Stand-Up Pt II

0:01Speaker 1:Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:11Speaker 2:Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And we are kicking off part two of our two-part episode on stand-up comedy. And I think if I remember correctly, Chuck, it was a couple of days ago, but you said something about alt comedy. We were going to talk about that.

0:28Speaker 1:That's right.

0:29Speaker 2:What is that?

0:30Speaker 3:Alt comedy is something that came about in the early 90s with a group of comedians performing in. And I don't know if that's where the term comes from, but performing in alternative venues.

0:45Speaker 1:They weren't performing.

0:46Speaker 3:And, you know, of course, they would all go to perform in a comedy store and all that kind of stuff, too. And comedy clubs, but they were well known for performing in like piano bars or like bookstores.

0:56Speaker 1:And things like that.

0:57Speaker 3:And, you know, people like Jeanine Garofalo, the great Dana Gould, who is a wonderful comic and human being still.

1:06Speaker 2:Yeah.

1:07Speaker 3:They started out at performing at a place called Big and Tall Books in L.A., the Luna Lounge in New York and Largo, the original Largo in L.A.

1:17Speaker 1:Were all sort of home bases for these comics.

1:21Speaker 3:Yeah.

1:21Speaker 2:We did a show in Largo. Was that the original Largo?

1:23Speaker 1:No, the original was like this little piano bar.

1:26Speaker 2:I see.

1:27Speaker 1:Uh, but the, the new Largo is great too. It's awesome.

1:31Speaker 2:For sure. Uh, so I mentioned Mr. Show before, if you're familiar with Mr. Show with Bob and David, um, that is essentially alt comedy at its core. And most of the people associated with the show, if not all of them were alt comics of the time, early, early mid nineties. Right. Um, Patton Oswalt, Maria Bamford, Mark Maron, PFT, the great Paul F. Tompkins. Yeah. One of the funniest people alive. Mary Lynn Raskub.

2:02Speaker 1:She's great.

2:03Speaker 2:Yeah. I was like, who is that? And I went and looked her up. I'm like, oh, OK. I had no idea that she started out as a stand up.

2:08Speaker 3:Yeah.

2:09Speaker 2:But she was great on Larry Sanders as the booking assistant to, I think, Janine Garofalo, right?

2:17Speaker 3:Yeah.

2:17Speaker 1:Janine Garofalo was on that show.

2:19Speaker 2:And she's probably more well-known by mainstream America as a character on 24. She was on 24 basically the entire run of the show. I'm not sure what she did, though, because I didn't watch it.

2:30Speaker 1:Yeah, she was great. She was part of that crew.

2:32Speaker 3:I know you mentioned Maria Bamford, but if you've never seen Maria Bamford's comedy, please go see it because she's still one of the most original comedians working today, for sure.

2:43Speaker 2:Yeah, and you said still, because most of these comedians, the ones who are still alive, are still working and still doing stuff, and a lot of them are still doing stand-up. Like David Cross, he's had some Mondo TV hits, like he was on Arrested Development, he was on Mr. Show, he's been on just tons of movies and just killed on all of them. He still does stand-up pretty regularly, as a matter of fact. Oh, yeah. Does Patton Oswalt still?

3:09Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.

3:10Speaker 2:Okay, yeah. So these guys are still doing stand-up, which is Really, to their credit, because most of them, I mean, Patton Oswalt was on what? Was it King of Queens?

3:23Speaker 1:I don't know.

3:24Speaker 2:I don't remember either, but he had a huge role in like a major network television show. Like, I just think it's amazing that they're still doing stand-up because as we've seen, people like Steve Martin and Robin Williams and all that. It's like once they became huge, they left stand-up behind. The early 90s alt comics did not. And they had some other there were some other characteristics besides just appearing in small like alternative clubs, too.

3:52Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. You know, it was, I guess, sort of an alternative point of view.

3:56Speaker 3:And this was in the 90s at a time where alternative music that was just sort of the buzzword for anything that kind of broke from the previous mainstreams of the 80s.

4:05Speaker 1:Yeah.

4:06Speaker 3:So a little more like they were making like insider references more. A little less like set up punchline and more sort of observational, like wry humor about life and telling stories about their lives and stuff like that.

4:22Speaker 1:What else?

4:23Speaker 2:They eschewed the racism, generally homophobia. Essentially, if you if you're familiar with Don Rickles, imagine the antithesis of Don Rickles.

4:34Speaker 3:Yeah.

4:36Speaker 2:One of the alt comics from this time, too, is very sadly no longer with us because he was also one of the funniest people around. His mind was just a national treasure, was Mitch Hedberg. Yeah. Were you into him?

4:48Speaker 3:Yeah, he's the greatest. We've talked about him on the show before. Mitch Hedberg is very, very sad that we lost him because he was just kind of getting started, I feel like.

4:57Speaker 2:Yeah, he really was. I came across, I think, a BuzzFeed list of 275 people. Of his jokes ranked from worst to best. And there really was no worst one on there. They're all just wonderful.

5:13Speaker 1:God bless you, BuzzFeed.

5:16Speaker 2:Would you like to hear one?

5:17Speaker 3:Sure.

5:19Speaker 2:Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease you can get yelled at for having.

5:25Speaker 1:I think I remember that joke.

5:27Speaker 2:And his like delivery too was just... just amazing. Yeah. His whole act was great. So, yeah, I'm sad he's gone too.

