Tom Green Live at the SModCastle #3

Bobcat Goldthwait: I have been trying to go a little easier on the celebrity bashing just because...

Tom Green: Who are the celebrities you like to bash the most?

BG: I really don’t, and I used to do that, you know what I’m saying, it used to make me feel…, but usually when I’m bashing a celebrity I’m, uh you know, like the other day, this is a true story, I was in Staples over in Studio City, and uh, I look, I go, “Who’s that fat guy dressed as Dice Clay in 2010”, and I go, “oh, it is Dice Clay”. And, and he, here’s the difference: like if you saw me, right, I would just be walking around going ‘hey, how are ya’ and he’s actually going ‘ehhhhh, I need some TO-ner, dehhhh;. You know, and you’re like, “Wow, really man? Really, you need that much attention?” (in Dice’s Voice) “Where’s your THREE-HOLE-PA-PER? Ehhhhh.”

I was like, so I whip out my phone cause I want to get a picture of him and I’m thinking how dada is this? I really hope someone comes behind me going, “Oh my god…”, like Emos going, “There’s Bobcat taking a picture of Dice,” like, like, how many Russian Dolls are inside there?

TG: But that’s who Dice is though. Just that, that is who Dice is…

BG: But then he ruins it for us other persona comedians. Cause he, you know, cause they… you know Andy Kaufman was a huge, you know, influence on me or even Steve Martin, you know you’d watch him and so for folks to not understand that these were personas that people came up with… but what I’m learning is that people really… There’s two things, they can’t separate them and the other thing is that they really don’t want to separate them.

Because it’s like, the last two movies I made went to Sundance and its much easier for people to go, “Bobcat Goldthwait made a movie, Bleh Bloo Bleh” and then they, their brains, they can’t, they go, “We already thought you were a, awww we wanted you to be a just, a fucking, a trivia thing. We just wanted you to be the loud screaming retard from Police Academy. Now you made a movie at Sundance, fuck, we’ve already figured you out who you were, what do you mean you’re making… goddammit, this is confusing!”

So you know, I don’t care, I just keep doing what I’m doing.


Tom Green Live at the SModCastle #3

De Bono's Thinking Course

It has always amazed me how little attention philosophers, psychologists and information theorists have paid to humor. Humor is probably the most significant characteristic of the human mind. It tells us much more about how the system works than does anything else. Reason tells us very little and we can devise reasoning systems with pebbles, beads on an abacus, cogwheels or electronics. But humor can only occur in a self-organizing pattering system of the sort we find in human perception.

Humor involves the escape from one pattern and the switching into another.

De Bono's Thinking Course / Edward de Bono / page 55

Butts Below the Border

Growing up in Southern California in the late seventies with a single mom (although in regular contact with a dad who was an accomplished musician), he played sports, made crank calls, and gravitated to comics like Steve Martin. “Putting an arrow through his head and playing the banjo and always going for the non sequitur, that’s what I loved,” Ferrell says. “He obviously became gigantic, but I’m sure there was a big portion of that audience that was, like, ‘What is he doing? I don’t get it—it’s not a setup, punch line, or storytelling.’ ”


Ferrell actually strives to produce that disorientation. “I’ve never been afraid of silence,” he says. “Silence and listening in comedy are big things that are overlooked.” If you don’t get the joke, he can wait. Like a musician (it’s no accident his films are filled with musical numbers), he thrives on changing the beat and riffing on a theme, letting the gag go on “and on and on and on and start to dip, but then because it’s going on so long it starts to get funny again.”


The approach goes back to his long stint on Saturday Night Live, where he’d double down on sketches that were dying in front of the audience—unlike some of his plainly miserable co-stars. “If something wasn’t working, the tendency would be to speed up and get through it,” he says. “But I would slow way down, and I would have this thing—I don’t know why, I love the audience, I want them to laugh, and yet something would kick in like, ‘Okay, you don’t like it, I’m going to make sure you really hate it,’ so I would just take my time. I don’t know, it was like a perverse joy in the agony of it being so painful. I can’t explain that.”


