Years ago, Comic Addiction and its “Crack-Up Den” was a platform for the funny folk of Dunedin to hone their stand-up skills. Some became national favourites, and some moved on with their lives. Unaware of the underground comedy scene in Dunedin, I’d spent years watching comics online, observing how members of the crowd howled with a unified glee that I seemed to be missing out on. There were differences between these videos and real life, too. The comics acted like people who didn’t really exist: vulgar yet hilarious, and with a naturalness foreign to someone sitting behind a desk contemplating opening an Omegle tab. Questions about why and how this behaviour emerged wracked my brain. The Crack-Up Den, recently re-instated on 7 June, and a trip backstage at OUSA’s comedy night held my answers.
Live comedy comes without ads, but at the cost of your freedom: once in, I couldn’t leave. Drawing attention to oneself was proven a terrible idea by a group, drunk from a BYO, who stumbled down Metro’s stairs and into a well-lit spot to be confronted with the wrath of MC Nick Erskine. What I didn’t realise was that this piece of audience interaction would develop into a back-and-forth exchange of insults that continued until the abrupt end of the show.
The increasing competency of the comics was not enough to suppress the aggression of the hecklers, who subsided briefly when a new comedian came onstage but returned with fresh vitriol as soon as “turd-sandwich” MC Nick returned. The rest of the audience became desperate for an interval.
Unfortunately, said interval was bittersweet as it cut short the single best comic of the night: Lockie Rhodes, the musically rude comic. The newfound optimism Lockie inspired meant the interval was used to load up on drinks, rather than steal away into the safety of the silent street. Though headliner Travis Monk emerged partway through the second half to boost the mood, the crowd’s hopefulness rapidly lost its naiveté.
MC Nick’s ability to cope with constant barraging seemed to go downhill as he admitted he’d tried to imbibe alcohol to gain confidence; weakened by this and the insults, Those People He Called Out In Act One were finally able to drive him off the stage using classic lines, like “when’s the punchline?” and “just stop.” When asked whether they thought they’d been a little harsh, the group of hecklers insisted their acts were justified: “he said Kate had a shit vagina!” There was no doubt the evening was hilarious, but only because it had left us with plenty of tales which justified our smug sense of superiority; this, it turned out, had been the point.
Mania en masse
The difference between watching comedy in a crowd and watching it online – aside from the absence of ads – seemed to be the laughter level. In a crowd, even mediocre jokes received a solid sounding of guffaws. It seemed odd that we were laughing more at amateur Dunedin comics than the professionals online, an inconsistency that needs explaining.I’m cynical and insecure, so I assumed the added laughter was people’s way of showing that they were smarter than the non-laughers. We sometimes laugh at drunks or the elderly when they do ridiculous things because we want to assure people that we know better than to act like that. Laughter shows our intelligence. When you’re in a crowd, there are plenty of people to tell you’re smart, so you laugh more.
I grew fond of this theory because it meant happy people were really just douchebags trying to show off their brilliant lives, and at first it made a lot of sense. For instance, some pretentious arseholes laugh at lecturers’ jokes and get involved in the lectures because they’re dickheads who want to flaunt their intelligence. Was it too much of a stretch to say that I was laughing at a comedy gig because I wanted the rest of the audience to realise that I got the jokes? Tom Furniss wasn’t convinced.
Tom had an alternative theory as to why we laugh more in a crowd: the crowd saps the stigma from laughing. The audience at a comedy night has just paid money in order to laugh. That’s how miserable they are. They don’t want to be looked at, either. Nobody wants to be looked at unless it will make them look cool, and laughing does not look cool. Suddenly screaming a series of sighs through an open-mouthed smile is already weird, but the connotation is also that you liked the joke. When someone says “that joke wasn’t funny,” you look like an inadequate dick. Uninhibited laughter is definitely not a casual thing to do, but when you’re in the Comedy Den you’re expected to laugh, so the mood changes. Without the stigma you’re free to roar at anything and be celebrated for it.
Comfort being key to comedy explained a lot. The self-deprecating characters and generally loser-ish nature of the comedians we saw was, I discovered, the point. Nobody likes big, outlandish characters or feels comfortable around them, but the crappy, depressed derelicts of a comedy room are all people with whom we feel equal. The improvised, casual nature of the deliveries also fitted with the theory; if it seemed as though the comedians had been rehearsing, then the whole ordeal would just be a reminder of how sad this all was.
This didn’t just explain laughter in the Den, but also in the lectures. The mature student at the front of a classroom is probably comfortable asking questions and laughing at jokes because they can’t see the two hundred other students hating everything they do.
The Necessity of Naturalness
MC Nick, who we saw slink off stage at the Den, says that natural delivery is even more important when MC-ing: “you absolutely have to get an audience on your side before getting a stand up out.” This is an interactive procedure, and is therefore largely off-the-cuff, which is why he’ll only write about 60 per cent of his set and spend the rest of it calling out members of the crowd with shit vaginas.The illusion of improvisation is a vital skill for any good MC: Ben Hurley’s performance at the OUSA Comedy Night during Re O-Week was an incredible feat of feigned improv. Before the show, he’d likened using puns to showing your working; they remind the audience that, at some point, the “funny guy” they’re watching has sat down in a dark room with a pen, paper, and presumably some tears, and nutted out their set. “It’s pretty sad,” Hurley admits. His sets, on the other hand, made the crowd forget what pens and trying were, as if Otago had not already deeply suppressed this particular memory.
