertise, the solution to this problem is to find ways to rebuild trust in authorities. That’s the opportunity The News has now lost. In refusing to play its part as election experts, the paper claims to be honoring the power of public opinion, but really it’s throwing up its hands in the face of it.

===

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. I’d like to have written “daily newspapers” here but very few publics in America are able to pluralize this anymore. Rather than making candidate-endorsement more dangerous (because there’s no daily newspaper to present counteropinions), I say this makes them more important. Who else but our print media has the time and resources to make claims unmarred by partisan claptrap?↵

When Being Not-Stupid Is Not Enough*

Better read critics and theorists may have long solved this problem, but for me it’s been hard to figure out where to go in critique and creativity after going meta—which I’m here going to clunkily define as using the very aspects, techniques, or tools of some process to go out and above that process in order to make some kind of comment on it. Or what the new OAD says: “denoting something of a higher or second-order kind.”

Now: it’s no good going meta about something’s having gone meta. This is just another form of going meta. Meta-meta is not cubing the square, so to speak, it’s making a 3-D model of a tesseract.

One way to get past meta came yesterday from Josh Fadem, a comic whose incredible, unparalleled, standup work is hard to find online but whose sketch work is all over. (You might know him as Liz Lemon’s agent.) I had questions about his deliberately “shitty” timing, where pratfalls and mic-stand trouble will last upward of 4 minutes while, later, four different one-liners get sped through all in a row. I suspected that there was careful timing going on on his end, despite the timing on our end being shitty, in terms of classic comic timing.

In doing standup, Fadem told me,

I’m gonna assume the audience all knows what good timing is. So if I make them think that a joke is going to come in a particular way, but then it comes in a totally bad way or different way, that’s a whole other joke in itself. But it’s also a new laugh. It’s the same thing—like if you ever watched movies like The Room. People have … they’re laughing at these movies for a particular reason, because it’s not doing what movies are supposed to do. There’s something funny about doing everything wrong. I used to approach it from a meta place, but now I think I’m thinking of something different. It’s like: where’s the joke that’s the off joke? I’m thinking of it more from a joke place than from a “What can I do that’s meta?” place.

I didn’t press Fadem on these ideas, they only surfaced going through my notes afterward. But I take him to mean that a “meta place” is highly rational, and the aim when one operates there is to provoke the audience toward increased awareness. Sure, this kind of provocation can lead an audience to laugh, but the whole approach is didactic and marmy. A “joke place”, on the other hand, is irrational. (N.B.: irrational ≠ subrational.) And given Fadem’s chronological development, it seems that one has to consume the meta in order to reach this third-order joke place—land of new jokes, wrong jokes, off jokes—the way we consume grammar to write novels or jazz musicians consume theory to improvise.

The difference is in intent. The problem with going meta in comedy is that it’s clever, and clever ≠ funny. Clever is right. Clever is correct. It’s sometimes a kind of truth, being clever, but clever’s from a meta place, and what laughs cleverness earns are given or proffered. They’re not yanked from folks’ guts. Funny yanks laughs from folks’ guts. It’s past intellect, even as so much good humor relies on its audience’s smarts.

For my ongoing appreciation of a joke, or for retelling or writing about later, that joke ought to appeal to my intellect, but when I laugh hard and suddenly and without consequence—when I laugh the way certain women’s posters exhort me to dance—it’s from somewhere past intellect. A joke place. Then I decide whether to wield my intellect to figure out why I’m laughing and whether I’m happy about it. It’s maybe a millisecond lag, but it’s like the way we feel that a surface is burning us before we sense its smooth or ragged texture. One quality is way more urgent and important than the other.

Lesson learned: being smart, clever, meta doesn’t get them in the gut. It may even be DOA as a creative approach. Or, as Fadem also put it:

Another thing that I like to do if I’m stuck is take the approach of “Well, I’m not gonna be able to think of something that’s brilliant and so I’ll just think as dumb as I can.” I’ll just be fearless and not cute or smart. You know? Just try to be dumb.

UPDATE: It occurs to me after the fact that cinephile Fadem’s celeb impressions—which are simultaneously accurate, funny-dumb, and about the dumb way impressions have to be accurate—are a better example of what I’m trying to say here than anything.

===

* Apologies to Built to Spill for borrowing and then clunkifying their title for a very great song.

Big News Day!

Saturday is historically the worst day of the week to read the newspaper. And yet here’s this morning’s Tuscaloosa News bucking trends. Two front-page stories I need to quote from.

First up is an AP article: “Lyon out as chief justice candidate”:

Democrats removed perennial candidate Harry Lyon as their nominee for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court on Friday, deciding he was unfit after he made disparaging remarks about homosexuals, his Republican opponent and party leaders.

