Getting The Joke

The Art of Stand-up Comedy

Oliver Double

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781408155035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Televisione

An examination of the art of stand-up comedy, its constituent parts and how they work Considering stand-up comedy to be an art-form deserving greater attention and analysis, Getting the Joke provides an exploration of the work of the stand-up comedian. Beginning with a brief history of the art form, the book goes on to examine the key elements, such as the comedian's stage persona, their material and how this is generated, the art of performance, their relationship to and interaction with the audience, and the development of stand-up skills. The book draws on interviews with many of the leading stand-up comedians, including Jo Brand, Alexei Sayle, Ross Noble and Rhona Cameron, and contains detailed analysis of examples from both the British and American markets. Aimed at fans of stand-up and aspiring comedians alike, Getting the Joke is the first book of its kind to offer an accessible and engaging analysis of the art of stand-up comedy. By the author of Stand-Up: On Being a Comedian - 'a fantastic book for anyone who's got any interest in stand-up comedy' (Mark Lamarr)

1. Born Not Made

‘I’ve Got a Degree in Beckhamology’

One sunny day in the early summer of 1999, I was driving down the M6 when I felt a sudden vibration in my hip. For a moment I panicked, convinced that my overused and under-maintained car was finally falling apart. Then I realised with a shock that it was my pager on vibrate mode for the first time. I wondered who needed to contact me so urgently. At the next services I checked the message. It was the CEEFAX news desk, wanting to interview me about the stand-up comedy module I was to run in my new job at the University of Kent.

It was the start of what was, in reality, a minor flurry of press interest, but to me it felt like a media feeding frenzy. There were articles in the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Sun and The Stage, as well interviews for local radio and television. The idea of teaching stand-up comedy at university had all the hallmarks of a silly-season classic, and the press went for the hey-you’ll-never-believe-what-these-crazy-academics-are-up-to-now angle. The Guardian’s piece started:

I say. I say. Did you hear that they’ve hired a clown at Kent University? No, really. He’s going to be teaching the students stand-up comedy. No. Seriously, laze ’n’ gennermen, he’s got a Ph.D. in it. Actually, Dr Oliver Double is not a clown, but he is a practising stand-up comedian. And he will be teaching third-year drama students who want it – and ooh, we all want it, don’t we, missis! – the art of rambling into a pub microphone and making people choke on their pints with mirth.¹

Some of the coverage was more cynical. The Sunday Times said: ‘Universities, quick to capitalise on the popularity of such subjects as media studies, see comedy as another way to attract students and the funding they bring.’ The Stage’s line was similar. They argued that ‘stand-up is too rich and juicy a pie for the education industry to keep its fingers out of’, and quoted a comedian making the same point more vociferously: ‘A course like this is an example of a university desperate to attract students in any way it can to get government funding.’²

The Sun discovered that a module on football culture at Staffordshire University involved studying the career and public image of David Beckham, and decided to put together an article entitled ‘I’ve Got a Degree in Beckhamology’, which presented a series of courses ‘ranging from the unusual to the bizarre’ which they described as ‘odd offerings from the wacky world of education’. Obviously, I was delighted to have my stand-up course listed as one of the odd offerings, and also impressed by the fact that they quoted me as if they’d interviewed me, which they hadn’t. All of this was good Sun-style fun, but there was a hint of a more serious agenda at work in the introduction to the article: ‘[S]ome of the subjects [university students] choose to study are worthless and will do nothing to help them get jobs.’³

This taps into a powerful and widely held belief: stand-up comedy simply cannot be taught. This argument is particularly popular among comedians themselves. Rhona Cameron, for example, says: ‘I don’t feel you can study stand-up, and learn stand-up from a situation like that. I’ve got quite strong views on that. I feel like stand-up has to be … a thing you have to kind of drift into. I think it’s an organic thing, and I think it comes from a kind of crossroads of life, or a feeling that … you’ve never fitted in or you haven’t got along with others.’

