Japanese Comedy: So Funny, It Hurts

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

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.

The A.V. Club Interview: Nick Kroll / by Steve Heisler / October 29, 2009

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

Brian Hiatt: What ever happened to your signature laugh, by the way?

Eddie Murphy: I don't laugh like that anymore, somehow it doesn't come out. It's weird to change something that's as natural as that. But it started out as a real laugh, then it turned into people laughing because they thought my laugh was funny, and then there were a couple of times where I laughed because I knew it would make people laugh. Then it got weird. People came up to me and said, "Do that laugh," or if you laugh, someone turns around and goes, "Eddie?" I just stopped doing it.

BH: Woody Allen has that line "Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I'd prefer to live on in my apartment." Is it any consolation that some of your work will live on after you die? 

EM: [Laughs] I love Woody Allen. Is it any consolation? This whole period of documenting an artist's work, movies, records, all this shit, it's 100 years old, if it's that. It's brand-new. Beethoven and those fuckers couldn't even listen to their shit, do you know how hard it was to find a mother­fucker with a violin that worked back then? And his stuff went through the ages. Technology has it to where they gonna play this stuff forever. But the reality is, all this shit turns into dust, everything is temporary. No matter what you do, if you're around here long enough, you'll wind up dribbling and shitting on yourself, and you won't even remember the shit you did. I saw this documentary on Ronald Reagan, and it was like, "Whoa." They say he came into the house, and he had the toy White House that he had taken out of a fish tank, and he goes, "I don't know what I'm doing with this, but I know it has something to do with me." He had even forgotten he was the president. No matter what you do, that shit is all getting turned into gobbledy­gook. In 200 years, it's all dust, and in 300 years, it ain't nothing, and in 1,000 years, it's like you wasn't even fucking here. But if you're really, really lucky, if you really did something special, you could hang around a little longer.

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview / by: Brian Hiatt / November 9, 2011

The A.V. Club Interview: Nick Kroll

Nick Kroll: Yeah. My New Year’s resolution in 2002 was to do an open mic. I started doing stand-up for a bit, and then I focused more on the characters and then came back, but every time from 2002 on, getting onstage, holding a mic, and talking to an audience. Then going back and forth trying to do stand-up and then trying to do characters, then figuring out where the two sort of met together. But I think that’s fair. I hope to think that I’m on schedule with Patton Oswalt. [Hardwick later said he might have been quoting Brian Posehn, but we didn’t learn about that until after this interview was conducted, so Oswalt gets the credit throughout this interview. —ed.] But I do think it takes a while, and I still think we’re all hopefully always getting better.

Kyle Ryan: What were you doing at the time, when you had the New Year’s resolution to do an open-mic?

NK: I had graduated from school, and I was doing improv. I had taken workshops at Upright Citizens Brigade, taking classes and loving it, but also just jonesing to get onstage, because when you’re starting with improv, you’re practicing alone in your groups in weird Chinese sweatshops in the Garment District, but not getting a ton of time onstage. That’s what sort of propelled me to try and do an open mic.

The A.V. Club Interview: Nick Kroll / by Kyle Ryan / January 28, 2011

The A.V. Club Blog: Patton Oswalt Responds

As far as I'm concerned, I sold out when I took that free plate of buffalo wings at Rumors Nightclub near Dulles Airport in the summer of 1989, at my first paid stand-up gig ($50 – I got the buffalo wings for hosting a belching contest afterwards). Ever since then, the only criteria for my career path is, "How entertaining will this be for me, and how much money can I get?" Getting to work with Brad Bird at Pixar met both those criteria perfectly. But spending a month and a half in Vancouver, watching Wesley Snipes have a slow-motion meltdown inBlade: Trinity, was equally valuable and enriching. Reputation, posterity and cool are traps. Shaky Kane said that, I think.

(*One night, at a dive bar after the day's shooting, the director, me, and Ron Perlman convinced a group of bikers – "convinced" = "bought them a lot of alcohol" – to show up with the director for the next day's filming after Wesley tried to strangle said director the day before).

Thus, my desire to work with Paul Greengrass, Martin Scorsese and Ang Lee is equal to my desire to work with Nicholas Cage, Tom Cruise and Carlos Mencia. I want the money, and the anecdotes.

The A.V. Club Blog: Patton Oswalt Responds / by Patton Oswalt / January 2, 2008

The A.V. Club Interview: Nick Kroll

Kyle Ryan: When The A.V. Club spoke with you in 2009, you said it was easier for you to do character-based comedy instead of more straightforward stand-up, because you had a hard time knowing yourself for it.

Nick Kroll: Yeah, it was easier to know a character’s point of view than it was to figure out what your point of view was.

AVC: Has that lessened at all?

NK: I think so. Again, the Patton reference is a good one. In those seven years, what Patton is saying is that you get to know what your voice is. It’s almost easier to look at someone on a train and be like, “Oh, that guy, I bet, thinks this about Obama.” But then when you’re like, “Well, what do I think about Obama?” You’re like, “It’s complicated.” [Laughs.] I don’t have any jokes about Obama, but I realized that I have very strong opinions about dogs and cats. But I think that it takes a long time to figure out what your point of view is, and the character stuff, at least in my case, I found it easier to have a sense of what they would think about a specific topic. In the case of the special, making Bobby the security guard gave him a purpose for being onstage, and Fabrice, having such a clear point of view that he’s the star and that he deserves to be onstage, gave him a purpose. But I think that being on the road and doing more and more stand-up has allowed me to figure out… like, I don’t think I’ll ever be Bill Hicks, but I think I’m figuring out what my opinion is on things.

The A.V. Club Interview: Nick Kroll / by Kyle Ryan / January 28, 2011

Joe Rogan Experience #193: Jim Gaffigan

Joe Rogan: Some people get tired of the stress. I mean Jim and I were talking about how much we love stand-up and we would never quit doing it. But everybody's got a different psychological make-up. And for some people, the anxiety of performance is really intense. 

Jim Gaffigan: Its also, I think some of it is luck. I mean it is a real cruel business. 

JR: Yes.

JG: So, I mean, I was definitely an angry guy. A lot of people were successful before me and I was angry for a couple years.

JR: You were bitter?

JG: Yeah.

JR: Really? How did you get yourself out of that?

JG: Therapy. 

JR: Really?

JR: Yeah. You know. And just also I came to the conclusion that I was not doing stand-up... you know I wanted to be... I was happy for my friends' success but I felt like I was a failure. But like I had to come to the conclusion: What is success? And what success is, is like doing what you love and actually getting paid for it. And so then I adopted that attitude. And then things started going my way. 

Joe Rogan Experience #193: Jim Gaffigan / aprox 50:56