Why Can't I Laugh Like I Used To?
I thought I knew what comedy was.
I started doing stand-up comedy about five years ago. Which means, by extension, I've been in comedy clubs for about five years. I must have been in clubs four or five hundred times in the past few years, yet I'm laughing much less than I was before. Or at least, laughing less at stand-up comedy.
First time I hit a club, I laughed pretty hard. At just about everything. It could be the lamest, most generic trite about dogs, drugs or the whole men-and-women-are-SO-different schtick and I'd laugh anyway. Back then, I had heard so little comedy, such ideas actually seemed somewhat new. As the years went by, I had to listen to comic after comic file on-stage with their various identical takes on John Bobbitt (hell, even I had one), O.J. Simpson (had one of those too, though mine referred to People's Court) and Monica Lewinsky (didn't bother with that; by then I knew better). I began to laugh less. And less. Now I just get angry.
Some comics have what sounds like a simple philosophy of what stand-up comedy is about -- make 'em laugh. And that does sound absolutely right.
But what is actually funny? Does it have to be new? Here's a story for you -- there's these three comics. First comic sleeps in the haunted bathroom, wakes up the next morning and says, "This sucks. I got no sleep and the ghosts threw poo on me." Second comic also sleeps in the haunted bathroom, wakes up and says, "This sucks. I got no sleep and the ghosts threw poo on me" (the repetition here is essential; now we know how the "normal" people do things, and this nicely sets up the "abnormal" shenanigans to follow). Third comic sleeps in the same bathroom, says "I loved it, but tell the bartender that his drinks smell funny." The structure of that story is the driving force behind about half the jokes little kids have ever told. And giggled at until snot flew out of their tiny little mushroom noses.
Go to a comedy club once and you might enjoy most of it; go often and you start to realize that a lot of ideas are very common and become very boring. Yes, men and women are different. And I guess black people do things like THIS and white people do them like THAT (substitute for Italian, Irish, or other nationality/race/creed of choice). Say Comic A comes up with what he thinks is a brilliant joke about how he's an addict -- he's hooked on phonics. How bloody rich; I'm laughing already. Comic B writes a similar joke. He might not even know Comic A already has a joke on the topic -- the idea is not unique enough that only one person could possibly think of it. And Comic C follows suit. And D. What they may or may not know is Comic E came up with the same idea 10 years ago, told it better and stopped doing it to maintain a shred of dignity -- but that doesn't matter. The average audience member will laugh at all five. Most of them haven't seen enough bad comedy to be jaded.
My advice to you, the comedy audience member, is this: if you go to see live comedy, hear a joke you've heard before from someone else and laugh at it, you make me want to slap you. A lot of comics, myself included, are like misbehaving children -- don't encourage us when we're bad or we'll keep doing it. If it's not new, for Christ's sake don't laugh.
I still think comedy is about the laughter, but I also think comics should try to be original. To look at comedy as an art and try to advance it and create something instead of just sticking to formulas. If a comic goes on stage and says, "Boy, that political correctness sucks -- when I die will I be TERMINALLY INCONVENIENCED, wah hah" or "Those cigarette labels -- wow! Lung cancer in non-smokers, well I'll smoke more, hee hee" I can guarantee you that somewhere (possibly up to 10 somewheres at any given time), another hack comic is telling the same hack joke, and probably just as badly. If a tree falls in a forest and crushes a hack bastard to death, does the tree die happy? If I were that tree, I'd have to say a ecstatic "yes."
And the entertainment argument doesn't even make sense these days -- there's the element of reality to consider. I wasn't doing comedy in the '80s but I hear that was its "boom" period. People wanted to see stand-up comedy a lot so club owners were willing to pay more. More comics were making a living then; some even got flown around the country. The odds of getting one of the dozens of canned-laughs sitcoms (complete with cute little kids, "wacky" situations and no jokes unless you're counting puns) or a spot on the Bad Comedy Mecca (ie A & E's Evening At the Improv) seemed better then. A chance to really shine on TV comedy, one of the best weapons used to crush all good humour into the dirt and replace it with sappy, punny, family-cutesy shit that should only be played in a dimension filled with thousands upon thousands of Prozac-enhanced Elmos.
The reason I haven't heard many stand-up comics doing bits about airplane food, for example, isn't because the bits are tired shit. Even though they are, that never stopped anyone. The reason is most comics don't take airplanes. This is because nobody with half a brain is going to pay for the average comic to fly anywhere, unless they're particularly spiteful and they hire a kamikaze pilot to fly a platoon of comics over the Himalayas.
That would be a film called "Alive 2" where most comics die quickly (preferably in hilarious ways, like being strangled by their own intestines). The survivors tell each other jokes, think they're all geniuses, and slowly die off one by one. Soon, even THEY grow tired of themselves, and after a few too many rotten jokes, one comic gets tired of waiting for the others to freeze to death, murders them all, eats them, then spends the rest of his life telling their jokes on-stage.
Point to all this being, of course, if catering to the average comedy-ignorant boob in the crowd is your thing, just where the hell is that gonna take you? There's hundreds of paid comics across Canada and few can actually sustain themselves solely on comedy. So instead of trying to be rich, which is almost impossible, bloody well be good.
One advantage of the "boom" period being over is since the money's not as much of a concern (since there isn't any), many comics are focusing on the art and are running many edgy, independently-run .
When you strive to be artistic, it won't always work but when it comes down to art vs. entertainment, there's something to remember. If you do something artistic, you might be entertaining as well -- you can do something fresh and experimental and still get mass appeal. But if you're going for the lowest common denominator, don't sit around waiting for someone to invent a Pulitzer Prize for Comedy to slap in your hand.