5:37Speaker 3:There was a thing though with alt comedy where some like club comics would sometimes sort of deride that scene. I know Bill Burr in 2012 called it that scene like you were in a comedy womb.

5:51Speaker 2:Yeah.

5:52Speaker 3:Like it was a real safe place to go and you weren't just going up in front of like a potentially hostile. I think there's like This idea that you earn your stripes by going in front of hostile crowds that might hate you and might heckle you.

6:03Speaker 1:And you got to earn your stripes that way in the comedy world.

6:07Speaker 3:And I think that all comedy scene, there were some comics that thought that that was probably not going to happen there.

6:13Speaker 1:So it was a little too easy.

6:14Speaker 2:Yeah, he definitely thought that. And I think his point was, if you took those comedians and put them in a regular club, they would. not do very well because they hadn't gone through heckling or something like that. And I think more to the point, I read the transcript of this. It was on some podcast, a comedy podcast. And he was saying that one of the things that really rubbed in the wrong way was that if their jokes bombed or something like that, they just told the audience that the audience was too dumb to get what genius they were.

6:51Speaker 2:And I was like, as I was reading that, I was like, totally. I could totally see most of these alt comics that I've mentioned telling the audience they're not getting it, that that's why they're not laughing, that it's them. And he called that out. And I was like, okay, I kind of get that. It was a little more nuanced than that. Yeah.

7:09Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so.

7:10Speaker 2:And I never thought I'd be standing here defending Bill Burr, but you know what I mean.

7:15Speaker 3:Uh, you know, with the rise of podcasting, you talked earlier about, uh, comedy podcasts, and that's such a huge thing now. Like most of the shows I listened to are comedy shows. And, uh, Mark Maron's WTF, of course, was an interview show. Uh, and the Joe Rogan experience, you know, Joe Rogan started out.

7:31Speaker 1:As a standup. Um, both of those shows were created in 2009.

7:35Speaker 3:And, um, You know, before Joe Rogan experience became like super, super political, it was much more of a and I think he still does some of that stuff now with this little comedy crew. But it was much more of like a Marin, like let's just have comedians on kind of thing.

7:52Speaker 2:Yes, he he very frequently referred to it as the craft. And I don't think I've ever seen a commenter online talk about him saying the craft and not deriding.

8:04Speaker 1:It is a craft. I guess you just can't say that out loud, huh?

8:09Speaker 2:For sure.

8:09Speaker 1:Yeah.

8:10Speaker 2:There was a great takedown video of him by another stand-up when he did that recent live stream comedy stand-up show Joe Rogan did.

8:20Speaker 3:Okay.

8:21Speaker 2:Apparently it didn't go all that well. All right. And this stand-up basically just disassembled it and pointed out all the reasons why, and it was very funny. But supposedly Joe Rogan used his clout to get it taken down at YouTube, which is not super cool.

8:36Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, I didn't hear about that.

8:39Speaker 2:But no matter what you think of Joe Rogan, his politics, the people he has on, his views, his opinions, it's indisputable that he's had an enormous impact on comedy of all kinds in the 21st century because of how huge his podcast is and because of how often he'll use his platform to bring on up-and-coming comedians. But because of the politics, most of those comedians are like, at least center-right, if not full-on right-wing comedians. And it's a huge, yeah, it's been a huge shift. I mean, you know, in the United States, it's been an enormous shift. And Joe Rogan's a huge reason why that's happened.

9:25Speaker 1:I didn't know that, actually.

9:27Speaker 3:I guess I don't keep up with the comedy scene as much, so I didn't know that was sort of a thing.

9:31Speaker 2:Well, let's talk about that. So, yes, those same alt-right comedians are often criticized in the same way that the early 90s alt comedians were. That was like Bill Burr said, it was a comedy womb that they weren't exposing themselves to what club comedians normally did. And the same thing is with the alt-right comedians today because they start out on podcasts usually. Right. Not even necessarily as stand-up. They're just funny guys on podcasts. And they go out and they get nothing but love on these podcasts. And then they go out. They've generated enough followers on Instagram or whatever to automatically get booked in a club.

10:13Speaker 1:Yeah.

10:14Speaker 2:Apparently, I read somewhere that 250,000 followers on Instagram is like an automatic yes for a weekend at a club, maybe even headlining there. But some of them have zero experience doing stand-up. And so the criticism is like, that's not good for the person coming to see you because they paid that money and they're expecting a good stand-up performance when you're taking this funny guy on the podcast out of the conversation and all that stuff. And it's just that person on stage.

10:46Speaker 3:Yeah.

10:47Speaker 2:It doesn't always go very well. They don't always necessarily become a good standup because they're funny on a podcast. And just the same way we're like that, that funny guy at work.

10:56Speaker 3:Right.

10:57Speaker 2:Wouldn't necessarily do very well as a standup either because it's a totally different context.

11:02Speaker 3:Yeah.

11:03Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.

11:04Speaker 3:Uh, you know, or they might like I always encourage funny people to try it because you never know. And we'll get to that at the end, like kind of the best steps for dipping your toe in that pond.

11:16Speaker 1:But, yeah, you're right.

11:17Speaker 3:I mean, the gatekeeping is different these days, of course, with social media and podcast. It's not like the old days where you would, you know, get up at coffee houses and open mic nights and then eventually maybe try and crack in to doing five minutes on like a local comedy night or something like that at.

11:35Speaker 1:A real club.

11:35Speaker 2:Right.

