by Ken Jennings
“People drive as much as eight hours to get to my shows sometimes, and they listen to episodes of my shows in the car!” Benson told me, marveling at his devotees’ dedication. “Plus there’s the name tag thing. I jokingly said that audience members should bring name tags so I can remember their names, and next thing I knew, elaborate name tags started appearing at all of my shows.”
To be clear, Doug Loves Movies ticketholders don’t bring conventional shirt-lapel name tags. Instead these are more often full-sized movie-parody posters that punnily incorporate the fan’s name into the title: Hot Tub Tim Machine, Hannah-merican Werewolf in London, Ten Things I Hate About Stu. Each panelist chooses a fan to play for and brings silly prizes for the winner. In 2016, Benson began letting panelists use their name tag owners as “lifelines” during gameplay, so the audience is now literally playing along. The fans are surrogate cohosts and writing staff as well, tweeting Benson ideas for games they’d like to see. They suggest categories for Doug Loves Movies standbys like “The Leonard Maltin Game” (a Name That Tune variant—how many actor names will you need to identify a movie from a capsule entry in Leonard Maltin’s movie guide?)I or movie combos for “Build-a-Title” (movie titles chained together: A Few Good Men in Black Beauty and the Beastmaster and Commander: The Far Side of the World According to Garp). The show developed the same way a “Build-a-Title” does: everything builds on everything else.
Doug Loves Movies is wildly successful, but it’s just one of the approximately one billion comedy podcasts being made today.II Most aren’t as extravagantly embellished or as rigorously structured as Doug Loves Movies. A more common template just has a comedian chatting with a guest or shooting the breeze with a bunch of comedy friends, and then uploading the recording with very little editing. It’s a medium that plays to a stand-up comedian’s natural strengths, it costs almost nothing to produce and distribute, and when successful it can be a way to reach over a million listeners per month. Some podcast comedians, like Comedy Bang! Bang!’s Scott Aukerman, The Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick, and WTF’s Marc Maron, have even seen their living room–style gabfests adapted into TV shows and grown to become the cornerstones of mini–media empires.
Podcasting and social media have redrawn the landscape of what it means to work in comedy today. But more fundamentally, they’ve also changed our sense of what it means to be funny.
Why Lenny Can’t Cook
In ancient Rome, they had a name for the worst kind of jokester: he was a scurra. Scurra has usually been rendered in English as “buffoon” by translators, but it’s also the source for our word “scurrilous,” meaning “vulgar or abusive.” To the Romans, the scurra was someone who made his way in society by telling tiresome, insulting jokes—not just a boor but, in modern comedy parlance, a hack. One of the worst qualities of a Roman jokester, according to Cicero, was that he used jokes “brought from home” instead of ones made up on the spur of the moment. Obviously prewritten quips, Cicero cautioned his fellow orators, “are generally frigid.”
But carefully premeditated comedy has been the dominant mode of being funny for most of recorded history, because humor is just too fragile to leave to chance. Even a legend like Mark Twain, when asked to give an after-dinner speech, would laboriously write his remarks out longhand and then memorize them word for word. We love stories of acerbic off-the-cuff put-downs by Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde, but part of us knows they’re fantasies: impossible to verify, probably too good to be true. They’re wit porn.
That all changed with Lenny Bruce. In comedy, everything goes back to St. Lenny. Today Bruce is mostly remembered as a free-speech martyr—threatened by vice squads for telling jokes about the Pope, targeted by the cops so many times that a fellow comedian began following him around on tour as an emergency understudy, arrested fifteen times for using words like “schmuck” and “tuches” in his act, sentenced to four months’ hard labor in New York State for obscenity, blacklisted by so many nightclub owners that his career died not long before he did (of a morphine overdose at the age of forty). But listening to Bruce today, you don’t immediately hear the rabble-rouser. In part that’s because his most scabrous nightclub material never made it to magnetic tape. But it’s also because jokes that might have pushed boundaries in the straitlaced fifties don’t seem nearly as edgy today. In his famous “Christ and Moses” bit, introduced as police evidence at his 1963 obscenity trial in Chicago, Bruce’s premise is that if Jesus were to come back today—get this!—He might be shocked at the glitz and hypocrisy of the modern church. Even if that was a fresh take on religion fifty years ago, it certainly isn’t today.
