I’m not sure how to find a way in to writing about the stand-up comedy stuff I’ve been researching and thinking about (and doing a couple of gigs) recently. Any analysis/deconstruction is slightly flawed because I’ve not really read a lot of critical interpretation of performance and theatre work and I don’t understand enough of the comedy world to contextualise the work or processes involved. I suppose, really, what I’m saying is that whereas I know the tropes and shorthand for various art world concepts, the following will be floundering about in the dark somewhat. And not funny.
First off, and it’s obvious really, is that stand-up is a performance. Just as acting in a play is. You have to seek out the character that you will perform and what will best suit the type of material you want to focus your act on. What’s interesting is that this process of finding your comedy persona is as complex as any artists’ exploration of the themes of their work. If you’ve never really known that artists undergo this process, then visit any college or university end of year exhibitions and compare the work of first or foundation year students with final year students. Broadly speaking, what you often find is that artists begin by exploring what it means to be an artist. The work is often the artist trying to find out why their own creations can be considered art or they begin to think about their place in the art world. And this in turn begins to unravel the fragile nature of the art world. Something that isn’t always obvious to outsiders, who often perceive it as a tightly formed, coherent place. As they progress through the years, they find a more intimate and complex relationship with their work and themes and begin to look further out or even further within themselves. Hopefully.
Comedy shares some of these conceits. For example, exploring the means of expression and the ‘language’ that you are going to use. And in a way, I’m quite directly referring to the words used by the performer, not just the ‘language’ in a semiotic way. But this is about getting to the heart of how you’ll frame your opinion about something. Comedians have an opinion about something. They all do, even if their jokes don’t being with, “have you ever noticed?” or “Why do some people/things/the world..?” It informs their argument about a subject. Even someone as surreal as The Mighty Boosh have a viewpoint. Even Jimmy Carr has a viewpoint. This is a response to something in life. Often it’s about casting something in life through a conceptual prism and shining it back out into the world, directly into people’s faces.
When I try to understand the immediacy of response that comedy demands and should evoke in the audience, I think about The Chapman brothers, whose work is often shocking and feels slightly exploitative of the themes it takes on. There’s an immediate gut reaction to the work and that often feels as though it’s enough to be take away with you. There is another layer there if you want to dig deeper but often it can result in wiping away the first reaction. Some of the work just doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. So it is within the varied field of comedy. A nob gag, most of the time, is just a nob gag. Or a racist ‘joke’ is just that. But, handled intelligently by someone like Richard Herring (in his Hitler Moustache show), it can bend that notion and leave you questioning your own response. Maybe ‘I’m’ the racist because I’ve reacted in the preordained way to that comment/joke? You can question and play around with those concepts. You don’t have to go that deep, obviously. But you don’t have to walk around a gallery thinking beyond the purely aesthetic: it’s just there if you want it.
Just to explore this notion of performance slightly further before I finish, I’ve noticed a dichotomy between the audience and their assumption and the performer. In comedy, the crowd assumes that it’s ‘easy’ and that the performer is having as much fun as they are. In the same way that pub banter is just getting pissed and enjoying some jokes amongst mates. This is why people don’t think of comedy as performance. Because of the way narrative is often told, in the first person and the character shares the same name as the performer in ‘every’ case and, quite simply, the normal tell-tale signs of fiction aren’t in place. There are no signals that this is a fictitious account of an event. Except in the more surreal story-tellers (Eddie Izzard for example) it could be someone recounting a thing that happened. Except, that those off-the-cuff stories have been written down, tried out and redrafted until they shine like the best Dave Eggers micro-fiction you could imagine. The skill, like any performer, is in being natural and relaxed. And inviting the audience in to allow you to take them through a narrative journey and to get them to react. And they must react. Despite what I’ve written above, you must have that immediate response. If nobody laughs, you aren’t doing your job. The chin-stroking can come later but the first response has to come from the gut.
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