11:36Speaker 3:If you have that social media following like you're talking about, if you have your own podcast, like you can bypass sort of what used to be locked gates.

11:48Speaker 1:Mark Maron, shout out.

11:49Speaker 3:And it's just a different scene now. I don't know if it's good or bad. I think a lot of the old school comics probably complain about it. But I'm not a stand-up, so I just sort of see it for what it is, I think.

12:03Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's tough at the end of the day to feel good about arguing about democratizing anything.

12:09Speaker 1:Yeah, true.

12:10Speaker 2:I think the point is that there's more non-funny stand-ups potentially than there ever have been in the history of the world right now.

12:20Speaker 1:Yeah, agreed.

12:22Speaker 2:That's not to say that all people who get their start on social media or podcasts aren't great at stand-up. Do you remember the girl and her boyfriend who was hanging out backstage with us in Toronto? I think you met them briefly.

12:36Speaker 3:Yeah.

12:38Speaker 2:That was Michelle Sui. And Yumi found her on Instagram. And she is hilarious, not just like on Instagram, but also in person. She's like a very, very early on in her career stand up. But Party Hardiston, Patty, I can't remember her last name. You know, Party Hardiston, she appears on Tim Robinson's stuff sometimes.

13:02Speaker 1:I know her as an actor, and she is totally weird and amazing.

13:06Speaker 2:Yes. If you follow her on Instagram, she's just constantly bringing the good stuff. So, yeah, it's not a total critique of social media or podcasts in general. It definitely has had a massive impact on stand-up comedy. Not all of it good.

13:21Speaker 1:Yeah, agreed. Should we take a break?

13:25Speaker 2:Yes.

13:26Speaker 3:All right. We're going to take a break and talk about the transition to the one-person show right after this. Thank you.

14:05Speaker 1:All right.

14:06Speaker 3:I promised talk of the one person show. And that is it's sort of a thing where it's stand up, but it's skinned a little bit differently. And they're often it's usually billed as like a one person show or like an evening with or something like that.

14:22Speaker 2:Right.

14:23Speaker 1:And it's definitely comedy.

14:24Speaker 3:But there can be very deep, sad moments of pathos and just sadness. There's usually a very well-crafted. kind of arc to the show, like it feels much more sort of plotted out. Mike Birbiglia, of course, is one of the masters of this craft. Alex Edelman and his great show Just for Us that ran on Broadway. Gary Gullman, one of my favorite comedians of all time, he has kind of made that transition in the last few years to a little bit more of a one person show.

14:59Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.

15:00Speaker 1:Rather than straight up joke telling.

15:02Speaker 3:And our buddy, John Hodgman, you know, John always calls his stand up imitation stand up like he won't say he does stand up. And it's definitely sort of a one person show. But it's all of this stuff is always very, very funny. It's just sort of slightly different than like a standard stand up set.

15:20Speaker 2:Yes. And those are all great examples, too, not just of great like one person shows, but also great examples of why a lot of people are like, that's not stand-up comedy. That's different. That just seems to be like an unnecessary controversy. I don't think it really matters. But there are definitely purists out there, if it hasn't become clear yet, who are like, this is stand-up comedy. Everything else ain't. And that's one of the things that they point to frequently is like, that's not stand-up comedy. One huge target was Nanette. From Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby that came out in 2017 and was a massive like cultural tidal wave here in the United States for sure. And I think in a bunch of other countries too. And like there, it was mostly like gut punches with some funny stuff carrying it between, but it was, And it was not funny. And in fact, she almost kind of uses, if not directly, I haven't seen it, but I had to read a bunch about it. It seems like she uses or she points out that comedy can be harmful because it can take, you know, stuff that really needs to get out and just kind of keep it simmered.

16:40Speaker 2:Like it doesn't let it out all the way. And so a lot of people are like, that's not, don't call that comedy. And it gets called comedy because Hannah Gadsby started out as a standup.

16:50Speaker 3:Yeah, I think Seth Meyers coined a term called claptor comedy rather than laughter comedy. And this it's like a show where like the audience will give applause in agreement with the person on stage and the points that they're making rather than like having people rolling in the aisles laughing.

17:08Speaker 2:Yeah. And in the case of Nanette. It's like they're clapping like you're so brave for doing this. And she is indisputably brave for having done that show. But but yes, she's not really making people laugh or she's making people laugh. They're laughing out of relief because it's carrying them out of this horrific story that she's just finished, you know?

17:28Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.

17:30Speaker 3:You know, Tig Notaro is a very, very funny comedian. And she actually had us perform live at her comedy festival yesterday. And is a wonderful human being as well. But she– Tig is probably one of the biggest risk takers in comedy, I think. And also just from hearing interviews with her and seeing her work, like, seems to care as little as any comedian I've ever seen as to what people think about her and her stand-up. That's– Like just totally comfortable in her own skin, does what she does. She very famously performed topless after her mastectomy and her breast cancer.

18:18Speaker 1:So, you know, that's what Tig would do.

18:20Speaker 3:Or when she went, I don't know if you ever saw when she went on Conan and moved the chair around for her whole act.

18:27Speaker 2:No, I didn't.

18:28Speaker 3:She went on stage and instead of doing comedy, she, I guess in rehearsals, I think as the story goes, she had a routine, but realized that this chair made an awful, like, squeaky sound when it moved across the stage. And so she got up there and she moved this chair around for five minutes.

