What is Stand-Up Comedy?

According to stereotype, analytic philosophers love nothing more than analyzing concepts, filling the ellipsis in

x is F if and only if …

with conditions held to be implicit in the meaning of a word.

It’s an anachronistic vision, both because “analytic truth” plays a minimal role in contemporary philosophy—there’s more interest in “real definition,” the metaphysical project of explaining what it is to be F—and because philosophers are willing to treat concepts as primitive: undefined but well-understood.

Yet the old skills remain, itching to be used: the intricate conjecture of criteria for being F; the boundless ingenuity of exceptions. Done well, even failed analysis can be a source of insight.

Take the concept, stand-up comedy, analyzed by Oliver Double in his definitive book on the subject, Getting the Joke. Though he is not a professional philosopher, Double has an instinctive feel for the game:

In my first book, I define stand-up as: ‘[A] single performer standing in front of an audience, talking to them with the specific intention of making them laugh.’ Now I find myself having to nitpick this to pieces. I say ‘a single performer’, but couldn’t what Morecambe and Wise did in their routines in front of the velvet curtains be described as stand-up? And aren’t there other performers who fit this description, who are not stand-up comedians? What about comic poets? Circus clowns? Storytellers? Performers of character monologues, like Joyce Grenfell?

The proposed conditions were neither necessary nor sufficient for stand-up comedy. Try again!

“Having thought long and hard about it,” Double continues, “I’ve come up with a list of the three things which define stand-up comedy, besides the fact of it being funny.” His criteria are: Personality, Direct Communication, and The Present Tense. All three conditions are delicate.

[1] Personality

It puts a person on display in front of an audience, whether that person is an exaggerated comic character or a version of the performer’s own self.

The paradigms of stand-up comedy are comics who perform as themselves—but the relationship between performer and character on stage is often vexed. Sometimes the character is emphatically not the performer: Al Murray appearing as The Pub Landlord. Sometimes, the comic has a pseudonym or stage name: Michael Pennington as Johnny Vegas. And even when comics perform under their own names, they often talk about the character on stage as someone distinct from them, to be addressed in the third person. Here is my comedic hero, Stewart Lee, in Content Provider:

I wish I could appear on Sky for the money; I wish I could, right, but I can’t. Because the character of Stewart Lee that I’ve created would have smug, liberal, moral objections to appearing on Sky. And I’m coming to hate the character of Stewart Lee. […] I even hate this, what I’m saying now. Pretentious, meta-textual, self-aware shit. “What’s wrong with proper jokes?” That’s what I say to me.

Faced with the person/character conundrum, analysts have gone so far as to suggest that what we see on stage is always a fiction. Here is Jay Sankey, in Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy:

In reality, stand-up comics are nothing more than actors, playing the part of stand-up comics.

On hearing which, the philosopher leaps into action: “vicious regress!” If being a stand-up is pretending to be a stand-up, it’s pretending to be someone pretending to be a stand-up, which is pretending to pretend to pretend… ad infinitum. The phenomenon disappears in a puff of logic.

There are mundane objections, too. In Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen, a one-man play written by Marcelo Dos Santos, Samuel Barnett performs as a stand-up comedian recounting his personal life.¹ An actor plays the part of a stand-up comic in what is, therefore, not an instance of stand-up comedy, however closely it resembles one. (A naive observer could mistake the play for a stand-up show.)

Better to go back to the paradigm of performers who play themselves and treat the nearby cases as derivative or borderline. Is it clear that when Al Murray portrays The Pub Landlord—a xenophobic "know-all know-nothing blowhard”—he is doing stand-up comedy, as opposed to an unusually informal, episodic, satirical solo play?

[2] Direct communication

It involves direct communication between performer and audience. It’s an intense relationship, with energy flowing back and forth between stage and auditorium.

This condition helps with the problem of circus clowns. But what about storytellers or funny magicians? They engage in direct communication, too.