That’s the lede. What’s funny about it is that this guy Lyon had already once before been removed from the party’s ballot (in 1994, in the governor’s race) for violating party rules. And so maybe everyone deserves a second chance. Lyon, though,

has referred to homosexuals as “freaks” in online posts and once suggesting killing a few illegal immigrants to scare others away from Alabama. He has been disciplined three times by the Alabama State Bar, including once for pointing a shotgun at a neighbor and her children.

Were any of these embarrassments grounds for removal? No. The Democrats removed him only after some recent rambling presentation where he disparaged other state legislators. What this means is that in Alabama, and within the Democratic Party of Alabama, you can have a pretty steady career despite being a known and total psychopath. A total psychopath who looks like some horrible union of Paul Bryant, Ned Flanders, and Shelley Winters.
Continue reading Big News Day!

The Comedy Combine: Review of 10 August 2012’s John Oliver’s New York Standup Show

JONYSS is a great idea for a comedy showcase that’s structured a little misguidedly and aired at a time (10pm CST Fridays) to ensure few but comedy nerds and homebodies will watch. Maybe Comedy Central’s hoping for an audience older than its faithful Workaholics/Tosh.0/South Park-loving demographic, though given last night’s lineup (white guys under 40) I wouldn’t say this is the case. John Oliver makes for a X host. X = a certain value of delightful here but that’s a word I really don’t want to use.

But it works in that you can see a spark of light in his eyes when he’s doing his bits (best one from his introductory set last night involved the shitty state of our union, and seeing it as the hardscrabble underdog team going into halftime in a Hollywood football movie, POTUS as the angry coach who needs to shout his team into a turnaround victory). His mouth curls in and out of a grin that reads as pure delight in getting to deliver the material. This delight’s infectious, which is what you want a showcase host to do: infect the crowd with the energy the comics need to respond to. Is it his accent? The tone we’re used to hearing in Daily Show field reports? There’s some great mix of stern authority and giddy childishness that sets the right mood.
Continue reading The Comedy Combine: Review of 10 August 2012’s John Oliver’s New York Standup Show

Very Good Paragraph Chunks

This is a standalone section from Claire Hoffman’s outstanding profile of Seth MacFarlane in the June 18 2012 New Yorker:

On a Monday night last summer, MacFarlane jogged onto the stage of a jazz club called Vibrato, in Bel-Air. He had on a slim-cut Gucci suit and clutched a highball glass full of whiskey. Without acknowledging the seventeen-man band behind him, he grabbed the microphone.

“How’re you all doing!” he shouted. A group of middle-aged blond women, holding fast-emptying glasses of white wine, let out a lupine howl from the bar.

Onstage, MacFarlane cut a dapper, if somewhat contrived, figure. Smiling rakishly, he could have been a man auditioning for a part in a Rat Pack movie. “I’m a little under the weather tonight, so forgive me if I sound a little like Joy Behar,” he said. “We are just fucking winging it.” The band launched into “The Night They Invented Champagne.”

The song is one of the tracks on “Music Is Better Than Words,” which was released in September. MacFarland spent more than a year recording it, and, watching him onstage at Vibrato, you got the feeling that the album was the culmination of a lifelong fantasy—like the bar-mitzvah boy who finally gets to perform “Thriller” for a captive audience.

MacFarlane discovered Sinatra in college and was hooked by his stylized masculinity. “I instantly sparked to it because it was accessible, yet very challenging,” he said. He couldn’t stand the records his classmates listened to. “Nirvana made me want to blow my brains out.”

On the stage at Vibrato, eyebrows knit in concentration, MacFarlane looked truly happy. The bad was lush and smooth, and MacFarlane executed the songs with bloodless technical precision. Mid-set, he took a swig of bourbon and introduced his favorite song from “The Sound of Music. “This was written after Oscar Hammerstein died,” he said. Pause. Long drink. “That’s Rodgers and Hammerstein, for those of you who are fucking idiots.” He cackled and started into “Something Good,” his eyes closed tight, lost in Fräulein Maria’s sentimental paean to her captain: “Perhaps I had a wicked childhood. Perhaps I had a miserable youth. But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, there must have been a moment of truth.” At a table near the front, a little boy asked his mother when MacFarlane would do the voice of Stewie.

Understatement! When will I learn how to do you?