18:51Speaker 1:That was it.

18:52Speaker 2:Like, was she talking while she was doing it? No. So she just wasn't talking. She was just moving the chair.

18:58Speaker 1:Moving the chair. It stopped.

19:00Speaker 2:That's funny.

19:00Speaker 1:Get a reaction. Move the chair.

19:02Speaker 3:Conan is doubled over laughing like on the side about just the, you know, the chutzpah of taking the charge, doing something like that.

19:09Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. One more thing on Claptor. It doesn't have to just be like brave or you're a risk taker or something like that. It can it can just be as simple as like preaching to the choir. So telling, you know, Democrat jokes or Republican jokes to an audience full of liberals. That's Claptor, you know.

19:28Speaker 1:Yeah, sure. Or like us on stage.

19:33Speaker 2:Yes, for sure. That's why I'm saying I don't think I would translate to a good standup because like talk about a womb, like everyone who's there knows who we are. They listen to us. They came to see us expecting exactly what we're doing. Remember that group of women at the casino in Ottawa? Yeah.

19:54Speaker 3:Yeah.

19:55Speaker 2:I have no idea if they thought we were funny at all. They had no idea who we were. They just came because they got comp tickets by the casino. And it's still not clear to me whether they thought we were funny or if they sat there because we called them out at the very beginning of the show and they felt obligated to sit there now.

20:11Speaker 1:Oh, I bet they had a good time.

20:12Speaker 3:Yeah. I don't know if they thought we were like the funniest comedians they'd ever seen, but they stayed.

20:18Speaker 2:They did stay. You can't argue with that.

20:21Speaker 3:Yeah.

20:21Speaker 2:Uh, What else?

20:22Speaker 3:Cell phones is a big deal these days because, you know, you can get famous and go viral for taking down a heckler on stage, which has nothing to do with your actual stand up set. It's always fun seeing a comedian take down a heckler. But in the days of social media and people with their phones in the audience. You might become like super, super famous as a stand up for like somebody that like jumps up on stage and physically attacks you or something. It's an interesting time.

20:56Speaker 2:Yes. Or the crowd work is all it's not even putting a heckler down like it's with a lot of younger stand up comedians today. It's like prompted like, hey, how are you doing? Are you here tonight? And then. instead of making a joke and moving on, that's like five minutes of material.

21:16Speaker 1:Like talking to the person on the front row.

21:18Speaker 2:Yeah. And then moving on to somebody else. And it's not even necessarily funny. It might be funny throughout, but not all of them are really particularly funny. And like crowd work is the bulk of that, that, that act. And again, the club comedians, the purists are like, what are you doing? That's not stand-up comedy. You're not even writing anything. You're just sitting there riffing with people in the audience, you know?

21:43Speaker 1:I'm a sucker for crowd work.

21:45Speaker 2:Well, okay. Well, then you would like this guy. I discovered him from researching. His name's Big Jay Oakerson. I'm not sure his sense of humor is exactly dovetailing with yours, but I think it's enough that you would find him funny. But he interacts with the crowd by basically... It's almost like improv where he's like, what kind of joke do you guys want to hear? And somebody will say something and he just makes up a joke on the spot. And it's not like a one liner necessarily.

22:12Speaker 3:Yeah.

22:13Speaker 2:Might even be like a little plot to it or something. But it's pretty impressive what he's doing off of the cuff.

22:18Speaker 3:Well, I mean, Rory Scoville does that. He's probably my favorite stand up right now.

22:23Speaker 2:Great.

22:24Speaker 3:He and Gary Goldman. But Rory, I mean, he has shows where he writes a set and does that.

22:28Speaker 1:And that's great. But he will also do these a lot of times.

22:31Speaker 3:It's like five nights in a row in a city where he will tell everyone ahead of time, like these are improv stand up shows. And man, you talk about the guts to stand up on stage with no material.

22:42Speaker 2:Yeah.

22:42Speaker 3:And just start making stuff up. And it's not a 10 minute set or whatever. Like he's up there for an hour just making stuff up. And it's so, so funny.

22:51Speaker 1:Yeah.

22:51Speaker 2:Well, that's the thing. He's funny. His mind is capable of doing that, you know? Yeah. So you mentioned Rory Scoville working today. There's a bunch of other people working today that are great in addition to him. Kyle Kinane is another good one.

23:08Speaker 1:Love Kyle.

23:10Speaker 2:My favorite, though, can I just go ahead and say who my favorite comedian of all time is, though? I think you might know.

23:15Speaker 1:I think I know, but go ahead.

23:17Speaker 2:Anthony Jezelnik, is that who you're going to say?

23:19Speaker 1:That's who I was going to say.

23:20Speaker 2:I don't know that there's ever been a funnier person on the planet than Anthony Jezelnik.

23:25Speaker 1:He's great.

23:26Speaker 3:And we know some people who know him and he's he's he's a really good guy, too. Right.

23:31Speaker 2:Yeah.

23:32Speaker 3:And he right now, I don't know if you know this, you probably do, but he's got a book club now that he started. No. And like promoting literacy is one of his big jams now. And I guess sort of a joke around that was he was when he's promoting this stuff and, you know, he has that delivery. And he said that, you know, people tell me they don't like to read. And I always tell them, you're you're just reading books. books that are too long. So all of his books and his book clubs are like really short. Uh, and that's his, his argument is that like, uh, people think they don't like to read because they're, they're trying to read stuff that's too long. And so he's, he's genuinely promoting like reading, uh, literacy and stuff.

