Comedy

There is a saying that goes:  "Those that can, do.  Those that can't, teach."  I'm not even good enough at comedy to teach.  Instead in my own blundering way I am going to try to say something insightful about comedy.  We are all experts on comedy.  By the time we reach adulthood we have been exposed to many thousands of hours of it, perhaps even the 10,000 hours Malcom Gladwell says are necessary to achieve expertise in a subject.

So we all end up with well informed opinions about what is good comedy and what is bad comedy.  But I think there is a genetic component involved.  I have never been a fan of The Three Stooges or Lucile Ball but millions would beg to disagree.  There is comedy I like and comedy I don't.  And what I put into each category will differ, at least in small ways, from what any other single individual would.  Part of what good comedians are able to do is to create comedy that a large audience will find funny.

And I am a terrible audience.  Performers want a reaction.  They want you to obviously signal what you like and don't like.  Good comics will take this in and adjust their act in ways large and small to more completely pull the audience in front of them in.  And a good comic wants a tough audience.  They want a challenge that drives them to put on their best performance using their best material.

They take great pride in winning over a tough crowd.  But they also disrespect a crowd that is either too easy, will laugh at everything, or too hard, will laugh at nothing.  I will often find something funny but not visibly react.  That is unfair to the performer and also a bad idea.  If everybody was like me then the performer would over correct or under correct and I would get a performance that wasn't as good as it could have been.  So it's my loss but I seem to be wired that way.  If I remember I try to be more responsive.

Time for a digression, and you know I love my digressions.  What are the pillars of success?  There are three of them but they don't get equal attention.  The one that consistently gets the most attention is effort.  As mentioned above, Malcom Gladwell in an essay entitled "The 10,000-hour Rule" popularized the idea.  (See his book "Outliers" for this and other essays on the subject of Success.)

Charlie Rose frequently interviews successful people like athletes.  He always asks about their secret of success and they typically answer by talking about how hard they work and perhaps what their training regime is.  This pattern is similar to the one that almost all interviewers use almost all the time.  And it is pretty useless for gaining any real insight.  To be helpful you have to compare what successful people do with what unsuccessful people do and look for the differences.  But the unsuccessful people are almost never interviewed.  Nor have they ended up being the subject of a Gladwell essay.

Many second, third, etc. place people also train incredibly hard and use top flight training techniques.  They do pretty much the same things the winners do.  Level of effort does not separate out the winners from the also ran's.  What does are the other two pillars of success.  The most obvious one is basic ability.  If you do not possess sufficient strength, agility, quickness, balance, etc. it really doesn't matter how or how hard you train.  There are high intensity tennis camps for kids.  If you attend one of these camps for a few years you can easily rack up the requisite 10,000 hours.  And many of them feature the newest and best training techniques.  But only a few of the graduates of these programs make it into the ranks of the pros.  And only extremely special individuals make it to a number one ranking.

If the difference in ability is great enough even unskilled people like myself can pick out the few that have a chance to be great from the many who will never be better than mediocre.  A great deal of skill is necessary to separate out the best from the merely very good and, more importantly, to know how to help them be their best. This aspect of success is occasionally acknowledged.  You are born with a certain level of ability.  And if you have the requisite amount of ability the decision as to whether you will put in the necessary effort and discipline is yours alone.  In other words, you do have some control over your fate.  When it comes to the third aspect of success, however, everything is completely out of your hands.

And that is fate, or, if you prefer, luck.  I like to use Bill Gates to illustrate how important luck is to the super-successful. The founder and long time president of Microsoft, Mr. Gates has long been the richest man in the US (and often the richest in the world).  It doesn't get more successful than that.  (For a good reference on the path that took Mr. Gates's from birth to helming Microsoft at its most powerful I recommend "Gates:  How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America" by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews.)  It doesn't get more successful than that.  And he attained that exalted status purely as a result of skill, right?  Consider:

He was born in Seattle, a city with a good tech culture and one that could offer him unprecedented access to computers as a High School student.  (See the Maines book for details.)  This kind of opportunity was available in few other places at the time and is still relatively rare.

He was born of white parents and was, therefore, white.

He was born male.  He has a sister.  There is virtually no difference in how they were brought up but he is known around the world and most people don't even know she exists.

