by Ken Jennings
But the fire stuff kills, put over by Pryor’s dazzling charisma and some of his best jokes of the night. There’s an unbelievable story about Pryor in his hospital room watching a news report saying he died five minutes ago (“You find God quick when they find your ass dead!”) and an even better one about a hospital orderly who wants Pryor’s last autograph. But the highlight is a long chunk about what it’s like to get a sponge bath when your body is covered in third-degree burns. Pryor mimes the excruciating pain, begging so convincingly that tears come to his eyes. “Don’t wash no more! Not even my little finger!” Huge waves of laughter wash over the stage, but the laughs are different now. This isn’t the funny side of his ordeal. This is a show of support; the crowd is responding because they love him and are glad he’s okay.
There’s something transcendent that happens between a comedian and an audience that I’ve never seen in any other kind of art or performance. A theater actor barely sees the audience through thousands of watts of stage lighting. Painters and authors work alone for hypothetical eyeballs from the future. Popular music is less of a one-way street: a rock band or hip-hop artist can feed on the energy of the crowd, to the delight of their fans. But that give-and-take feels even closer at a comedy show, because of the total absence of mystique.VI The venue is usually smaller, the material more confessional and spontaneous, the performer more relatable. “It’s that feeling you get when you’re proud of the human race for being able to do something wondrous,” comedy writer George Meyer told me, reminiscing about the alt-comedy shows he used to see at LA’s UnCabaret in the 1990s. “You just felt all these boundaries falling away like icicles. It doesn’t happen enough, but it’s probably the best feeling on earth.”
Richard Pryor didn’t have a podcast, but he understood the personal bond that turns well-crafted comedy into something greater. He introduces the fire story by telling a crowd of three thousand people—not to mention the millions who later bought the album or saw the concert film—that they’re all his confidants now. “I’m gonna tell y’all the truth tonight,” he says. “You gotta promise not to tell nobody.”
The 24/7 Comedian
The risk is oversharing, as Jen Kirkman is no doubt well aware. As a woman in comedy, her day-to-day reality is random creepy guys annoying her online. They feel they know her from her podcast and stand-up work, and whether that’s true or not, they haven’t made the mental leap to realize that she doesn’t know them. And a single off-the-cuff podcast comment can snowball into a thing—as it did in 2015, when Kirkman mentioned on I Seem Fun that she felt uncomfortable touring with a certain A-list comedian who had made advances to her and had a pervy reputation with women comics in general. Many listeners assumed (correctly, it turned out) that Kirkman was talking about then-beloved comedy star Louis C.K., and suddenly she was getting more media attention for her candor than for her comedy. She quickly pulled the episode.
It can be stressful; a comedian with a podcast or Twitter following is never really offstage. Paul F. Tompkins might be the most prolific podcast comedian of his time, having hosted three podcasts of his own, been a regular cast member on two more, and guested on hundreds of others (including at least two hundred Comedy Bang! Bang!s). Having fans who think they’re actually your friends can lead to entitled nitpicking (“What are entertainers doing here if they don’t want feedback?” a critical online follower of his once demanded), but on balance, he told me, the new arena has been a blessing for working comedians. The fragmentation of comedy might mean fewer people are getting fabulous seven-figure sitcom deals, but it’s created more avenues to make a good living without being a superstar. “If you’ve found your people, they will support you,” he said.
But the pace never lets up. A new special every year or two isn’t going to cut it now; comedy fans expect new laughs today. Bo Burnham told the New York Times in 2016 that fans will ask him, “Are you dead?” on Twitter if their “IV drip of entertainment” slows down even briefly. “If you’re not on [Comedy Central’s] @midnight every month,” he said, “you’re Thomas Pynchon.”
