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Who is funny?
It’s a half hour to show time, and Louis C.K. looks miserable. The comic is slumped alone in a chair in the dingy greenroom of Denver’s Paramount Theatre, the toll of weeks on the road apparent on his face. Clearly, all he wants to do is eat his ham sandwich and get ready for his show. But instead he has to contend with the likes of us—an overexcited professor and a nervous journalist who’ve just barged in to ask him to deconstruct what he does on stage.
It’s a wonder we got back here at all. C.K., with his stand-up specials and hit FX series Louie, is one of the biggest names in the stand-up business. Every one of the 1,800 or so seats for the show tonight at the Paramount Theatre—one of the largest and swankiest venues for comedy in the region—has long been sold out.
It makes sense to start our search for the secrets of humor by talking to comedians like C.K. In many ways, stand-up is the perfect petri dish for figuring out why we find things funny. It’s comedy boiled down to basics—just a comedian and an audience, no backstory, no sets, no editors or producers or censors, a place where you either score a laugh or you don’t. Stand-up is one of the country’s most prominent cultural inventions. Thanks to The Tonight Show and Seinfeld, the work of American comedians now influences comedy all over the world. Plus, judging from his performance at the Squire, Pete could use a few tips.
So, what turned Louis C.K. into Louis C.K.? How does someone be funny? Is it an innate talent, something you’re born with or that arises from the right conglomeration of instincts and personality traits? Or is it something that develops over time, either through absorbing the right rules or personal trial and error? And what about other variables to consider, such as childhood baggage and the quirks of various comedy clubs? How do they all influence someone’s ability to be hilarious?
We’re here hoping that C.K. can provide us with some answers. Heck, maybe the king of stand-up will be so taken with our endeavor that he’ll show us the secrets to being funny. Our quest will be over as soon as it’s begun.
Knowing that he has only a few minutes, Pete launches into the benign violation theory, but he only gets halfway through before C.K. cuts him off. “I don’t think it’s that simple,” he grumbles. “There are thousands of kinds of jokes. I just don’t believe that there’s one explanation.”
His research dismissed, his theory shot down, Pete casts about for something to talk about. “So I was actually chatting with some of your fans in the lobby, and I asked them what questions I should ask you . . .” he begins.
My stomach drops. When an older woman who had made one too many trips to the Paramount’s bar heard we were interviewing C.K., she shrieked out a question. But surely there is no way Pete would ask it.
I’m wrong.
“So one woman wanted to know how big your penis is.”
C.K. cracks the faintest of smiles but shakes his head. “I am not going to answer that.”
“I wouldn’t, either,” Pete responds. “But I’ve heard that if you don’t answer that, it means it’s small.”
Now there’s no smile.
Sensing we’ve overstayed, we head for the door. Clearly, we’re going to have to look elsewhere to figure out what makes people funny. So, we figure, why not go where many comedians go to try to break into the big time, to hone their acts and get noticed by agents and talent scouts and TV execs? Why not go where up-and-comers go to become the next Louis C.K.?
And with that, we’re off to Los Angeles to see how many more people Pete will alienate with penis questions. For science.
“Welcome to the La Scala of comedy,” says Alf LaMont. ‘This is where it all happened.”
We’re standing in front of the Comedy Store, a black bunker of a building surrounded by palm trees. Beside us, Maseratis and BMWs glide through the night along the Sunset Strip, the billboard-lined mile-and-a-half stretch of pavement curving through West Hollywood that’s always been steeped in a heady cocktail of fame and vice.
This part of town has long been a place of wise guys and movie stars, beatniks and go-go dancers, groupies and glam rockers—and, here at the Comedy Store, some of the pivotal moments in stand-up history. Los Angeles is bursting at the seams with comedy. There are stand-up shows big and small every night of the week at comedy clubs and improv theaters and cabaret clubs, even in the Masonic lodge of a local cemetery. There are podcast tapings and comedic web-video shoots and several major comedy festivals. There’s even a new academic concentration in comedy at the University of Southern California. The seeds of this bustling comedy scene can be traced here, to this spot, in 1972, with the opening of the city’s first dedicated comedy club.
“All the other comedy clubs got rid of their history, or never had it to begin with,” says LaMont, head of marketing for the Comedy Store. “Here, it seeps through the very building.” It might not be the only thing seeping through the cracks. LaMont, who resembles a carnival barker with his handlebar mustache, escorts us through a maze of scuffed floors and dingy hallways, describing the club like an out-of-control circus: Here, by the front entrance, are black-and-white photos from when the building housed Ciro’s, a celebrity nightclub with Mob ties, years before comics Sammy Shore and Rudy DeLuca rented the space and turned it into a stand-up joint.
And here, scrawled on the walls, are the signatures of up-and-coming comics who flocked to the Comedy Store when Shore’s wife, Mitzi, took control of the operation and it became known as the proving grounds to get on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. This who’s who of comedy includes David Letterman, Jay Leno, Andy Kaufman, Steve Martin, Elayne Boosler, Richard Lewis, Robin Williams, Arsenio Hall, and Richard Pryor. Here’s the bullet hole resulting from the time Sam Kinison got into an argument with Andrew Dice Clay and pulled a gun. (“Sam wasn’t trying to kill Andrew,” says LaMont. “I don’t think.”)
“And here,” says LaMont, guiding us to a forlorn spot in the Comedy Store’s parking lot, “is where things stopped being funny.” In 1979, comics formed a labor union and demanded to be paid for their performances, something the club had never done. The Comedy Store eventually began compensating comedians, but some union members were blacklisted. That included Steve Lubetkin, who, on June 1, 1979, jumped from the roof of the thirteen-story Continental Hyatt House next door, landing on the pavement where we’re standing. He left behind a note: “I used to work at the Comedy Store. Maybe this will help to bring about fairness.”
