Jokes Are Important

NOT A JOKE

There will be more posts here very soon. In the meantime…

But it must be said (apparently). “Showing Betty White” is not a joke. Betty White telling jokes is funny, but “Betty White” is not a joke. A joke is something Betty White comes up with and says, because she is a comedy icon. How did we get here? As was said on a brilliant podcast once, “the joke in that SNL sketch was ‘Katy Perry’s breasts’.”

Jokes are important and they will be back next week, MORE POWERFUL THAN EVER. Next week includes: why is it so hard to be a recurring character on The Daily Show for good comics, Todd Glass vs. Todd Glass, anonymous joke Twitter feeds, and why Kevin Hart is basically Christopher Titus.

In the absence, you are urged to check out Bob Newhart’s “Nobody Will Ever Play Baseball” from the Grammy for Best Album-winning (yes - not Best Comedy Album - Best Album) The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart. The year before, Sinatra won it. Now, fifty years later, it holds up. Give it three minutes, and we’ll see you Monday.

Life During/After Laugh Tracks

The history of the laugh track is well documented, but the fact that it continues today can easily be forgotten depending on where you spend your time in comedy.

Shows today like The Big Bang Theory and Rob make heavy use of it. That’s where you typically think of piped in laughter: bad television. If not bad, at least television where the people who made it are more concerned with losing your attention than they are proud of making a good product.

Laugh tracks feel outdated because the last ten years of TV has replaced them with talking-head mockumentary shows. The supposed “reality” format of Parks and Recreation and to a lesser extent Modern Family (it’s sometimes hard to tell if they still believe in the trope of “they’re making a show” on either of these, but that’s another discussion) doesn’t allow for laughs. If someone laughs, then you can’t look at the camera.

But in The Big Bang Theory you can pump in as much laughter as you want. You can tell the audience where the jokes are, at least in theory. That’s the supposed premise of the laugh track: tell people when to laugh by having others laugh. Nothing revolutionary, there - until you strip it out.

The Big Bang Theory is enormous. It’s one of the biggest things in the country. If you do a search online for “The Big Bang Theory” it comes up before the explosion that created existence. I’ll pause a moment to borrow a joke from Lewis Black:

“Now, I’d have a joke for that, but it makes me too fucking angry!”

The Big Bang Theory slathers on laugh track. Almost every line uses it, many of which are typical characterization points rather than jokes. An episode never seems to go more than fifteen seconds without a laugh moment. This is sometimes arresting when it’s done following something that could not be called a joke. The result is an alien show in many ways, providing the audience with a product that doesn’t always match the ingredients provided by the events on the show. But it doesn’t have to: they told you to laugh.

Another CBS show, Rob (which uses exclamation points at times, but why give them to it) is also huge. More than eleven million Americans have watched every single episode of Rob. If the laughs on the show were to be believed, this has to be in the trillions. In one episode of Rob, there were seventeen distinct moments before the credits where a laugh track was activated. That’s really the only term for it: a man in a room activated the machine to simulate laughter.

Signature among the seventeen in two minutes includes at one moment, when the titular character from Rob looks at a magazine and says “that’s a pretty thick magazine.” This is not in response to anything, so context won’t help. Later in the show, a character says the descriptive line “I have a squeegee.” This is rewarded with thunderous laughter, designed to hide any description as attempted comedy. Please don’t change the channel, please don’t go see how your DVRed The Voice episodes are. Please, please don’t do anything else. We’re joking! We’re joking even when we’re not!

Like The Big Bang Theory, this can be distracting on Rob. It’s probably not surprising or newsworthy to say that Rob isn’t very well made. They don’t care about consistency among the actions of the characters, sequencing, plot, or even the internal logic of the world they’ve made. They don’t even care about what they should care about in a show that seems to have abandoned exposition so much that every episode essentially begins with someone walking in a door, saying an episode title, and mentioning a conflict: jokes. There are (bad) jokes in Rob, but largely they have decided that essential truths about each character count as self references and thus comedy, but they’ve decided that in their first episodes. They seem to believe that through the power of the laugh track, both 1. Anything is a joke if we play the track after it and 2. Anything we say about anyone makes sense, as long as we keep saying it. Sure, Rob is a bad show, but it’s also a bad bad show.