While teaching stand-up might be seen as a bad idea, there clearly is a learning process involved, unless you subscribe to the notion that comedians’ powers are fully manifested the first time they perform to an audience. There are certain technical skills which need to be acquired, as Alexei Sayle points out: ‘It is a craft, you know, and … there’s an immense amount of technical jargon and also technical understanding that you need. How much you can be taught, I don’t know. It’s not a craft like carpentry where you can, say, teach it, but there is a very strong element of craft in it, you know.’ Similarly, Jeremy Hardy acknowledges that ‘the tricks in stand-up are something you can learn’.

This learning process usually takes place in front of a live audience. Most comedians begin by being bad at their job, their early performances marred by nerves. They are clumsy and awkward onstage. They fail to get laughs. The bad experiences are usually leavened by the occasional show where the comic clicks with an audience and goes down well. With experience, the act improves. The comedian learns the job simply by doing it. As Alexei Sayle describes: ‘I did as many as seven appearances a night, sometimes – one audience would be cold, the next warm, the next one lukewarm, then another cold, then a really hot one … In a technical sense it’s fantastic training.’⁴

A short history of teaching stand-up comedy

Advice

Comedians may be sceptical about teaching stand-up in a formal setting, but in many cases they are teachers themselves. There’s a long tradition of older comedians giving advice and informal tuition to less experienced acts. Groucho Marx acted as a father figure to many younger comedians, and was an early admirer of Woody Allen’s stand-up act. Milton Berle was well established when he first met Henny Youngman, who was working in a print shop at the time and doing weekend shows in the Catskills; Berle gave him advice about timing and delivery.⁵

In 1949, Bob Monkhouse was appearing low down on the bill of a concert at the London Coliseum in aid of war refugees. Max Miller was topping the bill, and Monkhouse asked him for advice. Though feeling unwell, Miller watched the younger comedian’s act and afterwards gave what Monkhouse described as ‘a master class in patter comedy by its greatest living exponent’. There was advice on delivery, vocal projection, energy, comic authority, timing and using gesture to create a mental picture. Miller even gave Monkhouse detailed advice on how to improve the structure of particular jokes. Monkhouse described absorbing technique from comedians like Miller, Arthur Askey and Max Wall ‘by osmosis’.⁶

Speaking on Radio 4 in 2001, John Sessions said that the thought of comedy courses ‘really chills me’, but went on to describe how John Cleese saw one of his early performances, and phoned him the next day to discuss it in detail. Cleese advised him to give the jokes more space, and to try not to lump too many ideas together in one gag. Sessions found the advice ‘fantastic’.⁷

Omid Djalili had a more sustained relationship with his informal comedy mentor: ‘It was really Ivor Dembina who then came to see me and took me under his wing and said, “Look, you’ve obviously got something, and you’re not quite there yet, you need someone to help you write some material” … And I think he taught me a hell of a lot actually, he taught me how to write jokes … to be honest, he taught me how to do it.’

In other cases, it is not so much a case of older comics giving advice to younger ones, as of comedians sharing knowledge among themselves on a more equal basis. Alexei Sayle remembers: ‘In the early days, I think we used to stay up all night. I can remember me and Tony Allen and Andy de la Tour, for instance, round Tony’s flat, staying up all night talking about comedy, and the nature of it … we talked about the kind of ethical aspects of it, and … I can certainly remember talking about the technical [aspects].’

Younger comics also learn from their older counterparts simply by watching them and observing their technique. Chris Rock talks of the need to ‘study comedy’, and recalls how listening to albums by acts like Woody Allen and Richard Pryor helped him develop.⁸ Adam Bloom describes how watching other comics at the Bearcat Club helped him prepare for his first appearance: ‘I used to go every single Monday without fail, and just watch, and learn, and suss it out. I kind of learnt by other people’s mistakes, in a way. Just, you know, worked out what open spots were doing wrong. And I could see there was a command that the established acts had that the open spots didn’t have.’

