Portrait of the Comic as a Young Artist
Originally Posted April 14th 2008
This post is in response to Andy Kline’s response to my response to his blog… You get the idea. You can see the original post and comments over here at DC Comedy 4 Now. Again, the first paragraph is a direct response, the rest pretty much stands on its own. It’s broken into 2 Parts, if you want to see other peoples responses in between, check out the original post.
Pt. 1
This was a really good post. My response is long as shit, sorry, but I hope you’ll take the time to read it and let me know what you think. I tend to agree with Jake that fragmentation and niche marketing is a trend that is much larger than comedy, facilitated by the growth of the internet and the transition from hard copy to digital data for multimedia.
Because companies (in theory and increasingly in practice) no longer have to spend money to produce CDs for instance, they don’t have to order a certain # of a disc for it to be worth something, they can just sell licenses to download which costs them almost nothing. This means that niche markets like classical music and genre stand up can be better served. Then when this is combined with the internet-provided ability for the consumer to state outright to the marketer what they’re interested in buying, you get a bunch of people who are willing to put down money to hear people tell jokes to confirm the views they already hold.
As I said, it’s not just stand-up, this new breed of preaching to the choir has obviously manifested itself in other areas, most notably politics and political entertainment, to the point where the people who watch Fox News and the people who watch MSNBC can hardly manage to communicate with one another, and oftentimes actually believe in different facts about history and the world.
Ironically this heavily postmodern and relativist situation America has found itself in is facilitated by the role of Religion in our society (it’s ironic since individually most religions believe they have a monopoly on the truth, an extremely un-postmodern and anti-relativist stance — The Pope has said that relativism is one of the greatest moral problems for the world today).
I say that it is facilitated by religion because it comes out of the desire to have different religious groups peacefully co-exist, which is related to the whole idea that everyone is “entitled” to believe what they want to believe regardless of facts. So out of control is this sense of subjective reality that recently States have begun passing measures which say that a student cannot be graded incorrectly in an Earth Sciences course for saying that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
I am a grumpy old man. Listen to my complaints about society.
I know it seems odd that I would tie this to the problem of genre comedy, but I really do think they are related because they are both symptoms of this “go fuck yourself I’m not listening to anything that I don’t already believe and you can’t convince me to listen, lalalalala I’m not listening” culture that we’re developing in America (and this isn’t just a conservative problem, Bill Maher is just as guilty of this brand of demagoguery as Bill O’Reily), and it is not a good place to be. When people can’t listen to opposing views and can’t agree on even basic truths as to what counts as good evidence and good reasoning, I don’t care if you’re talking about Comedy, the election, or whether or not there exists any such thing as the ‘soul’, if we can’t start listening and thinking more better (yes, more better), we are fucked.
—————————————-
Pt. 2
Haha, Oh Andy, you have no idea how happy I am that you asked the big “A” question. It may not come as a complete shock to you that I have some opinions on the topic. Again, it’s a big question so the answer will be long, obviously if for that reason someone chooses not to read it I won’t be crushed. If you disagree though I’d love to hear it.
The question is comedy Art is I think just like the question “is drawing Art?” The answer is of course, a resounding “sometimes.” I would say that Art is the employing of certain techniques filtered through a specific perspective to reflect on what we lovingly and pretentiously refer to as “the human condition.” A child’s muddy footprint isn’t typically considered art (except by assholes and postmodernists, aka assholes) because there’s no intention, perspective or technique behind it. So essentially I have a perspective and I want to communicate it in some way, and I use expressive techniques like painting or music or sculpting to get it across. Joke-writing and oratory skills are some of the comedian’s techniques.
Comedy is tough because it’s not very forgiving. The sound of an audience watching a brilliant dramatic play is about the same as the sound of an audience watching a mediocre dramatic play. Not so with comedy. Laughter is the bottom line and drug-like fix that comics are all chasing after, so it’s not shocking that you say that you don’t see young comedians being subversive, because to be frank, they’re mostly just trying to figure out how to get laughs, which is why there’s a lot of them going for the gross-out/uncomfortable laugh or the hacky “so guys be loving blowjobs, am I right? High five!” laughs, because those are fairly easy to get (by the way, I realize that I’m a young comedian too, but I say “them” just because I’m talking in the abstract and not about a specific group of anyone in particular). And I will say that making people uncomfortable is not in and of itself subversive, though they are sometimes linked it’s a common mistake to conflate them (hence the overuse of ironic references to rape in the alternative comedy scene).
And on top of all of that, there’s no one teaching comedy. Unlike other arts which have conservatories and majors associated with them, comedy has no such formal instruction, which means the burden is entirely on the individual to do all these things at once, and it’s a heavy burden.
I actually do believe that joke-writing and oratory skills could be taught in a conservatory-like setting just like acting or singing. I know that a lot of people will scoff at this, but I think it’s worth noting that until Stanislavski, acting wasn’t really considered a serious artistic discipline worth studying, and he died in 1935 so this wasn’t actually that long ago.
Hello, my name is Constantin! Around the turn of the Century I revolutionized acting, invented the pointy mustache, and traveled exclusively in dirigibles.
This wouldn’t turn comedy into a machine-like process as some people have suggested (unless you want to say all music that results from formal education is machine-like), because the Art comes at the point of expressing a personal world-view through the process of using comedic techniques in presentation, and individuals can and will find new ways to do it even if there is a formal process (Nicole Kidman is one example of an accomplished but not formally trained actress). Of course since most comedians are really anti-authority and in part because of this a lot drop out of formal education somewhere along the way, it might not work in practice. Anyway, I’m just saying, it’s not an absurd thing to suggest.
The job of the young comedian then is to work on learning his technique but also to develop his perspective. Good technique with no perspective just results in funny hackery, it’ll make the audience laugh in the moment, but it won’t stick with them five minutes after leaving the show. So I think a young comedian needs to take chances, which means there might be more times when he or she doesn’t get laughs early on, but they will hopefully learn from that and develop to be able to have a POV and get laughs, and maybe in time even do something innovative.
The bottom line is that if they want to be Artists, comedians need to take more risks, push themselves to produce work that is personal and couldn’t be written by just anyone. And I don’t think it’s a problem that is just facing young comics, it’s one that older comics face as well (consider how many aging hacks we’ve all seen). With young comics it’s just more glaring because comedy has a steep learning curve and they’re running on multiple tracks, and at the end of the day if no one is laughing, well…
4 years ago • 0 notes