Butts Below the Border / David Edelstein / New York Magazine March 2012

Tom Green Live at the SModCastle #3

Bobcat Goldthwait: I used to always dig a hole for myself, you know. I did a bunch of dates opening for Nirvana and the first one I did I was in Chicago and Michael Jordan had retired from basketball. And uh, I don’t know anything about sports and neither did Nirvana. We’re like going, “What the fuck is going on”, cause everyone had these homemade sheets and signs that said, “We still love you Michael”. And we’re going, “What?”, and so it was explained to us. (laughs) It was explained to Kurt and I why the town was so upset.

So, um, I walked out in front of a crowd there to see Nirvana and I go, “Hey, I feel bad for Michael Jordan but you know for 40 million dollars a year I’d shoot my own dad in the fuckin head.” And, um, the noise wasn’t even a ‘boo’, it was just ‘Deh!’, it was, it was fuck you, kill him, get him, all at the same time, ‘DEH!’ was the noise.

And I go, “Eh, all you punk rock fans, fuck you, your mom and dad dropped you off in a mini-van, you can, you know fuck off…”, and uh, I said, “I’ll talk all night and you’ll never see your precious Nirvanas.” And then, you know, as I walked past Kurt he was the only one laughing. (laughs)

Tom Green: Sure.

BG: I also, I remember the pit stopped moving, but like there was all this bustling trying to get up to the front, and I said that and it was just like, “Hey man…”

TG: But its almost like, you know that’s the ultimate moment of, of, you know, you’ve pissed off the entire audience and you walk by and Kurt Cobain is sitting there laughing, that’s you know, that’s, you know…

BG: But here’s the thing, I think you can understand this too, it’s like, you know Robin Williams is a good friend of mine and I think he really wants the whole world to go, “Hey Robin, you’re the funniest guy and you’re, you know…”, and he’s the closest you’re going to get, right, to getting that. And I’m like, I’ve always like, well I don’t, he and I would do shows together and people would go how did it go last night? And I go, “Robin Williams showed up, he did a show, it was great”, and then they go, “Fuckin Bobcat was there, do you know what he said?”. And I was saying to Robin, I go, “I own them, you know, they’re still fuckin pissed off at my set and meanwhile you know they just think you’re a great guy.”

You know, and um, I’ve gotten past that a little bit.

Tom Green Live at the SModCastle #3

Jerry Seinfeld interview

Seinfeld is 57. Without the cycle of preparation and performance that is stand-up it’s hard to see what else he’d do, save dream up the odd panel show. In 2009 the comedian Frankie Boyle said that he planned to quit stand-up at 40 “because most comedians are rubbish once they hit 40.” What does the doyen of US comedy think of that?

“That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. I think quite the opposite. Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think. Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most and you still have some physical energy.”

Which means that Jerry Seinfeld, by his own arithmetic, is just about at his peak.

Jerry Seinfeld interview / By Benji Wilson / The Telegraph /  7:00AM BST 18 Jun 2011

Born Standing Up

The new physicality brought an unexpected element into the act: precision. My routines wove the verbal with the physical, and I found pleasure trying to bring them in line. Each spoken idea had to be physically expressed as well. My teenage attempt at a magician's grace was being transformed into an awkward comic grace. I felt as though every part of me was working. Some nights it seemed that it wasn't the line that got the laugh, but the tip of my finger. I tried to make voice and posture as crucial as jokes and gags. Silence, too, brought forth laughs. Sometimes I would stop and, saying nothing, stare at the audience with a look of mock disdain, and on a good night, it struck us all as funny, as if we were in on the joke even though there was no actual joke we could point to. Finally, I understood an E. E. Cummings quote I had puzzled over in college: "Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement." Precision was moving the plot forward, was filling every moment with content, was keeping the audience engaged.