We stop in the Original Room, a space up front that’s known as the toughest room in the country. To show us why, LaMont has us walk on stage and he lowers the lights. Looking out, all we see is pure darkness, with a single, blinding spotlight shining straight at us like an oncoming train. “It’s important to hear the audience, not see it,” LaMont tells us.
LaMont’s tour ends in the Comedy Store’s Belly Room, a murky shoe box of a performance space up a rickety flight of stairs at the back of the club. We’re here to meet Josh Friedman, a clean-cut 22-year-old financial consultant who’s a friend of a friend. The year before, Friedman had tried out on a whim for a stand-up competition and ended up winning the contest at a big downtown club. Now he wants to see if he has the potential to go further—which is why he’s here in the Belly Room about to perform for the first time.
We take our seats, and the show begins. Soon the young comic is up. Friedman begins with a tale of a drunken night in Shanghai that ends with him taking a spin on what he thinks is a stripper pole, ripping out a support beam, and knocking out an old Chinese lady. Then he goes on to point out that people who complain that Doritos are like crack don’t know what they’re talking about: “You eat too many Doritos and it’s like, ‘My stomach hurts.’ You smoke too much crack and it’s like, ‘My teeth are gone.’ ” He ends with a bit about his doctor asking to look at his penis: “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this guy is trying to molest me!’ And then I realized how ridiculous I was being. He’s not some random guy off the street. He’s my optometrist!”
The six-minute set isn’t bad, but we’re biased. We like Friedman. For the real verdict, we’ll leave it up to a couple of pros we’ve invited to the show. One is Sarah Klegman, a young dynamo of a manager for Levity, one of the biggest comedy agencies in LA. The other is Jeff Singer, a hip-looking guy with black plastic glasses who’s the executive talent scout for the Just For Laughs comedy festival. These two spend their days watching stand-up reels and grilling club owners, their nights haunting open mikes and talent showcases, looking for the next big thing. And we want to know if Friedman has a shot at the title.
Klegman and Singer, who both watched the performance impassively, divide their comments into good and bad news: the good news is that Friedman has impressive confidence for someone so green. Now for the bad news. He’s too long-winded with little payoff, says Singer. “In a six-minute set, you have to get funny quick.” And that line about Doritos and crack? “He telegraphed that like a bad boxer.”
Klegman has her own critiques. He has no personality on stage, no particular voice, she says. Plus, his beats were off. If he’s going to tell stories, “he’s gotta dance into it.” Finally, he missed an opportunity with his appearance: “He looks like a gay fourteen-year-old,” says Klegman. “He should talk about that.”
If Friedman is serious about comedy, say Klegman and Singer, he has to get to work. He needs to get on stage four times a week, minimum. If he keeps at it, who knows, maybe he’ll be worth their time—five to eight years down the road.
That seems like a lot of time and effort to see if someone has what it takes to be funny. Could there be an easier method, a way to measure somebody’s sense of humor, like modern-day baseball scouts use on-base percentages or unintentional walk and strikeout rates to predict a player’s future performance?
One stumbling block is that no one seems to agree on what having a sense of humor means. Does it suggest you’re good at telling jokes—or good at getting them? Does it mean you find everything funny? Or that you laugh a lot? Most of the time, if you say somebody has a good sense of humor, you’re giving them an all-around compliment. (Or, if you’re selling your friend on a blind date, it means the date is not very good-looking.)
It doesn’t help that the term “humor” has had all sorts of different connotations. It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that humor became widely used in its modern sense, as a virtue. Before that, “humour,” from the Latin word for “fluid,” referred to bile, phlegm, and other bodily fluids believed to wreak havoc on people’s moods. A “humourist” was someone whose body fluids were so imbalanced they acted mentally ill. A “man of humour” was someone skilled at impersonating an insane person.1
Despite the confusion, researchers have made valiant efforts to measure people’s sense of humor. In the 1980s, Yale researcher Alan Feingold tried to rate humor as an ability to remember funny things: “What comedian said, ‘I get no respect!’?” “Complete this joke: ‘Take a long walk on a short ____.’ ” But mostly what he found was that those who scored high watched a lot of funny movies and TV shows.2
Tests that require people to produce humor, such as coming up with cartoon captions or crafting jokes, might make more sense, but so far, no one’s figured out a standardized way to do so. More effort has been put toward questionnaires that ask people to gauge their own sense of humor. But one of the problems with this method is that according to self-report measures, everyone in the world is hilarious. Researchers found that when asked to rate their own sense of humor, 94 percent of people claim it’s average or above average.3 Apparently, if everybody applied themselves, we’d be a nation full of Carrot Tops.
Klegman and Singer say they don’t need to use quantitative measures. Friedman doesn’t have what it takes. They can feel it in their guts. Later, at a greasy late-night diner, Singer elaborates on the subjective part of his job, the stuff he can’t quantify. “There are a lot of intangibles,” he says over bacon and eggs. “In comedy, you are looking for something that pops, something that will play to the masses, something that will make someone a star.” Sometimes, he says, “you can look at someone and there is something unique in their soul. It’s in their DNA.”
He doesn’t see that looking at Friedman.
“Okay, class, what’s the most important thing in stand-up comedy?” Greg Dean asks his students.
“Your relationship with the audience,” they respond in unison.
“What’s your reason for being on stage?” Dean continues.