Tompkins agreed. “It’s the pressure of the immediacy of everything now. Just as a consumer of social media, you see how quickly everything moves. So there’s a fear of getting lost in the onslaught, a feeling that you have to keep piping up or people will forget you exist. I have definitely had the thought, on more than one occasion, ‘I have to tweet something.’ ”
Back in the day, someone like Joey Bishop could put together half an hour of decent material and coast on it for decades, doing the exact same bits the exact same way every night. Today’s comedians, by comparison, face an exhausting, never-ending scramble for new jokes—daily, if possible. The boom of friendly, time-filling banter hasn’t just been a matter of taste. It’s a matter of necessity.
The World Behind the Curtain
Honesty and spontaneity have never been more valued in stand-up than they are right now, but podcasts are still the best delivery vehicle for the new authenticity. They’re completely unmediated by material, unencumbered by the weird dynamic of an orator addressing a room of strangers. No comedian ever accidentally reveals anything real they don’t want to in, say, an HBO special, but on podcasts and social media, who knows where the conversation is going to go? Many comedy podcasts have meta moments where the hosts step outside the show to talk about how they think the interview might go, or how it went. WNYC’s 2 Dope Queens might swap notes about their celebrity crushes; Marc Maron might update listeners on his cats or his depression. In effect, we go backstage with them.
Lorne Michaels famously hates it when Saturday Night Live cast members “break”—crack up or break character—during a sketch, but in the last few decades it’s become a common occurrence on the show. Audiences always go nuts for it. The appeal of seeing Rachel Dratch or Horatio Sanz lose it on live television was hard to articulate. It wasn’t just the tingle of superiority, like when you spot a continuity goof or a sloppy special effect in a movie. It was something deeper, more delightful—like it was a mitzvah to be allowed to be a brief, vicarious part of such unplanned merriment!
Old-timey comedy is sometimes a tough sell for my kids, but they both love “The 2,000-Year-Old Man,” the Mel Brooks–Carl Reiner recordings in which an interviewer asks an extremely old man about his remarkable life, from prehistoric times down to the present day.
REINER: Did you have a national anthem?
BROOKS: Each cave had a national anthem.
REINER: Do you remember what yours was?
BROOKS: I certainly do. You don’t forget a national anthem. [singing] “Let ’em all go to hell, except Cave Seventy-Six!”
What’s infectious about the “2,000-Year-Old Man” routine isn’t the jokes so much as the sense that the performers are having just as much fun as the listener. Brooks and Reiner began the skit as a gag at cocktail parties, and only went onstage with it when famous friends like George Burns and Steve Allen encouraged them to make a record. The routine’s ad-libbed roots are everywhere on the recordings: Brooks trying not to crack up in advance when he knows he has a great joke lined up, Reiner asking questions he genuinely suspects might stump his kvetching partner, both barely stifling laughter sometimes after a surprising exchange. It doesn’t hurt that we know the pair were real-life friends for more than sixty-five years, who into their nineties were still meeting up to watch Jeopardy! together every weeknight.
Podcasting is a never-ending supercut of “SNL cast members goofing” moments, but without the bother of the actual sketch. We’re enjoying what we take to be the actual relationship between the comedians involved. The whole Broadway Danny Rose thing of comedians hanging out together in Manhattan delis like Lindy’s was always real,VII but, selfishly, the comics never used to invite us along. Civilians could only get a glimpse into that world by watching televised Friars Club roasts on NBC variety shows, where legends like Groucho Marx and Bob Hope would say terrible things about each other to the merriment of al
l.VIII Modern viewers may have only seen celebrity roasts in their twenty-first-century Comedy Central incarnation, in which celebs who are already Internet punch lines (Justin Bieber, Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump) try to win good-sport points by grinning through a series of staffed-out jokes delivered by an odd mix of respected comedians and random outsiders (Jewel, Shaquille O’Neal, Martha Stewart). The format is now in at least its third decade of self-parody, and the only really noteworthy sets in recent years have come from comedians trolling the whole ritual. Norm Macdonald, for example, “roasted” Bob Saget by reading insults from an old joke book that he’d copied onto index cards. “Bob has a beautiful face, like a flower. Yeah, a cauliflower!” Andy Samberg went even further afield in 2013 when he came up to the lectern to roast James Franco and then said incredibly nice things about him instead: “Oz the Great and Powerful? More like, a movie that transported me to a magical wonderland!” Today’s overprogrammed Kabuki roasts give only a faint hint of the drunken, authentic bonhomie that prevailed in Dean Martin’s day, when it was clear that everyone was there to have a good time with pals and not because an agent or publicist recommended it.IX Milton Berle explained the insult comedy of roasts this way: “It’s just a crazy way of telling people you love them.”