- Steve Martin

Steve Martin / Being Funny: How the pathbreaking comedian got his act together

Steve Martin / Born Standing Up

The Joe Rogan Experience: Podcast #174

Joe Rogan: Well that bit was the only bit that, in the history of my act, where I had to change my act because of the bit… twice! Once I had to change my act because of the bit because it was bombing so bad I thought there was no… nowhere it was going to get good. This bit is going to eat me… I gotta get rid of it. Its fucking me up… sometimes you commit to a good idea and the good idea somewhere along the line, along the development process, falls apart. And then its not funny anymore but you’re still committing to it so you have to do this bit and while you’re doing this bit no-one’s laughing and its just weird.

And then somewhere along the line I realized that what I was doing was… The bit was about watching tigers fuck and it makes you feel like so inadequate… when you watch these wild predators and they’re just fucking on television and there’s no warning about it. And I realized that the only way… what I’m doing right now is I’m explaining how these tigers are fucking and the people are not feeling it… they’re not feeling it.

What I gotta do is  be the tiger. You gotta be that tiger. You gotta throw yourself  into that thing where he’s fucking and you know I forget the words to the bit but you know the point of it was that it was so primal that you know there was, there was nothing, no…

Eddie Bravo: Your tiger voice is amazing.

JR: I just decided… You gotta think like you’re an animal. I mean, I think its… look, the narrow perception of that animal must be pretty fucking simple, “Fuck, Kill, Sleep… that’s the menu” that’s part of the bit and that’s what I was thinking, like when if you’re thinking like a tiger there’s not a whole lot of variables going on.

Then I worried about politics and shit. They’ve got laser beam focus on fucking and killing. And they’re giant. You know, you gotta think like that. Then the bit became so strong that I had to put it at the end. Because I put it in the middle because it was dying, you know, I would do it and it would eat a dick and then I would still have my good stuff to pull myself out and maybe I could joke around a bit, “Well it was pretty funny to me when I was writing it, heh heh heh” and then I’d pull myself out of it.

But then it got to a point where I couldn’t leave it in the middle because it was just slaying. Once I figured out how to be the tiger, and I would do this violent fuck thing where I’d throw the fucking stool down and roar… (editors note: listen to the podcast to hear Joe Rogan growl like a tiger)

The Joe Rogan Experience: Podcast #174 / aprox. 2:06:00

Born Standing Up

Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: this is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet. If I wasn't offering punch lines, I'd never be standing there with egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. I would move through my act without pausing for the laugh, as though everything were an aside. Eventually, I thought, the laughs would be playing catch-up to what I was doing. Everything would be either delivered in passing, or the opposite, an elaborate presentation that climaxed in pointlessness. Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn't care if they laughed at all and that this act was going on with or without them.

I was having trouble ending my show. I thought, "Why not make a virtue of it?" I started closing with extended bowing, as though I heard heavy applause. I kept insisting that I needed to "beg off." No, nothing, not even this ovation I am imagining, can make me stay. My goal was to make the audience laugh but leave them unable to describe what it was that had made them laugh. In other words, like the helpless state of giddiness experienced by close friends tuned in to each other's sense of humor, you had to be there.

At least that was the theory. And for the next eight years, I rolled it up a hill like Sisyphus.

My first reviews came in. One said, "This so-called 'comedian' should be told that jokes are supposed to have punch lines." Another said I represented "the most serious booking error in the history of Los Angeles music."

"Wait," I thought, "let me explain my theory!"

- Steve Martin

Steve Martin / Being Funny: How the pathbreaking comedian got his act together

Steve Martin / Born Standing Up

Born Standing Up

In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it. I didn't quite get this concept, nor do I still, but it stayed with me and eventually sparked my second wave of insights. With conventional joke telling, there's a moment when the comedian delivers the punch line, and the audience knows it's the punch line, and their response ranges from polite to uproarious. What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song.