“To tell the audience what’s wrong,” they answer.
Dean, sitting in a director’s chair on stage at the Santa Monica Playhouse, looks satisfied. The dozen or so people sitting around us in the small theater’s stadium-style seats are halfway through his five-week intro stand-up class, and they seem to be getting it. The students here are retired lawyers, dock workers, and the unemployed. But they all want to get into comedy. That’s why they’ve come here, to take what’s reportedly the longest-running stand-up class in the country. And today, Dean, named best comedy teacher at the Los Angeles Comedy Awards, is going to teach them about riffing, the art of interacting with your audience.
“Stand-up comedy is the most terrifying thing on the planet, and riffing is the most terrifying element of stand-up,” announces Dean. He’s a big, imposing guy, but he comes off as gentle and a little geeky. That doesn’t make what comes next any less intimidating: Each student has to get up on stage and start riffing like they’re working the room. “And remember,” says Dean, as he pulls out a stopwatch, “Be playfully mean.”
Earlier today, we’d visited Dean at his house, a small bungalow in Hollywood filled with small yipping dogs, whiffs of incense, and the flotsam of a life lived oddly. There are circus hats and juggling pins and Buddha statues and two suits of armor standing guard by the fireplace, remnants of a career that includes a stint as a Ringling Bros. circus clown, a one-man comedy act called the “Obscene Juggler,” a warm-up act for Chippendale dancers, and personal assistant for self-help guru Tony Robbins. For Dean, it all culminated in what he calls his life’s work, “a taxonomy of comedy that other people can build on.”
To explain what he meant, Dean started diagramming jokes on a whiteboard he’d set up in his living room. He explained that his joke-writing method arose from number-one benign violation critic Victor Raskin and his linguistic theory of humor—the idea that a joke involves two different and opposite scripts, or frames of reference, with one script usually suggested by the set-up and the opposite script often revealed by the punch line. Take an example Raskin uses in his hefty book on the subject, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor:
“Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper.
“No,” the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply. “Come right in.”
The script suggested by the set-up is that the patient wants the doctor at home so he can be treated by him. The second script revealed by the punch line is that the patient doesn’t want the doctor home, so he can be treated in a different manner by the doctor’s wife.4 All Dean did was turn Raskin’s theory into a step-by-step joke-writing process. The first step, Dean told us, is coming up with the first scripts, or set-up. “Any statement will do,” he said, writing one on the board:
My wife is an excellent housekeeper.
The obvious meaning of this phrase, what Dean calls the “Target Assumption,” is that the wife is great at housework. But what else could “housekeeper” mean, he asked us; how could this key word, what he calls the “Connector,” be construed? What about if “housekeeper” means someone who literally keeps the house? He calls this step, coming up with a second script, the “Reinterpretation,” and it’s key to finishing the joke, which he wrote on the board.
My wife is an excellent housekeeper.
When we got a divorce, the bitch got the house.
The system is an elegant way to take obtuse scholarly theory and put it to good use. Even Raskin has nice things to say about it. “Greg is a very nice man, and I have always been flattered by his attention,” he responded when I e-mailed him on his thoughts about Dean’s work. Still, Raskin being Raskin, he added, “He is no scholar, and the way he understands the theory is very simplistic.”
Dean admits that his joke-writing trick doesn’t a comedian make. That’s why in his classes and his book, Step-by-Step to Stand-Up Comedy, he also tackles all sorts of other stuff, like how to hold a microphone and use words with hard consonants because “k” sounds are funnier than “r” sounds, and how to “tag” your punch lines with follow-up punch lines to turn jokes into ongoing bits. And how to riff.
The first on stage for Dean’s riffing exercise at the Santa Monica Playhouse is a student named Jack. He looks around the room and focuses on a guy near the front.
“What’s your name?” asks Jack, grasping an imaginary microphone.
“Er, Herb,” the guy ad-libs.
“And what do you do, Herb?”
“Work in a salon.”
“Oh, really,” purrs Jack, flashing bedroom eyes at Herb. “I never would’ve guessed—you look so strong and tough!”
The bit’s a hit, as are many of his classmates’ ad-libbed riffs. Pete and I are impressed. But does that mean that Dean and his comedy-class colleagues are on to something? Is rote instruction the best way to become funny? Questions like this leave many established comics fuming. There’s no shortcut to stand-up, they declare; the only way to do it is to put in your years at the clubs, working your way from show opener to feature to headliner, developing your voice through endless nights of blood, sweat, and other sorts of liquids. Does it make sense to pay somebody to teach you what to do, they argue, when some of the most famous comedians of all, like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Steve Martin, are the ones who broke all the rules?
These critics might have a point—or they might not. Sooner or later, aspiring comics need to put in stage time. But could taking classes or working with an expert speed up the process? It’s hard to know, says Pete. Nobody’s ever tested it. “None of these processes are scientific,” he says. And without the science, it’s tough to make promises about anything.
Take a basic concept that many comedy teachers agree on: you need to stick a big, pregnant pause between your set-ups and punch lines—sometimes as long as several seconds. As Dean notes in his book, quoting from his comedy-expert predecessors, “Timing is knowing when to stop speaking in the midst of a routine in order to allow thinking time for the audience to prepare itself for the laugh that is coming up.”5 On the surface, this advice seems obvious: when someone tells a joke, he or she pauses between the set-up and punch line—right?