He was born at the right time.  His signature skill is computer expertise.  A little sooner and there was no opportunity for anyone to rise as spectacularly as he has.  A little later and he would have had a lot of difficulty standing out from the crowd.

He selected his parents well.  His father was a successful attorney, well known and respected in the Seattle business community.  His mother was a long time member of the University of Washington Board of Regents.  Getting this job requires political connections.  Keeping this job requires a great deal of skill.

He was brought up in a very competitive environment.  He was taught the skills necessary to thrive and succeed when up against "type A" personalities.

Change one of these attributes, all completely the result of luck, and the Bill Gates we know would never have existed.

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco near silicone valley.  San Francisco at the time was unique due to the existence of the Home Brew Computer Club.  Had he grown up anywhere else Jobs would probably now be as well known as Gates' sister.  Mark Zuckerberg was born in New York near IBM world headquarters.  Here too we have a nearly unique environment.

Consider all of the people who have built a company from nothing to a Fortune 500 ranking in the last fifty years.  Nearly all of them are male and nearly all of them are white.

Mr. Gates' parents were part of the Seattle power elite.  He literally learned how the decision makers in large businesses think and operate as a child at his father's knee.  He and his siblings were forced as children to hone their competitive skill.  The early growth years of Microsoft involved building and maintaining a close relationship with IBM.  Knowing how IBM executives thought and operated was invaluable.  And his competitive skills helped him get the best of IBM by negotiating a non-exclusive deal for DOS.  Being able to license DOS to all comers was what catapulted Microsoft from a company no one had heard of to a tech powerhouse.

So Mr. Gates' spectacular success is due to the lucky factors that he was a white male with the proper social background who was born in the right place at the right time to be in the right position to apply his talents.  And that luck enabled him to be as successful as he has been.

We see this all over the place.  If Tiger Woods had been born 20 years earlier he would have been a complete unknown because he would never have gotten a chance to play.  The first couple of times he played in the Masters the Augusta Golf Club still barred blacks from becoming regular members.

Edison could not have become "Edison" if he had been born in another country or been born a woman or been a person of color.  No one would have given him a chance to show what he was capable of.  To be a great success you must be allowed to be successful and you must have access to the external factors like education or training that are necessary to your success.

Certainly all three factors contribute.  If you don't have the necessary abilities you are doomed before you start.  If you don't have the right kind of luck you never get a chance to get into the ring.  You can get a certain distance on luck and ability.  This was definitely true in sport a hundred or so years ago.  Star athletes were often naturally gifted individuals like Jim Thorpe.  But the level of competition has increased so dramatically in so many fields today that to excel you now need to put in the training, often from a very young age, necessary to hone your abilities to their peak.

So after that long digression, back to comedy.  And here's my justification for the digression.  Comedy is now much more competitive than it used to be.  Mark Twain was largely self taught.  He achieved significant success almost from the start anyhow. Will Rogers was also self taught.  It seems unlikely that this is still possible.

Most successful modern comics now serve some kind of apprenticeship.  They are part of Second City, the Chicago based improve group (or others based in elsewhere the US or elsewhere).  Or they do years of stand-up in small clubs and eventually work their way up to larger venues. From there they graduate to Saturday Night Live or perhaps score a short run comedy show on a cable channel.  If the show is successful (most of them flop quickly) their show gets extend.  Or if the first show is a flop they somehow manage to get another chance and succeed.

Steven Colbert is a classic example of this.  He did an apprenticeship at Second City.  He then scored a gig on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  He then moved on to a successful nine year run on cable.  He is now holding down the seat formerly held by David Letterman in the 11:35 PM weekday slot on CBS.  Some details are different but Jimmy Kimmel's (ABC), Jimmy Fallon's (NBC) and Conan O'Brien's (TBS) trajectories are similar.  Numerous SNL alums have scored big in the movies or with long running TV shows.  But their SNL gig was not their first comedy job.

Most successful comics say that time in front of an audience is critical to honing their craft.  You need to know what actual people think of your material.  They are the ultimate arbiter of what is and is not funny.  But lots of people have gotten time in front of an audience at a club and only a few have made it big.  Again if you don't have the talent and the luck then all the time in the world in front of an audience is not going to turn you into a success.  And I can't imagine any comic has put in 10,000 hours before making it big.