A skillful comedian could coax a laugh with tiny indicators such as a vocal tic (Bob Hope's "But I wanna tell ya") or even a slight body shift. Jack E. Leonard used to punctuate jokes by slapping his stomach with his hand. One night, watching him on "The Tonight Show," I noticed that several of his punch lines had been unintelligible, and the audience had actually laughed at nothing but the cue of his hand slap.

These notions stayed with me until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

-Steve Martin

Steve Martin / Being Funny: How the pathbreaking comedian got his act together

Steve Martin / Born Standing Up

A Stand-Up Joke Is Born

The most underestimated quality of successful stand-up comedians is how hard-working they are, which became clear as this joke evolved over two months. Stand-up is the rare form that usually requires test driving in public. Myq (pronounced Mike) Kaplan, a respected regular at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, has since tried variations of his chivalry joke at about 80 performances. Almost every time, he tapes it, studies the results and jots down new ideas. That’s the job, he said, one he can’t imagine ever not doing.

........

Looking back at the joke’s various incarnations, Mr. Kaplan said it was heartening to see improvement. Yet nothing was more fun than the first time. “When you introduce a joke into the world, and the audience laughs,” he said, “it’s the most invigorating, thrilling thing.”Still, every night is a new audience, and partly to keep his show fresh, he keeps tinkering with the chivalry bit. He’s happy with the joke he told on “Conan,” but he doesn’t rule out changing it.“No joke,” he said, “is ever finished.”


JASON ZINOMAN / CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK: A Stand-Up Joke Is Born / Published: March 5, 2012

Born Standing Up

I had a short-lived but troublesome worry. What if writing comedy was a dead end because one day everything would have been done and we writers would just run out of stuff? I assuaged myself with my own homegrown homily: Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.

Steve Martin / Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life / Page 104

Comics Are Now Selling Laughs by the Download

Stand-up comedians of a certain era knew they had arrived when Johnny Carson invited them to a desk-side seat on “The Tonight Show.” A generation later, the gold standard was getting a solo comedy special on HBO. But in the Internet era, the yardstick for success has been redefined.

A handful of top-tier performers have begun producing stand-up specials on their own, posting them online and selling them directly through their personal Web sites, eliminating the editorial control of broadcasters and the perceived taint of corporate endorsements.

DAVE ITZKOFF / The New York Times / Published: March 20, 2012

Fitzdog Radio: Merrill Markoe

Merrill Markoe: I heard this scary thing on this podcast that I was on yesterday. They said that guys get on stage now, and I haven’t been to clubs lately, so I’m…  but I mean really lately… He said they just get on stage now and read their tweets off their phones.

Greg Fitzsimmons: Really?

MM: And I just thought, you mean is there no place, not even on stage, where you’re not staring at your phone? You’re telling me you even, when you get on stage, you’re just gonna stand there and stare at your phone? That sounds like, I, I would kill myself if I were in the audience and a comic got up and just started scrolling on his phone…

GF: But that’s what I’m saying Alternative Comedy has turned into… Its like literally like, “I’m not trying… I’m just talking.”

MM: Well who needs that?

Fitzdog Radio: Merrill Markoe / aprox 00:51:01

Fitzdog Radio: Merrill Markoe

Greg Fitzsimmons: I’ve never done the same set because I have ADD and kind of jump around and do new stuff and crowd work and whatever, you know, mix up my material. So this was 1 hour, same jokes, same order, and I was crushing like I normally don’t  and I was like maybe I’m supposed to be doing it that way?

Merrill Markoe: Yeah!

GF: But its not as much fun.

MM: Yeah, no it isn’t as much fun… It’s a one man show.

GF: Yeah, exactly.

MM: That’s the reason I’ve never done a one woman show. I’ve thought about it before, people have suggested it to me, and I’ve just thought, but what happens the thirtieth time you’ve done it just exactly in that order. How do you not want to pull your hair out?