Recently, Salvatore Attardo, linguistics professor at the University of Texas A&M and former editor-in-chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, along with his wife, Texas A&M colleague Lucy Pickering, decided to find out. The two analyzed recordings of ten speakers reciting a pre-written joke as well as a gag they came up with on the spot. What they found was unexpected: the participants didn’t pause before punch lines, and the mean length of time between set-ups and punch lines was in fact slightly shorter than the pauses between sentences in the set-up.6
“It was absolutely counterintuitive for us,” Attardo told me on the phone. For more than a year, they couldn’t get anyone to publish their results, because no one believed them. When they presented their work at academic conferences, they were told, “You must have gotten the worst joke-tellers in the universe.” But their findings withstood scrutiny, and with additional analysis, Attardo and Pickering also found that punch lines aren’t marked by any sort of unusual pitch, speed, or volume.7 There’s nothing differentiating a punch line from the rest of a joke other than it’s supposed to be funny.
So why do we assume otherwise? The best theory Attardo’s heard is that it could be thanks to one of the most famous one-liners of all: comedian Henny Youngman’s iconic 1930s quip, “Take my wife—please.”
“This joke only works if there is a long pause,” said Attardo. “Because Youngman was so famous and it was such a prominent joke, people essentially said, ‘Because there is a huge pause in that joke, there is a pause in all jokes.’ ”
So maybe it’s time for people everywhere to retire the idea of pausing before punch lines. Or as Youngman might put it, take Attardo’s research—please.
I’m a dog. I’m not just any dog, I’m Boy George’s dog.
Pete and I are on stage at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre at the foot of Hollywood Hills, in an unobtrusive storefront space across the street from the ornate headquarters of the Church of Scientology. The location is fitting. These days, people flock to the classes at UCB Theatre and its counterpart in New York like religious converts. The country’s only accredited improv and sketch-comedy school, UCB teaches roughly 9,000 students a year, with many more on the waitlist. Improvisation appears to have eclipsed stand-up as the way to get hilariously huge; Mike Myers, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Jimmy Fallon, and Conan O’Brien are just some of the celebrities who came out of improv groups. And right now, UCB Theatre, founded by comedy star Amy Poehler and her colleagues in 1999, is on the top of the improv hierarchy, boasting alumni that have gone on to write and perform for Saturday Night Live, The Office, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Ellen DeGeneres Show . . . the list goes on.
We’re participating in an improv class taught by Joe Wengert, a wonkish, bespectacled guy who’s one of UCB LA’s top instructors. We’re among some of the program’s most advanced pupils, the ones most likely to be tomorrow’s comedy elite. Since improv is all about creating performances on the spot, for my first assignment of the day, Wengert teams me with student Darwyn Metzger and tells the two of us to act out a made-up movie called Wilmer Grace and His Dog. “Set in the late 1980s,” somebody suggests. “Starring Boy George,” adds another. “And his dog.”
Instinctively, I drop to my hands and knees, ready to be Boy George’s dog: “Woof!” Darwyn looks at me like I’m an idiot. I’ve just broken one of improv’s most important rules: “Yes, and . . .” The seemingly obvious thing to do if you’re trying to be funny with somebody else is to disagree with them, for the same reason disagreements are useful to me as a writer: Arguments are funny! Conflict is interesting! But in improv, it’s all about letting the interaction of the performers progress to see what sort of things unfold. An argument stops that process cold. Instead, improvisers are trained to agree with whatever their colleagues say, then use it to further the action: “Yes, and . . .” “No” is a no-no. But I didn’t even get that far. By pretending to be a dog that can’t do anything but bark, I’d killed all potential interaction between Darwyn and me before we’d even begun.
It’s not about being funny, it’s about being honest. That’s what Charna Halpern told me weeks earlier on the phone: “There is nothing funnier than the truth.” Alongside the late improv master Del Close, Halpern co-founded the influential Improv Olympic Theater in Chicago, now known as iO; helped develop the “Harold,” the three-act long-form technique that’s the triathlon of improv; and wrote the definitive book on the subject, Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation. The improv system laid out in Truth in Comedy reads like a self-help book: Be honest. Agree with one another. Stay in the moment. Welcome silence. Listen to your inner voice. There is no such thing as a mistake.
There’s a reason the rules sound so life-affirming, said Halpern: improv is all about building bonds with one another, forming order out of the chaos. “We are saving our corner of the world,” she said. Halpern has run improv workshops for warring factions in Cyprus, and once flew to Switzerland to teach the physicists working on the $9 billion Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator to loosen up. “I should get a Nobel Prize,” she declared. It’s unclear whether she was joking.
Our UCB class lasts for hours, but the time flies. Improv is play, and it’s a lot of fun. Afterward, at a nearby coffee shop, the students seem ready to do it all again. “I love using another person to succeed or fail on stage,” one of them tells us. “It’s freeing,” says another. “It’s like therapy light,” raves a third.
We haven’t heard anything like this from the stand-up comics we’ve been talking to in LA, folks who seem like a whole different comedic species than these improvisers. “It’s a different beast,” a UCB student says about stand-up. “It is flexing two completely different muscles.”
Are different people really funny in different ways? Scientists believe so, and they’ve gotten good at parsing those differences. Take the Humorous Behavior Q-sort Deck, a 100-item test developed at the University of California, Berkeley, that measures how people use humor in their everyday lives. Pete and I subjected ourselves to the Q-sort Deck, discovering its procedure is every bit as ungainly as its name. Going through the assignment’s 100 cards, each labeled with a different humor statement, and organizing them in piles from least to most representative of how I use humor, I was soon asking questions I’d never asked before: Do I laugh heartily from head to heel? (Probably more than I care to admit.) Am I bored by slapstick comedy? (Who isn’t?) Do I find humor in the everyday behavior of animals? (Is it possible to say no to this once you’ve been exposed to the miracle website “Animals Being Dicks”?) To ensure I was as honest as possible, I recruited my wife, Emily, to help out. Soon she was grumbling, “Why in the world are we doing this?”