24:13Speaker 1:It's, it's pretty awesome.

24:14Speaker 3:It is.

24:15Speaker 2:That is the, that is the opposite of what his persona is. Like his persona is, is insult comic, but also really dark.

24:22Speaker 3:Yeah.

24:23Speaker 2:And really, um, Really egotistical and arrogant and yes, he's not really like that in real life But he's managed to keep that going that persona going for like 20 years Yeah, he has I think three Netflix specials all three of them kill every time we've ever seen him in person It's just like you just like you said we were like Conan like doubled over laughing like yeah laughing as hard as you ever have out loud the bunch of other people laughing and A bunch of other people who aren't laughing because they had no idea what they were going to see. And if you're not prepared to go see him, especially if you're sensitive at all to some types of humor, you're not going to have a good time. But I would suggest everybody go look up Anthony Jezelnik.

25:09Speaker 1:Yeah, he's great.

25:11Speaker 3:And you can't do much better these days than Mulaney still. He's one of those that I think has sort of mastered the craft. such that he just can do no wrong. And he, next year, I tried to get tickets to some of these, but have you heard about his Mulaney takes Manhattan run that he's doing? He's doing seven nights in New York in a row. And he's starting out at like the comedy cellar. And then it's like comedy cellar, then Bowery ballroom. And then he goes up and up and up through Carnegie.

25:39Speaker 1:Hall radio city. And then eventually Madison square garden.

25:43Speaker 3:And all of those, you know, I signed up for the, list to try and get into any of those shows and could not get into any of them.

25:51Speaker 2:Yeah, I believe that, though, except for Madison Square Garden. Man, that's big time, dude, to sell out Madison Square Garden.

25:57Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, dude, I think he last year went on a run where he sold out like multiple nights in a row at Madison Square Garden.

26:03Speaker 1:He's just crushing it. Yeah.

26:06Speaker 2:I have one more anecdote about Anthony Jezelnik.

26:09Speaker 1:All right, let's hear it.

26:10Speaker 2:We went and saw him at Funny Bone. Which was the one that was on Roswell Road? I don't think it's there anymore.

26:17Speaker 1:I think Funny Bone.

26:19Speaker 2:Funny Bone? No, that was out in Roswell. This was the Punchline.

26:22Speaker 1:Punchline.

26:23Speaker 3:Okay.

26:24Speaker 2:So we saw him at the Punchline, which is a really tiny club for any of you who've never been to the Punchline in Atlanta. I mean, like maybe a 75, maybe a hundred person seat club. So it was really small. And this was the first time we saw him and we were just laughing. But Yumi was like really, really laughing.

26:42Speaker 3:Yeah.

26:43Speaker 2:I think the joke that got her, he was saying that his family scattered his grandma's ashes outside of the funeral home because that's where his arms got tired from carrying the urn. And just, it just got Yumi. So she's laughing, crying.

26:59Speaker 1:Yeah.

27:00Speaker 2:So much so that he stopped the show and asked her, he was like, what's your name? And she said, Yumi. And he goes, I want all of you laughing like Yumi. I want Yumi, Yumi, Yumi.

27:11Speaker 1:That's great.

27:12Speaker 3:Yeah.

27:13Speaker 2:So that's how hard we laugh at Anthony Jeselnik. And if you go check out Anthony Jeselnik and you're like, this is wrong, don't judge us.

27:21Speaker 3:Right.

27:22Speaker 1:No, he's great.

27:24Speaker 2:I love that.

27:24Speaker 1:I wish I could have seen that.

27:26Speaker 2:Yeah, it was great.

27:28Speaker 1:Should we take a break?

27:29Speaker 2:I think we should. Is this our first or second?

27:33Speaker 1:I think it's our second break.

27:35Speaker 2:Okay. Well, we'll find out in the edit.

27:36Speaker 3:Yeah. We'll come back and talk about some less fun stuff like the psychology of stand-up right after this. Thank you.

28:16Speaker 2:Okay, we're back, Chuck. And as you promised, we're going to stop talking about funny stuff. We're going to talk about the psychology of being a stand-up because there, as you can probably guess, there's a specific type of person who makes a Good stand up. And it's actually been studied a little bit here or there.

28:34Speaker 1:Yeah.

28:35Speaker 3:You know, I don't think it's any secret that most stand ups will say that like their comedy oftentimes comes from pain. If you polled 100 stand ups, you'd probably be in like the 80 something percentile of people that weren't like, yeah, I had a great childhood. I grew up and I was just happy all the time and everything was awesome in my life.

28:55Speaker 1:But they have studied it.

28:56Speaker 3:There's a guy named David Webb on the all about psychology sub stack. who found some studies and found that, you know, as it bears out compared to population averages, stand-ups have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and emotional distress, which is not surprising.

29:13Speaker 2:No. And actually, to kind of dig in a little further, there's something called the Oxford Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences, or OLIFE. And there are some dimensions that pop up that comedians score higher on that. If you put the whole thing together, you're like, yeah, I can kind of see that's a stand up comedian. They score high on unusual experiences. So they perceive things differently, use magical style thinking. They make unexpected connections that other people might not make.

29:45Speaker 3:Yeah.

29:45Speaker 2:There's your jokes right there.

29:47Speaker 1:For sure.

