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.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
The PIT and the Comedy Club
The PIT (People's Improv Theater) looks like a nightclub when you first walk in. Spacious, all decked-out in black and red, it boasts a serious-looking bar, lots of mingling room, and an industrial-strength theater in the back. Its Undergound (i.e. basement) space is a bit funkier, and that's where I ended up when I stopped by for "Pen and Pencil," a sketch writing clinic for fledgling comedy writers.
I only wanted to watch and get an idea of what I might be in for when my classes begin next week. The clinic, however, was in a tiny room with a couple of old couches and a few swivel chairs. Not an easy place to fade into the woodwork, especially since I was the first one to arrive, aside from the clinician, or "jam meister" as he preferred to be called.
Eventually a couple of genuine participants straggled in, and the room, which had seemed like a third-degree interrogation cell began to feel more like the basement rec rooms of my youth. Both my jam mates had just finished a superhero sketch, apparently a rite de passage of all NYC comedy writing classes. We read the skinny, bearded guy's script aloud. The author played the hero, Captain Compliments, and I got the role of the arch-villain, Professor Sarcasm, ultimately destroyed by the Captain's back-handed compliments. The jam meister suggested it might work best as a cartoon. Meanwhile I was freaking out at the possibility that sometime in the next few weeks I might be required to write something just this structured and farcical....
No worries!! The next sketch, submitted by the young, brooding guy who'd been texting up to this point, was an amorphous blob of crazed pornographic genius hot offf the unconscious. The war for the affections of bisexual women between the super-macho, yet sensitive, hero, JusDaTip, and a race of uberlesbians, who could only be defeated by having period sex with the bi-babes. He mentioned that his script had offended everyone in his comedy writing class. "Never mind that," the jam meister told him. "You can't let other people's reactions stop you." WTF!?! Having just abandoned a corporate cubicle for my comeback, I was awed that in my new world political correctness no longer held sway.
Later that evening I made it over to the Gotham Comedy Club. A comic, who looked like Woody Allen after a few years of weight training, told a rambling joke about wanting a "big-butted woman" to sit on his face, making his cause of death ASSphyxiation. A porno shaggy dog story!
Note to Self: All the lines have been erased -- in the new world of comedy, the Aristocrats rule!
I only wanted to watch and get an idea of what I might be in for when my classes begin next week. The clinic, however, was in a tiny room with a couple of old couches and a few swivel chairs. Not an easy place to fade into the woodwork, especially since I was the first one to arrive, aside from the clinician, or "jam meister" as he preferred to be called.
Eventually a couple of genuine participants straggled in, and the room, which had seemed like a third-degree interrogation cell began to feel more like the basement rec rooms of my youth. Both my jam mates had just finished a superhero sketch, apparently a rite de passage of all NYC comedy writing classes. We read the skinny, bearded guy's script aloud. The author played the hero, Captain Compliments, and I got the role of the arch-villain, Professor Sarcasm, ultimately destroyed by the Captain's back-handed compliments. The jam meister suggested it might work best as a cartoon. Meanwhile I was freaking out at the possibility that sometime in the next few weeks I might be required to write something just this structured and farcical....
No worries!! The next sketch, submitted by the young, brooding guy who'd been texting up to this point, was an amorphous blob of crazed pornographic genius hot offf the unconscious. The war for the affections of bisexual women between the super-macho, yet sensitive, hero, JusDaTip, and a race of uberlesbians, who could only be defeated by having period sex with the bi-babes. He mentioned that his script had offended everyone in his comedy writing class. "Never mind that," the jam meister told him. "You can't let other people's reactions stop you." WTF!?! Having just abandoned a corporate cubicle for my comeback, I was awed that in my new world political correctness no longer held sway.
Later that evening I made it over to the Gotham Comedy Club. A comic, who looked like Woody Allen after a few years of weight training, told a rambling joke about wanting a "big-butted woman" to sit on his face, making his cause of death ASSphyxiation. A porno shaggy dog story!
Note to Self: All the lines have been erased -- in the new world of comedy, the Aristocrats rule!
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Comic Timing
The only problem with being ahead of your time is that when your time
finally comes, you're usually out of time. Maybe you've given up or moved on to other things or maybe your
inspiration's dried up or your ego's suffered so much forced transcendence that
it no longer leaps to grasp the slightest shred of aggrandizement.
Worse yet, when your time does arrive, you're engulfed in the multitude. The ideas and expressions that defined you, gave you unique access to the meaning of the moment and with it the right to be heard, are now in everybody's mind. The things you identified and perceived through an act of creative intuition have progressed to the point where everyone can perceive and understand them. And you become just another purveyor of the commonplace.
In the old days when I was writing satire, comedy and politics weren't supposed to mix. At least not in anything but tepid one-liners, which took the world at face value, inserted a couple of laughs, and left the sheets unruffled. Using humor to strip the news and the media creating it down to their absurd undergarments was off-limits -- too heavy or too frivolous depending on which side of the divide you fell on. It's taken fifteen years of Stewart/Colbert to bring people to the point of accepting without question that the demolition of a politically programmed reality is the highest form of comedy.
Back in those days, there was no solidarity in satire. Sure, there were a few comedy clubs and irony-tinged theater groups (respectively beset by showbiz and avant-gardism). But nothing like today's New York, with standup venues and improv theaters on nearly every block, and an entertainment industry insatiable for new stars, scripts and realities to fill the infinite space of cable, internet, and cellular programming. It seems like we are in a comedy renaissance in this city, having achieved that synergy of underground creativity and mainstream success on which such moments thrive. Or perhaps, and better yet for my purposes, we have already passed the peak of this renaissance:
For I have decided to make my comeback, and this time I will strive to be Behind the Times instead of Before them.
Worse yet, when your time does arrive, you're engulfed in the multitude. The ideas and expressions that defined you, gave you unique access to the meaning of the moment and with it the right to be heard, are now in everybody's mind. The things you identified and perceived through an act of creative intuition have progressed to the point where everyone can perceive and understand them. And you become just another purveyor of the commonplace.
In the old days when I was writing satire, comedy and politics weren't supposed to mix. At least not in anything but tepid one-liners, which took the world at face value, inserted a couple of laughs, and left the sheets unruffled. Using humor to strip the news and the media creating it down to their absurd undergarments was off-limits -- too heavy or too frivolous depending on which side of the divide you fell on. It's taken fifteen years of Stewart/Colbert to bring people to the point of accepting without question that the demolition of a politically programmed reality is the highest form of comedy.
Back in those days, there was no solidarity in satire. Sure, there were a few comedy clubs and irony-tinged theater groups (respectively beset by showbiz and avant-gardism). But nothing like today's New York, with standup venues and improv theaters on nearly every block, and an entertainment industry insatiable for new stars, scripts and realities to fill the infinite space of cable, internet, and cellular programming. It seems like we are in a comedy renaissance in this city, having achieved that synergy of underground creativity and mainstream success on which such moments thrive. Or perhaps, and better yet for my purposes, we have already passed the peak of this renaissance:
For I have decided to make my comeback, and this time I will strive to be Behind the Times instead of Before them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)