GF: Well some guys do this whole discipline thing, like Chris Rock does it and Louis CK and Carlin did it, where you take a year and you add jokes in and you refine them and at the end of the year you do the special and you just throw it away. Start from scratch. That’s just not the way my mind works, you know. For me its about finding the moment in the club at that time and pulling jokes that work that I’ve written and then, you know, if I’ve got something new that’s what I’m focusing on. You know I’ve got a 5 minute chunk on immigration and I’m adding jokes in and taking them out and then they become this chunk where I’ve got 7, 8, 10 chunks in a one hour show, in any order, but I’m pulling from 20 chunks. And so I find that’s just my style and, ah, its not conducive to what makes comedians really big.

You know you look at guys like Jim Gaffigan and Birbiglia that are selling out theaters and its that structure thing. That 1 hour, put it out, start again… You know when you put the hour out you go do Letterman and Conan… you do little chunks of the hour to promote it. It’s a whole science.

Fitzdog Radio: Merrill Markoe / aprox 00:47:35

Fitzdog Radio: Merrill Markoe

Greg Fitzsimmons: For me what’s hard is that now I think there was a shift. It used to be you just did stand-up and if you were funny they moved you up to be the feature. And if you were funnier than the headliner you became the headliner. And people came to the clubs and now its like you have to tweet and do podcasts and, you know, send out, you know, do so much free radio and stuff to… and so you don’t have that time for the joke writing and the creative part and the laying around and going to movies with friends where material comes from.

Merrill Markoe: Well you don’t really have to tweet and do podcasts, do you?

GF: Sure you do. Oh my… You cannot… Nobody goes to a comedy club anymore. They used to say, “Hey, it’s the Denver Comedy Works, great club, I got a date, let’s go.” Now its like… Its all hard tickets. They go to see Greg Fitzsimmons and there’s nobody in there that just came into the club. Its like selling theater.

MM: Huh…

GF: So you really gotta push… the business is slow.

Fitzdog Radio: Merrill Markoe / aprox 00:50:04

Charlie Murphy: I Will Not Apologize

I’ve literally been all over the world doing stand-up comedy. Who would’ve figured that? Not me. I mean I could’ve figured myself doing a lot of other things but not stand-up comedy. But look, look where I’m at man. And this only because, you know, when the opportunity came, I wasn’t afraid to go after it.

So if you’re the kind of person who, you know, is on the fence about what you want to do with your life, look at what Charlie Murphy did. Opportunity came, I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, I just wasn’t afraid to try it. I wasn’t afraid to fail, I wasn’t afraid to fall, so I took the walk, I walked the walk, I walked through the fire, you know, and its been a very, very enlightening experience. I mean, you know, look at me now man, everything boils down to this one moment, where I step on the stage and do one hour of stand-up comedy. Wow.

Just thinking about it makes actually me sleepy. So, uh, I’m a lay down and take a nap. When I get up, lights on.


- Charlie Murphy

Charlie Murphy: I Will Not Apologize

The Humor Code: Neal Brennan on ‘Comedic Polymaths’ and the Future of Funny

Wired: What, for you, is the toughest kind of audience to make laugh?

Neal Brennan: Black audiences are probably the toughest for me to make laugh. I’ve gotten pretty good at performing for them, but it’s still a challenge. The level of performance has to be higher. “Dry” doesn’t really work for them. They demand energy. I do racial material, so it needs to be nuanced and smart and true. And they will eat you up if they smell that you’re nervous.

Wired: Can you give an example of when one of your jokes failed badly? Can you explain why it failed?

Brennan: Last night I tried a joke about Irish people. I made the observation that every country on Earth has their own cuisine, their own restaurants. Irish don’t have restaurants; all we have are bars. And we don’t even make our own beer — except for one, Guinness — and we won’t even bother serving it cold, because we consider refrigeration too festive.

