After class (Tomiaki) Daiku wearily tells me about the long road ahead for his pupils. If this class is typical, he says, only 3 percent of them will have a successful job in comedy five years from now. Those odds don’t dissuade people from shelling out 400,000 yen (roughly $5,000) for a course at the New Star Creation school in Tokyo or its sister campus in Osaka, where up to 1,500 students enroll each year. They’re hoping to earn a spot in Yoshimoto’s talent stable, work their way through the company’s theaters, and eventually hit the airwaves as owarai geinin—television comedians—like the stars of Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!!, who were members of NSC’s first graduating class in 1982.
Yoshimoto trains comedians, places them on the stage, casts them on shows, and takes a percentage of their earnings. “It’s like the old studio system,” says Yorihiro, of Yoshimoto Entertainment USA. “We take care of people throughout their careers and throughout their lives.” Top comedians are on several shows at once, sometimes recording more than one show a day. Yorihiro claims that a comedy superstar in Japan can earn as much as a top Hollywood actor.
It’s a given that part of what these stars will be called upon to do is perform in batsu games. Yoshimoto Kogyo prepares them to be entertaining regardless of the indignities they suffer. You can see this in another class at New Star Creation, about acting out emotions. The decorum of the stand-up class is gone; students now perform with ferocious abandon. One gyrates uncontrollably on an imaginary stripper pole. Two others slap each other in the groin while shouting, “Let’s get it on!” Another duo simulates oral sex with such intensity that their instructor suggests they get a room. There’s a hint of desperation to their antics, but it’s easy to see how aspiring comedians would endure strange punishments and humiliation to stand out. Eat a tube of wasabi? Sure. Nipple-clamp tug-of-war? A small price to pay for stardom.
Japanese Comedy: So Funny, It Hurts / By Joel Warner / 11.19.12 / wired.com
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Monday, December 3, 2012
The A.V. Club Interview: Nick Kroll
Steve Heisler: When did you first start to get that in-flux feeling with all your projects?
NK: Well, the only date I can tell you is that I came out to L.A. July 24, 2007 to start work onCavemen, the Oscar-winning television show. And I had done a little bit of a pilot season the year before. There’s just a feeling, when you’re just an actor—I have great admiration for people who are just actors. I don’t understand it, the idea of waiting to get cast, being at the whim of others. I find it incredibly powerless and frightening, so that’s why I’ve been constantly trying to create my own content. We’re in a really amazing time where we have the ability to go off on our own and make things that look just as good as stuff on TV, put it up in the Internet, and within a couple of days, have hundreds of thousands of people seeing it, without having to wait for a studio to approve something. Without having to make sure that, “You can’t say certain words,” or “You can’t use that brand.” That’s the beauty of the web.
SH: Was there a moment when you realized you wanted to adopt this DIY philosophy?
NK: It’s tough to say. I came to New York and started doing stand-up and improv, and started auditioning for commercials and voiceovers and stuff. My first job was on a pilot of that prank show called Boiling Points on MTV. It was spring break in South Beach, and they flew me down there to do it, and it was amazing. I was in South Beach, I was doing this thing for MTV, and I remember… [Laughs.] Two months later, when the show was coming out, I was driving back down to Georgetown to do some improv festival; I was going to go back down to college and be like, “Look at me, I’m on this show! I’m doing it!” I sent out a big e-mail saying, “Watch out, everyone!” [Laughs.] I sent that on a Friday, I’m driving down to D.C., and that afternoon, I got a call from the producers being like, “Your segments are not going to be on the show; you’ve been basically cut out.” Two lessons were learned, which were, one, you’re at the whim of other people, and two, until something is on the air, and you see yourself on the screen, then it’s not real.
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