No Time for Losers, We are the Champs
GUYS, don’t freak out too much, but I’ve started listening to a new podcast. (The first episode aired in 2011, so it’s technically not “new,” but you get it.) Typically, in my unscripted podcast rotation, I listen to Pete Holmes, Bill Simmons, Sorry I’ve Been So Busy (with Goldstein/Goldich,) Las Culturistas, Jonah Keri, Zach Lowe, Don’t Get Me Started, and, when I like the guest, WTF with Marc Maron. However, I’ve put all of these on hold since I’ve started listening to “The Champs.”
The pod is hosted by Neal Brennan, a great stand up, director, and writer/producer of stuff everyone loves, including “Chappelle’s Show,” and “3 Mics,” as well as stuff only me and a few other people enjoy, including “The Goods.” (The James Van Der Beek bits are really good!) The co-host is Moshe Kasher, a stand up whose “Returns” episode on the Pete Holmes’ pod made me laugh so hard I cried on the 7 train. (His “insensitive Stephen Hawking voice” is unbelievable…) Moshe grew up in Oakland with conservative Jewish parents who were deaf…and he got out of rehab for drugs and alcohol when he was 14…so you could safely say he’s seen some shit.
Neal and Moshe are also joined by DJ douggpound, a comedy DJ who drops samples from music, tv, and random noises, into the conversation. However, he isn’t in later episodes, so it’s possible he gets booted from the pod. I’m not entirely sure. (To be honest, I’m not too interested in their PODCAST DRAMA.)
Podcast….
Plus Drama….
Gives you Podcast Drama!
Generally, The Champs do a good job of asking real questions while also spending a bunch of time messing around with the guest. Unlike on other podcasts, I actually enjoy the bullshitting on this pod because, in a sort of circuitous way, it gives you an insight into who the guest is when they’re not on mic. (For example, if you were to overhear all of my casual conversations, you’d hear me drop the word “circuitous” and learn a lot about me!!)
Of all the smart and funny guests on the pod, (they only interview non-white people,) one of the most enlightening conversations was with stand up, writer, host, and actor from Curb Your Enthusiasm, JB Smoove.
Not only is JB effortlessly funny and opinionated, but he said a few things that really got me thinking. When asked “Were you good right away?” in reference to doing stand up, he responded “NO, of course not, you have to find yourself, find your own voice. It takes a while.”
Now, that’s not revolutionary advice. (In fact, it’s really what everyone says.) However, his standard take on comedy isn’t so standard because he’s JB Smoove, one of the most “natural” and charismatic performers around. (He’s like the Tazmanian Devil of bits.) When watching him, it feels as if he’s never not been hilarious. So, when he says that he too needed years of practice to figure out his timing, energy, and material, you realize that the “hard work of comedy” exists for pretty much everyone.** So, if it’s that way for even these naturally hilarious comics, it’s got to be the same for me. I finished his podcast feeling motivated to do more sets.
**(There are notable exceptions to the idea that “years of hard work” need to be done for everyone. There are comics who are savant-like. These guys wouldn’t have to work that hard to be good, but worked really hard anyway and became great. I’m mostly thinking of Dave Chappelle and Harris Wittels. (This opinion is based mostly on hearing other great comics talk about them. Read Aziz on Harris here.) I don’t strive to be these two in the same way that a 25 year-old taking his first piano lesson doesn’t tell his teacher that Beethoven sucks and that he can “do just as good.”)
For me, I don’t necessarily see myself as the same type of performer as JB. He talks a lot about how he often goes on stage without knowing what he’s going to talk about, and figuring it out as he goes. (It’s something that takes tremendous balls and lots of skill.) The comedy that I want to make is closer to the Birbiglia/Minhaj/Brennan/Gethard style, where stories weave in and out of bits, and it’s all sort of planned. (In their specials, the off-the-cuff stuff works because it proves the scripted material isn’t being blindly recited, so, even the tightly scripted and precise bits, are “alive” each performance.)