A common dig on shows with laugh tracks and arguments like this is that Seinfeld used them. There’s a lot of work out there done on how the people behind the show felt about using it, but look at how this affects different shows. People on YouTube have taken to uploading clips of shows with laugh tracks and trying to isolate the actual show sound and remove the tracking. Many of these are edited so poorly they step on the jokes even to remove the track, but one in particular is worth comparing. Take this scene from The Big Bang Theory, in which a character is lamenting many things. It’s only a minute and a half.

There are some actual jokes here which are discernible without the track. Someone is dismissive of a “nerd” which counts as comedy, in a relative sense. The bear claws bit has a setup and punchline. There’s a chuckle in the entire observation that Mario has a “date” in some way and the character (we needn’t use the name) doesn’t. That said, the real version of this is slathered in track. At best, they’re worried that if they don’t help you, you won’t be able to find those three jokes. At worst, they think there are more than three.

Comparing The Big Bang Theory to a sacred cow like Seinfeld is somewhat mean and it’s reductive to boil both shows down into tiny bits and judge them, but let’s do it anyway. Watch a Seinfeld scene with the same laughter removed. It’s not as well done, and the sound has to skip out more often so the flow doesn’t really work. The difference is less in that this one is funnier, because saying a show isn’t as funny as Seinfeld is hardly damning. It’s more in finding the truth about tracking in the first place.

You don’t point out jokes by adding a laugh track, you find out where they weren’t when you remove it. Tim and Eric recently said on Jesse Thorn’s podcast Bullseye that they view what they do as replacing the laugh track. Rather than play laughter, they hold on a scene for too long to point out where they intended a joke. The difference is that this makes sense when explained, but doesn’t beat the viewer over the head or insult them. If you thought the scene was funny, Tim and Eric want to give you a tense moment to recognize it. If you didn’t, they want to wring out another few seconds to see if that works. If neither does, then at least they did their best within a joke context without supplying anything external.

Mugging at the camera and extending a shot too long are effective laugh track substitutes, so it’s not a perfect argument to say that they are really that different. They are less insulting to the audience on their face, but they also have made some seemingly impenetrable television for audiences. People aren’t watching shows that don’t have people laughing or cheering in the background. It’s probably too basic to say that people want to feel part of something, and a show that isn’t showing them how people respond to stimuli is creating a window that most people don’t want to take the time to look through.

Maybe it isn’t, though. Laugh track television is easy television. If a joke doesn’t work, as has so often been said, “we’ll just sweeten it.” The era of laugh tracks has to be replaced by an era where people are rewarded for writing something people can appreciate without being told how their appreciation should manifest, but maybe that’s too expensive or difficult to do right now. The real shame isn’t the laugh track, it’s the simplistic view of American viewers that makes the decision to use it and the fact that it’s being used to hide things that aren’t even jokes. The result is that a person who watches comedies on most networks now isn’t even getting exposed to jokes anymore. Bad jokes are still jokes, but “this is a magazine” or “you are coming with me to my house later” aren’t either of them.

Not even if it sounds like people laughed at it.

Same Joke, Same Joke, Same Joke

Street jokes. Kid jokes. Joke book jokes.

Whatever term you want to label them with they mean they same thing: something is old, and it’s not funny.

Any time in a cab will make you do some real thinking about what the problem is with most people and comedy. “Comedy nerd” is a generally accepted term within comedy fandom, but when you break it down it just means that someone likes good comedy. Be it stand up, improv, sketch, or generally any form of people finding new ways to make someone laugh.

That’s just it: street jokes aren’t really comedy. Comedy is about someone making you laugh at the unexpected or the unconsidered. Kyle Kinane opens a track on his masterful album The Death of the Party by saying “I remember the first time I had to take a shit in a bar.” The track is more about the source of fear and race relations in Chicago than about the opener, but he caught your attention by saying something unexpected (BUT NOT. RANDOM.) and following it up with an extended explanation.