NY & DC Comedy Trip Roundup

Best laid plans…. Here are the comics I ended up seeing in New York:

Elna Baker
Kevin Townley
Eliot Glazer
Kate McKinnon
Cintra Wilson
Julie Klausner
Evan Q. Franceschini
Josh Ruben
H. Jon Benjamin
George Gordon
John Roy
Adam Sokol
Kara Klenk
James Harris
Matt McCarthy
Mike Feeney
Liz Miehle
Todd Barry
Scott Sharp
Chris Difate
Andy Hendrickson
Hannibal Buress
Scotland Green
Seaton Smith
Hari Kondabolu
Dwayne Kennedy
Ari Shaffir
Kevin Avery
Louis Katz
Sharon Spell
Sara Schaefer
Christian Finnegan
Leo Allen
Anthony DeVito
Yannis Pappas
Judah Friedlander
Al Madrigal
Brendon Walsh
Aziz Ansari
Jermaine Fowler
First Comedy Cellar Guy I Couldn’t Write the Name Down Of Because NO NOTETAKING!
Second Comedy Cellar Guy
Darrell Hammond
Aziz Ansari
Dave Attell
Sixth Comedy Cellar Guy God Damn It
Greer Barnes
Max Silvestri
Mike Racine
Leo Allen
John Roberts
Brendon Walsh
Gabe Liedman
John Mulaney
Aziz Ansari
Herbie Gill
Jeff Maurer
John Mulaney
Chuck Martin
Jerry Seinfeld

That’s 60 total standup or hosting sets I watched in ten days. Eight of those were women. That’s a 13 percent showing. Poor form, NYC! Outside of the Ted Talks show I saw at Littlefield in Gowanus, I was only able to see women perform in group shows at UCB East. Not the Comedy Cellar (whose booker is a woman), nor beloved shows Whiplash and Big Terrific.

Sure: I missed some shows I needed to catch. It’s not like Janeane Garofalo wasn’t at Union Hall that one night, or Judy Gold didn’t do that all-queer show I skipped. But what does it mean that this is the lineup for the upcoming New York Comedy Festival?

Kevin Hart
Aziz Ansari
Bill Maher
Robin Williams in conversation with David Steinberg
Ricky Gervais in conversation with John Hodgman
Jim Gaffigan
Patton Oswalt
Brian Regan
Artie Lange
Rob Delaney
Marlon and Shawn Wayans

Marlon and Shawn Wayans are funnier than any one woman, clearly.

DC Comedy Trip: Jerry Seinfeld @ the Kennedy Center

My seat, dotted.
In a small club like the Comedy Cellar, laughter bubbles and percolates around the room like a backyard water feature. At the 2,400-seat Concert Hall of the Kennedy Center it breaks like waves on a nearby shore. The room swells, and the slow rush of it rises into the air and trails off, like a balloon released to fate. It’s a very soothing noise. Minus the words coming from the comic at the center of the 100-foot-wide stage you could fall warmly asleep to it.

Jerry Seinfeld looked great Saturday night. In his sharp charcoal suit and close-cropped hair, he seemed never to stop moving. He had so much stage space and he knew how to use it. It was less stand-up comedy and more leap-around comedy. It’s more energy I’ve seen out of most comics, and Seinfeld (can it be true?) is 58 years old. I’ve never been part of an audience so happy to be seeing the person it came to see (one passing reference to Newman and the whole room erupted). That Seinfeld’s opening bit was about what a pain in the ass it was for all of us to come out to see “Jerry” (so bizarre that he’d assume we’d all collectively refer to him with his first name; my telling you I saw “Jerry” Saturday night would be as disarming as if I told you I was going to see “Ciccone”) only seemed to make us love him more.

He is a pro, an expert, an artist. And his comedy is very, very broad.
Continue reading DC Comedy Trip: Jerry Seinfeld @ the Kennedy Center

DC Comedy Trip: John Mulaney @ the DC Improv

John Mulaney is 29 years old, and it’s a cuspy age for a very cuspish comic. “I don’t look older, I just look worse,” he says in a bit from his last special. “When I’m walking down the street no one’s ever like, ‘Hey, look at that man,’ I think they’re just like, ‘Hey, that tall child looks terrible!'”

The tall child lost in the adult world is Mulaney’s central concern. Or more so it’s the bad kid growing into a bad adult. These are different roles. The bad kid disobeys, obedience being the central job of being a kid. There’s plenty in his act about breaking the rules and paying the price (or not). Mulaney jokes about his kidself getting his face slapped for wanting to watch more than an hour of cartoons, being evicted from a store at age 10 just for smelling bad, shouting “McDonald’s, McDonald’s!” on a car trip and getting something far worse. And then in high school, the bad kid disobeys with drugs and drinks, inciting a whole basement of other bad kids to chant “Fuck da police!”

With each of these bits, we in the audience get to relive some disobedience of our own, or disobey vicariously through Mulaney. We like it because we’re adults now, and this incongruence of time—Mulaney’s physicality makes it happen (more on this)—is what keeps us laughing.