It’s not obvious, on reflection, that storytellers should be excluded from the realm of stand-up comedy. If old-school comics told conventional jokes, not narratives—in the 1950s, “sick comedian” Mort Sahl compared his old-school peers to “card file[s]”—that is no longer true. If it’s intended to amuse, storytelling counts as stand-up.

We can address the anomalous place of funny magicians by adding that stand-ups generate amusement primarily through what they say and how they act it out. The more the laughter comes from something other than direct communication, like magic tricks, the less clear it is that we are dealing with stand-up comedy.

[3] Present tense

It happens in the present tense, in the here and now.

This is the most important part of Double’s theory—and yet it’s slightly out-of-focus. The temporality of stand-up is no different from the temporality of theatrical performance. In The Empty Space, the legendary director Peter Brook observes:

There is only one interesting difference between the cinema and the theatre. The cinema flashes on to a screen images from the past. … The theatre, on the other hand, always asserts itself in the present.

Imagine a version of Feeling Afraid in which the actor playing the part of the stand-up comic wrote the play, and the character is a version of himself. He would meet our conditions so far, including the present tense—but he would be performing a play, not stand-up comedy. Why?

The issue is not present-ness but presence. As Stanley Cavell once argued, in theatre, actors and audience “occupy the same time” but “do not occupy the same space.” This is what differentiates theatre from stand-up, as Double’s full gloss on the present tense confirms:

It happens in the present tense, in the here and now. It acknowledges the performance situation. The stand-up comedian is duty bound to incorporate events in the venue into the act. Failure to respond to a heckler, a dropped glass or the ringing of a mobile phone is a sign of weakness which will result in the audience losing faith in the performer’s ability.

This is not about time, but the absence of the “fourth wall”: there is no pretense in stand-up that we are not present to and for the performer. We are.

The stand-up’s relationship with the audience is distinctive. The first time I saw him live post-pandemic, Stewart Lee joked about what he had learned under lockdown: “I’ve come to realize that, in many ways, the audience are an essential part of what we do.” This could be said of other modes of live performance, but not in quite the same way. Double quotes Dave Gorman on why stand-up is “impossible to rehearse”:

It’s like a guitarist rehearsing by playing air guitar. The audience are actually the instrument.

Stand-up comics acknowledge, and work with, the presence of the audience to them.

What emerges is a rough account of stand-up comedy: performance intended to amuse an audience by direct communication, in which performers play versions of themselves, with no pretense that the audience is absent.

The analysis is no doubt subject to counterexample. (Philosophers, do your worst!) But it has a weakness of principle, too, which is that theatre, as such, tends to destabilize the fourth wall in pursuit of new vitality. This is central to Brook’s argument:

It is always the popular theatre that saves the day. … Salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that’s not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back: theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns; the one-night stands, the torn sheet pinned up across the hall, the battered screen to conceal the quick changes— that one generic term, theatre, covers all this and the sparkling chandeliers too.

Meyerhold and Brecht were inspired by the circus, the music hall, the cabaret.

For Brecht, a necessary theatre could never for one moment take its sights off the society it was serving. There was no fourth wall between actors and audience—the actor’s unique aim was to create a precise response in an audience for whom he had total respect. It was out of respect for the audience that Brecht introduced the idea of alienation…

Brook’s fantasy is more radical: “This is how I understand a necessary theatre,” he writes; “one in which there is only a practical difference between actor and audience, not a fundamental one.”

The aspiration may seem fantastical or out of reach, but it is a literal reality most nights of the week. Go to any open mic, and you will see performers who differ from their audiences only in their line-up slot or whether they happened to sign up. The performance has no more fourth wall than a lean-to.

From one perspective, the open mic night is a marginal instance of theatre, the bare minimum that could count. But our analysis, and Brook’s argument, point the other way. This is the exemplar, the paragon, the Platonic Form: all theatre aspires to the condition of stand-up comedy, performed at an open mic.

1. Thanks to Jon Norton for telling me I needed to see this play, and for writing about it here.