Once I had my answers, added up the totals, and plugged in some mathematical formulas that brought back nightmares of high school algebra, I had my five humor-style scores for the five different ways people tend to create and appreciate humor. Incredibly, my results were almost identical to Pete’s. We both scored positively for “socially warm versus cool” and “competent versus inept” humor styles, meaning we both use humor to encourage positive morale, and we’re both witty (although Pete is more confident in his schtick than I am in mine). Unfortunately for those we chat up at cocktail parties, we both scored negatively for the “reflective versus boorish” style, suggesting our humor can be unappealingly competitive and clownish, and we’re both a bit negative in “benign versus mean-spirited” humor, so we’re equally likely to tell cruel jokes. The only difference was in “earthy versus repressed” humor, which means Pete likes dirty jokes while I’m a bit of a prude.
So maybe the UCB students are right. There are different comedic muscles. And it does seem that different muscles come into play in stand-up and improv. But Wengert the UCB teacher, who has a thriving stand-up career on the side, thinks the two share more similarities than most people realize. “All good comedy talks about what is wrong and what is funny about a situation,” he tells us later. “A lot of times, the approach for both is, what bothers you about this situation, what’s truthful about it.”
Again and again, we’ve heard that the best comedians are at some level outsiders, the people who can stand apart from everyone and everything and ask themselves, “What’s funny about this?” As scholar Stephanie Koziski noted, comics have more in common with anthropologists than either group is likely to admit: “The comedian and the anthropologist share a way of seeing. This involves the capacity to stand outside themselves and to empathize with people who are different in order to more fully understand their actions and beliefs.”8
Maybe that’s why ethnic and cultural outsiders in America, those with one foot in the mainstream and one foot outside, have long thrived in comedy. A 1979 Time magazine article estimated that while Jews constituted just 3 percent of the U.S. population, they were responsible for an astounding 80 percent of all comedians.9 While Jewish comic supremacy has surely since declined, their ranks have been replaced in part by African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and, more recently, Muslim Americans. Among this influx was Chris Rock, who grew up in a working-class section of Brooklyn but was bused to predominantly white schools. That made him an outsider in both places, a painful situation for a young kid, but a great state of affairs for a future stand-up icon.
Of course, you don’t have to be a minority to be a great comic. But either way, it seems helpful to cultivate what W.E.B. Du Bois called your “double-consciousness,” your “two-ness.”10 Yes, in the United States this phenomenon has been a bad thing, something that’s kept people fractured and suspicious and struggling with self-identity. But on the bright side, it also makes for good comedy.
For something that’s conceptually so basic—joke-telling in its primal form—all we hear from stand-up comics in LA is how complicated it is to do their job right. In comedy, they explain, context is everything. There are too many outside variables, they tell us, too many ways those simple jokes can get mucked up by quirks of the comedy club or audience or a million other factors. “Comedy is seldom performed in ideal circumstances,” wrote Steve Martin in his memoir, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life. “Comedy’s enemy is distraction, and rarely do comedians get a pristine performing environment. I worried about the sound system, ambient noise, hecklers, drunks, lighting, sudden clangs, latecomers, and loud talkers, not to mention the nagging concern, ‘Is this funny?’ ”
And more than anything else, comedians seem to worry about the space they’re trying to be funny in. Is it a “good” room or a “bad” room? But what does that even mean? What constitutes a comedy club, after all, is all over the map. In Los Angeles alone, we’ve visited venues ranging from brightly lit halls to shadowy bars to back-alley alcoves to black-box theaters to the back room of a comic book store. But if the comedians we’ve talked to had it their way, clubs would all look more or less the same: a densely packed, dimly lit space with low ceilings, red curtains, and nothing at all that’s blue. As Jordan Brady, a comedian turned director whose 2010 documentary I Am Comic explored comedy-club designs, put it to us, “A great club experience is best served dark and intimate.”
What’s funny about these suggestions is that they go against best practices in retail-space design. Research shows that consumers are happiest—and therefore most likely to spend money—in environments with open layouts, high ceilings, and blue-hued color schemes.11 But as Pete points out, an ideal comedy club isn’t designed to get people to buy stuff, even if some drink-shilling club owners wish otherwise. It’s to help them have an emotionally arousing experience: to laugh.
And from that perspective, the comics might be on to something. Experiments have shown that people exposed to warm color schemes, especially those with red, are more likely to become aroused and excited, while cool colors like blue are calming and sedative. And the last thing you want of a comedy audience is everybody feeling calm and sleepy.12 Furthermore, darkened clubs might help people feel more concealed and therefore less inhibited in what they’re willing to laugh at. In experiments, people in poorly lit rooms and wearing sunglasses were more likely to do devious things because they felt anonymous.13 Being packed into a comedy club might have the same disinhibiting effect. When people are in large groups, they are more likely to do embarrassing things such as act like monkeys, make rude noises, and suck on baby bottles.14 Apparently, if you get enough folks together, everything turns into a frat party.
