The Sheila Variations

The un-funnies

I saw an abysmal stand-up comic last night. I have seen more than my share of un-funny comics, and I have so many thoughts about them, as psychological entities unto themselves, that I could probably write a book.

Let's see. What are some of the things that come to mind?

First of all the most obvious:

How on earth can someone not know they're unfunny?

And on the coat-tails of that one: it is MORE forgivable to think you're funny when you're not if you haven't chosen COMEDY as your profession.

Ya get my meaning?

If you think you're funny, and you are NOT, and NO ONE thinks you're funny, not even your mother, then it is unforgivable that you would inflict your unfunniness on an innocent populace who are PAYING to see you be funny.

I basically find the whole "people who think they're HILARIOUS when they are SO NOT" phenomenon interesting in all its forms ... but I find it ESPECIALLY pathological when someone like that chooses to try to be a comedian. There are so many of these people out there.

I've spent a lot of time around comics, and dated a few, so I could view a lot of this up close. The guys I dated WERE funny, however. I could never date someone who thought he was funny, when he wasn't. Ew. How could I not just come out and tell him the truth? How could I ever say, "Dude, you are totally not funny."?? I'm a Sagittarian. If we think stuff like that, then we MUST say it. Additionally, I hold funny at a high high premium. I come from a funny family. We value jokes. We value humor. It's a big deal to me. You either HAVE it, or you DON'T. And yes, people's senses of humor are different ... so a lot of this is subjective, but I am not talking about "Hey, who do you think is funnier - 3 Stooges or Abbott and Costello?" Different people will answer different ways, because of their particular sensibilities. That ain't what I'm talking about - that is WAY too advanced. There are people out there who flat out DO NOT have the funny gene. They just DON'T. I would find it very challenging (ehm - read: impossible) to be with someone who thought he was hilarious when I didn't find him funny at all. I'm big on funny. I can't DESCRIBE it, but I know it when I see it. Kind of like pornography.

Also: with the un-funny people, it's hard to descsribe, but I found it hard to get close to them, or have good conversations with them, because somewhere in them there was a rock-hard resistance to self-knowledge or anything even resembling truth, a holding-on-for-dear-life energy that I could practically SMELL. It's almost like I could imagine them putting their hands over their ears, shouting, "LALALALALA" in order to avoid the truth about themselves. (Ahem. Scott Peck's People of the Lie. That's all I'm saying.) It takes a lot of energy to avoid growth. A LOT of energy.

So - having met a bunch of the un-funnies, and having seen many of them perform, horribly, night after night after night, being faced with not just boredom from an audience, but outright hostility - it is an almost anthropological level of interest with me how many UNFUNNY people gravitate towards that particular profession where funniness is required.

It's FASCINATING.

It's even more fascinating because, on the whole, stand-up comedy is, perhaps, the most brutal of all the performing arts. The audience is there for the sole reason of laughter. If you don't make them laugh? Then you bomb. You are greeted with crickets twirping in the twilight silence. The worst possible sound. A soul-crushing sound to a stand-up comic. A white-hot-shame kind of sound. All stand-up comics bomb sometimes. Even the most successful. It's great to hear them talk about it ... Chris Rock, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams ... all of their collective stories of BOMBING. It's great because you realize the process, the hard work involved behind the seeming effortlessness, the long long road of trial and error. I love to hear those stories.

Many stand-up comedians, in order to have breakthroughs in their work, need to accept the fact that they're going to bomb a lot. The stand-up comics who play it safe, whose sole goal in life is to NEVER BOMB, don't make it. They don't take risks. They are not fearless on stage. And a good stand-up comic? I bow to them in awe. These people are some of the most fearless artists/actors I have ever seen. They are constantly creating, throwing themselves into this VOID. If a joke bombs, they don't linger, or mourn it, or apologize for themselves - they either comment on it, and get an even bigger laugh, or they plow right along. But these comics MUST be willing to bomb. Anything worth having in life involves risk.