But the Friars Club ethos of affectionate ribbing is now mainstream. There was always something a little bit combative about stand-up comedy, because in many respects it’s a zero-sum game. You have to be a little funnier than the comedian before you and the comedian after you if you ever want to get ahead. The dawn of sketch comedy and especially improv changed that dynamic: they were art forms that put the funny people on the same side, made them into tight-knit little teams. The chilled-out yuk-trading of podcasting and Twitter continues the cooperative tradition. The only way to be funny is to make everyone else look funny as well.
Sure, there are still rough edges, because comedians can be a fragile and irritable lot. It’s not always easy to tell when they’re really getting along: Are Doug Benson and Bert Kreischer really fighting on this podcast, or just screwing around? Do Marc Maron and Michael Ian Black really hate each other today on Twitter, or is this a bit? Sometimes the comedians themselves might not even know for sure; passive-aggressive kibitzing is a tricky medium. In general, though, the modern mood of comedy isn’t jealous, bitter neurotics setting each other off, a dynamic that might have boiled a lot closer to the surface in times past. Now it’s buddies cracking each other up. A little neutered, maybe, but companionable.
Most importantly, the funny people have let us eavesdrop on their shenanigans. This confers insider status on us as well! To the modern comedy fan, who would collect comedian trading cards if that were a thing, this is nirvana. Lenny Bruce, once again ahead of the curve, spent almost ten minutes of his Carnegie Hall show educating the audience about what it’s like to do stand-up in different kinds of clubs. In 1961, that was pretty inside-baseball. But fifty-odd years later, there were so many sitcoms about the life of a stand-up comic that Maria Bamford and Patton Oswalt could rip on the convention in the first episode of her show Lady Dynamite. In the age of peak funny, every laugh is a knowing laugh.
Building a Society on the Sweetness of Folly
The drift toward a looser, chattier comedy isn’t a shocking innovation. It’s just a bigger stage for the way pretty much all people use humor all the time. Our tendency to think of laughter as the result of a joke is in many ways deeply mistaken. Sure, responding to a joke is one thing human beings use laughter for. We also use small amounts of salt in chocolate chip cookies, but cookie-baking isn’t really what salt is for.
Neuroscientist Robert Provine has spent his thirty-year career studying the psychology of laughter, recording untold hours of conversation in order to quantify how and why people laugh. He and his grad students sat in shopping centers, parks, office cubicles, and food courts, eavesdropping on strangers and creepily notating in thousands of notebook pages the laughter that dotted the conversations around them, like Amazon explorers recording birdsong. His discovery, in short, was this: everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. Most real-life laughs, for instance, didn’t follow comments that were funny at all. Even the 10 percent that were provoked by mildly funny remarks weren’t linked to real jokes, nothing so quotable you’d want to retell it to a friend later. Speakers, surprisingly, laughed 46 percent more than their audiences. And laughter may feel like a freeing paroxysm in the moment, a near-complete loss of control and composure, but Provine found that it actually followed strict mechanics: no laughs that interrupt speech, a reliable 210-millisecond gap between “ha”s, and striking temporal symmetry. (In other words, if you play a laugh backward, you don’t get subliminal satanic messages. You still get a human-sounding laugh.)