To see if the comedians knew what they were talking about, Pete figured there was only one thing to do: build his own comedy club. Incredibly, the Denver Art Museum let him do so. During one of the museum’s monthly after-hours social events, in which the building remains open late and a cash bar serves up drinks, Pete, working with his collaborator Caleb and graduate student Julie Schiro, took over a small 15-by-50-foot gathering space, filling it with rows of chairs and setting up a movie projector stocked with comedy footage: an Ellen DeGeneres Show sketch in which the actor Dennis Quaid terrorized a café barista (“Dennis Quaid wants a coffee!”); a compilation of “epic fail” videos, most of which involved people hit in the groin; and clips of babies making ridiculous faces as they gummed on lemons. Throughout the night, they had groups of museum visitors “attend” their comedy showcase, varying aspects of the room for different performances—changing lighting levels and switching the color of the background behind the movie clips. (Pete had hoped to modify room temperature, but the museum wouldn’t go for it. Something about damaging millions of dollars’ worth of art.)
Sure enough, combining low lighting with a red backdrop seemed to make some of the clips funnier—but not all of them. And none of the differences reached levels of statistical significance. Plus, an outside variable threw off the results, one Pete never anticipated in an upright place like an art museum: As the night progressed, people became increasingly drunk and rowdy. “That’s great for a comedy club,” says Pete, “but bad for science.”
What about the people who fill the comedy clubs, we wonder—those who come to hear the jokes? Is there a difference between a good comedy audience and a bad one? Hollywood believes there is—and has lately been throwing time and money at the issue. Which is why, just after dawn one morning, Pete and I drive to a warehouse in a bland Burbank industrial zone to have our chuckles evaluated by the laughter queen of Los Angeles.
“Have you practiced laughing?” I ask Pete.
“I practiced yesterday, while I was stuck in traffic,” he says. “It was kind of embarrassing.”
I haven’t practiced. And it’s 7 a.m., and I haven’t had coffee. There is nothing at all to laugh about.
Lisette St. Claire greets us at the warehouse’s entrance, showing us around its cubicle-filled interior—the headquarters of Central Casting, the giant staffing company that’s Hollywood’s go-to place for extras and stand-ins. “This is the heart of Hollywood,” she says. “Eighty-five to 90 percent of everything that’s shot in LA, we have a finger in it.” That’s why she’s seeing us so early. In a few hours, things will get busy around here. Folks will begin to line up outside for a shot at being cast as “Homeless Man Number Two.” Sometimes, for certain jobs, St. Claire casts herself. “It’s fun,” she says. “You get to be a hooker one day, a doctor the next.”
Her most unusual assignment of all fell into her lap thanks to The Nanny, the 1990s sitcom starring Fran Drescher. Years earlier, Drescher had been assaulted in her home by armed robbers. She wasn’t keen on having random people in her studio audience. The show asked Central Casting to provide prescreened audiences for the show.
For St. Claire, the casting director assigned to the task, not any old audience would do. “I was not about to send just anybody. I wanted people who were really good,” she tells us. St. Claire’s overzealousness on the matter makes sense: from her outsized personality to her riot of curly hair to her storied history as a onetime mud wrestler, she’s not the sort to do the bare minimum.
She started auditioning people, looking for dominating, infectious laughs. If chosen, folks got $75 for a day’s worth of chuckles, slightly better than your typical extra. If folks made the cut, she put them into one of three tiers: top-level Group A, second-string Group B, or “when hell freezes over” Group C.
Her formula was a hit. Her phone started ringing, with three to four shows a week turning to Central Casting’s cacklers instead of, say, a laugh track. “We couldn’t get enough people with good laughs out,” she says.
St. Claire’s live laughers have a better scientific track record than the canned version. In one study, researchers found that the sound of strong laughter caused people to rate a Steven Wright comedy routine funnier—but only if they believed the laughter wasn’t pre-recorded.15
So, do our laughs make the cut? St. Claire turns to me. “Laugh like you’re about to pee your pants.”
I try my best, feeling goofy and awkward as I cackle as loud and long as I can. It’s hard not to feel like a fool when you’re laughing at nothing whatsoever.
When I’m laughed out, it’s Pete’s turn. He slaps his knee and rears his head back, mouth agape. No wonder his college friends nicknamed him “T-Rex.”
“Not bad,” St. Claire says with a polite smile. “I’d put you both in Group B.”
The laughter queen is being kind.
No trip to Los Angeles is complete, we figure, without a road trip to Las Vegas. So on a bright California morning, we lock our apartment, pack up our rental car, and, trading hackneyed shouts of “Vegas, baby!” head out onto the road . . . only to find ourselves stuck in five-lane, bumper-to-bumper, no-end-in-sight traffic. At 11:37 a.m. on a Saturday. “This is not the exciting Swingers-style trip we envisioned,” grumbles Pete as we idle in a sea of cars. He points to a homeless man pushing two shopping carts piled high with odds and ends down the sidewalk. “That guy is beating us.”
Eventually we make it through the congestion and, after hours of cruising through desert vistas of gnarled Joshua trees and craggy mountain peaks, we make it to Sin City. It’s like a fever dream in the middle of nowhere: gargantuan casinos soaring overhead, kitschy music blaring from all directions; lurid neon flashing—and, in the middle of it all, featuring a smile as bright as any of the signs on the Las Vegas Strip, a huge billboard for the man we’ve come to see: “Funny Man George Wallace for President!”
