#get funny

[maythefool]

[ago-biado]

BLUE... (xxx)

[parttimecomic]

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Designed to Fail, Built to Last

I’ve been thinking about joke efficiency lately.

If you want to do well on stage, the best thing you can do is whittle your bits down to their most crucial elements; jokes. Jokes that work. If a setup is too long, cut it. If a punchline isn’t getting consistent laughs, throw it away.

Focusing on this has been a breakthrough for me. But it does sometimes make me sad. The phrase for cutthroat editing is “kill your darlings,” so it stands to reason that a lot of what I have to cut I actually love. Usually I have to get rid of a joke because it’s based on a reference that too few people will get, at least in an average crowd.

This got me thinking about Mystery Science Theater 3000, both of today and yesteryear. One of the things I’ve always loved about MST3K is that the show makes really, REALLY obscure jokes. 

One of my favourite jokes was on This Island Earth - a security guard reading a magazine is startled at his post. One of the bots says "I was reading it for the Kilgore Trout story!"

Kilgore Trout was Kurt Vonnegut's fictionally prophetic SF writer, and the joke is that he could only be published in porn magazines because he was too weird to be published anywhere else. So this quip was a roundabout way to say that the guard was looking at porn that also invoked, and complicated, the classic Playboy apologia, "I read it for the articles!" It takes two seconds to resolve, and it takes a VERY PARTICULAR SORT OF NERD to get it. Everyone else would pass over it in silence. The fact that it made it into the episode (which they released as "MST3K: The Movie" - ostensibly their bid for mainstream attention) is bananas and I love them for it.

No reference is too nerdy, too Minnesotan, to get away with for Mystery Science Theater. So how do they do it?

I think it has to do with format. Joel, Mike, Jonah and the bots have to fill 80 minutes worth of movie with jokes. Everything that happens on screen needs a comment. Dead space isn’t a failed joke, it’s silence from the commentators while the movie marches forth without them.

This requirement, of constant riffing, has an interesting result: NOT EVERY JOKE HAS TO LAND. Which means that they can populate the film with one-percenter jokes designed for very particular audiences.

In a comedy club, that would mean the joke is a failure. But in a show like MST3K, that’s why you love it. Every time I got one of these as a kid, I felt like a genius. That feeling helped me create a real bond with the show, because I felt like I was part of the club.

It’s no surprise to me that MST3K is back for more, albeit with a new cast and crew. And I feel certain that everyone working on the new version loves the show in part because they were people who responded to these buried jokes, the ones designed, it seems, for no-one else but them.

[all-you-need-knw]

Marvel’s DareDevil

Season 1: Ep 5 World On Fire

[dierker]

corn jokes about ohio are very tired and completely neglect to utilize the fact that if you live here there is a 60.1% chance you will either become a president, an astronaut, or a serial killer

[parttimecomic]

Life, horror, and comedy that isn’t funny

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?

Both show that comedy is never too far from being horror, and that horror is tightly entwined with comedy.

[parttimecomic]

What stand-up taught me about writing

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.

If I think about it, I’m surprised by how often I have a voice in my head saying “this isn’t good yet” – and I’m surprised by how often I don’t listen. Writing bad is easy; writing good is hard. But stand-up gives you one hell of a reason to put in the effort.

[parttimecomic]

I love asking comedians who their fave is.

It’s a loaded question; if you answer it honestly, it is usually going to say something about what you’re trying to do on stage. If someone says “Bill Burr,” they’re at least a little bit invested in poking holes in the audience’s hypocrisy, whatever they perceive it to be. If they say Tig Notaro, they’re probably trying for an absurdist approach with a social edge. Brian Regan – they’re interested in joke-craft and a clean approach. And maybe the most fun is that you can usually guess what someone’s going to say when you see them on stage, emulating their hero in an imperfect, developmental way.

My fave is Kyle Kinane. Immediately. Obviously. I love lots of comics, and respect a great many more. But Kinane speaks to me deeply, because he speaks the language of shame.

Kinane’s character is, in my read, “the enlightened dirtbag.” He comes across as the drunk buddy you left behind in high school, the lovable ape who just was never able to get his shit together. You’re a bit embarrassed of him and for him, but what’s great about Kinane is that he’s even more embarrassed of himself. 

That’s why he’s enlightened - he knows who he is, and he’s constantly shocked by it. There’s a joke in Whiskey Icarus where he outlines the racist ideas that pop into his head before he can even condemn them: “I don’t know why that’s in here” he says, pointing to his head. “I’m more upset about it than you are.” 

Most of Kinane’s jokes are structured like confessions. “This is my life” is the subtext of most of what he says. “I should know better. I do know better. But this is my life.” His second video special, I Liked His Old Stuff Better has a joke that never fails to make me cringe in beautiful sympathy. Kinane puts himself in opposition to his brain: “Today’s going to be a great day, I can feel it” says Kinane. “No it’s not,” says his brain, “because remember that time when you were six and dropped a brick on a frog?” He acts out the resulting shame spasm, at killing a creature out of thoughtless innocence, with his entire body.

I know that feeling. I know that feeling hard. Moments of regret that can pull you out of the present and send you hurtling to a past you can never erase, that nail you to a self you used to be and have tried ever since to distance yourself from.

Shame is very important to me. I was raised Catholic. So was Kinane. I don’t know if that’s the magic bullet that makes him speak to me so directly, but it sure helps.

I’m not a dirtbag, not really. I enjoy some drinks but I’m rarely, if ever, “that guy” at the party anymore. But I identify with the pattern of disappointing yourself and love the economy that Kinane is able to bring to expressing that through his character.

I’m still working on figuring out who I am on stage. I tell people I do “mild absurdism and gentle self-deprecation” and I think that’s true, but I need to figure out how to get that across faster.