Also there’s a kind of relief. No longer a kid, the adult inherits the communal position of setting the rules. And adult-Mulaney wants to obey but can’t. It’s what makes him a bad adult. He’s a terrible driver. (Others on the road “expect to see a blind dog driving while texting and drinking a smoothie. Instead they see a 29-year-old healthy man trying his best.”) His girlfriend has to step in and explain how he should be treated. He seemingly can’t even order Chinese food the right way.[1] Even his outfit Friday night—jacket and slacks, button-down shirt with no tie—conveyed the unsteadiness of his place between childhood and adulthood. It was the uniform of an adult, but not quite.

About half the material was new to me. Maybe a quarter was from previous specials, and another quarter I heard two nights previous at Big Terrific in Brooklyn. And yet I laughed throughout it all, again, because the material is so strong and his delivery is such a pleasure to watch. Why? What makes it such a pleasure?

In developing the chunk about how his girlfriend takes care of him (from New in Town), he has this great bit about Delta Airlines, which I’m happy to write about after Delta Airlines fucked everything up with my travel getting back home that I hate them and will always hate them and encourage others to hate them with me. It’s a long drawn-out fantasy of abuse after Delta delays his flight. Mulaney says “O-kay!” and heads off to the bathroom, coming back to the counter later. “Any updates?” he asks. “Yeah we took off when you were in the bathroom,” the Delta people say. “Because we hate you!”

“O-kay!”

They give him a food voucher that doesn’t work, and he takes it to the “Ruby Tuesday Fuck-You Express” to buy a frozen Caesar salad with it, and they go “No!”

“O-kay!”

“Wait,” they say. “You’re a little fat girl aren’t you? SAY IT!”

And Mulaney says “I’m a little fat girl” in the voice of a little fat girl.

Mulaney, as I’ve said, is a tall child. At first he seems reputably adult, but as you keep looking you can see how incredibly young he looks. It’s like he was drawn as part the crowd on a picture page from Encyclopedia Brown. That he’s able in one second to play a convincing authoritarian adult (i.e., a good adult, making the rules) and in another to jump into the body of the little fat girl might be his central talent.

This dynamism filled his set the other night. Here’s a man we’ve seen on TV, who with the precision and wisdom of what he knows to be true (“There’s lots of places to pull over in a relationship, and what [my friend] did was he took the car and just drove it into a wall”) can presume a happily granted authority over us in the audience. So it’s so great when he shucks this authority and plays dumb. It’s like a hairy man in drag, or when we say a pet thinks it’s people. Mulaney can sound precisely like our parents at their cruelest, most furious moments (our mothers, mostly; there’s a smarminess we recognize from lunch ladies and schoolbus drivers, the gender-incongruity of which only adds to the comedy), all the while looking and playing the part of a little boy. He’s a bad tall child who’s totally getting away with it, and I’m amazed every time at the performance.[2]

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. One of his best bits I neither want to spoil nor can figure out a way to transcribe without totally destroying. Most of the humor comes through Mulaney’s vocal work and the funny unequal relationship he’s able to paint between him and the lady he orders from. “Sorry you’re so over Chinese food, Chinese-food lady.”↵
  2. The night’s funniest/saddest bit was watching recent Georgetown grads boo an eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate, just for being from Arlington. This during some light crowd work. “You guys hate national cemeteries or something?” Mulaney asked. “Why do people boo Arlington so much?”

    “B&T crowd,” said some dude.

    “Oh okay,” said Mulaney. Then: “What?”

    “It’s Virginia!” yelled the dude’s lady companion. “It’s like New Jersey.”

    “Except it’s not,” Mulaney said, knowing full well how ridiculous it was for little kids—likely getting money from mom and dad so they can live within the District proper—to pretend at being New Yorkers, with real B&T traffic.↵

NY Comedy Trip: Big Terrific at Cameo

There’s a fan front and center on the stage of Cameo, a theater in the back of the Lovin’ Cup Cafe, which blows upward at the crotch of whomever’s standing at the mic. It gave a couple comics last night something to address immediately, a nice way in to a set after the applause, something more visible and direct than “How’s everybody doin’?” It also blows upward into this strange fiberart sculpture suspended from the ceiling (see above), a wide gauzy sheet from which hang scores of yardlong threads that wavered like cilia from the breeze. The thing made a kind of frame for the comics. It’s both big and terrific, the way monsters are.

Max Silvestri is one of two hosts, and he may be the quickest comic I’ve seen all week. Not just in the speed of his delivery, but in the way some crowd work with the visiting mother of one the Brooklynite women in the audience could turn on a nickel into a sendup of his powers of deduction. I say nickel because his bravura piece from last night involved an old man trying to change a quarter for five nickels at a bar. Where Silvestri was able to take this premise involved such quick invention—before I knew it we were talking about puppets and doll laundrettes—that the comedy of his subject was like tripled by it. I mean: I couldn’t tell whether I was laughing at what the jokes were saying, or that these jokes were suddenly begin said, or that these jokes had been yanked into the bit so suddenly. I mean: it was all three, of course. Just a stunning performance.
Continue reading NY Comedy Trip: Big Terrific at Cameo

NY Comedy Trip: The Comedy Cellar

Legendary spot. You see it all over Seinfeld’s Comedian documentary, and lots of scenes from Louie have been shot inside and outside it. I was assigned a seat directly next to the kitchen and my drink order was finally taken during the introduction of the host for that night. “You can’t take notes,” my waitress told me. “Put it away or they’ll confiscate it.”