As entertainment journalist Richard Zoglin wrote in Comedy at the Edge, “Stand-up comedy may be the only major art form whose greatest practitioners, at any given time, want to be doing something else”—whether that be a sitcom star, a film icon, or a late-night talk-show host. But it’s difficult to break out in such a way, to become mega-stars with multimedia empires. For one thing, once you’ve reached the top, it’s hard to stay there. Unlike rock stars, comics can’t just do greatest-hits tours, since old jokes are, well, old.16
Still, some comedians have managed to become fabulously rich. But maybe they had an unfair advantage. Is a white comic, for example, more likely to strike it rich than a black comic? To find out, Pete decided to mine the data from an online list of nearly 200 comedians’ net worth, ranging from the $800 million fortunes of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David to the $5,000 income claimed by Andy Dick.17 Working with undergraduate research assistant McKenzie Binder and cognitive scientist Phil Fernbach, he sliced the info every which way. Not surprisingly, they found the biggest predictor of success was age. The longer folks had been in the business, the more money they’d earned. Being involved in endeavors other than stand-up, such as starring in or producing films, also correlated with higher net worth. Gender didn’t have much effect, but then again, only 10 percent of the comedians listed were female. A few other traits, though, did seem to offer marginal help. Comedians who were atheistic or agnostic, were married, or, yes, happened to be white, tended to be richer. But these effects mostly went away when Pete and his collaborators controlled for the other relevant characteristics. Put another way, Chris Rock wouldn’t make more money if he were white, but he would make more money if he wrote, produced, and directed more movies.
George Wallace, a former ad-agency salesman who started in comedy in late-1970s New York alongside his roommate and friend Jerry Seinfeld, seems to have handled his ascension to the comedy firmament with ease. While he’s never starred in a sitcom or big movie, he sells out the biggest theaters, has appeared on the biggest talk shows, and was named among the 100 greatest comics of all time by Comedy Central. And here in Las Vegas, at the Flamingo Resort and Casino, where he has a running show we have tickets for tonight, he holds court like a king over his flashy fiefdom.
Some say Vegas, with all its distractions, is one of the toughest places for a comic to perform. But not so for Wallace. As soon as the comedian, in a gray suit and signature beret, steps on stage in the Flamingo Showroom with its 60-foot ceilings and red plush seating, he’s in his element. The near-capacity crowd eats up his cracks about NBA stars, televangelist Joel Osteen, and what he’d do if he were president. Every “yo mamma” joke lands a laugh, every time he trots out his catchphrase, “I be thinkin’ . . .” folks go wild. It’s a bit hokey. But Wallace is fun, he’s boisterous—and most of all, he seems happy.
Such a persona goes against one of the most endearing stereotypes in all of comedy: the road-weary, liquored-up, drug-addled, and all-around screwed-up comic. As British humorist Jimmy Carr and his journalist co-author Lucy Greeves put it in their far-reaching book Only Joking: What’s So Funny About Making People Laugh? “In a room filled with people, the comedian is the only one facing the wrong way. He’s also the only one who isn’t laughing. For normal people, that’s a nightmare, not a career aspiration.”18 In many famous cases, that nightmare hasn’t ended well. Lenny Bruce overdosed on drugs. Mort Sahl lost himself in obsession over the John F. Kennedy assassination. Richard Pryor set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine and nearly killed himself. The comedy industry accepts these potential outcomes as a given. The Laugh Factory, one of the biggest comedy clubs in LA, has an in-house therapy program. Two nights a week, comics meet with psychologists in a private office upstairs while lying on a therapy couch once owned by Groucho Marx. “Eighty percent of comedians come from a place of tragedy,” Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada, a colorful guy in hip sneakers and jeans, told Pete. “They didn’t get enough love. They have to overcome their problems by making people laugh.”
But could Wallace, with whom we’ve been granted a sit-down, be the exception? The proof comedians don’t have to be miserable? After his Flamingo show, casino personnel pull us backstage and whisk us through a maze of corridors, past stretching cabaret dancers and a mariachi band set, into a well-appointed dressing room with Wallace’s name on the door. The towering, grinning man inside greets us, happy to chat. “I had the perfect childhood,” Wallace says. “My ultimate goal was to work Las Vegas, and now I’m here.” He rambles on with a confident swagger, like a rambunctious grandpa overflowing with stories. Plus, he says with a wink, “I’m the most successful comedian you’ve ever met, and I can go pee without anyone bugging me.” He points to a photo on the wall of his friend Seinfeld. “He can’t go pee.”
In the early hours of the morning, we thank Wallace for his time, figuring it’s time for us to go. “Don’t leave!” he cries. “I’m going to be lonely!” He says this jokingly, but there’s something in his voice. Maybe the most successful comedian we’ve ever met has no one else to talk to, nowhere else to go.
Even Wallace could have a trace of unhappiness buried beneath his layers of contentment and success. Does this mean funny people are inherently unhappy? Gil Greengross, an anthropologist from the University of New Mexico, looked into the matter by subjecting comics recruited from a local stand-up club to established personality surveys. He found that comedians on the whole don’t report having more childhood problems than typical university students, nor do they appear to be more neurotic. He did find that they tended to be slightly more introverted and disagreeable than others, an odd finding considering that they’re always making jokes in front of crowds. But, as Greengross put it when I talked to him, “The personalities they project on stage might not be their personalities in daily life.”19
Our time with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre students left Pete wondering if improvisers would score differently on such tests. So he partnered with Greengross, as well as HuRL graduate student Abby Schneider and decision-research scientist (not to mention improv alum) Dan Goldstein to undertake what they believe is the largest-ever data collection on amateur and professional funny people. They had more than 650 UCB students—from absolute beginners to members of the theater’s house teams—complete online surveys measuring personality traits like agreeableness, neuroticism, self-awareness, and tenacity. When the data came in, Pete and his colleagues found just one area of difference between the two types of humorists: the students specializing in improv tended to be more conscientious than the stand-up comics. The improvisers, the data showed, were more likely thorough, efficient, and deliberate (i.e., they were good at coming up with what comes after “Yes, and . . .”). But there’s a downside: Conscientious people tend to be perfectionists. Take it from the two of us: that’s not always a good thing.