You may be thinking that this joke should have worked, and I would agree with you. The reason it didn’t is because I didn’t give it any setup. I didn’t say that I don’t like being Irish because we’re depressing and generally alcoholic. I’m going to do the joke again tonight with that setup. Hopefully, it will work.

Wired: What is the worst heckling you’ve ever experienced? How do you handle hecklers?

Brennan: I did a show about a year ago. At this point, I was a fairly experienced comic. I went on late in a predominately black/Latin room on the Lower East Side in New York City. I was pretty nervous for the set, as I am the first time I go on anywhere. I walk onto the stage, and some kid in the audience yells out, “Yo, are you scared?” Most of the audience didn’t hear him, and I ignored him. But he was right. I was scared. And he could tell. And then I was scared and embarrassed. The set was a C-plus, at best.

wired.com

Louis CK’s Shameful Dirty Comedy

Anthropologist Mary Douglas has a nice definition for dirt, saying it is “matter out of place.” A fried egg on the plate is fine, but a fried egg all over my hands is dirty. Hyde continues to say that dirt is always a byproduct of creating order: to create a place for things means that there will be situations where things will be out of place. And this is why Louis CK’s comedy is dirty: the thoughts, as dark and natural as they may be, are put out of place. The secrets are told on stage in front of others, but it’s through that vocalization that we begin to understand ourselves and our relationship to the world we live in. Shame is diffused through its publication and distribution. Shame is reduced through its sharing. By pointing out the dirt, and realizing that the things themselves aren’t dirty but just out of place, we begin to see that the lines can be redrawn and order rethought. By voicing that shame, it allows one to assess if his or her thoughts or actions are worthy of that judgement, or if it is merely a casualty—dirt created by an ill-fitting standard. Articulating our impulses is dirty business, and maybe this is why Louis’ been able to tread in a territory others haven’t been able to navigate. As Fran Lebowitz said, “If you’re going to tell the truth, you better be funny. Otherwise, they will kill you.”

Frank Chimero

WTF with Marc Maron / Episode 238 - Michael Ian Black

Marc Maron: The same reason that I may have hated you as a person is the reason why you were, ah, a great stand-up performer… is that you were set in your character. I mean the thing about, the hardest thing about doing stand-up, is having that character, or having a character at all other than jokes and you already had that.

Michael Ian Black: I did but it wasn’t necessarily… as I got older, and as I progressed and continue to progress, it wasn’t necessarily, it isn’t or wasn’t necessarily where I want to remain, ah, I think you can be a smug asshole and have that be fun and funny for awhile, and for me its been X number of years but at a certain point it becomes limiting. And so I’m trying to sort of break through that a little bit and part of that involves trying to learn how to, umm, how to really be myself and expose myself and that’s hard to do….

MM: Or talk about your kids…

MIB: Talk about my kids. Talk about my life, talk about my feelings…

MM: Yeah…

MIB: Which you know, for a long time I denied even having.

WTF with Marc Maron / Episode 238 - Michael Ian Black / aprox 1:03:00

Vulnerability and The Honest Comic

To me, an honest comedian is a self-documentor and a self ethnographer.
 An honest comic analyses and deconstructs that which is not spoken.

…

Being honest is the only true edgy that is left, because being absolutely honest is what makes people uncomfortable. 
Speaking from your soul makes people uncomfortable.

They can see the vulnerability and they can identify with it on a basic human level. They also instinctualy know how much balls it takes to do that.

There is a deep vulnerability to being honest and exposing that vulnerability is the risk.
 The risk of greatly humiliating yourself and that risk is high.

The reward is just as great, if not greater. 
The reward is absolute freedom to be who you are 100%. Its almost therapeutic and cathartic when it works. To both performer and audience.

PETE SSERWANGA

http://iamcomic.co.za/vulnerability-and-the-honest-comic/