The Comedy Support Group
Two things are common ground in books that purport to teach you how to be a stand-up comic.
No-one can be taught to be funny, only how to turn their innate comedic sensibility into art.1
On the received model, the spigot of humour is turned on or off by the time one hits the age of reason. Its setting can’t be changed—there are no comedic plumbers—but the flow can be redirected, a hose attached to the faucet, at its other end a sprinkler, or a fountain, or a disappointing trickle. To make the output nutritive, or beautiful, is the work of stand-up comedy. Done well, it can feed an audience and make it grow.
Stand-up today is about honesty, and insight, and storytelling: you have to speak the truth of your experience; it’s not about conventional jokes.
The best way to write stand-up comedy—according to the books—is to begin with what you care about, what you find hard, or weird, or scary, or stupid, and worry about punchlines later. Which sounds fair enough, though the philosopher within me senses paradox. If you have to speak your truth, not dispense formulaic jokes, what if your truth is that you are obsessed with formulaic jokes?
But the paradox is shallow. One could do stand-up comedy about one’s love for old-fashioned jokes without telling old-fashioned jokes, or while having them operate at two levels—the joke and the joke of one’s relation to the joke.
Why did the stand-up comedian cross the road?
I don’t know: why did the stand-up comedian cross the road?
None of your business! Stand-ups are human beings with lives of their own. Not everything we do is for your amusement.
I love conventional jokes, but even more I love the power of stand-up comedy to confront the hardships of life.
The first open mic I did was called “The Comedy Support Group.” I know: it sounds like a program for recovering comedians, like AA except they’re all emotionally sober. But the label fits. A lot of comics at the Support Group talk about difficult things: anxiety, depression, anorexia, ADHD, suicide—not to mention a woman who had to have a series of internal organs removed. (Not right there, on stage; she was telling us about it.)
What I find mystical is the way comedy can transform the worst that happens to us into laughter. This could be distancing, or dismissive, or dishonest—a form of denial. But it needn’t be. The astonishing fact is that we can laugh while acknowledging and even drawing closer to adversity. Comedy can be a source of solidarity and solace.
I’ll end, appropriately, with a Holocaust joke. It’s what they call a “street joke,” relying on a pithy formula, exchanged by word of mouth. Recalling his time as a child in the “family camp” at Auschwitz, Otto Dov Kulka writes about the creativity and humour that sustained him:
That special humour, that black humour with which we made jokes … about the only way one left Auschwitz—through its smokestacks, the smokestacks of the crematoria—jokes in this vein, or the language we developed as our vernacular, was a constant work in progress that was created there, and I can remember nothing like it from this point of view at any stage of my life.
I can’t say for certain, but I suspect this is the joke he is alluding to:
Q: Did you know there’s a way to escape from Auschwitz?
A: Yes; through the smokestacks.
It feels dangerous to joke about the Holocaust: I’m not sure we can laugh at this. But if anyone’s allowed to do it, it’s Jews in Auschwitz.
They say comedy equals tragedy plus time—but you can’t always wait.
BONUS CONTENT: Steve Allen (1957): “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” Charlie Chaplin (n.d.): “Life is a tragedy when seen in closeup, but a comedy in long-shot.” Thomas Hardy (1889): “All comedy is tragedy, if only you look deep enough into it.”
Jay Sankey, Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy: “I do not believe someone can be taught to be funny. Not from a book, not from a thirty-two week course. Either you’re funny or you aren’t. But if you are a naturally funny person, I believe you can learn to be a stand-up comic.”
This is exactly what I’ve been doing with my Brain Damage Diares Substack! (What’s the point of having life hand you a brain injury if you can’t laugh at it?) Just, you know, without having the theory behind it.
I think there’s also a powerful element of “If you can laugh at it, it doesn’t own you” at work in the sort of comedy you’re talking about here. Like “Screw you thing that wants to destroy me.”
Is there a place the Atlantic Monthly essay of yours can be read without hitting the paywall? This is such an interesting topic.