One thing I love about standup comedy—which is perhaps my favourite form of contemporary art—is that it is at once unmediated and reflexive. Standups speak directly to an audience, playing versions of themselves, sometimes with a pseudonym, more often sharing their performer’s name—but characters nonetheless. It’s the original autofiction.
The origins of standup comedy are often traced to the speaking tours of humorists like Mark Twain in the mid-nineteenth century, who made comic personalities of themselves. But the history goes further back. Minstrel shows in the early nineteenth century featured comic monologues (or “stump speeches”) that were racist precursors of standup.
And when you think about it, the form—direct address to an audience, intended to amuse and entertain—is older still. We find it in Laurence Sterne, the comic genius behind Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), who published his sermons, controversially, as “Mr. Yorick,” the parson of Shandy Hall.
Yorick’s sermon on Ecclesiastes VII 2.3—“It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of feasting”—employs devices often seen in standup comedy. There is hyperbole, as in the preacher’s first response, which he interrupts halfway through:
That I deny—but let us hear the wise man’s reasoning upon it—for that is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to his heart: sorrow is better than laughter—for a crack’d-brain’d order of Carthusian monks, I grant, but not for men of the world…
And there is audience interpolation: it turns out that this is not the preacher’s response to Ecclesiastes, but the ventriloquized response of the congregation addressing him:
… did the Best of Beings send us into the world for this end—to go weeping through it,—to vex and shorten a life short and vexatious enough already? do you think my good preacher, that he who is infinitely happy, can envy us our enjoyments?
It’s only several hundred words into the sermon that Sterne speaks in his own voice—or the voice of Yorick?—and only to remark that he won’t give this objection the dignity of a response: “I will not contend at present against this rhetorick,” he sniffs.
Putting words into the mouth of one’s audience only to complain about them or ignore them altogether—it’s an artifice I love in standup comedy: the audience engaged as interlocutors, only to be put back in their place.
Interaction with an audience is not always simulated. There is also the “crowdwork” at which some comedians, but not all, excel. We can trace this back, past Yorick’s sermons, to his namesake in Hamlet. As Shakespeare was writing the play, William Kempe, his clown, quit the company. (That’s why the only clown is Yorick’s skull.) Kempe was replaced by Robert Armin, who in 1600 wrote Quips for Questions, an early modern guide to crowdwork, featuring comic comebacks to mundane queries. Armin wasn’t a buffoon but a holy fool speaking truth to power. “Dost thou call me fool, boy?” King Lear rants. “All thy other titles thou hast given away,” his Fool replies. “That thou wast born with.”
And why stop in 1600? The Book of Ecclesiastes has itself been read as subversive standup comedy. When the speaker, Quoheleth—a son of David in Jerusalem—asks
What profit is there for humans in all their hard work with which they work so hard under the sun?
he might be heard as protesting the human condition—or as condemning life under Egyptian rule, where “the Sun” was a common epithet for pharaohs and Ptolemaic kings. Political satire is disguised by double meaning.
In his commentary on Ecclesiastes, Knut Martin Heim credits the insight that it operates as standup comedy, somewhat incredibly, to watching Jim Gaffigan. But he’s not joking. Heim finds comedy in Quoheleth’s performance of an absurd, egotistical Solomon, in the poet’s redundant, repetitive phrasings (“all their hard work / with which they work so hard”), and in episodes of call-and-response.
He may exaggerate when he attributes “side-splitting consequences” to the ambiguous image of the fool’s heart telling him (or another) that he is (or they are) a fool, or when he finds “hilarious” a “slapstick” critique of bad governance that ends with a warning not to criticize the king. But the patterns, and the patter, are there.
In fact, they are so clearly present in the Book of Ecclesiastes that an Australian comic, Anthony Noacks, performed it, almost verbatim, as a standup show last year. Adopting the persona of David “Dave” Davidson, he preached Ecclesiastes at comedy festivals, with asides on his failed marriage and the plight of the performer in the pandemic.
By most accounts it didn’t really work, and the best review I’ve found makes gentle fun of it:
As a stand-up show, it’s no side-splitter—there’s a time to laugh, and this may not be it. But there’s also a time to think, listen, and appreciate this inventive solo theatre piece.
The jokes in Ecclesiastes may have landed in 450-180 BCE, but perhaps you had to be there. It’s one of the bleaker books of the Bible, after all. “A mirage, nothing but a mirage … it’s all a mirage,” the sermon begins—and ends.
But I don’t think it’s the bleakness that inhibits laughter. One of the most compelling forms of comedy, for me, is whistling in the dark. The jokes just need updating. Here’s Drew Michael, a modern-day Quoheleth, in a 2016 stand-up set:
Sadness and depression are very different things. Sadness is when something happens and you temporarily become sad. Depression is a medical condition … where you see things for what they are.
There is a thread that runs from Ecclesiastes, to Lear’s fool, to Yorick, to black vaudeville performers like Bert Williams, to the “sick comedians” of the 1950s and 1960s, to the present. It’s a sublime fact about us—our saving grace, perhaps—that we can see things for what they are, and see that they are bleak, and laugh.1
Huge thanks to Abe Mathew, who gifted me a copy of Heim’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, and to Marah Gubar, who instructed me on minstrel shows and introduced me to Bert Williams.
We don’t normally think of the Bible as funny, but the Book of Tobit is another with some unexpected dark humor and subversion. For instance, the bride’s father giving Tobias his daughter’s hand in marriage while telling his servants to dig his grave. The next morning, they sneak in the room to see if he’s still alive and, upon discovering him breathing, run back outside to quietly fill in the grave before the groom finds out.
Kieran, I couldn’t help but think of you when we watched James Acaster’s four-part “Repertoire” special on Netflix. I am not the connoisseur of standup that you are, but those shows (watched as a whole, as they have to be) floored me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. It wasn’t just that he was funny, it’s that it seemed like he was bending and reinventing genres of standup in ways I’d never seen. Hope to talk to you about it sometime. And if you haven’t gotten to it, highly recommended obviously