Purely as a stand up, I also obviously loved the Chris Rock episode. More than JB, Rock’s comedy is a closer to the stuff I see myself being able to do well. (Again, not saying I can be Chris Rock — but his hours have an arc to them that I really love and want to strive for.)
In the episode, Rock talks about performing “Bring the Pain,”one of his hour specials, “probably 100 times” before the taping. Now, you’re currently reading a blog about that very thing: doing stand up 100 times. However, he was referring to doing that specific hour 100 times, not doing 2–7 minutes of stand up 100 times. So, I’ve got a long ways to go to match his work ethic. (At this point, I’ll take any comparison to Chris Rock, even if it’s just that we both use the metric system as a numerical benchmark.) Either way, I like hearing about the hard work my “comedy heroes” put into their art. (Comedy isn’t always seen as “art,” — the Oscars, for example, don’t have a category for “Best Comedy,” which is a shame because Apatow and Sandler would be multiple Oscar winners.) I’ll save my thoughts on that for a different 2000 word post…but for now…
1996 Fictional Oscar for “Best Comedy” would have been tight:
Matilda — Would have been a well-deserved honor for Hollywood legend Danny DeVito.
Happy Gilmore — One of Sandler's finest. Probably my pick in terms of rewatchability, probably a long-shot, Sandler brings all his friends to the Oscars anyway.
Swingers — Considered a “classic” — definitely has the vibe of guys in their 20’s being single trying to figure out what do with with heartbreak. (Directed by Jon Favreau, the Iron Man 2 director, not the guy making a bunch of money from a media company that only exists because Hillary lost.)
The Bird Cage — Robin Williams, RIP
The Cable Guy — Would have been nominated because of Carey’s fame, but c’mon, not his best.
And the Oscar goes to:
From this list, and given the tendency of Oscar voters, I’d say that Bird Cage and Swingers are the early favorites, but late momentum swings for the up-and-coming, post-SNL, Sandler, giving him his first Oscar win. (In this hypothetical, he wins a second for Mr. Deeds. “yes daddy, yes!”)
Back to Stand Up:
Rock also had incisive observations about his fellow comedians. Louie, he says, “goes to work like a blacksmith,” “everyday he goes into his workshop,” but instead of “things”, he comes out with great comedy. The best analogy though, was in reference to doing as many sets as possible in order to get better. He referred to doing a high volume of sets as the “hiking of exercise.” Essentially: You’re doing so little at a time, (taking a step,) but you’re doing it in such high volume that you forget you’re even working out at all. Then, after lots of sets, you slowly, and then all-at-once, have a beautiful view of something you didn’t expect. (Even though I dislike hiking — just go for a run, you know? — I still enjoyed the analogy, and you should, too.)
With wisdom of Smoove and Rock, let’s talk about these two sets from a while ago.
Set 14, The Stand, 5 minutes
Mr. 3000
Football
Scotland — Girls — Teaching — Basketball
Dorito Taco
Overall: I did this set at The Stand on a rainy Friday evening. The Stand (also the name of Edinburgh Club — no relation) is perhaps my favorite room in the city. It’s a wide, dark space under an actual restaurant on the east side. Noah, my dear friend was in the audience, breaking my typically steadfast rule that “friends don’t invite friends to open mics.” That said, he’s also a lifelong performer, and is therefore a pretty fantastic audience member. He laughs, he loves the commitment to a bit or a performance even if it’s not totally working, and he’s always good for a well-timed “Woo!”
This set, as well as the next, represent a little bit of a turning point for me, in that afterwards, I started to write more new material. At this point, since Set 1, I’d mostly stuck to the same few ideas. After these two sets, I knew I wanted to expand, rewrite, and reorganize. Not because the bits were totally bombing, but because they weren’t necessarily growing. (The first thing I wrote down after finishing this set was: “needs to be punchier,” which is the nice way of saying, “needs to be better comedy.”