You can tell you’re about to be told a street joke by the opening line. Typically, it will be something close to “A man and a woman (blank).” When did we, as a people, decide this is what counts as comedy? A wide net is great, and it is fantastic that someone can find any joke funny, but we can do better:

A man and his wife are in the store. He says “Honey, beer is on sale for $7 a case - what a deal!” She tells him, we cannot afford any luxuries, we have a family now. Later, she sees that her favorite lip stick is on sale for $10 and says “Darling, I must get this - it’s a great deal!” When he reminds her that she wouldn’t let him get the beer, she says “It will make me so pretty, though!” He responds, “The beer will do that, too, and we’ll save three dollars!”

We shouldn’t be accepting of street jokes. In a cab, maybe. At a family function, it depends on the person. But just as we shouldn’t accept it when people are ignorant in other ways, jokes need to be elevated. Comedy nerd shouldn’t be a special term we assign to people who cultivate good stand up and good jokes - it should be a subgroup within the whole of our population, where the norm is that people hear that joke and suggest you check out how the world of jokes has progressed.

There aren’t generations anymore, and there aren’t reasons to let that slide.

Marc Maron’s interview with Gallagher (which you absolutely should hear if you somehow haven’t) back in January of last year focused largely on the concept of street jokes and hacky material. Established comics drifting back into street jokes is sad, but young comics and open mic comics trafficking in them is even worse. We live in a golden age of comedy, and audiences are usually too smart to laugh at:

What do you call two Mexicans playing basketball? Juan on Juan!

… but street jokes are out there. Comedy nerds - nay, regular comedy people - have a responsibility to not laugh uncomfortably at street jokes. Writing new material is exceptionally hard. Performing it is brutally difficult. Living in a world where it’s okay to tell a street joke is far harder. Jokes are important.

Dane Cook is LeBron James

Hatred fuels the Internet. People love to hate celebrities, musicians, politicians, and basically anyone that has done something to become well known enough that people are aware of them. That’s just the way of the web; it’s too easy to dismiss anything as unfunny, boring, or self-aggrandizing. Sometimes with purpose and sometimes without, but the area between those two is far more interesting.

Drew Magary, Deadspin’s funniest blogger, wrote a piece about LeBron James in 2010 that became iconic. LeBron had a choice to make: he had to pick which team he would play for at the end of his contract. It was a gigantic move, and even though it ended up being less instantly career-defining than it seemed like it would be, it definitely solidified an already widely-held perception of LeBron. As Magary said, “LeBron James is a cocksucker.” Here’s Magary:

“He’s a cocksucker. Fitting that his most memorable career moment will come when he doesn’t even take a fucking shot. He’s a guy that cares more about the end result of playing basketball – massive, unending adulation – than he does actual basketball.”

Dane Cook is the LeBron James of comics.

Dane’s in the news this week for his antics on stage. He said a lot of things not worth repeating, and that’s coming from a post that both uses the word and links an article with the word “cocksucker” in the title. Plenty of comics have meltdown sets, especially when going through loss or issues. Dane’s defended himself (slightly) in saying that his act was part of a new persona after a year away from the mic and was influenced by the (very sad) passing of Patrice O’Neal. He’s clearly going through more than that, and though it’s difficult to feel bad for someone with the star power and presence of Dane Cook, it’s important to step back and consider what is at work.

LeBron and Dane both want many of the same things. They want to be thought of us great and they want to be the best at what they do. Dane wants people to put his albums on par with Bill Cosby: Himself in a hundred years. LeBron wants to win so many games that it doesn’t matter what metric you judge him on, he will have earned his King James nickname. There are problems with comparing the two too closely, but it’s worth going down the rabbit hole a bit.

Comics are coming from a place of self-doubt and an awkward childhood. They seek love, laughter, acceptance, and respect from the community. It is in this last capacity that the NBA and the open mic look so much alike. In both, you’re only as good as your last showing. In both, respect cannot be bought and is king. In both, you have to work from the bottom and prove your spot among the very few that will get noticed.

The wide perception is that neither one did this the right way. LeBron was drafted out of high school and had a shoe deal before an NBA rebound. Dane, though nearly 40, has been dogged by the concept that there’s stand ups with jokes he’s supposedly pilfered and time he’s definitely stepped on to get where he is. These are both fairly common, but there’s few better summations of either career track.

