Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  The crowd is cheering when time runs out. Pundance turned in an incredible performance but I’d call this one for Isaac. Soon, a chant erupts: “Two more minutes! Two more minutes!”

  Jo puts her hand over her face and shakes her head.

  “You guys keep chanting and we’re gonna be here all night.”

  Everybody screams even louder.

  “All right,” she yells, reaching for the timer. “Two more minutes, same topic. Go!”

  “At the end of the day, you’ll find I’m the bigger asshole,” Pundance says immediately, and points at his eyeball. “I-risk a lot by saying that, but I believe it.”

  Isaac has a slightly trembling smile at the one-two punch, but he spits fire right back.

  “As long as we’re talking about eyes,” he says, “you should shut up and be my pupil.”

  The crowd explodes. Pundance waits for the laugh to die down, grinning like he has something ready for this.

  “You guys went pretty crazy for that one, considering how cornea joke it was.”

  Something in the room ruptures and the air is now made of howling. Onstage, Isaac and Pundance have inched forward and are now in each other’s faces.

  “I think for me, trouble is afoot,” Isaac says, accurately.

  When the timer goes off, Jo and Fred have to physically pull Isaac and Pundance apart. They’re both smiling, and they clearly respect each other’s skills, but the potency of the moment has them so keyed up it looks like a prelude to a fistfight. Instead, the pair breaks one of the only steadfast rules at Punderdome, and clasps each other in a bear hug.

  The clap-o-meter goes center stage, and Isaac is up first. The Littlefield crowd is loud, but they’re obviously holding back. Pundance is going to win.

  He came here with no experience, like Punky Brewster, and somehow blew the roof off the place. While he may not have experience with pun competitions, I’m convinced he must have some experience onstage in one form or another. Pretty much everyone who kills here does. I’m just curious what his is.

  After the show is over, Pundance, whose real name is Matt Chaves, is swallowed by a congratulatory swarm. A few minutes later, though, I jostle my way through and ask what he does.

  He’s a stand-up comedian. Of course he is.

  Semifinals

  8

  @ the Joke of Midnight

  The crowd at Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank had no idea what they’d just gotten themselves into. Buying tickets to something called Uncle Clyde’s Comedy Contest certainly counts as a caveat emptor situation, but nobody likely anticipated seeing the brawny bulk of Ben Ziek bound onstage to recite some puns.

  Years before he discovered improv, Ziek made his live performance debut as a stand-up comedian. The foundation of his act back then was not puns, but rather impressions. He’d do Kermit the Frog singing “Rainbow Connection,” and he had a mean Swedish Chef in his repertoire. He did stand-up in coffeehouses and college shows, once even opening for a popular campus headliner whose name he can’t recall. By the time he cobbled together forty-five minutes, though, he was five years in, and most of his references were out of date. (Not Kermit, though. The relevance of Kermit the Frog will outlive us all.) Soon he gave up stand-up and started doing improv instead. But recently, he’s been attempting a comeback.

  With years of live performance under his belt, Ziek has started going to open mics at Flappers, along with the occasional booked gig. Instead of impressions, his new act capitalizes on his status as the World Champion of Pun Competitions. He started off writing a pun a day on Twitter in an effort to gather enough material to fill a few minutes. He only drew from his road-tested catalog of Punniest of Show routines for his set’s grand finale. The crowd response so far has been substantially less batshit than what Ziek usually gets at O. Henry, but he plans on sticking with it. As Gary Hallock could vouch, though, stand-ups who try punning are usually way more successful than punsters who try stand-up.

  Making a pun is comedy math, and all stand-up comedians are basically Isaac Newton. So when a stand-up comedian comes to a pun competition, she is more or less a wizard. Not only can stand-ups make quick, unexpected connections between words and ideas, they also have the instincts and timing to make anything sound like a punch line. In the same way punsters see word-contortion opportunities everywhere, a comic can funny up any sentence. The rhythm of a joke just becomes automatic, along with knowing which words to hit the hardest. And whether it’s dealing with hecklers or doing crowd work, stand-up comedians always learn how to think on their feet and craft jokes out of whatever the moment provides them.