In other words, I was treated like shit. The Comedy Cellar is a great (because small and intimate) space run in such a way that your having a good time becomes a struggle you have to fight for, not a outcome of a comfortable and well managed experience. Such is the way with every comedy club I’ve been in.

Comedians must have reasons to love performing there. And comic audiences must be happy paying so much for such a shitty experience. Every great show I’ve seen this week has been free. Not cheap: free. I’ll never understand it. Maybe my book could be about how to enjoy comedy clubs.

NY Comedy Trip: Whiplash (w/ surprise guests Aziz Ansari and Judah Friedlander) at UCB

hing happens in you when someone you have seen on television appears on a stage. This is just given and not interesting. But something joyous and profound happens when someone you have seen on television appears unannounced on a stage and does standup to you. This is a common enough occurrence at not just the Upright Citizens Brigade theater but other venues around the country that it becomes part of the experience—prognosticating with friends in line pre-show about who might show up, Tweeting about it during or after the show so’s to be the first to report the news. The fun one has or does not have listening to funny people becomes tied to this level of access and intimacy.

I’ll have to come back to this tomorrow. Ditto the sets by Al Madrigal and Brendon Walsh.

Last night Judah Friedlander and Aziz Ansari did walk-on sets. The joyousness and profundity came not just from the fact of seeing live and in person what you’ve only seen distantly on TV. It comes from what you get to see, an inversion of celebrity identity that happens right before us.

On Parks and Recreation Aziz Ansari plays Tom Haverford, a goofball wanna-be lothario. There is overlap, to be sure, between Tom and what I as an audience member feel I know of Aziz, but Tom is not real. Aziz is, and when he came on stage last night I felt joy about getting access not just to his real-lifeness, but his personal authenticity, his own direct voice. Whereas Tom Haverford’s voiced by a whole team of writers. So what’s been constructed to form Ansari’s public identity gets inverted on the standup stage. The public’s made private (or privater.) It’s like the difference in feeling I get between a fictional narrator and a nonfictional one.

Judah Friedlander, though, inverts this inversion. His character on 30 Rock, Frank Rossitano, is infinitely realer and more authentic than Friedlander’s standup persona, who wears a T-shirt reading WORLD’S GREATEST and does ironic schtick about being great at karate and bedding many women. It’s flat[1] material. Nearly all crowd work. And it killed.

How did it kill? More than anyone I’ve seen, Friedlander is lightning-fast in reacting to audience’s questions, and he’s deeply committed in these quick bits to his character. In other words, he’s like a one-man improv group, maybe the best one in the country. But the joy of seeing in person the person behind what one’s seen on television is lessened by the tenacity with which Friedlander sticks to his schtick. He’d never appear on stage in a cardigan and a tote bag, for instance, half -Lemon’d from stress. He’d never speak honestly to Jenna about how phony she is and why. He’d never cow to his mother.

On TV, Rossitano appears to us as a far realer person than Friedlander allows himself to be perceived on stage. Ansari’s act stands in contrast here—he does a lot of work on stage to separate his self from his TV character. Anxieties about dating and cohabitation, for instance, that Haverford would never have. Also lots and lots of sincere crowd work. Friedlander also works to separate himself from his character, but he does it by pushing us away from his self and toward this performed inauthenticity. Somehow it feels just as intimate.

There are more things to be said about cameos and how they operate in theatre, say, or on television. I keep coming back to rock shows, because this is what I used to stay up past 11pm on a Monday night to catch when I was the age of most of last night’s audience (which is a topic for a much longer post than I have the time for now). Bands require guitar techs and drum kits and set up time and three-to-five-minute songs to move you. It’s way easier for a beloved comic to get up for 10 minutes and put on an amazing show. It’s so cheap: all you need is a mic and a bottle of water. No wonder kids are staying up past 11pm on a Monday night to catch it.