What still feels most contemporary in Lenny Bruce recordings is how informal he is, as if thirty years of tuxedoed club comics had never existed. Prior to Bruce, it was clear why comedians called their jokes a “routine” or an “act.” The former emphasized the roteness of recycled stage comedy, the latter its inherent dishonesty. On his records, Bruce started out doing a slightly more political take on what were essentially silly Shelley Berman telephone routines: German talent agents remaking young paperhanger Adolf Hitler into a feared dictator, President Eisenhower skeptically interrogating his embattled aide Sherman Adams. But that wasn’t how he saw live comedy—even in his most formal surroundings, like when he played Carnegie Hall in 1961. “I can’t be ponderous,” he explained to the crowd that night. “People say to me, ‘How come you don’t do the bits in the records?’ ” He compares that to hearing a neighbor tell the same anecdote over and over at a party as new people join the conversation. By the fifth time, the joke’s not making you laugh anymore. “He’s corrupt, man, he’s not funny! Why doesn’t he stop with that boring story? . . . So that’s it! If you dig hearing the same thing, go by your neighbor’s, man! But I can’t. As soon as it becomes repetitive to me, I can’t cook with it anymore.”
As a result, Lenny Bruce onstage just talked. He thought out loud. On his Carnegie Hall recording, he begins by telling a long, aimless story about his recent travel woes trying to get to Philadelphia during a weather delay, then gets sidetracked yelling at some galoot in the balcony for a full minute. Whole sentences fade out into unintelligible muttering. He’ll make a funny observation (a mini-story about a doting mother who has no idea that her perfect son is gay—she’s always bragging about how much he loves Halloween, brings servicemen home, etc.) and then move on half a sentence later without even finishing the thought. He’ll seem to be building to a point, then wander off on a tangent for three or four minutes, then take up the thread again when it peters out. It’s brilliant, but it’s more like going out to lunch with a nervous, entertaining friend than it is like any kind of performance.
Bruce’s stage style is often compared to jazz, and his recordings make that an easy comparison today. He keeps calling people “cats” and money “bread” and the venue “this scene.” He says “dig it” as punctuation and compulsively snaps his fingers. He’s so Lenny Bruce all the time that it’s crazy! But the jazzlike improvisation hasn’t aged a day, the sense that anything could happen at any point and it would always be something new. Music, like comedy, had been tightly scripted for centuries. Performers would come to the stage and play exactly what someone else had written, down to the littlest sixteenth note. It was part of Bruce’s contrarianism that he refused to play the score, even if he had written it himself. Getting sidetracked into his own thoughts and riding them wherever they went was the whole point.
Audiences have long had to grapple with the fact that Bruce wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny in the vein of the comedians he so obviously influenced: George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor. I’ve heard modern comedians from Patton Oswalt to Bill Maher parrot the modern received wisdom: as comics go, Bruce was important, but not terribly funny. The first half of that sentence is undeniable. Lenny Bruce’s name is most often invoked to explain boundary-pushing comedians like Sam Kinison or Sarah Silverman, but an act doesn’t need shocking sexual frankness to owe a debt
to Bruce; his voice is easy to hear anytime a stand-up goes obviously off script into his own head (like Andy Kindler), or giggles at his own jokes (like Mitch Hedberg), or puts candor ahead of polish (like Maria Bamford). Without Bruce, you wouldn’t have the confessional alt-comedians of the 1990s, the Janeane Garofalos and Marc Marons, picking at their scabs onstage. You wouldn’t have Todd Barry putting together a 2013 “Crowd Work” tour (and subsequent Netflix special) in which he left his jokes at home and just riffed with audience members for almost two hours every night.