  The Pundance Kid’s victory at the first Dome of the year is an extreme example of how being a stand-up works in your favor at a pun competition. Sometimes the influence flows the other way, though. It certainly did in Darren Walsh’s case.

  Walsh was a pun-obsessed illustrator and animator living in the United Kingdom when he first set foot onstage to do stand-up in 2010. Rather than downplay his punning addiction, he made it the centerpiece of his act.

  “A few of you are probably wondering why I have a projector here,” he says in one routine, gesturing to a screen behind him as two words appear. “It’s so I can literally project ‘I’ll vomit.’” He then waits a beat before adding, “That’s a sick joke.”

  In his first few years of performing, Darren began earning awards and landing on Comics to Watch lists. When the UK Pun Championships launched in 2014, Darren won. The following year, he took his first solo show, Punderbolt, to Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival on the planet. It was a smash. At the time I got in touch with him, he was preparing to bring his second show, S’Pun, to the 2016 Fringe. Over just a handful of years, Darren had managed to build a thriving live act purely on the strength of puns.

  “The UK comedy circuit is ​very different from the American one in that way,” Darren says. “It might be because in America having ‘a message’ or an observation is more important, whereas here it’s acceptable to just be silly.”

  Yes, clearly nobody in America would be interested in, say, three hundred pages of people being silly with puns. But Walsh might be onto something. Apart from the great ginger exception of Carrot Top, very few stateside stand-ups have puns in their acts. American comics seem acutely aware of puns’ reputation as the lowest form of humor and so they strive to avoid being painted with that brush at all costs. The American comic most associated with wordplay in recent years, though, is probably Myq Kaplan. Whether he likes it or not.

  Myq’s initial claim to fame was placing fifth on Last Comic Standing, a TV show that emerged from the early 2000s gold rush to give every profession its own American Idol. Since then Myq has appeared on just about all the late-night talk shows and he’s released several albums, a Comedy Central half hour, and a Netflix special. Although his style has definitely evolved along the way, each of these releases is at heart a playful celebration of language that includes some amount of punning.

  “I want to assure you that of the number of puns that cross through my brain, only the smallest fraction come out of my mouth,” Myq tells me as we swerve through traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

  If you’ve spent any time around Myq Kaplan onstage, online, or in a moving vehicle, the idea that the puns he shares are just the tip of some lexical iceberg is frankly terrifying.

  We had planned to meet for coffee, but after e-mailing back and forth a few times, he invited me on his podcast instead. It was just easier that way. Going for coffee with a comedian and no microphone in 2016 is just an Unrecorded Podcast.

  On Myq’s show, Hang Out with Me, we talked about basically everything except puns. Now as he’s driving me home from the studio in Astoria, the floodgates have opened. As he describes it, wordplay seems to be the background machinery constantly whirring in Myq’s brain. Puns, spoonerisms, and portmanteaus are always sliding in and out of place like panels on a Japanese puzzle box. He’s better equipped for it than mo
st comics, too. In college, Myq discovered he loved diagramming sentences and learning the math of language, so he majored in linguistics. He wanted to know everything there is to know about the mechanism behind his particular form of mania.

  “Certainly my interest in linguistics and my predilection for making the kind of jokes I make, those both spring from something inside,” he says, the taillights from the car ahead reflecting off his glasses. “Those are both symptoms of the same internal disease.”

  Myq doesn’t think he actually has a disease like witzelsucht, but rather an insistent compulsion. It’s what drove him to title his first album Vegan Mind Meld. It’s probably what also made him include on that album several religious frozen sperm puns in a row, including: 12 apopcicles, ejaculate conception, There’s Something About the Virgin Mary, and on and on. Myq is alternately in love with and wary of puns—especially considering how they’re perceived in the United States. In order for that religious sperm bit to work during a set, he has to warn the crowd that they’re about to go through a “pun jungle, or pungle,” and if they bear with him, it’ll all be over soon.

