ha-ha not-funny

By Robbie on June 22, 2009

On Friday I went with some friends to a comedy club in Manhattan's meatpacking district to see the ever-brilliant Maria Bamford. On the bill was a second, male comedian, and off it, but stealthily piggybacked on, were two others, a Korean lady and a middle-aged man from Queens. All three illustrated in their own styles why Miss Bamford, to her credit but maybe not overall liquidity, exists in a realm above stand-up as a form and a circuit. Here are some things she didn't do: perform a blow-job on the microphone; berate the audience for not laughing at her; indulge in faux-improvised, Carson-like "saves" on failed jokes and botched deliveries; tell jokes; solicit applause for the wait staff; laugh at herself; exploit any particularities of her body to brand herself, or pre-empt anyone's crude impression of her by insulting her sex or race or weight or ethnicity; swear (much); yell; riff on things we've all noticed in our everyday lives. Her success lies partly in not showing strong interest in the observers out in the room.

If you've heard my records you don't need the disclaimer, but: I like coarse jokes plenty. And laugh at enough run-of-the-mill stand-up (including the Korean lady's blow-job joke). And understand the usefulness of and need for some professional standardization even in an art that affects to be spontaneous and scabrous. But how about a little creativity along with it? In the acoustic country galaxy with which I'm familiar, a few giant stars like Earl Scruggs and Tony Rice have distorted the gravitational field, pulling in swarms of less-imaginative artists with their massive stylistic inventions. From what I can see of stand-up, a few bold old-timers, like Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby, have done the same. 

The setting in which the careerist cut-ups have to perform has its own difficulties. The merciless hawking of watered-down drinks. The dumpy set with brick wall, stool, straight mikestand, funny-font club logo. The grim office-party dullards pressed tightly into rows of sticky black tables. The manic succession of act after act after act. I observed to my friend Bryn that my instinctive response to each new person popping out from the curtain to prod my funnybone was an ice-cold, gritted-teeth revulsion. "Yes," he said, "each one has afresh to turn the giant battleship around." Though I've never worked in comedy, it looks to me even tougher and more crowded with miserable humans than music, and Bryn's metaphor, with its odor of war and Sisyphean effort, strikes me as dead-on.

To close on a more upbeat note, I saw the Roundabout Theater's production of "Waiting for Godot" two days later, and thought it was terrific -- inspiring, hilarious, and full of heart. It's tricky enough to manage a piece of music or theater with an element or two of excellence, much less this, with its pretty evenly fine cast, set, costumes, and script. A good script is like combustible material and performers the sparks. My kids and I were talking about what Samuel Beckett was getting at for a long time afterward, and if anyone from the show happens to read this -- thanks!