29:49Speaker 3:One of the other ones is cognitive disorganization. So a thought style that may be a little more scattered or shifting kind of quickly between things. A lot of times that can really be gasoline for getting great ideas, even though it may not be the easiest thing like in life.

30:08Speaker 2:No, I mean, living with a disorganized mind is very difficult. Also, so can introvert of anhedonia be difficult because you might have trouble making social connections. And yet at the same time, you want to. validation from people. So you go get it from strangers on stage.

30:30Speaker 3:Yeah.

30:31Speaker 2:You know, it's kind of lonely and you don't enjoy being around people. And that's a stand up comic if I've ever met one.

30:40Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. And then the last one was impulsive nonconformity.

30:43Speaker 3:So, you know, someone who will break a rule, push a boundary, obviously someone who will say something that no one else would say, like in public, they would say it on stage. And it's not, you know, You know, this is like a Venn diagram when it comes to this stuff. It's like a combination of different things out of these lists will maybe make someone a little more inclined to do stand up or maybe be good at stand up. Yeah. But, you know, you have to be someone who's quick witted and make quick associations between things and be comfortable not, you know, necessarily being a part of the middle of the road of life, you know.

31:21Speaker 1:Yeah.

31:21Speaker 2:You know, when I read this and think about it, when I see all those components broken out, I see Dave Vettel standing there as like the example, the illustrated example of the standup comedian.

31:33Speaker 1:One of the all-time greats.

31:34Speaker 2:Yeah. And he's like, he's like Norm Macdonald in the sense that he's like a comedian's comedian. Like a lot of people might not find them that funny. Sorry, Dave. But Pretty much every stand-up comedian, especially the club comics, are going to just say, like, that guy's a legend. Oh, yeah.

31:52Speaker 3:And you can still, I mean, you can go see Dave up in the Comedy Cellar in New York on any given, like, random Tuesday. You know, he's still just like, I feel like guys like that and performers like that just love being on stage and doing it. And, like, it's not about, like, you know, Patton Oswalt's still doing stand-up. He doesn't need to do that kind of thing. He's made a great living as an actor. But they just love getting up there and telling jokes and making people laugh, like in being in a room with that energy.

32:19Speaker 2:Who doesn't? Seriously, I mean, I think anybody would love to have all their jokes laughed at. But yeah, it's just whether your jokes are actually funny or not is the key.

32:29Speaker 1:For sure.

32:30Speaker 3:You know, if you're a stand up, like I mentioned, you might have had like a rough go as a kid. You probably had to not like found humor as a Maybe as a defense in life, like maybe you were bullied or maybe it was a bit of survival skill in your own family. Obviously, the worst situations if there's real abuse, but at the very least, just like maybe a happy, not so happy family with family tension.

32:54Speaker 1:And it was a survival skill for you.

32:57Speaker 2:Yeah. When you're being threatened to be beaten up by a bully, you'd say something like, take my lunch, please. And then the bully would just crack up and let you go.

33:07Speaker 1:Classic move.

33:08Speaker 2:There's some other things that don't fare well for being a stand-up, too. According to a 2016 study done by Australian researchers, the average stand-up comedian dies 10 years earlier than people in the general population. Yeah. That's a significant amount of time. Yeah.

33:30Speaker 1:How do they explain that?

33:31Speaker 2:Think about how much life you could pack into 10 years, Chuck.

33:34Speaker 1:I know. I'm thinking about my first 10 years. I accomplished a lot.

33:39Speaker 2:Exactly. But they looked at 200 stand-up comedians and they compared them to comic actors and dramatic actors. And stand-ups died younger than both, although not as much as compared to the general population.

33:52Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.

33:52Speaker 3:I think 80 percent of those stand-ups still died of natural causes, but they were likelier to die from non-natural causes like accidents or obviously overdoses is included in that or by suicide.

34:09Speaker 2:On a banana peel, which is the classic way for a stand-up comedian to die young.

34:14Speaker 1:So what if you want to be a stand-up? What should you do? What are the steps you should take?

34:19Speaker 2:Oh, there's a lot of stuff you can do. It turns out there's a lot of people on the internet who like to write blog posts about that. And we looked through a bunch of them and found that they all kind of generally fall into the same handful of categories. One of the basic ones, obviously, is come up with material. You say, duh. But there's some things you have to do to come up with material. I think most comedians suggest you start with a solid five minutes of material.

34:43Speaker 2:Most of the reason why is because wherever you get like your shot at getting up on stage, especially as somebody brand new, you're probably going to get five minutes. So you just want to have that prepared and you want to prepare way more than five minutes of jokes just to start. Right.

35:00Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.

35:01Speaker 3:Have you seen the latest Bradley Cooper movie that he directed with Will Arnett?

35:05Speaker 1:Is this thing on?

35:07Speaker 3:No.

35:09Speaker 1:It was actually pretty good.

35:11Speaker 2:You're the only person I've met who said that.

35:13Speaker 1:That said it was pretty good. Oh, I liked it quite a bit.

35:18Speaker 3:It's about this guy who accidentally stumbles on stage for an open mic night. Just this, you know, dad and a family going through a divorce and it stand up ends up being kind of the thing that he loves doing.

35:31Speaker 2:Yeah, I liked it.

35:32Speaker 3:Cool.

35:33Speaker 2:That's awesome.

35:35Speaker 1:Who said they didn't like it? Everyone else that you spoke to about it?