Both have talent. They were the same, once, among their communities. LeBron being hated or loved was a coin flip in his youth. He could choose to be the villain of the NBA or the plucky young kid with too much talent to fail. Dane was the comic everyone told everyone about, because for a time it seemed like no one was doing what he was doing. In the mid 2000s, nearly every comedy fan knew Harmful If Swallowed and Retaliation were required listening.

So what happened? 

Above all else, neither one cared (or cares) what is thought of them. The input of the community doesn’t phase them, because largely they don’t even respond. They’re too big for judgement, even in fields where judgement is most sacred and most damning. Dane has made it clear over the years that he has no interest in any negativity. That’s become part of his entire being. He seems to want the world to believe that if he is unceasingly upbeat and manic, then there could be no evil about him. LeBron has chosen to remain mostly silent, famously demanding photographers not look at him and not giving the world much to work with.

They have both proved to the world that our responses will not impact their next move. You hate Dane Cook? He had a perfectly easy opportunity to respond to T.J. Miller and soften the blow, and he blew it seemingly on purpose for what he may have expected would be a good joke. It wasn’t, and Dane’s love of polarizing the audience got the best of him. You hate LeBron? He doesn’t even know about it, and if he does he won’t let you know, which is a different sort of amazing.

LeBron is an exceptional basketball player, and will be remembered as such for lifetimes after his own. Dane, however, is a really great comedian with some tragic faults, and isn’t managing his legacy very well. Even on par with LeBron, whose legacy-management has to be among the worst of this generation. They don’t need you, they don’t need the media, and they don’t need respect. Or if they do, then they don’t know how to backtrack to the point where they will get it from a scorned community.

It’s easy to hate Dane’s persona now, but his comedy was at one point something worth taking note of. His dedication to the last few years of his world, it seems, is so for an entirely different reason. Check back on both of them in ten years, but it’s starting to look like LeBron’s learning that controlling his spin is harder than not acting like an asshole. Dane could do well to learn the same lesson.

Tweet Tweet Tweet!

Every news outlet wants to talk about “the next big thing” on the Internet. Since they’re still treating Twitter that way, let’s talk about that.

You can bemoan the use of usernames and tweets in otherwise “respectable” news media, but Twitter isn’t going away. Maybe without smartphones people might have had time to get bored, but not in this era. 

Steve Martin was on Rock Center the other day (as anyone who had to watch the only channel they play in every cab now knows) and Brian Williams asked him some not very interesting questions about bluegrass and some equally uninteresting questions about Twitter. You can’t be all that mad at a show that plays in a cab, but something Steve Martin, one of the greatest comic minds of this generation, said stuck out. When asked what he likes about Twitter, he said:

“I don’t know, it’s been an outlet for comedy. I thought it was going to be promotional, and it ended up just being an outlet for humor.”

A normal person’s Twitter can be about how much work sucks, how slow the bus is, or how much they love their family (as it turns out, the few people that do are really, really into telling you they love their family). That’s fine. That is partially what it’s for.

The Twitter for promoted cyber-business robots can be both mindless and unintentionally funny. One of today’s, Wheat Thins, offers a look into what PR people think they should be paid to do. Someone at Wheat Thins paid a person actual dollars to tweet about what Wheat Thins thinks Martin Luther King, Jr. would do today. This, too, is okay. People in an office decided that you will buy more Wheat Thins if you know that Wheat Thins is definitely on board with MLK, so they wanted you to know that their crackers support peace. Now you know. It really is the future!

However, the fact that using Twitter for comedy was the second thing Steve Martin thought of speaks volumes. Promotional use of social media definitely has a purpose, but Twitter is a different world. One where what can sometimes seem like the most meaningless corner of the web (today’s trending topics include Steve Nash, whose NBA team is 4-8 right now, seven month old pop song “Moves Like Jagger,” and an advertising campaign that has people yelling at each other about weight loss) can become the streaming consciousness of our world.

Or it can be little jokes.