  These days, Myq has little use for puns in his act. Early in his career, if he thought of a solid original pun, he’d find space for it. As he amassed more material, though, he resisted being pigeonholed as a wordplay comic. His style became more geared toward “obsessive-compulsive parentheses disorder,” where in the middle of one topic he’ll burrow into a subtopic, and another subtopic within that one, like comedy Inception. His 2014 Netflix special is almost completely devoid of puns. After his closing joke mentions Hitler, though, he can’t resist ending the special with, “I hope I didn’t make you Mein Kampf-ortable.”

  Myq’s punning is now mostly restricted to Twitter. Every other tweet comes emblazoned with the warning CUTE JOKE ALERT!, followed by something like “Elephants are good at multi-tusking.” Twitter is where comics like Myq go to bury the puns they can’t use onstage and to lance the boil of wordplay building up beneath the surface. It’s also where armchair comics proudly display their puns while playing along with @Midnight, a show where Myq has both worked as a warm-up comic and appeared as a guest. A lot of comedians dismiss the show’s Twitter participation as amateur hour, a blizzard of timeline-clogging obnoxiousness. When those same comedians actually go on the show, though, they appear to enjoy themselves. Probably because it’s the one place they can pun in public without warning people that it’ll all be over soon.

  Back when Myq Kaplan was on Last Comic Standing and Darren Walsh was first trying out stand-up, Alex Blagg was nursing an obsession with Twitter games. They seemed to pop up out of nowhere once or twice a week and commandeer his entire feed. Something like #BreakfastFilms would appear and then a marquee comic like Patton Oswalt would tweet “Omelet the Right One In” and then, voilà, an amateur pun avalanche would come tumbling down. It was lightning in search of a bottle.

  One day, Blagg wrote down in a Google doc of project ideas: “Game show where comedians compete at hashtag games.” Then he forgot about it. Half a year later, when he was launching a production company, the screenwriter found himself combing through that Google doc for ideas to pitch. The Twitter game show looked like a winner. After troubleshooting through a few potential formats, Blagg and his partners eventually created a pilot episode. Wisely, they ditched the original name of the show: Twitter Dome.

  The tone of the @Midnight pilot was arch and satirical. Its big conceptual joke was the idea of taking Twitter super, super seriously. The set looked like a James Bond villain’s secret volcano-lair—as though contestants might be killed off if they couldn’t come up with a decent #BreakfastFilm (e.g., Waffle Metal Jacket) fast enough. They’ve since dialed back on the smoke machines and lasers, surgically removing the ironic quote marks from the competition. By the time @Midnight made it to air, the series resembled more of a gamified Daily Show with a heavy Internet focus. Of course, the viewers playing Hashtag Wars at home still ended up taking the competition as seriously as the pilot suggested they should. Some contestants did, too.

  “I really wasn’t trying to lose, ” Jen Kirkman says in the hall backstage. She has just lost on @Midnight, playing against Paul F. Tompkins and Randy Sklar.

  “Oh, I know you weren’t!” Paul says, a smile breaking out beneath his riverboat gambler’s mustache. “I kept looking over at you and you were like fucking into it.”

  The two walk so loosely beside each other, it’s obvious there’s no tension between them. Neither cares about winning a game as much as they care about helping each other put on a funny show. But Paul is right. There was a moment during the taping when I saw a predatory look flash across Jen’s face—a look I associated with Punderdome. It was the kind of severe smile someone about to crack a joke makes after sliding from They’re gonna love this to They’d better love this. That’s the unexpected side effect that happens when comedy meets competition.

  Continuing down the hall, we pass a section on the backside of the set where all the contestants so far have graffitied their names in marker. It’s sprawling enough to look like a mass memorial for the Comedian Wars of the 2010s. At this moment, @Midnight is nearing its four-hundredth episode. That’s four hundred hashtags. Four hundred For the Win rounds. An incalculable sum of ad-libs from whip-smart host Chris Hardwick, the comedian and podcaster who is so integral to the show, his name is in the official title, @Midnight with Chris Hardwick. Since its debut in 2013 @Midnight has brought consistently high ratings, earned an Emmy, and more important for our purposes, it’s turned the Internet into a pun competition just about every night of the week.