35:39Speaker 2:Well, people online, typically. I didn't see that it was very well. You're the only person I know who's seen it, actually. From my impression, it just wasn't very well received.

35:50Speaker 1:Well, hey, buddy, I received it.

35:52Speaker 2:Okay. Well, now you give me a reason to go check it out. If you thought it was good, you got good taste in movies. I know that.

35:58Speaker 1:I appreciate it. I thought it was pretty good. But that was a sidetrack. After you have your material, you got to practice it, of course.

36:04Speaker 3:Mm-hmm. Especially like you can get away with having notes on stage if you're like a super well-known comic and you're like workshopping new material and you can make a joke about like, oh, the notes are on my stool. But like you don't want to get up there looking at any notes if you're just starting out like that's a bad look.

36:20Speaker 2:No. And actually, that brings up another Jeselnik anecdote. The first time we saw him was at South by Southwest years and years and years ago. And he was part of like four or five other comedians. And he was like one of the last ones to get up. And all the other comedians had their little notebooks that they were basically reading off of on stage. And Jeselnik gets up there, his stuff's totally polished and everything. And he's like, I don't have my notebook with me. I feel so unprepared.

36:44Speaker 1:That's good.

36:47Speaker 2:Then he proceeded to kill.

36:48Speaker 1:Of course he did.

36:50Speaker 3:So once you had that material, once it's practiced, you want to You know, you want to make it really good. And so that means you need to do it in front of people. So pick something very low stakes. Obviously, if you're someone who's never done it, you're not going to have any other choice but low stakes. It'll just be a local open mic or something like that. But that's where the rubber meets the road. And that's where you're going to figure out, like, not only what's funny, but like how you tell it. Can you tell it in a different way? Can your timing be a little different?

37:18Speaker 3:Can you stress a certain word? Or paste something in a little bit different way to make something that wasn't funny one night funny the next night.

37:26Speaker 2:Yeah, and it'll also give you some real insight into how you should structure your five minutes, right? So what joke goes where? You want to start with something strong, often like a one-liner. Then you put your riskier stuff in the middle, which doesn't necessarily mean just like, you know, potentially tasteless jokes. But like weird jokes, maybe something that doesn't have a punchline. And then you follow with like your biggest joke, the one you know you're going to get the most laughs from because then you get to walk off stage to that applause while people are still laughing. Yeah.

37:57Speaker 3:And not always, but oftentimes that last joke is a rejoinder where you might circle back to something from the beginning. Again, there are no rules, but that seems to be a formula that works pretty well. Yes.

38:11Speaker 2:Okay, Chuck. Here's a really important question that I'm interested in exploring because no one's answered it and it's certainly not settled. But the question is as follows. Should there be any topic that's off limits for stand up comedians? What's your answer?

38:30Speaker 3:Well, my honest answer is no, because it just feels to me like a medium that should just be completely wide open, but it's like that free speech thing, not free from consequences. If you wanna get up there and say awful things about a group of people or something, I think it should be allowed, but people may hate it and people may put up a big fuss and hate you because of it.

38:58Speaker 2:Yes. Okay, well, you're in good company because basically every standup comedian on record who's gone on record about it is like, yes, or no, there should not be any topic that's off limits for stand-up comedy. But if you dig in a little further and go one layer deeper and you say, well, wait a minute, do you mean that no topic should be off limits for any comedian, any individual comedian? Or you're saying that for stand-up comedy in general, no topic should be off limits. And then like a division. starts to come about because you reach the question like who can say what about who. Right.

39:36Speaker 3:Yeah.

39:37Speaker 2:And that's where the debate really starts to begin.

39:40Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, for sure. What do you think?

39:47Speaker 2:I think it cuts both ways. I think that if you think that you have something very funny and insightful that you could make basically anyone laugh with that's offensive and you're willing to take the risk, more power to you. And I hope it is funny because something like that can just be groundbreaking. On the opposite side, if you're offended by a joke, I think that it's incumbent upon you to stop and say, why am I offended by this? Like, what is actually offending me personally about this? Or am I being offended on behalf of some other people who may not even be offended by it? And if you start traipsing into that territory, I think you should examine yourself a little further and your sensitivities, because I think that that's a, That's something that can help people in life in general, not just in taking stand-up comedy in ways that it can just make you laugh.

40:46Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.

40:48Speaker 3:You know, there have been cases where there have been comedians with like certain disabilities that get up on stage and part of their act, sometimes a big part of their act is making fun of that disability in a certain way. So, you know, that's a case where obviously someone that, or, you know, like any sort of ethnic joke, joke, if someone is of that ethnicity, it's obviously going to go over a little bit less with less controversy.

41:15Speaker 2:Yeah.

41:16Speaker 3:If you're not of a certain ethnic group and you're making fun of a different group other than yourself, like I still say more power to you if that's your thing. But just be be ready if it's like not good or it doesn't work, you know?

41:31Speaker 1:Yes.

41:32Speaker 2:I think the key, the through line here is if it's funny. If it's so funny that that group that you're making fun of or that is involved in the joke, even if you're not making fun of them, if they will laugh, then it's just legitimately, objectively funny, I think, at that point.

41:50Speaker 3:Yeah. And it also depends on how much people love you. People generally kind of love Sarah Silverman. I know, obviously, she has people who don't like her, but she's sort of a beloved comic. And She has got a, you know, in her past, like some derogatory ethnic slurs in her routines. She's made very famously, had some rape jokes in her past routines. She wore blackface. And Sarah Silverman always seems to bounce back. And I think it's because people like Sarah Silverman. And I love Sarah Silverman.