Riff: As I often do, I started to set with a riff about the room/a thought or observation about the day. Here, I referenced Noah, by saying “I brought the only actual audience member, I feel like I should get my money back.” (The mic cost $5…so this played okay in the room, and certainly better than it does reading about it now!)
I also riffed a few ideas in my Scotland bit. The host/opening comic did a long bit about doing comedy in black rooms. So, when I did my “there’s not a lot of black people in Scotland” bit, I added in “for comedy, there are NO black rooms,” which got a pretty big reaction. Again — if I were not doing this blog, and forcing myself to write about this sort of stuff, that isn’t the type of line I’d tell my friends I riffed. However, it is interesting to listen back to older sets and remember that I did in fact play to the room, and was “present” in the space where I was doing comedy. (So that’s kinda cool, right?)
Set 15, Gotham Comedy Contest, 5 minutes
Riff on the room
Football (Jesus Musical/New!)
Scotland
Black and White Cookie
Coach Carter
Getting Better All the Time:
Before writing about this Gothem mic, I reread “Post the Third” where I last wrote about performing at this mic. (I wanted to make sure I wasn’t confusing the performances — last time, Ninja guy performed, this mic, the white host “accidentally” said the N-word. Hard to keep all this high-quality comedy straight, you know?)
Anyhow, in my reread of that post, I realized some progress I had made that I didn’t fully register formally. That is, in that post, I was still physically nervous when I got to the stage. I would stammer a little bit and open with “sup guys?” and generally wasn’t comfortable at all. Now, even a dozen sets later, I’m certainly more able to start with a joke, talk to the audience, and be less concearned about “forgetting” my material. I’m by no means “comfortable,” beacuse I think that takes years, I’m certainly a little more confident and more-likely to feel “present” while on stage.
The Set:
This show is the “Gothem Comedy Contest,” which is a mic that happens in the basement of the Gothem Comedy Club. (They call it “The Lounge” but I’d call it “a basement with felt on the walls.”)
If you recall (and if you’re one of my 30 readers, you might!) when I wrote about this mic the last time, I mentioned that there are “two winners based on laughs” and that “winning might be a good short-term goal.”
Riff: I started with “at a certain point in this mic, we’re all just hoping everyone is really bad. At least we’re honest about it at this mic.” As Seinfeld says “I like a bit to be funny right away” — so it was nice to start with a laugh. (I also don’t really believe this — I don’t sit at open mics hoping people are bad — that would be a horrible way to live, even at a mic where we’re competing.)
The Set: So there are two winners at this mic and I really thought I deserved to be the second winner. (I was not!)
I started with a new bit about how I quit football and chose to be in a Jesus musical instead. “I decided I’d rather get fake crucified than actually tackled” Tagged with “Just kidding, they did’nt let me play Jesus…”
I did a new bit about my breakup in Scotland and said “I started doing stand up after the girl I was seeing broke up with me to date my college best friend…so, the thing about comedy is that it just can’t be more embarrassing than my actual life.” Then I pick someone from the crowd, ask them their name and say “(person’s name) you don’t scare me! Tim and Kate got together — we’re all going to be fine!” — I think this joke is funny for several reasons: It’s fun to say in public. It’s the actual first-names of those people and I always think it’s hilarious when comics use real names. And it’s often how I genuinely feel — “we’re all going to be fine — we all can survive a certain amount of embarrassment, so why not do stand up?”
Overall: So while I didn’t win, I didn’t bomb either, and for 15 mics in, that’s sort of great! I’ve continued to work on each of these bits, and I’m looking forward to catching up with these posts in real life! Today, I’ll be off to QED for set number 37. (I should probably start including 3–5 sets in a single post, but I should also probably just do that and stop writing about how I’m going to.)
As you know, @gjmollica for tweets
@gabemollica from the gram
gjmollica@gmail.com if you want to sign me up for Blue Apron.