But other than that, UCB instructor Joe Wengert turned out to be right: the personalities of stand-up comedians and improvisers are far more alike than different. Despite their cheerful and engaging on-stage demeanor, the improv students ended up being just as disagreeable and introverted as stage comics.
So are all comedians jackasses? Not necessarily. In his solo research, Greengross found one other bit of data: Those comedians who seemed to have the most success, in that they reported having the most shows booked, were those who tended to use friendly, more affiliative humor in their daily lives and were more open-minded, agreeable, and extroverted than their counterparts.20 As Greengross put it to me, “There might be something in the combination of being nice to others, and not being an asshole, that pushes you over the top.”
We heard the same thing from Chris Mazzilli, the cool-as-ice co-owner of Gotham Comedy Club, the poshest stand-up joint in New York City. “It’s a business,” Mazzilli told us about comedy. “A lot of people don’t treat it as such.” If you want to be successful, he concludes, “don’t be an asshole.” Yes, comics make their living by creating conflict and turmoil in front of an audience, but if they hope to succeed with managers, agents, club owners, producers, and directors, that conflict and turmoil had better stay on stage.
So why is it that people assume successful comics are the opposite, that they’re screwed up both on stage and off? It could be because by nature of their career, all they do is talk about what’s wrong with themselves, says Pete: If you’re going to mine your life for comedy material, for benign violations, you’re going to start with the violations—relationship struggles and health problems and other topics—that people don’t talk about in polite company, but are great for a laugh.
To test his hypothesis, Pete recruited grad student Erin Percival Carter and Colorado State University professor Jennifer Harman to run an experiment in which they had 40 people come up with a short story they might tell to others at a get-together. Half had to recount a funny story, while the others just had to be interesting. Among the humorous stories were tales of a dog swallowing a box of tampons, a guy getting caught singing in the men’s room to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” and someone deciding one drunken night to let a buddy burn a lightning bolt into his forehead so he’d look like Harry Potter. When others read the stories and chose which authors seemed the most “messed up,” the funny storytellers were rated significantly more screwy than the others.21
But maybe these storytellers were viewed as screw-ups simply because they weren’t very good at telling funny stories. So the team re-ran the experiment, this time employing the talents of our new friends at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Alex Berg, UCB LA’s artistic director, was so excited about the partnership, he launched a whole UCB “science department” to handle it (cute, we know). Once again, when the findings came in, the UCB performer who penned a funny story about teaching grade-school kids to swim when he didn’t know how to swim himself was judged to be significantly more messed up than the UCB member who described in a serious manner saving a guy who’d fallen onto the subway tracks—even though both stories were actually written by the same person.
In conclusion, maybe we’re all equally screwed up. The rest of us just aren’t as motivated as comedians to share those screw-ups with others in the guise of jokes.
That is, except for the Harry Potter lightning-bolt guy. He needs professional help.
On our last night in Los Angeles, we head back to the UCB Theatre to catch the hottest stand-up show in town: “Comedy Bang Bang.” The small black-box theater is crammed with twentysomethings in hipster T-shirts and baseball hats, swigging booze from brown paper bags beneath the venue’s prominent “No drinking” signs. As usual for the show, nobody knows who’s going to perform. But that doesn’t matter to folks in the know. Tickets for the event sold out days ago, as they do most weeks.
When the show starts, Pete and I sit in back, taking it all in. We’ve seen so much stand-up lately we act like snooty connoisseurs, nodding and whispering to each other, “Oh, that’s funny,” rather than laughing like normal people.
Then, at the end of the night, the big special guest: Aziz Ansari, co-star of the sitcom Parks and Recreation and, alongside Louis C.K., one of the biggest comedy names around. He’s here to work on material.
Ansari works the audience, asking what dating sites people frequent, and segues into an extended bit on internet matchmaking. He complains that as a child he was ignored by pedophiles, something he doesn’t understand: “For child molesters, I must’ve been like the hot chick at the bar.” The crowd eats it up, but with one graphic molestation joke, he takes it too far. The laughter dies.
“Oh, come on!” he cracks in mock annoyance, gesturing at a digital recorder he has running nearby. “Other people have laughed at that. I’ve taped it. Want me to play it for you?”
Later, Pete realizes something: “Comedians are using science.” While comics like Louis C.K. might deny there’s a formula behind what’s funny, they’ve all developed their own formulas—by experimenting bit by bit, recording their shows night after night and gauging the results. As we’ve learned here in LA, it’s not about whether or not you’re funny, it’s how you’re funny: how you learn the ins and outs of the business, how you develop your comic perspective, how you mix honesty and humor, how you deal with bad venues, and how you handle your shot at fame. And the only way to learn is through hard, repetitive, empirical work. “Comedians are experimenting every time they go up on stage and try a new bit and they gauge how the audience responds,” says Pete. “They tweak it, see how it changes, tweak it, see how it changes.”
Yes, non-scientific stuff plays a role, too. Several months after our trip to Los Angeles, comic hopeful Josh Friedman sends us an e-mail. He’s turned his attention to improv, he tells us: “As an art form and personal activity, I find I enjoy it a whole lot more,” he writes.
The talent scouts’ gut feeling was right. He didn’t have stand-up in his soul.
Call it whatever you want, but experimentation is integral to being funny. “To say that science can’t help comedy is to ignore what comedians have learned throughout the years,” Pete says.
Yes, comedy’s a bit messy, a bit dangerous. But then again, so is science.