Provine also found that “LOL” is a lie. We laugh thirty times more frequently with others than when we’re alone. (For someone who’s alone, “laughing out loud!” is in reality almost always “a small smile,” but “ASS” is problematic as a texting acronym.) This isn’t the most counterintuitive of his findings, but it might be the most important. Laughter, Henri Bergson wrote a century before Provine, “must have a social signification.” This can’t be overstated: all jokes require a collaboration. You have to decide to try to make me laugh, and I have to be willing. Failing that second ingredient, even the world’s funniest bon mot, unveiled with exquisite delivery and timing, will result in stony nonlaughter. The tacit agreement has to hold on two levels: we both have to share the sense that this is an appropriate situation for joking, and then within the joke itself, we both have to be on board with its style and premise. This is true of all shared merriment. Charles Darwin once noted that even tickling will only produce laughter when “the mind [is] in a pleasurable condition.” Otherwise, all you get is a pissed-off ticklee.
Laughter, in other words, may feel deeply personal and involuntary, but in fact it’s nearly always helping to order a social web that binds people together. In 2004, two Stony Brook psychologists studying the effects of humor found that jokes told in a first encounter will bond two people faster than shared values. Faster than shared values! Cognitive scientists theorizing about the origins of humor must grapple with the fact that laughter may have evolved not as a side effect of the brain’s “amusement” response, but in parallel with it, as a way for early hominids to signal playfulness, relaxation, and intimacy—when tickling each other, when wrestling with other juveniles. In an amazingly prescient evolutionary stroke, laughter may have even predated funniness. We know that many of the great apes make laughterlike sounds when at play, putting the lie to Arthur Koestler’s famous assertion that only our species is Homo ridens, “the man who laughs.”
In 1975, psychologist Antony Chapman recorded children listening to funny audio clips through headphones. The children laughed more when they were tested in groups—even if they weren’t listening to the same material. Even more remarkably, the children rated the same recordings as funnier when they were listening with a companion or two in the room. As paradoxical as it sounds, being amused by something can sometimes be the result of laughter, rather than the other way around. I accidentally discovered the same effect while watching old episodes of M*A*S*H on DVD. Finally, after twenty years, I had the chance to experience the show the way its creator Larry Gelbart intended: without canned laughter spooned over the top of everything.X But to my surprise, when I chose the laughter-free audio track and settled in to watch, the show felt cold and mirthless, with awkward silences peppering the repartee. Over the decades, I’d become accustomed to a version of M*A*S*H that prodded me into laughing not just with the zany antics of Hawkeye and the gang, but through the magic of peer pressure as well. “Our sense of humor,” Max Eastman once observed, “is subject to stampede.”
Another popular theory about the origins of humor and laughter is that it’s all one big mating ritual gone awry. There’s some compelling evidence here: a sense of humor could have been valuable in sexual se
lection for our hominid ancestors, because then as now, it was a hard-to-fake indicator of intelligence, confidence, and other measures of reproductive fitness. On a first date, a bit of quick repartee with the waiter is a more convincing show of brains than telling your date, “Just so you know, I’m very smart.” On modern surveys, both men and women consistently rank “a good sense of humor” near the top of the list of traits they look for in a match. (This isn’t as symmetric as it might appear at first blush, though. When researchers present funny remarks in connection to photos of women, male subjects don’t rank the women any higher. It turns out that when men say “a good sense of humor,” they mean “someone who will laugh at good jokes, e.g., mine.”)
The Renaissance thinker Erasmus is best known today for his satirical 1509 essay “The Praise of Folly.” The essay is narrated by Folly herself, the goddess of all things silly and lighthearted, and she claims that no marriage will last long without her gift of good humor. “A wife [does not long tolerate] her husband,” she claims, “except as they mutually or by turns are mistaken, on occasion flatter, on occasion wisely wink, and otherwise soothe themselves with the sweetness of folly.” In fact, Erasmus goes further than that: Folly claims that this is also true of any relationship, whether in government, business, academics, or friendship. “In sum, no society, no union in life could be either pleasant or lasting without me.”