But what about the second contention, that Bruce wasn’t particularly funny? It might not have bothered him. “Joke-telling is not my shtick,” he told the Carnegie Hall crowd. Later in his career, when he would often spend his time at the microphone just reading his own trial transcripts aloud, he would end his performance by apologizing. “I’m sorry I haven’t been very funny, but you see, I’m not a comedian. I’m Lenny Bruce.”
Naked Honesty
Today, we are living in Cicero’s utopia: spontaneous humor, in the form of podcasts, panel shows, social media, and the like, has finally become ascendant over the canned variety. And Lenny Bruce’s apology still applies: it’s the rare comedy podcast that’s as wall-to-wall funny as a scripted comedy act or show, just as few serious podcasts can match the polish or careful research of a nonfiction book or Frontline special. But in podcasting, that doesn’t matter so much, because the medium is the message. Intimacy, not careful execution, is the engine that drives the whole enterprise. Forty-two million Americans are now weekly podcast listeners, and the average listener spends five hours and seven minutes a week with their shows. Five hours and seven minutes! Your podcasts accompany you to the gym, drive to work with you, ramble on while you make dinner.III Most often, their voices are right in your ears, talking just to you. You’re not in an audience. You’re in a relationship.
Seattle musician John Roderick became a full-time raconteur when his band, The Long Winters, went on indefinite hiatus around 2010. The following year, he began recording his lengthy phone calls with tech writer Merlin Mann and releasing them in podcast form: Roderick on the Line. “After five years, people think they know me,” he told me when I asked about his listeners. “To their credit, they know we’re not friends, but they think we’re the kind of people they could be friends with, if not for whatever. ‘If I didn’t live in Kansas City.’ ‘If my college friends hadn’t all moved away.’ ” The alienation of modern life is real and devoted friends are sometimes in short supply. We’ll settle for kindred spirits.
Comedy podcasting magically grants us a peer group that is not just faithful but funny. As listeners, we become part of the sparkling repartee. Late-night talk shows and sitcoms have always traded on the same appeal, of course. Johnny Carson was a reassuringly avuncular guardian angel who would check in on you every night before you went to bed; NBC’s Friends was your quirky peer group, upgraded. But podcasts are a way to mainline that sweet showbiz immersion. Now the chummy comedy voices aren’t telling jokes delivered by a room full of writers. The laughs aren’t carefully workshopped, with every beat of the delivery timed down to the millisecond. Instead, the rhythm is unstudied, organic. Some jokes fall flat. Mostly the comics are just telling real-life stories undoctored or trading repartee with funny colleagues. That’s the same stuff we civilians imagine ourselves doing at our funniest moments. Comedians: they’re just like us!
In podcast culture, we also imagine that we are seeing the comedian as they actually are, warts and all. If nothing else, it seems like it would be exhausting to maintain a funny onstage persona over hundreds of hours in front of a podcast mic. There’s more than a little truth to this. Many of the most famous stage personas in comedy history have been about as real as pro wrestling gimmicks. In his act, Jack Benny was famed for his cheapness; in real life, he was one of the most generous philanthropists in Hollywood (and generally overtipped waiters, to make sure word never got around that his stinginess was real). In the 1960s, a young comedian named Jack Roy had no success with his angry, hostile stage persona; after some midlife legal troubles, he came back to comedy with a more self-deprecating line of jokes, changed his stage name to Rodney Dangerfield, and the rest was history.