===

[[]]Possibly outmoded, too. One joke last night was a Chuck Norris joke, but without transcribing it for those folks eager to see him I’ll say it might be the best Chuck Norris joke I’ve heard, in how by disparaging the hell out of Chuck Norris the man he’s able also to disparage Chuck Norris jokes themselves. Hence possibly.[[]]

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. hing happens in you when someone you have seen on television appears on a stage. This is just given and not interesting. But something joyous and profound happens when someone you have seen on television appears unannounced on a stage and does standup to you. This is a common enough occurrence at not just the Upright Citizens Brigade theater but other venues around the country that it becomes part of the experience—prognosticating with friends in line pre-show about who might show up, Tweeting about it during or after the show so’s to be the first to report the news. The fun one has or does not have listening to funny people becomes tied to this level of access and intimacy.

    I’ll have to come back to this tomorrow. Ditto the sets by Al Madrigal and Brendon Walsh.

    Last night Judah Friedlander and Aziz Ansari did walk-on sets. The joyousness and profundity came not just from the fact of seeing live and in person what you’ve only seen distantly on TV. It comes from what you get to see, an inversion of celebrity identity that happens right before us.

    On Parks and Recreation Aziz Ansari plays Tom Haverford, a goofball wanna-be lothario. There is overlap, to be sure, between Tom and what I as an audience member feel I know of Aziz, but Tom is not real. Aziz is, and when he came on stage last night I felt joy about getting access not just to his real-lifeness, but his personal authenticity, his own direct voice. Whereas Tom Haverford’s voiced by a whole team of writers. So what’s been constructed to form Ansari’s public identity gets inverted on the standup stage. The public’s made private (or privater.) It’s like the difference in feeling I get between a fictional narrator and a nonfictional one.

    Judah Friedlander, though, inverts this inversion. His character on 30 Rock, Frank Rossitano, is infinitely realer and more authentic than Friedlander’s standup persona, who wears a T-shirt reading WORLD’S GREATEST and does ironic schtick about being great at karate and bedding many women. It’s flat{{1}} material. Nearly all crowd work. And it killed.

    How did it kill? More than anyone I’ve seen, Friedlander is lightning-fast in reacting to audience’s questions, and he’s deeply committed in these quick bits to his character. In other words, he’s like a one-man improv group, maybe the best one in the country. But the joy of seeing in person the person behind what one’s seen on television is lessened by the tenacity with which Friedlander sticks to his schtick. He’d never appear on stage in a cardigan and a tote bag, for instance, half -Lemon’d from stress. He’d never speak honestly to Jenna about how phony she is and why. He’d never cow to his mother.

    On TV, Rossitano appears to us as a far realer person than Friedlander allows himself to be perceived on stage. Ansari’s act stands in contrast here—he does a lot of work on stage to separate his self from his TV character. Anxieties about dating and cohabitation, for instance, that Haverford would never have. Also lots and lots of sincere crowd work. Friedlander also works to separate himself from his character, but he does it by pushing us away from his self and toward this performed inauthenticity. Somehow it feels just as intimate.

    There are more things to be said about cameos and how they operate in theatre, say, or on television. I keep coming back to rock shows, because this is what I used to stay up past 11pm on a Monday night to catch when I was the age of most of last night’s audience (which is a topic for a much longer post than I have the time for now). Bands require guitar techs and drum kits and set up time and three-to-five-minute songs to move you. It’s way easier for a beloved comic to get up for 10 minutes and put on an amazing show. It’s so cheap: all you need is a mic and a bottle of water. No wonder kids are staying up past 11pm on a Monday night to catch it.

    ===

    [[]]Possibly outmoded, too. One joke last night was a Chuck Norris joke, but without transcribing it for those folks eager to see him I’ll say it might be the best Chuck Norris joke I’ve heard, in how by disparaging the hell out of Chuck Norris the man he’s able also to disparage Chuck Norris jokes themselves. Hence possibly↵

NY Comedy Trip: Knitting Factory Showcase with Hannibal Buress

Huge, free night of comedy last night that I’m going to try to get at comic-by-comic.

HANNIBAL BURESS
I think a lot of what makes Buress so funny is the way his slow, laconic voice hides a sharp-as-hell intellect. Hides is the wrong word here, but he’s got the verbal timing of a stoner, and he’ll often wear this steady grin while working through a bit, but when the punchline lands what had seemed like a stoner now seems like a guru, the kind of seen-it-all hermit people hike up to caves to ask life-changing questions to. It’s like a slow wit that’s still impeccably timed.

He stood himself in great contrast to Seaton Smith, who’s got a rapid-fire delivery and a voice that’ll growl in high pitch for emphasis, like a motorbike stuck in a low gear. But also in great complement to him. In some between-acts bantering crowd work about white guys and black guys and who can run faster, Smith mentioned that there’s always one white guy in the Olympics. “He’s always from South Africa, have you noticed that shit?” Buress: “You think that’s the residual effects of Apartheid?” This didn’t kill like it would have if it were in a proper set, but what’s also great about Buress is watching him masterfully let stuff like that go.
Continue reading NY Comedy Trip: Knitting Factory Showcase with Hannibal Buress

NY Comedy Trip: Todd Barry’s Voice

“Got a great voice don’t I? A woman once said to me my voice was like butter,” Todd Barry told us at one point in his 20-minute set at the Laughing Devil Comedy Club[*] last night, and this hypothetical woman’s absolutely right. Barry’s voice is reedy and deep like a bass clarinet, and he adds at the ends of certain setups and punchlines a kind of exhaled drawl that we come to take as a signal. Here’s kind of how it works/sounds:

I don't eat right.
I see people who eat worse than me now.