Jim Carrey talks about that a lot. His original stand-up routine had to do with that rubber face of his, and how he could twist it into the most amazing impressions: Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, Jack Nicholson in everything ... And these weren't just impressions, they were more like he was actually channeling these people. This was his act. Highly successful, and highly lucrative. But something was missing for him ... maybe somewhere he knew that the impressions were too easy for him, that there was something else he had to offer. And yet ... nobody wanted it. They only wanted him to show up at the clubs and do Henry Fonda. All that other stuff wasn't welcome. So Jim Carrey took a huge risk - a risk no one (his management, his agent, his publicist - all these people who were making a ton of money off of his impressions) wanted him to take. He walked away from impressions, he walked away from Career # 1 and started to make up his own stuff, started to re-create himself into the manic genius that he is today. But it took a lot of guts. He bombed A LOT. He traveled to colleges, to tiny comedy clubs in butt-fuck nowheresville, and tried out his new material. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. The stuff that worked, he kept, the stuff that didn't, he tossed - or tried to make it work in other ways. But in order to do that, he needed to be willing to experience what it felt like to BOMB. Jim Carrey NEVER bombed during his impression act. It was a done deal. He could do it in his sleep. But this new stuff? The crazy Jim Carrey stuff? It was a risk.

The risk paid off though. It was through this new and freer act that the guys at Living Color took notice, put him on the show ... and from that came Ace Ventura ... and from that came ... well. The highly successful versatile guy we see now.

But all of that came from a willingness to be bad. To suck. To have people NOT laugh ... so that he could figure out what would work, what his special gift was.

And so back to my original contemplation: the vast armies of the un-funnies.

Who ARE these people? How can they get up there, in the BRUTAL atmosphere of a comedy club, and be so un-funny? Why do they put themselves through it? Why do they have so little self-knowledge? Why can they not FEEL their un-funniness?

I'll tell ya something. I'm funny. I can feel my own funniness. My friends think I'm funny. I'm able to do stuff on stage in order to make people laugh. I know how to do that. And the laugh then comes. I'm not a stand-up comedian, and have no desire to be one, but just as a person on this planet, with a wee bit of self-knowledge, I do know that funniness is one of the things I've got going for me. There are many things I do NOT have ... but I'm okay with funny.

These people, the un-funnies, go through life ... and I cannot believe that other people, the people in their lives I mean, think they're funny. Like ... they SO have the desire to make people laugh, and yet they do not have the ear for it. They're tone-deaf or something. It's like the ranks of untalented freaks on American Idol ... hasn't anyone ever TOLD these people the truth???

I don't have the answers here, and I wouldn't be surprised if some know-it-all reading this jabbers forth with some theory. "It's obviously because of THIS." Fine. Do that. But I'm more interested in contemplating the whys of this phenomenon, rather than coming up with a pat answer.

I'm interested in the psychology of these people. The seemingly WILLFUL obliviousness to their own gifts, or lack thereof. You see it in all the arts, actually ... it's filled with people who really aren't any good at said art, and yet ... they put in all the time, the money, the energy to make it a career. Countless examples will suffice.

It's the un-funnies, though, who REALLY interest me. Because it's so specific. And also, here's the deal: Let's say you're an actor, and you're not a good actor. You are clumsy, bad, you basically have no talent. And no one has ever told you you have no talent, but this is your dream, and so you continue on. Okay, fine. Very common. But with plain-old acting, it is easier to hide your lack of talent - than with stand-up. It is easier to get skills to use as a smokescreen over what you do not have. You get vocal training, physical training, whatever. You still may not have any innate talent, but you can acquire skill. This is a way of hiding, for many. I still don't understand why people with no TALENT for the thing want to do it, but so be it - they do. And you can certainly "hide" your no talent, and people won't pick up on your OBVIOUS unfitness for your chosen career.

But with stand-up comedy? It is IMMEDIATELY obvious who "has it" and who doesn't. That's why I say it is brutal.

There is nothing more LOUD than the silence in a comedy club when there should be a laugh.

Audiences clap politely at the end of a regular play, and then go out and say to each other, "I thought that lead actor wasn't so good ... but the play was all right ... let's go get something to eat."

This does not occur in stand-up comedy. You do not get polite applause, if you suck. You get a hostile silence. You get hecklers. I have seen unfunny people walk off the stage in disgrace, because they couldn't take it, they were bombing so bad.

This is the brutality of it.