Darren Rovell wrote the quintessential list of Twitter rules (beware, there are 100), but it doesn’t need to be that structured. Since Wikipedia will be down, you need something to do. Here are five people who saw Twitter as what it is - a place to make little jokes - and consistently do it well again and again.

Telling someone to follow someone on Twitter is a step away from asking them to help you move in the modern world, but these five people were made on Twitter, not the other way around. Some of the funniest people in the world either don’t use Twitter at all, or use it as an .rss feed. This is a waste, but none of this is:

Rob Delaney

Rob Delaney is the best argument for Twitter. He has mastered the art form, and could be the man who showed us all what it was capable of becoming. He aggressively brings forth his proud loves, an assault on everything he hates, and generally is more intense than anything you’ll read and still be able to laugh at. Calling someone ‘outrageous’ on the Internet in 2012 is basically meaningless, but that might be the best word to describe Delaney. He has a fascinating life story that will have to wait for another time (but is easy to find online) and a fantastic blog on Vice (read this one about Katy Perry to see what you’re in for), so if for nothing else, his Twitter is great for the best ‘little jokes’ and links to Rob Delaney-related long form reads.

Followers: 301k

Alec Sulkin

Tweeting under “@thesulk” - the Family Guy writer has become symbolic with “funny on Twitter” for basically being as negative as possible. The Sklar Brothers asked him on their podcast if he was this dark in his relationships in real life. He told them that he usually destroyed relationships by being silent and emotionally distant. It doesn’t sounds hilarious, but Sulkin mixes some of the best-worst pun work online, beats himself up with the best of them, and does something in two lines that alternative comics have been doing in long form for decades.

Followers: 339k

Jenny Johnson

Jenny Johnson has perfected the form of tweeting back at celebrities. This is done all over Twitter, but it isn’t always funny. She’s figured out the formula for success, and does it so much that people tend to yell at her for re-posting some of her greatest tweets. Some of the simplest jokes (“my sleep number is vodka”) are the best, and she is the master of the one line tweet. Between yelling at people we’d all like to yell at, proud personal assholery, and a light disdain for her fellow man, Jenny Johnson is someone you might not have ever heard from in the non-Twitter era (what a phrase?) and someone you damn well better hear from in it.

Followers: 141k

“Karl Welzein”

Karl Welzein (@DadBoner) is a phenomenon, plain and simple. Karl is intended to be a send-up of modern masculinity and a time gone by at the same time. He takes “toilet naps” at work. He keeps his liquor in his trunk (“trunk liquor,” obviously) so that his roommate Dave and the homeless man he picked up (Homeless Peanut) won’t drink it. Karl doesn’t usually mean well, but he isn’t necessarily malicious. He just wants to have a beer or twelve, eat six mango hab wings (three times), and fall asleep on the bathroom floor. No one seems to be able to figure out who owns the account, which adds to the spectacle. It’s gone so far that there are sites with no other purpose than speculation. Whoever it is, they tweet daily, just enough, and you begin to feel like Karl is someone you actually know - as terrifying as the thought might be.

Followers: 46k

We Bought a Z00

The list is really only just four because you can’t really follow something that doesn’t update anymore, but this list absolutely has to include the inexplicable fake account for We Bought a Zoo. The AV Club tried to explain it in the account’s infancy, but it needs and has no explanation. For two weeks in December, some comedy nerd out there put forth a entire world of madness that less than 5,000 people saw. It’s a real shame it had to end, but that completes the story. Go scroll all the way down and walk through the absurdness of the actual world of owning a Zoo, maybe.

Followers: 4,500

And as for Steve Martin? Maybe follow him, too. These first.

CHARACTERS: Nick Kroll is El Chupacabra and Fabrice Fabrice

From Richard Pryor’s Mudbone to Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man, comedians have found a way to express their craft through character work. Today, we explore Nick Kroll as El Chupacabra and Fabrice Fabrice.

Nick Kroll may best be known for runs on Community (briefly), Childrens Hospital (less briefly), and The League (still there). While he’s a brilliant comedian who can level a barb quicker than just about anyone working today, he was also on Cavemen. That aside, his character work deserves considerable attention.