I saw a guy eating lunch he had a burger,
fries,
milkshake...
beer.

Burger-fries.
Milkshake-beer.

Underlines for when that drawl gets deployed. Like I said it works as a signal, the way certain ghosts do, the ones who are continually slipping around corners. It’s a voice that beckons: Here, follow me for a sec. I’m going to take you somewhere very interesting.

Barry’s comedy is narrative and rich with detail. His jokes involve a basic format, where some anecdote that illustrates a personal habit or interest of Barry’s is turned, through dialogue, into a kind of absurdist fantasy. One bit was about phones dropped in toilets:

I asked a friend if she ever dropped her phone in the toilet and she said, “I did but there was no pee in there.” Really, never? That’s the luckiest series of events ever.

This is all Barry needs to set up a world where the falseness his friend believed is made literal and true:

They’re installing a new toilet? Who’s first in line—you are! Mayor cuts the ribbon. Glare from the scissors blinds you. You slip you fall. Where does your phone go? Into the crystal clear waters, of an innocent virgin toilet.

In reading the above, insert laughs after every punctuation mark, laughs Barry’s won by both the slow and steady timing of each line, and also the specificity of detail. And it’s interesting how much work timing and detail do to make us laugh, because the thing about these absurdist fantasies Barry paints is that, given the way they’ve been set up, we know precisely where it’s headed. I mean: this isn’t the surprise of a punchline. There’s no turn that delights us into laughing. When Barry asks “Where does your phone go?” we know he’s going to say “the toilet.” But he says “Into the crystal clear waters,” and we laugh that he hasn’t yet said “the toilet.” And when he says “of an innocent, virgin toilet” we laugh again because he didn’t only say “the toilet.”

It’s his voice that does the jokework, but it’s the absurdism that reveals the jokestuff, if you will—the thing we’re all meant to laugh at. So many comics we like we like because they speak certain truths. Jon Stewart. Kathy Griffin. Bill Hicks. Joan Rivers. Todd Barry, too. His comedy is like a Beckett play, where all the characters say to each other what normally is never said, and often can never be said.

===

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. It’s in Long Island City, which is close, in Queens. We were told it’s the smallest comedy club in New York City, and given that the stage was about the size of a dining room table, and the room not much wider than an SUV, I don’t doubt it. It’s an incredibly intimate space to see comedy, and so it was a total shame to see it run like a big impersonal comedy club. Yes there was a two-drink minimum Yes, assigned seating. Yes, the menu pushed overpriced party cocktails named for famous comedians. (“That’s a huge drink, holy shit. Did you order the Todd Barry?” Barry asked one audience member last night. “It’s a shot of funny and another shot of funny.”) So while I got excited by the place when we first arrived, the club-style rigidity made it a drag. It’s the perfect way to ruin such an intimate venue.↵

NY Comedy Trip: Matt McCarthy at UCB East

I.
If standup’s effect on its audience were judged by scientists, they’d rig up people with all kind of Clockwork Orangey probes that measured vibrations in the belly and sides, constriction of the facial muscles, and the milliliters of wetness secreted by the tear ducts. If I had such data available from last night, it’d show that Matt McCarthy is the funniest comic I’ve ever seen live.

How is this possible? I wasn’t two-drink-minimumly boozed up, and owing to the mostly mediocre showcase that preceded McCarthy’s set I hadn’t been much primed to laugh. But throughout his set I couldn’t stop laughing. And now that I want to write about it, to figure out how what happened to me last night happened to me last night, I’m having a hard time. McCarthy’s comedy is nothing groundbreaking, formally daring, or even new. But he is the funniest comic I have seen in a very long time. Possibly ever?

II.
There are funny people in the world whose funniness is more of them than something that comes from them. Kevin McCarthy (no relation?) from Kids in the Hall comes to mind here. He looks funny. He has a funny hair and face. He can sit in sketch and say “And I never got my water” or “Cat on my head” and I laugh very, very hard. Matt McCarthy’s gift is a similar kind of physicality. Picture the perfect union of Bobby Moynihan’s boisterous, indignant intensity and Conan O’Brien’s mawkish clowning between monologue bits. McCarthy can look at the audience with a certain bug-eyed severity, and everyone laughs.