There’s a long tradition of agents and managers helping to nurture and develop the acts they represent, particularly in America. Woody Allen was helped through the sometimes painful transition from successful comedy writer to stand-up act by his managers Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe. They found him bookings in small venues to allow him to develop his performance skills, talked with him about comedy until 4 a.m., and helped him to edit his material. Allen looks back on Rollins as ‘a great coach, a great teacher, a great manager’. Later, Joffe and Rollins helped Robin Williams, for example advising him to end a character piece about an old man looking back at the time before World War III with a moment of pathos.⁹

Comedians sometimes get similar help from people who run the venues in which they perform. At the original Comedy Store in Los Angeles, Mitzi Shore would critique each of the new young acts she put on. When George Black ran the London Palladium, he would sometimes offer advice to the acts he booked. He might, for example, criticise a weak routine, telling the comic, ‘It’s dull … You’d better lose your pants or something.’¹⁰

When fledgling comics progress to appearances on radio or TV, they may find themselves working with people who can help them adjust their acts to the new medium. Hughie Green would help to shape the acts that appeared on his TV talent show Opportunity Knocks. Later, when Bob Monkhouse hosted the same show, he would offer detailed advice to comedians, helping them with delivery, joke construction, and the structure of the overall act.

Working on the regional BBC Radio show Wotcheor Geordie, Bobby Thompson received detailed coaching from his producer, Richard Kelly, who remembers: ‘[O]f course, we spent quite a lot of time instructing him, giving him hints and tips on how to handle an audience, on pauses, on timing … particularly on emphasis.’¹¹ When Thompson used up his existing material, Kelly found a writer called Lisle Willis to provide him with more. Thompson found learning the new material difficult, as he had a poor memory. Kelly would spend long hours rehearsing with him, teaching him different ways of working with punchlines and ensuring he got the emphasis right in particular sentences. One joke had a payoff line which went, ‘And leave me outside the way you’ve always done,’ and Thompson kept insisting on placing the emphasis on the word ‘done’ instead of where it should have been, on ‘always’. It could take a whole afternoon’s work to iron out such problems.¹²

Acting schools and clown training

Some comedians have had more formal training than this, albeit not specifically aimed at preparing them for stand-up. Shelley Berman trained as an actor at the Goodman Theater School in Chicago, and felt that this contributed to the development of his unique and extraordinary vocal style: ‘The study of speech, for example, I felt contributed to my work … as a comedian. The placement of my voice – I don’t know why, but somehow I know I can perform in a theatre without a microphone … Yes, certainly the education is a contributing factor there. Whatever is natural is natural, but there was considerable vocal development and speech development in my schooling.’

Andre Vincent had a rather more exotic training, studying clowning for six months at the Fratellini Circus School, and later being taught by Keith Johnstone when he performed theatresports with the Loose Moose Theatre Company. Vincent feels that both clowning and improvisational theatre have fed into his stand-up act: ‘I mean, there’s lots of … little tricks … with stand-up that’re … to do with clowning and sometimes to do with improv, where you have … structured levels and some sort of status level … You’ve got this … status and pecking order, and if you get angry with somebody or you wanna show anger, what you do is you sort of like turn away, and then you turn around and you come back to them. And it’s so good to do that … within stand-up. If … somebody says something quite horrible, [you] don’t just sort of go straight into them, because then you become as horrible as them. You turn around, walk away and then just turn around and go, “Hey, hold on,” and you know, you make a thing of it. People’ll go, “Whoooo!” and they’ll go with you.’

‘How to’ guides

My stand-up course was by no means the first attempt at offering some kind of formal training specifically geared to stand-up comedy. A number of ‘how to’ guides have been published, which claim to offer the budding comedian useful advice. In 1945, Lupino Lane wrote a book called How to Become a Comedian. Lane came from a line of comic performers stretching back to the seventeenth century, and had worked as a silent-film comedian and in stage musicals, as well as having experience of variety. His book covers topics such as ‘How to Use an Old Gag’, ‘Patter’ and ‘Timing’, which might have been of use to fledgling front-cloth comics in variety theatres, as well as ‘Female Impersonation’, ‘Crazy, Acrobatic, Knockabout and Slapstick Comedy’ and ‘Ventriloquism’, clearly aimed at other types of comedian.

