Creating a Comic

The other night, a few of us were talking backstage about Jeff Dunham; specifically, whether his act could be characterized as little more than racism with puppets. That debate, like most of its kind, is unresolved and ongoing.

The conversation segued to the general topic of racial humor, and we spent a little while feeling sorry for ourselves over how politically correct Seattle audiences tend to be. Then my friend Dan Sapegin told us about this online clip from Daniel Tosh, host of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0:

So, is it racist? Uh, yeah, pretty much (you can vote in their online poll). But it doesn’t really seem malicious, and it’s pretty funny. Does that make it OK? The debate continues…

The most significant fact of the 20th century will be that the North Americans speak English.

I’m feeling pretty warm and fuzzy about the English language these days.

I recently watched a fantastic BBC program — I think those fruits would call it a programme — called The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (link goes to the first full episode). It tells the story of English as though it were a person, starting with the language’s Germanic origins as the crumbling Roman Empire receded and Flemish tribes migrated to Britain. From there, English adapted through a succession of Danish and Viking invasions that altered and nearly eradicated it, followed by a massive infusion of French during the Norman occupation, and then it variously co-opted and shamelessly stole words from Welsh, Gaelic, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Arabic, Indian¹, Carribean, and Native American sources, among others, on its way to becoming the international lingua franca.

The fact that English is such a pastiche of other languages makes it difficult to learn, if it’s not your first tongue. The flip side of that coin is its vast vocabulary, which allows us to express ourselves in wonderfully precise and varied ways.

I think we take for granted, sometimes, just how many shadings of meaning we can deploy by finding the right words. For example, I could describe myself as happy, and that would get the basic point across. But English also gifts us with dozens of words that mean the same basic thing, with subtle yet important differences. I could also describe myself as being content, which is very different than if I’m feeling ecstatic — or cheerful, sanguine, peppy, grateful, or exultant.

One of my other favorite examples² comes from the synonyms for the word alone. We could also say solitary or isolated and in both cases, we mean very different things. Solitary has the sound of a sort of voluntary nobility, a whiff of the heroic. Thoreau was a solitary figure at Walden pond. Isolated, on the other hand, sounds involuntary and a little sad – maybe even pathetic. The Unabomber nursed his deranged grievances in isolation, not in solitude.

Hey, isn’t this blog supposed to be about comedy?

The richness of the English language is a bounty for comedians, because we can almost always find a funnier word to get our point across.

For example, the words dick and cock are perfectly serviceable ways to reference male genitalia, but the old fashioned penis (or slang peener) often sounds funnier up on stage. Dong is even funnier, and so far wang has given me the best mileage out of all of them, substituted into the exact same jokes. Groin linguistics!

1. The word “jungle,” among many others, is originally from India. So is “bandanna.” [↩]
2. I didn’t come up with this example myself, but nor can I remember who I heard it from. John August, maybe? [↩]

You’ve heard of Chat Roulette, right? It’s the site that let’s you chat via webcam with strangers around the globe. Since it’s totally unfiltered, I’m sure you can guess at this scheme’s problems number one through eight hundred: dongs, dongs, and more dongs.

This Daily Show segment on Chat Roulette is one of the funniest things they’ve done in a long time:

Check out this list of the 24 best Chat Roulette screenshots for more (NSFW) lulz.

Amanda the Aspiring TV Writer broke my heart yesterday. Yeah, she’s a babe, but I don’t mean it like that — we’ve never actually met. What she did was generously take the time to offer me some advice that I really didn’t want to hear.

I asked Amanda what, given her Hollywood experience, she thought the upper page count limit is for a half hour sitcom pilot — proudly noting that I had managed to whittle mine¹ down to 44 pages. Did I need to keep whittling in order to avoid looking embarrassingly amateurish?

She suggested that I take a look at other similar pilots² for the most recent season, gently noting that the pilot for the the breakout smash Modern Family rings in at a svelte 33 pages.

Ouch. She was too polite to say so outright, but I understood the answer to be that yes, me and my 44-page comedy pilot were clownshoes-wearing amateurs. Ah well. Time to put away the scalpel and get out the machete. This is going to be a painful and bloody mess.

If you have any aspirations toward screenwriting, I strongly recommend Amanda’s blog (and not just because she shares a first name with my protagonist). She’s working her way up the ladder as a writer in the same way that I am as a comic — and blogging about it along the way. She’s a bit further along on her journey, having begun in 2007 and already worked at an agency, and her archives are a treasure trove of valuable information.

1. Amanda Evergreen is trying to put herself through college with a job at the local tanning salon, assisted and hindered by her exotic dancer roommate and the two sex-obsessed guys working at the gym next door. Body Shops is a raucous comedy about young people struggling to get by while toiling away in our modern-day body temples. [↩]
2. I.e. half hour single-camera ensemble sitcoms. [↩]

Stand-up comedy is like any other skill: it takes practice, practice, and more practice to develop your talent. If you take time off, you’ll be a step behind when you take it back up.

When I take a few weeks off from jogging, I know that my first day back is going to be lousy, especially compared to my peak — and that I’m going to be a lot more sore than usual the next day. The same goes for stand-up, although the soreness the next day is more psychological than physical (unless you were so offensively bad that you got beat up after the show).

A few years ago I went jogging with one of my brothers, who had been a big runner in school. He hadn’t exercised for some months, though, whereas I had been running almost constantly for the previous two years. I was astonished that he was able to keep up with me so easily — in fact, he probably could have left me in his dust — and when I asked him how he was in such good shape, despite having taken so much time off, he shrugged modestly and said that he had built up a pretty good base.

Another kind of base: a Zerg base. Like
Andrew, I used to be a huge Starcraft nerd.

Since he had been running for years and years, often at a very high competitive level, his regression to the mean was still far, far beyond most people’s huffing and puffing and oxygen tanking and EMT calling and next of kin notifying. He couldn’t have set any personal records on that day, but he had built up his base for so long that he was easily able to pace me.

The same is true with any other skill: sports, musical instruments, writing, computer programming, academics — when was the last time you solved a quadratic equation? We used to do that shit on a daily basis, but these days you might just as well ask me to build a time machine that dispenses candy and blowjobs.

Anyway, I took about a month off from stand-up, and my first few appearances back have been rough. Last night, my third time back on stage this week, was the first to approach the comfort level I had when I left off. Since I’ve only been doing this for a year, my base isn’t very high, and certainly not high enough to take that much time away from the stage. Lesson learned. Time to keep building the base.