He’s performed a host of characters on podcasts, in his own special Thank You Very Cool, and in various web videos and stand up routines. Since there are too many to mention at one time, this focuses on his two largest extremes, Spanish radio DJ El Chupacabra and the impossible Fabrice Fabrice.

El Chupacabra became a fixture on Reno 911! as he invited the officers to supposedly read traffic reports or give announcements, but invariably turned the show into the same brand of humiliation that Reno did so well. The character is always played as slightly mean, somewhat oblivious, and completely flippant. Kroll’s dedication to keeping the character the same clearly terrible - but clearly excited - radio DJ helps cement what to expect on every performance, as well as doing wonders for creating a realness to what could easily just be a throwaway fake Spanish accent masquerading as a character.

Chupacabra always invades a recording by pretending (or believing, this reality is wonderfully inconsistent and allows for a semblance of madness about the character) that he is still in his own studio. His traffic reports are done by a man who consistently informs you that there is “mucho traffico.” His soundboard is his mouth, which is always called out by any guests or hosts of any show Kroll is performing on. This works on multiple levels - it allows Kroll to “Kroll around” and make his trademark sound effects he’s created without any technology, but it also opens up the world of Chupacabra, in that you realize that his own supposed show in Mexico is just one man making noises with his mouth and pretending to take callers. This makes him a sad figure, to a small extent, and plays insanely well against the madcap attitude Kroll adopts when playing the character.

There are a cast of radio “personalities” that Chupacabra always brings on his appearances. From Donkey to Senor Juarez to a baby to a goat, Kroll wholeheartedly mixes his band of (very) slightly different voices with no attempt to hide that he’s doing them all. Senor Juarez will call in and be forgotten, a nonsensical few segments will happen, and Chupacabra will insist that they “take a call.” This happens almost solely on podcasts where no calls are taken and the recording is not live. This small absurdity is blown to ten through calls with what can barely be called a character: a baby who claims to have possibly “done a 9/11.” It’s madness, absolute madness. There’s a parody of both morning zoo radio and Spanish culture in there, but these are just the framework from which Kroll’s inner excitement bursts forth.

As bombastic as El Cupacabra is, the sadness of his apparently poorly produced (“organic” he would have you believe) radio show is nothing when faced with the reality of Fabrice Fabrice. Kroll plays the character as loud as anyone has ever been, in character or not. He works craft services for “the actors, and writers, and producers, and Jewish people.” He only speaks in a loud toneless screech, he only wears bright pastels and gaudy accessories, and he’s got something to explain about the inside world of film and TV production. Even if you dislike the character, Kroll’s wardrobe choices to portray Fabrice live say everything necessary about how big he wants to play the character and about how little he thinks of the perception. It’s proud, in some weird way. Just as El Chupacabra is hardly about Spanish culture, Kroll’s Fabrice Fabrice is hardly about flamboyancy or any sexual culture. There’s a gray area with any character who is an extreme, but almost none of Fabrice’s humor centers on his own sexuality. He could just as easily be straight, and just have adopted an ambiguous element to himself in the world of media production. There aren’t lazy jokes to this subject, it’s just a small, sad element of the production world through which Kroll can mock the establishment: the guy at the bottom of the pecking order who has decided he is at the top.

The best element of both characters is that they both contain jokes beyond the surface. It would be easy for Nick Kroll to say words wrong in Spanish or to just wear bellyshirts and call it a day. Instead, these are the jumping off points for jokes that wouldn’t work as well with his typical delivery. If he has to put on a bellyshirt to tell jokes about That’s So Raven and craft services, then he’s entitled to use it as a signpost. If he has to be a radio DJ to throw stones at culture, so be it. His range is so wide that it helps to have the outrageous elements to solidify who he’s portraying - once you’ve seen Fabrice once, in future audio versions you are able to fill in a lime green boa, three pairs of sunglasses, and platform heels. Nick Kroll plays Rodney Ruxin on The League completely straightforward, so his range is wide - but his character work shows that his bench is also deep. Both characters make interesting appearances throughout his work, and when you find a chance to live in the world he creates, take a moment to appreciate the madness that starts with a stereotype and expands to some pretty damn smart jokes.