In the last twenty years, the number of ‘how to’ guides has proliferated, but many of them tend to oversimplify the subtle techniques of stand-up and offer dogmatic advice which is sometimes simply wrong. In Stand-Up Comedy: The Book, Judy Carter defines modern stand-up as a form of self-expression: ‘People confuse stand-up comedy with telling jokes … Joke-telling is the old Catskill school of comedy … The new school of comedy is personal comedy. Your act is about you: your gut issues, your body, your marriage, your divorce, your drug habit …’ However, having argued against simply ‘telling jokes’, and in favour of a freer, more creative approach, she goes on to stipulate ‘specific stand-up formulas’: ‘All stand-up material must be organized into the setup/punch format. If your material isn’t organized like this, you’re not doing stand-up.’¹³

It is hard to believe that the free-flowing routines of geniuses such as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly or Eddie Izzard were produced with this rigid, formulaic set-up/punch approach. Carter specifically warns against personal anecdotes, saying ‘stories don’t work’. If Pryor or Connolly, say, had followed this advice, they would have had to shed some of their strongest material.

Comedy classes

Then there are stand-up comedy classes. The idea of formally teaching comic skills probably originates in the training which took place within theatrical families over hundreds of years. Lupino Lane writes about the knowledge passed down within his own family, with tuition in such areas as acrobatic tricks, juggling and ‘The art of miming or expressing the emotions, in “dumb show”’. His father, whom he describes as ‘a most patient tutor’, taught him comedy skills and specific routines.¹⁴

Classes aimed at the general public have existed for the best part of a hundred years. In 1907, the young Marx Brothers spent some time in the newly established Ned Wayburn’s College of Vaudeville, and appeared in a showcase performance featuring some of those that had studied in it. Like the ‘how to’ guides, comedy classes have proliferated. In 1972, Pete Crofts set up his Humourversity, which describes itself as ‘Australia’s foremost training institution in the art of humour, comedy and laughter’. It offers courses and workshops on stand-up as well as related topics like comedy writing and public speaking with humour. In America, workshops are offered by comedians such as Judy Carter, or by venues like the Comic Strip in New York, which offers an eight-week programme and private tutoring. Jamie Masada, who runs the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard, has even established a Comedy Camp for Kids, where students from inner-city schools can learn stand-up skills.¹⁵

In the UK, the idea of teaching comedy has been floating around since the 1970s, when Trevor Griffiths set his play Comedians in a night-school class for stand-ups.¹⁶ It’s only more recently that classes like this have become well established outside the world of theatrical fiction. In the late 1980s, when he was just starting out as a comic, Frank Skinner ran stand-up workshops at the college where he was working. Although he looks back at the experience as ‘the near-sighted leading the blind’, he received media coverage for the course, and this attracted the attention of Jasper Carrott, who turned up to one of the classes and offered advice and encouragement to the participants. Later, Skinner ran workshops as part of a Red Stripe-sponsored tour for Amnesty International, and the class at the Wythenshawe Forum in Manchester was attended by future comics Caroline Aherne and Dave Gorman, who was just nineteen years old. Gorman remembers: ‘It was … twenty-odd people sitting around, and Frank sort of talked through what he thought about stand-up and showed a little video, and then that was discussed and analysed, and then anyone who wanted to was able to get up and do … five minutes in front of everyone else. A few of us did, and I did.’ The experience proved to be c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Born Not Made
• 2. A Beginner’s Guide to Stand-up Comedy
• 3. Personality
• 4. Working the Audience
• 5. Challenging the Audience
• 6. The Present Tense
• 7. Delivery
• 8. How it’s Done
• 9. Why Bother?
• Appendix: Exercises for Teaching Stand-up Comedy
• Glossary of Comedians
• Notes
• Sources