I am an engineer. I like to know how things work even if I have no interest or ability in actually doing it myself.  So I have checked out many interviews of many comics over the years.  I have picked up a couple of nuggets.

Jerry Seinfeld says comedy is like looking for nuggets of comedy gold in a mine.  They are few and far between.  You can learn how to better recognize them and where to look for them with practice but it is never easy.  The audience is good training.  If you get in front of an audience frequently you can make slight changes to a joke by tweaking the contents, the delivery, the timing, and see whether the change gets a bigger laugh.  Over time this hopefully teaches you to better construct the joke in the first place.  This seems like common sense to me.

But Jon Oliver made an observation that was not at all obvious to me.  He said if you are really serious about the business of comedy you have to do whatever it takes to land the joke.  This often means leaving aside politeness or even basic human decency.  You have to completely commit and be willing to suffer the consequences.  Often the most successful comedy has a streak of meanness or outright cruelty in it.  In its least unpleasant form the comic denigrates himself.  Rodney Dangerfield's signature line was "I can't get no respect."  Phyllis Diller called her husband "Fang".  Yet she was married to the original Fang for more than 25 years and had six children with him.

Another interesting example is that of Joan Rivers.  She started out doing soft humor deprecating herself and her long time husband Edgar.  But over time her humor became much more hard edged.  This was especially true after Edgar committed suicide.  The event happened shortly after the cancellation of her night time talk show, the one that had caused a split between her and Johnny Carson, the then long time host of "The Tonight Show" on NBC.  She became adept at putting down hecklers at her stage show.  She also characterized herself as a complete tramp and made very specific and vulgar jokes about the physical wear and tear this entirely fictitious bad behavior had caused.  This turn was a classic example of doing whatever it took to land the joke.

A lot of humor depends on having a handy a punching bag.  It is sometimes the comedian herself, or the spouse, or a misbehaving member of the audience.  Don Rickles, unique among comedians, has perfected the art of using random audience members as his punching bag.  He is famous for even doing this to known mobsters.  He was not at all sure it was a good idea the first time he was asked to do it.  But the mobsters felt it was a badge of horror to be publically ridiculed by Rickles.  After that, anyone of any notoriety expected to be singled out for abuse.

Rivers also found herself in a unique position when her daughter Melissa asked to work with her.  By this time Joan's "top dog" persona was well established.  As was her "go for the jugular" approach.  Melissa was well aware of this but wanted on board anyhow.  And the pairing worked well.  And as expected Melissa became a frequent punching bag.  In perhaps the most famous example of this they both appeared on the same season of "The Apprentice".  Joan won by, among other things, forcing Melissa's elimination.  Whatever it takes to land the joke.  The good news is that there is every indication that they had a very warm and loving relationship offstage.  Whatever it takes to land the joke is can be hard on personal relationships but apparently they found a way to make it work.

Finally, I am going to make what even I think is a feeble attempt to deconstruct a joke.  Fortunately the joke is short, only four words.  Generally credited to Henny Youngman the joke in it's entirety is:  "Take my wife -- please!".  It is a classic joke with a setup and a punch line.  The setup is "Take my wife".  It sets up an expectation that the wife is going to be discussed.  And this immediately establishes a whole framework of expectations.  Specifically, the normal expectation is that marriages are happy unions.

This expectation is totally destroyed by the one word "please".  (Note:  For the joke to work properly there should be a short pause between the setup and the punch line.  This short delay allows the audience members to settle in and accept the framework of expectation implied by the premise.)  The punch line tells us that the expectation conveyed by the setup is completely wrong, that the marriage is, in fact, an unhappy one.

And this leads me to my observation that a good joke should set up a framework of expectations.  The more economically this can be done the more likely the joke is to work.  It's hard to imagine being more efficient than doing the whole thing with just three words.  Then the punch line should force a perspective shift that compels a complete re-evaluation of the expectation.  It turns out that our brains are very good at this and in the right circumstances can do this in a remarkably short period of time.

But timing is important for the effective delivery of  a joke.  And experience in front of an audience informs the comic just how long the appropriate mental processing takes.  If you go too fast the mind set of the audience is not in the proper place when the punch line is delivered and they literally miss the joke.  If you take too long the audience gets bored and their attention wanders away from where you want it.  Then they understand the joke but it has lost its punch.

And that is pretty much everything I know about comedy.  And its not nearly enough to be able to do it well.