TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "comedy"
Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club
Fun read. Tobolowsky talked about the collection on NPR:
Where there’s truth, there’s life. … Aristotle talked about something called techne. … There is a little jolt that we get when we recognize the truth, and it gives us a little burst of pleasure. Aristotle said it is the basis of comedy and it is the basis of all drama, is trying to find techne. I think that’s helped me in my comedic acting, and it’s certainly helped me in writing my book, in that I have to have faith in what really happened, and I hope that techne is created in people’s brains as either they read or if they watch me on screen. … When we see truth in someone else’s story, we recognize it as part of a universal story.
Filed under: my reading year 2013
![George Saunders, Tenth of December
Kevin McFarland at the Onion nailed it:
[T]he most compelling reason why Saunders doesn’t need to bother with a novel comes not from literature, but from standup comedy. Call it the Mitch Hedberg argument: “I’m a standup comedian. I got into comedy to do comedy, which is weird, I know. But when you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things besides comedy. They say, ‘All right, you’re a standup comedian. Can you act? Can you write? Write us a script.’ They want me to do things that’s related to comedy, but not comedy. That’s not fair. It’s as though if I was a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, and they said, ‘All right, you’re a cook—can you farm?”
There’s a touching nod to this in the acknowledgements when Saunders thanks his agent:
Esther Newberg, for her tireless guidance and friendship these last sixteen years, during which she has given me the great gift of making me feel that all I had to do was write as well as I could, and she would take care of the rest, which she has, with incredible discernment and energy.
Filed under: George Saunders](http://24.media.tumblr.com/67f74f53e9f34dad26d1e5f2dc758b00/tumblr_mh8qas2nuf1qz6f4bo1_500.jpg)
George Saunders, Tenth of December
Kevin McFarland at the Onion nailed it:
[T]he most compelling reason why Saunders doesn’t need to bother with a novel comes not from literature, but from standup comedy. Call it the Mitch Hedberg argument: “I’m a standup comedian. I got into comedy to do comedy, which is weird, I know. But when you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things besides comedy. They say, ‘All right, you’re a standup comedian. Can you act? Can you write? Write us a script.’ They want me to do things that’s related to comedy, but not comedy. That’s not fair. It’s as though if I was a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, and they said, ‘All right, you’re a cook—can you farm?”
There’s a touching nod to this in the acknowledgements when Saunders thanks his agent:
Esther Newberg, for her tireless guidance and friendship these last sixteen years, during which she has given me the great gift of making me feel that all I had to do was write as well as I could, and she would take care of the rest, which she has, with incredible discernment and energy.
Filed under: George Saunders
Gave this a spin last year after seeing it as one of Chris Rock’s favorite albums that show up at the beginning of Bring The Pain. So funny.“We had never seen the belt…”
“…but, we had heard about it.”
To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
One of my hands-down favorite comedy albums ever.
On not sucking mid-career and a batch of good Chris Rock interviews
These days I find myself drawn to reading the thoughts of people who are mid-career—not at the end of their careers, and not at the beginning, but in the middle, because I feel like that’s the period where you really have to keep up your stamina, keep chugging, keep working. You’re not necessarily hungry anymore — you might have a nice house, nice wife, couple of kids, a decent fan base, etc. People are over the excitement about your rise, and people aren’t splicing together the kiss-ass retrospective clip reels, either. Your best work may be behind you, may be in front of you, but you just don’t know. (Maybe this is always true.) I do this because, being not at starting line, but a few meters down the track, I’m just looking in awe at these people who keep running the marathon without burning out. (Not sure why my lazy, non-runner ass is using a running metaphor, but hey…)
Chris Rock strikes me as a mid-career guy who has his shit together, and whenever he has an interview published, I try to read it.
Judd Apatow interviewed him for the Vanity Fair comedy issue:
Was it more fun when you first started? If so, what the fuck are we supposed to do now?