The dejected, unpretentious nature of the comics may have been helping the delivery, but it certainly wasn’t giving them much credibility. By committing themselves to “acting natural,” some of the less experienced performers seemed as though they were too lazy to prep. As we left the comedy, we heard murmurs of people saying they could do stand up just as well.
Ben was quick to say this spoke well of his natural delivery, but warned that it takes a bit more to become a professional. They had to be thick-skinned to go through night after night of abuse; Nick Rado told eerie tales of a comedian who waited eight years until he was funny.
Tom explained that successful comics keep trying, pulled along by the high of their first gig. Making a few of your friends laugh becomes making a room filled with people laugh harder – the ultimate social affirmation. According to Lockie, it’s like crack: the first time’s amazing, but afterwards it’s never the same. Tom explained that the first gig’s material is easier to find: you’re condensing your whole life’s funniness into ten minutes. After that, you’re forced to scrape the barrel and find more.
Miserable Material
Scraping through your thoughts for comedy eventually means accepting the fact that most of your mind is miserable. Lockie, the musical crowd-pleaser from the Den, draws parallels between comedy and therapy. “Where else do you get to talk about yourself for an hour but in comedy?” he rhetorically asked while talking to me about himself for an hour. “You’re being validated by the audience.” Where else but at a comedy night would people be prepared to hear the opinions of a 25-year-old with the life experience of an aged moss?Lockie, like many others, draws on negative experiences for his material. Part of the set I witnessed covered his cat’s death, which his family hid from him for months. In Metro, it seemed hilarious; in the old armchairs of the interview office, it was a horrific, miserable story. “It wasn’t just that the cat had died,” he confided. “My dad had killed my cat because he didn’t like it. He’s a vet, but he didn’t even use that. He just used a spade.”
Having strangers laugh at your bad experiences seems like a good prelude to suicide, but for comedians it seems to be the opposite. Lockie was quick to emphasise that by joking about your misfortune, “you find yourself removed, and commentating.” When you comment and profit from your misery there’s a plus side to the pain: instead of thinking about how much you loved your cat, you’re thinking about how much the audience will love his death. Terrible things get to have a purpose and be celebrated. In comedy, people often make jokes about the miserable things they think are about to happen, because then when it does there’s a funny element as opposed to just pain.
Simon Amstell, a popular British comedian of Jewish heritage and homosexual tendencies, is the kind of awkward person who would probably have a shitty time regardless of his cultural background and sexual orientation. His material is so bleakly self-deprecating, I can’t help but wonder if Lockie’s assertion that you can be “removed” from the experience is a mentally unhealthy response. Amstell has revealed to press that this is the case for him: “it means that I’m not feeling things fully, and that’s part of what’s wrong with me.”
When a person is prone to bad experiences to the point of sensing an imminent one, making light of their misfortune becomes not only therapy, but an anticipatory defence. However, as Amstell says, the technique has made him even more depressed by trading in the experiences that are supposed to be meaningful for an easy laugh instead.
Tiptoeing Around Taboos
We can all agree, then, that dark comedy’s an odd endeavour for a comedian. What’s weirder is that we actually laugh at it. An easy way to get an audience response is by fingering the forbidden, hence the nervous cackles at dinner tables when my grandmother explains that her dentures let her give better head.Some comedy, though, goes past mere grossness and into the three Rs: rape, race and religion. Can these things get the same laughs as your garden-variety vulgarity? Ben says “yes”: anything can be made into a clever joke. It isn’t the subject matter that makes someone laugh, but the joke it’s crafted into. The appeal of the three Rs is that they build up tension in the audience, so when it turns out the rest of the statement is just a joke, they laugh. The laughter comes from the implicit idea that the risqué topics carry a lot of weight and are important, so when they are made light of the audience is relieved.
Despite being “the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen” – Ben’s words, not mine – Dane Cook’s rape joke is perhaps the best example of turning a taboo subject into a funny, accessible societal critique: he doesn’t mock rape, or rape survivors, but rather the culture surrounding and supporting it.
However, this was not enough to convince MC Nick that the three Rs weren’t dangerous. He explained that his greatest fear regarding his material wasn’t offending someone, but having someone agree with him. When he makes jokes about gays and nobody challenges him, he worries that someone won’t realise that the whole joke isn’t “gays suck,” but rather “wouldn’t it be stupid if people actually believed that gays suck.” Saying rude things about the gays is usually unchallenged in a comedy setting, so it’s not a big step for the audience or homophobe to think that the same things can be said unchallenged in reality, too.
A Natural Conclusion
Why, with such trials and tribulations, do so many people have the chutzpah to assume they, too, could be great stand up comics? The big names on campus believe that the general populous’ mistaken beliefs are actually a result of the comedians’ talent. “The key to stand up is to make it look effortless,” Ben said, reaffirming the necessity of naturalness. “If everyone else wants to do it, it’s probably because you’re doing your job quite well.” Nick agreed, saying that he feels the droves of amateur wannabes are “the ultimate compliment.”There seems to be an overwhelming view that naturalness, or the illusion of it, is the most important part of stand up delivery. The appeal and need for naturalness in comedy have shaped it from the one-liners of the 1950s into the self-depreciating, dark, and seemingly improvised ordeal it is today.
Not only is delivery changing, but, as Lockie informed us, the types of show are moving forward. Instead of stand up being the main place to see people like Ben Hurley and other NZ celebrities, TV panel shows are. Lockie’s latest show blends the audience environment and interaction of stand up with the improvisation of panel shows. The show, Relapse, pushes these new aspects of comedy and removes the chances of any show being the same. As such, everyone who seemed scripted during the comedy night will have to work with little opportunity for preparation, and plenty for failure.