Okay, so why? We’re not infants who laugh at funny faces. Or maybe we are? What I need to write about here is clowning, a tool some comics use to either deliver jokes or milk certain bits for more laughs. Steven Wright’s probably never clowned in his life. Seinfeld? Louie CK? Maybe sometimes. Chris Rock does it. Jon Dore and Aziz Ansari, too. Katt Williams? God yes.[°] Clowning as I want to talk about it’s a kind of exaggerated miming as a means of illustration. So you land the punchline, and then you act out the punchline through mime, to keep the laughs going. It’s all physical. It’s often silent.

McCarthy’s clowning is sometimes illustrative and sometimes just pure clowning. And you would think that, to keep the audience laughing continually as he did, this’d have to happen at a kind of rapid pace. But no. McCarthy’s presence is so strong that he can stand behind the mic stand and look at us (or not) or mime something (or not) and still hold us in thrall. It’s clowning elevated to the sublime. We look at him as though we might certain miracles unfolding before us.

III.
Let me try to come up with examples. One bit he has is about NYC horses as actual deputized police officers (which I hope is true). This bit’s set up with McCarthy revealing that his favorite thing about New York is the horses (itself a pretty funny conceit). “Am I right?” he asks. “Anybody else?” Giggles from the room, but no vocalized agreement. “The neighs have it,” he says.

It’s a pun even a devoted pun-lover like me can’t find a way to love. So what follows are 26 seconds of McCarthy clowning increasingly large or arcane forms of weaponry he’s firing at the audience. Double-handed pistols. An old Civil War musket that needs filling and tamping. “The neighs have it,” he repeats a couple times, unloading on the crowd, over and over again killing us all.

Another bit’s about an old girlfriend who’d buy sex toys but never use them, because they were worth more in their original packaging. Again, a pretty decent gag about Star-Warsian geeks. “Nerd alert!” he screams at us. “Right!? Right.” And then he holds up two split-V’d Spock hands. “Go Mork your own Ork!” he yells, scissoring the hands together. We laugh. I’m cackling like a deceiving old prospector at this point. And then he holds his palms out like antennae from the top of his head, flapping them one at a time. “Go watch DVDs of Alf!”

IV.
That I’m doing such a poor job of capturing his comedy in print is a good indicator, I think, that McCarthy’s act is so charged and incredible. The best comics can somehow create a form of intimacy with each member of the audience, such that we come to believe each joke is meant for us most of all, and what this means, then, is that the strongest and most moving comedy is going to need to be in the moment. Live and direct. McCarthy accomplishes this while maintaining a fecund, loving antagonism with his audience. His improv skills are manifest in the way he could turn interruptions, flubs, and errors into sources for more comedy.

But of course any established comic can do this. It’s called being a professional. What makes McCarthy stand out is the reckless mania behind his improvisations and recoveries. Yesterday I talked about being held somewhere uncertain by a comic. Today I used the word thrall. That’s McCarthy’s power. In his hands you feel captive. It’s the exact same feeling as being tickled, the exact same mix of agony and ecstasy. We can barely bear it, but we don’t want it to stop.

===

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. For some reason, examples of female clowning comics are escaping me. Any help?↵

NY Comedy Trip: The Talent Show — TED Talks

I.
What’s the opposite of a joke? For standup comics, it might be the long-form comedic monologue.

Pick up any book on how to be a comedian, and they’ll all tell you that to be a comedian you cannot get on stage and tell jokes. There’s a great story in Patton Oswalt’s Zombie Spaceship Wasteland about getting booked at a shitty club in I want to say Oregon, where some local comic asks him where he gets his jokes, never thinking that Oswalt wrote his own. This guy got up and told a bunch of blue jokes he got from joke books and killed. Killed!

To be a successful comic these days you write your own material because the first audiences you have to impress are other comics. And if your material is “How is diarrhea like color blindness? It runs in your jeans,” nobody is going to be impressed.

So goes the popular wisdom. I’m hoping later next week to see how much this don’t-tell-jokes dictum’s across-the-board true.

II.
With this book I feel I need to avoid looking at and thinking about improv and sketch comedy. Standup on its own is so vast and uncapturable that I need as narrow a lens as I can find. Ditto monologues. Who knows where they came from (This American Life? ASSSSCAT‘s guests monologist?), but of late we’ve seen the rise of storytelling and comic monologues. Micro one-person shows. If the purest definition of standup I can find is someone getting on stage solo (or in duos) to make an audience laugh, these monologues can’t be ignored. They are standup.

And they are the opposite of joke-telling standup, a kind of full evolution away from standup’s Borscht Belt origins. Phyllis Diller has a file of 50,000 gags for any occasion. Such material is useless to the present-day comic. Useless because utterly impersonal.
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