Yes, it was more fun. First of all, you had three goals: (1) To get good at comedy. (2) To make money from comedy. And (3) to get laid from comedy. What do we do now? Well, people seem to think we’re good. We have money. We’re married, so the whole working to get laid thing is over. Sad to say, but we work now to maintain our lifestyles, to not suck, and to avoid Celebrity Apprentice.
In his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, he talked about hanging out with his grandfather preacher:
I used to watch him write his sermons. He writes his sermons pretty much the same way I write my act. He would never write the exact sermon. He’d always write the bullet points, whatever would hit him, and he would write it when he was driving. And I probably come up with half of my standup when I’m driving…His preaching, it’s weird, it’s not a lot different than my style on stage…
When you grow up with a preacher, it’s almost like- it’s like seeing a magician stuff the rabbit in his side jacket. Like, I knew all the tricks… I don’t think he thought of it as tricks, but every job becomes a job, and you figure out shortcuts and you figure out, you know, ways around things…
A good sermon’s always great… these guys, they’re always - they have this task of coming up with a new - with new material every week. I like how a preacher can talk about one thing for an hour and 10 minutes. I keep trying to figure out how I can do that in stand-up. So, how I can, like, OK, how can I just be funny about, you know, jealousy? You know, a preacher will pick a topic and they’ll run with it for the whole sermon, like, and, you know, take you on a ride talking about literally one thing. And I just love that style. So I’m always - I’ve always been trying to figure out how do I do that in stand-up.
In this NYTimes Q&A, he talks about the itch to get back into comedy clubs (“I haven’t done any dirty work in a while”), but the near-impossible task of “workshopping” in the digital era:
When you’re workshopping it, a lot of stuff is bumpy and awkward. Especially when you’re working on the edge, you’re going to offend. A guy like Tosh, he’s at the Laugh Factory. He’s making no money. He’s essentially in the gym. You’re mad at Ray Leonard because he’s not in shape, in the gym? That’s what the gym’s for. The sad thing, with all this taping and stuff, no one’s going to do stand-up. And every big stand-up I talk to says: “How do I work out new material? Where can you go, if I have a half an idea and then it’s on the Internet next week?” Just look at some of my material. You can’t imagine how rough it was and how unfunny and how sexist or racist it might have seemed. “Niggas vs. Black People” probably took me six months to get that thing right. You know how racist that thing was a week in? That’s not to be seen by anybody.
Filed under: Chris Rock
Paul Brownfield on comedy podcasts as more intimate experiences than live acts:
I don’t consume stand-up live anymore; I download it onto my iPod, booking a comedian’s voice in my ear as I walk to work or try to fall asleep. This way of hearing comedians is at once totally dislocating (when was this recorded?) and more intimate than seeing him live; instead of the comedian’s act, you get the comic as extension of the act, the comic forever in the process of writing the act — the more anthropological half comedian, half human being.
Because of podcast overexposure, in fact, I fear I’m losing interest in stand-up altogether, or at least in the performance of it. Listening to a live show, performed in front of an audience, now feels inevitably deflating — the energy off, the crowd response interruptive, the comic now working a crowd, instead of just working you. That’s the appeal of the podcast: the comedian is broadcasting straight into your head, and you in turn are engaged with him, so that the both of you are practically sharing a thought balloon.
Sit-down vs. stand-up?
From the liner notes:
I’m a perfectionist with my comedy, and this recording is anything but perfection. As I now realize, sometimes when you spend too much time perfecting something, the root of pure inspiration disappears.
When Ira Glass encouraged me to write material about my four months of hell for This American Life, I had no idea that when I walked on Largo’s stage to workout what I’d written, that I’d be releasing it to the masses two months later. The day after this was taped, Louis CK called to say that he felt it was really important for people to hear the show and that he wanted to release it on his website. At first, I felt there was no way I could release such a raw set, but after I gained some distance and encouragement from friends, I realized that if I could help a single person on this earth feel that they can push through something—whether it’s a rough day at the office or a deadly diagnosis—then it made zero sense for me to not release it.
