Why is it that every standup show lately has to begin with the emcee getting into the audience's shit? Basically picking on and embarrassing them? It's been that way at the last two shows I've been to, and in both cases it was at a paid-entry, drink-minimum kind of club. So the audience was paying for the abuse.
I hadn't been to a comedy club for quite a few years before I began my current plunge. So maybe this is the current state of the art. In the old days, there were always a couple of comics who made fun of the audience -- that was their shtick. And it was always a little risky to sit in the front row of any comedy performance. But this seems different. It's the tenor of the whole show. The host/hostess comes out and makes fun of the audience for ten excruciating minutes, singling out individuals and couples for interrogation and mockery, assigning each of them a stereotypical role, coming back out between sets to reinforce the narrative. The comics get in on the act too, in many cases continuing the story and adding their own twist to the grotesqueries created out of the people who simply came to watch them perform.
Perhaps the idea is to create a sense of fun and intimacy where boundaries are relaxed and everyone can laugh at themselves and thus at the comedians? But we don't get to laugh at the comedians in way they try to get us to laugh at one another. Do we get to say how ugly their shoes are, whether they're going to get lucky on their next date, whether their clothes come from Walmart or JC Penney's, the size of their genitalia, or the fact that their take on people is cliched and superficial? NO! They have the microphone, they have the stage, they have claimed the iron throne of comedy for their complacent asses.
Whatever the explanation, I think it's cheesy, a cop-out. A death by a thousand cuts for those without the ability to kill.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Upright Improv
The Upright Citizens Brigade is the premier sketch and improv theater in New York, with alums crowding the roster of SNL, the Comedy Channel and HBO. So you might expect their performance space to be sleek and well-tended. Instead, the west side Chelsea venue is a dim, somewhat shabby basement with four or five rungs of ramshackle seating surrounding a bare floor that serves as the stage. What's lacking in theatrical infrastructure, however, is made up for by audience enthusiasm, which was brimming over at last night's performance by Tami Sagher and Chris Gethard, two veteran comedy writers who also do improv.
The audience was clearly there to laugh, which they began to do almost before the first word was spoken onstage. From that point on, every phrase out of the performers' mouths -- whether setup, punchline, or random murmur -- was greeted with the same raucous outbursts. Perhaps, this was the audience's fine-tuned sensitivity to improvisation, feeling the performers reach for the next line, squealing with delight at what they managed to come up with. Or perhaps it was an as-yet-unnamed phenomenon I've been noticing among certain comedy goers -- their habit of indiscriminately laughing at everything. A laughter which is more about showing (to themselves as much as others) that they Get It, than about the humor of the joke that they get.
In any case, the laughter was misplaced, as the first part of Sagher & Gethard's performance was not very funny. The promising comic premise -- a couple's dissection of an incident in which the wife was "forced" to sodomize her husband's ass -- meandered into a long, drawn-out relationship melodrama. Along the way there were references to twitter and hashtags, all met with loud guffaws, the word "hashtag" having become for white millennial audiences what the word "motherfucker" was to a '90s Def Jam one -- a punchline without the need of joke.
The second half of their show, however, was pure brilliance! A Groundhog's Day like repetition of the same scene, each time more elaborate with a new and ingenious twist. A woman rouses a napping man to eat the pie she has just baked. The man compares napping to time travel. A metaphysical dispute ensues, and the man retreats. The scene repeats -- now the man has built an actual time machine and wanders the spacetime continuum in search of "a fucking piece of pie". The scene repeats -- the woman has discovered the time machine and has replicated herself....
As the performers spurred each other to greater heights of improvisational invention, the manic laughter subsided. The audience watched in rapt attention, ensnared in the crazed logic of the story emerging before them, laughing only at those points where things suddenly came together in a fit of comic genius. The Game was on, and we were all in the Zone.
The audience was clearly there to laugh, which they began to do almost before the first word was spoken onstage. From that point on, every phrase out of the performers' mouths -- whether setup, punchline, or random murmur -- was greeted with the same raucous outbursts. Perhaps, this was the audience's fine-tuned sensitivity to improvisation, feeling the performers reach for the next line, squealing with delight at what they managed to come up with. Or perhaps it was an as-yet-unnamed phenomenon I've been noticing among certain comedy goers -- their habit of indiscriminately laughing at everything. A laughter which is more about showing (to themselves as much as others) that they Get It, than about the humor of the joke that they get.
In any case, the laughter was misplaced, as the first part of Sagher & Gethard's performance was not very funny. The promising comic premise -- a couple's dissection of an incident in which the wife was "forced" to sodomize her husband's ass -- meandered into a long, drawn-out relationship melodrama. Along the way there were references to twitter and hashtags, all met with loud guffaws, the word "hashtag" having become for white millennial audiences what the word "motherfucker" was to a '90s Def Jam one -- a punchline without the need of joke.
The second half of their show, however, was pure brilliance! A Groundhog's Day like repetition of the same scene, each time more elaborate with a new and ingenious twist. A woman rouses a napping man to eat the pie she has just baked. The man compares napping to time travel. A metaphysical dispute ensues, and the man retreats. The scene repeats -- now the man has built an actual time machine and wanders the spacetime continuum in search of "a fucking piece of pie". The scene repeats -- the woman has discovered the time machine and has replicated herself....
As the performers spurred each other to greater heights of improvisational invention, the manic laughter subsided. The audience watched in rapt attention, ensnared in the crazed logic of the story emerging before them, laughing only at those points where things suddenly came together in a fit of comic genius. The Game was on, and we were all in the Zone.
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