#114 - We must stop comedians from putting sketch comedy in their standup specials

Stand-up comedy is. my. shit.

I love it so much and I truly always have.

I did not grow up in a Beatles/Stones household, we were a Lewis Black family. I learned how to use Kazaa and Limewire to get random clips from old Jim Carey sets. Chris Rock’s specials took up a huge chunk of my first iPod (it was the one with the spinny wheel, an icon of early digital tech gimme back tactile buttons!!!). Comedy Central was the channel my siblings and I most agreed on, we got stand-up DVDs for Christmas, you get it.

When I go out these days, it is not to concerts, it’s to comedy shows. (There is literally no other reason I would ever traipse all the way over to Gowanus! Not even for its famous canal.) I love a well-curated list of pros, I love watching people find their voice, and I love seeing the evolution of a set from inception to final results.

And there are SO MANY incredible comedians in New York right now (and if they move to LA I will feel personally betrayed—update, the comedian I was most hoping wouldn’t, just announced he is lolol whoops! feels like some opposite manifestation to me!) and it’s truly one of the top 5 perks living here.

The other 4 include: public transit, bodegas that are open 24 hours and always have pre-cut fruit, style for style’s sake, and Seamless. The whole art/museum/culture thing is great too.

And when I tune in for stand-up, that’s what I want to see. There are plenty of ways to play within the medium (see: Julio Torres and Rachel Bloom’s newest show) but I’m here to see someone tell jokes with a microphone, and I would prefer it to feel loose and unplanned but it’s okay if I can tell there’s a script underneath.

(I’m not operating in some delusion that these jokes are off-the-cuff but I do appreciate it when a comic is at least in-tune enough with the audience to deviate and throw some zingers in to make the night special. I’ll go see the same bits multiple times without complaint, as long as they’re good. Work on transitions or commit to the British style of plowing through jokes rapid fire.)

But I will not bend on my view that sketches are not stand-up.

And I am straight up begging comedians to stop mixing sketches into their hour-long specials.

Sketches are great and fun when you’re working with a tiny budget. They’re easy to share online and build a reputation off of. I get it.

But these artists are kind of infantilizing themselves by bringing sketches with them everywhere they go? Almost as if they don’t have a commitment to the art form of stand-up. Like they can’t stop telegraphing to the audience that the special might not be good enough on its own.

Stand-up is challenging because there’s nowhere to hide.

(Though many try to create shields—nothing is more frustrating as an audience member than being blamed for a bad joke. “Ooo didn’t like [unfunny joke relying on unexamined misogyny for a punchline] did you Brooklyn?!?!” like, no we didn’t! be funnier?? Soz!)

Cutaways to semi-related acted bits are weird, but it also feels ideologically lazy. That’s not “an hour”, that’s a compilation of eight “tight fives” in a row. And I would argue that they are not the same!

The first person I noticed this with was Nick Kroll. Then Chelsea Peretti had a weird clown thing happening during hers? I wish Jenny Slate had released a documentary & a stand-up special because I don’t love watching them combined into one.

And recently, John Early did it too.

His special is so good but then the momentum comes to the abruptest of halts and I just…did anyone laugh at these in the editing room?? I feel like my comedy meter is broken around this but I truly do! not! get it!

And the stand-up in his new HBO special deserves better!! I loved it so much I wanted more of it because I’m greedy but I also feel like he fell into the trap of making absolutely laser sharp observations and then not knowing how to end it so he builds to a comedic climax and then…sings a song.

C’mon John! I believe in you!!! I know the closer was hard to come up with but that is, in fact, why you get paid the big bucks!

Same thing with crowdwork like—I’ve seen it done well a handful of times but it really does just feel lazy and I resent that it does so well on TikTok because now it’s done so much more often at shows these days.

Sidenote: audiences have been absolutely wild lately?? So many hecklers and people who need to REACT to every joke. Babes, just laugh!!! Also, laugh instead of clapping we are not at a Ted Talk get used to laughing out loud you are in an audience it’s an active thing to participate in?? I think comedians need to get a lot more comfortable kicking people out or shutting people down harshly and figuring out how to recover because it makes me so tense as an audience member when hecklers are left unchecked. Sometimes they’re not even saying mean shit they’re just making the entire show about them and then the audience gets groany because they’re literally…ruining the show. And they may be having fun and when they get engagement from the comic rather than rebuke it reinforces the behavior did we learn nothing from Pavlov?!

The shit coming out this week about people watching YouTube while in the movie theater for Oppenheimer and the girls who thought it would be so funny to play fart sounds throughout an entire screening of Barbie. We gotta reconstruct the social contract and quick and there needs to be some bold text about filming people in public like I need platforms to be held accountable and also I need them to implement a “subject of this video did not consent to be in it” option in their report system!! And also the more algorithms reward “controversial” behavior the more people will engage in it. And Covid broke everyone’s brains a little bit and we in NO WAY need to “bring back bullying” but I think that’s often just a poorly worded plea of "we used to have well-established boundaries about performing certain behaviors in public spaces and that kept a lot of people from being blatant assholes" and I agree with that!