A carefully groomed image can do half the work for a comedian before he even takes the stage. Jack Benny’s most famous joke came on his radio show in 1948, when a stickup man threatened him with the line, “Your money or your life!” Benny paused to consider for ten seconds while the studio laughter built to a roar. “I’m thinking it over!” he finally said. The line is only funny because the audience knows about his cheapskate reputation; with any other comedian, it’s not even a joke. Kliph Nesteroff memorably wrote that Jack Benny’s comedic persona let him land “punch lines in 1959 that had been set up in 1939,” an unparalleled feat. Or a comedian can get laughs by swimming upstream against their established persona. A young Woody Allen regularly got his biggest laughs with nonjokes about his sexual magnetism and prowess.IV
Everyone has a soft spot for certain comedians with big, exaggerated stage personas—Andy Kaufman, Pee-wee Herman, Phyllis Diller—but that school of comedy has never seemed less relevant than it does right now. Our most beloved comedy stars still have distinctive personalities, but we demand they be plausible! Andrew Clay’s misogynistic “Diceman” from the 1980s and Phil Soltanek’s quavery man-child “Emo Philips” are cartoon characters, but Larry David’s “put-upon misanthrope” and Dave Chappelle’s “weed-smoking provocateur” and Maria Bamford’s “fragile misfit battling both adulthood and mental illness” just seem like honest (if selective) versions of their real selves. Longtime dues-payers like Amy Schumer and Louis C.K. leapt to mainstream stardom not with increasingly clever shtick, but by baring the darkest corners of their souls.
In August of 2012, Tig Notaro went onstage at Los Angeles’s Largo comedy club and on the spur of the moment decided to replace her planned jokes with a brutally candid half-hour monologue about three recent blows: a breakup, her mother’s death, and a Stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis. “Good evening, hello, I have cancer,” she began her set. That’s not an opening joke that a Bob Hope or a Milton Berle would necessarily have recommended, but before long the stunned audience was hanging on every word. Two years later, with her cancer in remission, she would often show off her double-mastectomy scars to comedy crowds. Sometimes she would do the second half of her set topless. Instead of alienating audiences, Notaro’s frankness about her personal life turned her from a respected “comic’s comic” into a household name overnight.V She sold a memoir to HarperCollins, starred in a Netflix documentary about her life, and had her semiautobiographical comedy series One Mississippi picked up by Amazon.
It’s My Friend Who Doesn’t Know Me
Boston-born writer and comedian Jen Kirkman started her popular I Seem Fun podcast in 2013. Subtitled The Diary of Jen Kirkman, I Seem Fun is confessional by design, generally recorded by Kirkman while she’s propped up alone in bed, free-associating about stories from her week or pet peeves or whatever comes to mind. When she posted the first episode, she described it like this: “It’s stream of consciousness with a point. It’s like this—Jen wants to talk to you so that you know who she is. Then we can go from there. It’s an easy and free thing to do for thoughts that are too long to tweet and ideas that aren’t quite yet stand-up or other things. It’s your friend leaving you a really long voice-mail message—hopefully an entertaining one.” That’s as good a mission statement as any for today’s more spontaneous, intimate comedy. It’s your friend.
Kirkman told me that her podcast has changed her career and fan base. The chunk of the audience she actually talks to, the ones who stay for meet-and-greets, all feel like they know her from her podcast. They’re invested. “I got a letter once—okay, an e-mail—from a listener,” she said. “She had become a fan of my podcast before knowing my stand-up. She said that she went to see me do stand-up and felt herself rooting for me, loo
king around the room as I got laughs as if she knew me. She felt proud that this person she ‘knew’ from a podcast was showing a different side of herself and it was working.”
That connection is key. In such a crowded comedy marketplace, stand-ups on tour can’t expect to sell out shows to clubgoing casuals who are fine with catching Generic Comedian X. (“As seen on Conan!”) To make a living, they need to be appointment viewing. “It’s easy to just decide to skip seeing a comedy show one night because ‘she’s so funny but I want to stay in tonight and return e-mails,’ ” said Kirkman. “But if people feel that they know a performer and aren’t just looking to laugh but to feel connected—they’ll come out and see that comic.”
The most famous storytelling moment in the history of comedy is probably the last twenty minutes of Richard Pryor’s Live on the Sunset Strip, in 1982. Pryor relives the night two years earlier when, after a days-long bender freebasing cocaine, he poured 151-proof rum all over his body and lit himself on fire. It was a dazed suicide attempt, and it came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding. Pryor spent six weeks in a hospital, undergoing an agonizing series of skin treatments, sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, and surgeries. At first glance, it’s not the most promising material for a stand-up set.