  @Midnight is an impressive showcase of just how funny stand-up comics can be without any prepared material. They make one joke after another, round after round, and they make it look easy. Unlike the devoted hordes contributing #SadTVShows and #RuinAChildrensBook entries from home, the comics actually have a ticking clock and a live audience. (I arrived at NooseRadio and Red Vag of Courage, respectively, only after several minutes of deep thought.) It’s the difference between singing in the shower and, well, singing in the shower on a comedy game show on TV. When I visit the set during the week of @Midnight’s first-ever Tournament of Champions, I hope to find out how the show’s best get so damn good at it.

  After arriving at the enormous, cotton-candy-colored Stage 2 of Hollywood Center Studios—where I Love Lucy was filmed, I’m told twice—the first thing I want to see is the writers’ room. It’s an option that apparently is not on the table, though.

  “We sacrifice goats in there,” Alex Blagg says. Further prodding reveals that the room is sealed with bureaucratic red tape from the network. Alex’s hands are tied. Instead, he shows me the crafts service table—which has a Dionysian smorgasbord of Slim Jims, Fritos, and peanut M&M’s, along with a sloppy joe maker—and tells me about the writers’ room.

  In the same way a punch line is only as strong as its setup, the comics on @Midnight only get to tomahawk-dunk most of their jokes with an alley-oop from the writers. Plenty of jokes naturally arise from the guests’ interplay with the host and each other, but the jokes they make in the rapid-fire games have been reverse engineered with precision.

  The writing staff, whose room I am not allowed within, is split just about evenly between stand-up and improv performers. Some of the more established ones, like Shelby Fero and Blaine Capatch, occasionally compete on the show, but all the writers have a chance to play the game every single day. It’s their job to field-test each segment and make sure that night’s guests will be able to extract enough jokes out of it. A Hashtag War, for instance, generally won’t make it on the air unless ten to fifteen minutes of spitballing in the room yields forty to fifty decent jokes from the writers. This is exactly what the O. Henry committee does with new pun categories before approving them, although something tells me this is probably the funnier place to be.

  Compared to how vast the audience appears in panning shots on a flatscreen, the seating area for
@Midnight now looks about the size of a modest sandbox. (It’s amazing what can be accomplished with soaring camera jibs.) The set itself looks bigger, though. It’s encased by glass walls streaked with white pulsating lines and circles meant to suggest circuitry, but which look more like a tube map of London. A handler escorts me to a seat a few rows back from the front, where the people with the most visually interesting hair are concentrated.

  “You will be on TV more than everybody else,” a refrigerator-size warm-up comic named Roger tells them. “So no resting bitch face.” Everyone laughs, implicitly agreeing to the terms.

  Chris Hardwick, or Papa Bear as Roger calls him, is instantly amped as he settles in at his podium, a steel sandwich with two Facebook-blue lights as the bread. With a background in improv, stand-up, and futilely attempting to distract horny viewers from cohost Jenny McCarthy on MTV’s Singled Out, he is an ideal host—for this show, and, hypothetically, for Punderdome. He’s quick, he’s generous with whoever else is onstage, and he’s nowhere near too cool to make puns.

  In his nightly uniform of well-fitted suit, skinny tie, and carefully disheveled hair, Chris is normally the most dapper on the show. Tonight, however, Paul F. Tompkins is wearing a straight-up black tuxedo with a violet pocket square, decisively winning any unofficial sartorial competition. Jen Kirkman and Randy Sklar look perfectly fine, but the disparity between them and Paul makes it seem like either they or he were deceived about a dress code in an elaborate prank.

  When Chris announces the Hashtag War, I’m sad to see that it’s not even slightly punnable. Instead, tonight’s entry, #IfTrumpWins, makes good on the universal truth that Donald Trump is the most reliable joke target of 2016. The very next game, however, produces almost exclusively pun responses.