And so the army of un-funnies remain fascinating. WHY would you put yourself through that, if YOU. AREN'T. FUNNY! There must be so much self-deception going on. Like: the person truly believes, deep down, that he is funny. He KNOWS he is as funny as Mike Myers. He just KNOWS it. All he needs is the chance Mike Myers got, all he needs is a BIGGER stage, a NATIONAL platform ... and then he could REALLY be funny!! Who can truly be funny in a tiny dingy comedy club? The club is too small for me ... I need to play bigger stages. THEN people will see how funny I am.

I have heard unfunny stand-up comics talk this way. They think if they could, abracadabra, be plopped down as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, right here and now, that they would kick some serious ass. It's the VENUE that makes me unfunny. Not my own dern lack of talent!!

Self-deception, desperation, and a hungry hungry need to be loved. This is what drives the un-funnies. This is why it is so uncomfortable to watch them. It's uncomfortable to have someone NEED you to love them in most circumstances in life, but it's really uncomfortable when they are doing an unfunny comedy act, and you do not feel like laughing, you do not feel like loving them, as a matter of fact you can't stand them, you can't laugh when you don't feel like it - laughter must be spontaneous ... and so you sit there, as joke after joke bombs, and all you can sense is this: love me love me love me energy coming off the unfunny person.

This is what I experienced last night.

I find it extremely toe-curlingly awful to be in that situation, and yet I also find it interesting. Basically, as I sat watching this un-funny man whose weight was on par with the King of Tonga's, I was sitting there, wincing at each awful joke, and yet I was also thinking to myself all of the stuff I wrote above. He's doing awful jokes, and I'm sitting there pondering Jim Carrey's career, and the lessons he learned ... I'm wondering about the whole: How can this guy NOT KNOW HE'S NOT FUNNY thing ... I'm contemplating self-deception in all its forms ... I'm wondering about the un-funny man I see before me. What drives him? Who is he? What is it like to really not know who you are?

I am not saying this guy has NOTHING to offer. But comedy is definitely not on the list.

(I always come back to this: Stella Adler, acting teacher, said once: "It is not that important to know who you are. It is important to know what you do, and then do it like Hercules." That's really the question, for me. Know what you DO and then DO it. But the un-funnies have chosen the wrong "do", so to speak. They have not asked the question, "What is it that I DO?" We all have something to offer. Maybe what we're seeing when we are assaulted by terrible stand-up comedians is the ghost of old dreams, 6 year old stuff, practicing Lenny Bruce routines in the mirror ... we all have dreams like that. Some of us, by necessity, let them go, and find out what our gifts REALLY are. Some of us, like Jim Carrey, do NOT let that dream go ... because that really IS what he DOES, and so he proceeds to live his whole life where he does it "like Hercules". And some of us, the un-funnies, never let that 6-year-old dream go, even though life has pretty much passed them by as they chased a dream inappropriate for their own gifts. It's kind of sad, actually. I have these odd melancholy contemplations as I watch ragingly un-funny comics.)

In a weird way, I wanted to go out afterwards with the King of Tonga comedian and ask him questions, just get a little bit close to the self-deception, so I could really study it. I'm weird that way. I'm interested in psychology, in what makes people tick, and in the ways that people (myself included) can lie to themselves.

Un-funny comedian last night started off with a whoppingly awful "joke" about the tsunami. He said something about how he caused the tsunami when he got into his own bathtub. So, there's a lot that's sad about this ... I immediately started psychoanalyzing him from the darkness, and continued to do so throughout the routine (It was a defense mechanism, I realize, a way for me to get through the bad-ness of it all.). He is letting us know, right off the bat, that he knows he's fat. And so he wrapped that around the tsunami somehow, and the whole thing just bombed.

Throughout his routine, as joke after joke fell flat, he KEPT saying, "That one went over really well in Long Island ..." "That joke usually gets a laugh down in the Village ..." Like, telling us how OTHERS had laughed and where they were when they laughed ...

heh heh heh My sister and I were howling about this later.

"Woah, that joke normally has them rolling in the aisles in Poughkeepsie ..."

He ended his routine with a joke about breast cancer, which then led into a joke about yeast infections, which then led into a joke about handjobs.

It. Was. Agony.

And yet ... let me be clear: HIGHLY interesting.

It was very painful to sit there, it felt almost abusive, like: Jesus, man, please just STOP!!! .... but it was also VERY interesting.

Hmmm. This man is not just not funny. He is ACTIVELY not funny. And yet ... he is a stand-up comic.

How on EARTH does this happen so often??

Posted by sheila