[Originally posted on August 11, 2010]
With this Thursday's Open Mic Night at Yuk Yuk's rapidly approaching, I've been thinking more and more about what makes something funny. What I've noticed with a lot of the comedians who've been featured there is that they're getting better and better at recognizing when a joke is falling flat and they should move on. You see it with professional comics all the time: Mitch Hedburg said, "You're going to love that joke later, because I'm going to take all those words out and put in new ones." He got that it was falling flat and took a funny way out. Brian Posehn makes references to his own nerdiness, covering awkwardness with more awkwardness, in a self-referential pile of awkward that seems to make him even more endearing to audiences. Dylan Moran seems to have hundreds of amazing throwaway lines ready, so he can cut to them when he needs to. Those are all decent ways of handling every comic's worst nightmare: a dead joke.
Larry the Cable Guy tries to encourage people to laugh at bad jokes by saying, "I don't care who you are, that's funny." It doesn't work that way. It's like showing an unfunny scene and playing a laugh track over it—you're assuming your audience needs to be told when to laugh. To me, a joke needs to live or die on its own: if it's funny, the laughs will come. There are, according to my favourite definition, 3 paths to a laugh: upset, reversal, and surprise. That definition stands for everything from Family Guy to medieval jesters to Lewis Black. So here's a series of notes on something very near and dear to my heart: comedy.
There are a few comics who are amazing at giving the impression that they don't give a damn if you're laughing or not, they're just being themselves. These comics seem to be either very natural or very rigid, depending on their delivery: Zach Galifianakis seems natural, and is very good at being weird on stage, which can make even only slightly funny jokes seem funnier; Scott Faulconbridge and a few others are more mechanical, which has the same effect. With a delivery like that, the audience is slightly uncomfortable. It's hard to pull off, but since comedy is "upset, reversal, and surprise" (really wish I could remember where I first heard that...), it can work to the comedian's advantage. An off-balance audience is more fickle and will turn on the comedian faster if they're not expecting it, but it can make for bigger laughs through emphasizing the "upset" part if it's handled properly.
The History
Want some history behind "upset"? George Carlin. His "7 Dirty Words You Can't Say On Television" was a near-instant hit, and brought the discussion of freedom of speech in the arts to the forefront. His view on it, that words were words, and not inherently "bad" or "good", has lasted in to current-day arguments over the limits of free speech. More history? Andrew Dice Clay. Though he's mostly a punchline now, at one point his "dirty nursery rhymes" and misogyny made him a huge name, and his fame was increased every time a religious group or critic complained about the abuse, intolerance, and political incorrectness in his act. "Upset" comedians command a lot of press, good or bad.
The Upset
The press they get can work against them though. The old standby is that, "there's no such thing as bad publicity," but as reflectors of their time comedians can be called to account for the biases of their times. Bill Hicks, a counter-culture comedian whose "Arizona Bay" bit still leaves me in stitches, once railed against "fags". Sam Kinison, a major influence on current "angry" comedians, had hours of material about gays, attacking them for degrading society, being different, and in his mind, spreading AIDS.
I think of myself as a child of the 90's because I came to whatever bizarre semblance of maturity that I hold when political correctness was around. Grunge was cool. Counter-culture was accepted culture, and even seemed above it at times. While some from my generation rave about the terrible pop music of the time, or the equally awful TV shows, they tend to forget that the 80's were also the decade of homophobia, major inner-city crack and crime problems, and The Scary Communist Threat at the end of the Cold War. There are very few modern comedians who can pull off that type of gag and still get the audience on their side. Louis CK heads to misogyny or at least "un-PC-ness" every once in a while. Sarah Silverman bases most of her act on saying shockingly racist things while being "cutesy" about it. But they pull it off.
The Conclusion
But then again, there was MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, right? Couldn't have been all bad, could it? It wasn't. There was some great comedy back then. "Upset", despite its drawbacks, produced some of the best influences on modern comedians there's ever been. "Upset" comedy almost singlehandedly took stand-up from small clubs to larger stages through political commentating, opinion-based bits, and challenges to the status quo. But the next step in the sequence, "Reversal", may introduce an even broader swath of the funny...Until next time, keep giggling, and come out to Yuk Yuk's Open Mic Night this Thursday! Cheap admission, cheap beer...you can't go wrong!
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