42:27Speaker 2:She's very lovable. And the thing is, is she's not beloved by, you know— like racists, she's beloved by like the people who kind of lean social justice warrior. And yet she's extremely well known for telling racist jokes. The, the, I think the reason why she's able to, um, to traverse those very dangerous waters is because at the end of the day, her racist jokes are not putting down any group. She's actually pointing out this, like the, the, secret thoughts that people like her or in her group feel guilty about having.

43:07Speaker 3:Right. Yeah.

43:08Speaker 2:So it's not like she's putting down black people. She's pointing out how, you know, like white people like inadvertently think of black people and don't even aren't even aware of it. She points that out.

43:20Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.

43:21Speaker 3:And it obviously also matters like the power structure and the power dynamic as a comedian. So Ronnie Chang is a comedian. His last special was incredible.

43:34Speaker 2:Yeah, it was.

43:35Speaker 3:And he makes fun of white people a lot in that show because and he can get away with that because he's an immigrant to the United States who is in a position of less power than the white people that he's making fun of. So he's he's punching up. And you've heard of like punching up or punching down, like punching up is is almost always funny. Punching down is is usually not funny.

43:57Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just really not. I mean, it's just not like textbook. It's not funny almost ever.

44:05Speaker 3:Yeah. And I love Dave Chappelle, but he seems to have just gotten kind of mean with some of his stand up. And that's to me where it kind of crosses the line is like and it's just a personal opinion.

44:16Speaker 1:But I don't know. I haven't found him as funny.

44:21Speaker 2:I hate to say it, but I agree with you. I don't think it's because he's being mean. I think it's because he's turned kind of preachy.

44:28Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe.

44:29Speaker 2:And he's gotten away from jokes more.

44:32Speaker 1:Yeah.

44:32Speaker 2:I think he's just I think he's become so uncoupled from, you know, the average person because he's just become so vastly wealthy.

44:39Speaker 1:Yeah.

44:40Speaker 2:That it's hard for him to relate. And then also, I think he doesn't like being come after. I think that that's really like affected him. And so he's coming out offensively even harder.

44:50Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true.

44:52Speaker 3:But, you know, like like we said, it's like you can say what you want, but the audiences are the ones who are going to have the final say. So it's society who's going to. ultimately decide like what's funny and what isn't and who should be allowed to say what or not, you know, because that's what you're doing. You're getting up on stage in front of people and saying, judge me, basically. And people will judge you one way or the other. Right.

45:17Speaker 2:For sure. There's one other thing that really stuck out to me, too, was you had said I don't know if it was in this episode or the last where you weren't familiar with the alt-right comedy becoming a big thing. like around Joe Rogan. I saw a really good explanation for why that's emerged. And that was that back in like the 70s and 80s, America was very, very conservative. And so it made sense for left-leaning, liberal thinking comedians to be huge because the comedian's job is to basically take on the establishment, to criticize the establishment. Well, if you follow the arc of American society through the 90s, it got way more liberal and Way more politically correct.

46:00Speaker 2:And so the people more on the outside of that type of society are right-leaning and they became the ones whose role it was to attack the establishment. That's the best example I've seen or best explanation I've seen for the rise of alt-right comedy.

46:18Speaker 1:Interesting.

46:19Speaker 2:I thought it was interesting too.

46:20Speaker 3:Yeah.

46:21Speaker 2:Hopefully these two episodes were interesting and people weren't just like, you know.

46:26Speaker 1:I don't think so.

46:27Speaker 2:Okay, great. Well, Chuck doesn't think you guys fell asleep, which I think means it's time for listener mail.

46:35Speaker 3:This is we got shouted out in a book yet to be released. And so we're going to plug that book. Author Sarah Addison. Hey, guys, I'm reading an advanced copy of Sarah Addison Clark's new book, Paper Ghosts.

46:49Speaker 1:It comes out Tuesday next week.

46:51Speaker 3:So I guess it'll already be out by the time this comes out.

46:53Speaker 1:Sure. Y'all got a shout out in the book, guys.

46:56Speaker 3:Uh, it's somewhere around chapter 18, although they may change since this is an advanced copy, but one of the main characters had been talking with her friend on the phone about the main plot line. And the next sentence is after they hung up Bailey queued an episode of the stuff you should know podcast, this one explaining chaos theory, which seemed appropriate.

47:15Speaker 2:I saw that.

47:16Speaker 1:Pretty great. Uh, Sarah Addison Allen. Well, wait a minute. It said Clark earlier.

47:20Speaker 3:So I'm not sure if that was a typer or what, but the author is Sarah Addison Allen. Okay. It's from North Carolina. So a lot of her books, if not all, are set in the southeast. I haven't read them all, but I've enjoyed the ones I've read so far. So I thought I'd share. That is from Abby Sellers.

47:36Speaker 2:That's awesome. Thanks for pointing that out, Abby. And thank you to Sarah Addison Allen, too, for including us. And by the way, you have great taste because that is one of our best episodes, the one on chaos theory.

47:47Speaker 1:That's right. Everyone go out and get Paper Ghosts.

47:50Speaker 2:Yeah. Great, Chuck. That was well done. And if you have seen us out in the wild and want to share a story about it, we'd love to hear that kind of stuff. It's thrilling. You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

48:10Speaker 1:For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.