I also resent that improv is seen as some pinnacle of the comedy art form when it is mostly a practice arena. I love the magic of performance and I get that a well done improv show that you know is happening on the spot is super impressive.

« Where are my Whose Line Is It Anyway heads at??? »

But I also think it’s become overrated because so many of the comedy stars of today came up through improv and talked about it on on of the nine million comedy podcasts, and so people going to Second City/IO/Groundlings/UCB became a tracked measure to Break Into Comedy & Land A Spot At SNL.

SNL becoming a cultural juggernaut was! a! mistake!

Lorne Michaels is legitimately evil and what he has allowed/endorsed from writers and performers is genuinely shocking and appalling and the case against Horatio Sanz from an underage fan is truly one of the most abhorrent and shocking cases I’ve ever read about and cast so many of the people I used to admire into a completely different light!!!

Even Tina Fey knows it! When the news broke about how toxic the set of The Other Two was, no one was surprised. SNL is a show that was fueled by coke and the schedule stuck but now they’re all normies who are forced to stay up until 4 in the morning and we treat that like a ~super cool~ part of the job rather than bad business practice. We uh, we know what conditions people do their best work in and SNL is basically the opposite. It’s encouraged to be cutthroat, the institutional elitism is off the charts, and it’s the ultimate pay-to-play setup with “Daddy Lorne” (hearing grown ass adults say that phrase sincerely is bone chilling).

It’s also—a base camp! Not the summit! But we allowed everything that was even semi-decent from the 70s to remain relevant rather than innovating and allowing new talent and different gatekeepers to be at the helm of multi-billion dollar companies so we watch as year after year performers sell their souls for a shot at Impressing Lorne so they’ll be granted other, bigger opportunities.

Like, we know Hollywood is not a good/fair place, but I also get that being creative is an innate part of the human experience and people should be able to make a great living as a performer so I don’t begrudge them for trying. And with everything we know, I imagine the truth is even darker, but they stay and they have to be okay with what they’ve seen/expirienced/know of because they’re already implicit in the systemic abuse of the entertainment industry. So they may as well benefit from it, I guess?

We are not seeing the funniest people anymore, we’re seeing the ones willing to play the game.

(Which is why I do think apps like TikTok and front facing camera videos on Twitter were/are important especially for comedians who would be shut out of the traditional process but the ones I see using it most successfully are those treating it as a springboard rather than the ultimate form of their art.)

And sometimes they get an outside shot and make something really wonderful within the system, but I see the gates slamming all over the place as the backlash to progressivism grows and people blame the “middle of the country” for their small-mindedness. Bigotry can, and does, exist anywhere!

Anyway, I want stand-ups to feel no pressure whatsoever to cut away from their one-person-one-mic setup to show me a scripted bit. I want improv to remain in its own arena with the principles taught being extrapolated upon rather than lauded as The Only Pure Form Of Comedy To Ever Exist (sometimes, in scripts, saying no is funny! the reason “yes and” is important for the stage performance is that you’re not trying to end the scene! and sometimes in scripts, you are! improv is just codifying what most people refer to as Doing Bits With Their Friends it is not some magical formula aaahhhh), and I would really love it if no director ever felt the need to include 3-5 minutes of semi-funny improv in a movie because while it may have had the eeeentiiiiire cast & crew in stitches it does not read the same way on camera and I hate it so much!!!

To end this on a positive note, here are some standups that I really enjoy!!

Marcia Belsky - Evangelical @ Joes Pub (I went to this in May and only discovered this recording while searching for a clip for this list and it is one of my top 5 favorite shows of all time!!!) (you may also know her hit song, 100 Tampons)

Jenny Zigrino - Hour long set

Naomi Ekperigin - 20 minute special

Mohanad Elshieky - What to Say if You’re Interrogated by an Extremist Militia

Pat Regan - “Pat” Is the Least Sexy Name

and Meg Stalter, Sabrina Wu, Joel Kim Booster, Liza Treyger, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, Jaboukie, and so! many! more!

I love comedy, I think it’s a broad and expansive form of art and communication and I think it’s so weird/wonderful that we can’t help but laugh at things and all of our laughs are little vocal signatures and they burst out of us uncontrollably and I think humans are so funny in that way.

But I also think there are specific archetypes & forms and if I buy a ticket or tune into a promised stand-up special, I am looking for jokes and not a one-man monologue about how hard it was to come out that offers few ha’s! I am more than happy to tune into that monologue, but we can all agree that’s not “pushing the boundaries of the form” that is just mislabeling a genre because one has more social cache than the other. (As if Fleabag and Get On Your Knees aren’t wildly successful appropriately labeled one-woman monologue shows!!)

Will I continue to trek to Gowanus to see shows (even in the summer heat)? You bet. I fucking love comedy even if the venues most of my preferred comedians perform at are mixed seating/standing and can’t pour a mix drink to save their lives 🧡

The best part of comedy shows will always be standing outside the venue afterwards smoking and chatting about the show and the art and cracking the jokes days/months/years later because art is connective and expansive and making specific observations about human nature lends itself to beautifully to universal truths!

👋👋 Aaaand that’s my time thank you so much!!