How the Comedy Nerds Took Over

In 1992, I sat in a comedy club in Toronto with an 86-year-old Henny Youngman, and as he watched the performer onstage, he grew so enraged that he almost heckled his own opening act. A young comic was warming up the audience with “crowd work” — asking people where they’re from, working off their responses, etc. — and Youngman looked on with disdain. “ ‘Where you from?’ ‘Where you from?’ ” he muttered. “Who cares where they’re from? They paid to see you. Tell them some damn jokes.”

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Most comedians would like comedy to be considered an art. If so, they must also accept that every art needs an active amateur class. There are amateur-theater troupes, amateur-writer groups and weekend garage-rock bands — and now there is the comedy nerd. The conflict between club comics and alternative comedians will likely continue, as long as each side feels threatened by the existence of the other. The definition, however, of what it means to be a “real” comic will remain the same.

A real comic can’t stand the idea of not being funny or of an audience he can’t win over. In this respect, stand-up is a lot like boxing. Just as a fighter must believe, when he steps in the ring, that he is going to win by a knockout, a comedian has to believe, however improbably, that he is going to make every single person laugh. He understands intellectually that this may not happen, but he must be emotionally convinced that it will.

“Either you’re a comic or you’re not,” Henny Youngman told me before that show in 1992. “You prove yourself, and you make a living at it. Then you’re a comedian. Otherwise you’re a guy who thinks he’s a comic.”

How the Comedy Nerds Took Over / By ANDREW CLARK / The New York Times Magazine / April 20, 2012