Creating a Comic

In last week’s entry about stand-up gimmick acts, I made the following point:

The uncontested master of the gimmick act is the brilliant Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of Ali G, Borat, and Bruno. At this point, Cohen isn’t just a comedian; his commitment is so total that he’s more accurately categorized as a performance artist. And the results are hilarious. Stephen Colbert is another comedian whose total commitment to a character is pitch-perfect and makes for great comedy.

Taking me to task in the comments, Andrew responded:

I don’t view Colbert or Cohen as a gimmick. That’s a character but they’re very original… a Gimmick is something anyone could do and pull off the same. I could build a robot and I could invent a hand puppet and tell street jokes. I couldn’t do Stephen Colbert.

Andrew is absolutely right, and makes some other excellent points on his blog. In my haste to pad out my own blog entry with examples, I trampled all over the important distinction between a comedian doing a character versus employing a gimmick.

While a character might involve the use of props, costumes, makeup, and silly voices, those are just window dressing for the role the comedian is playing. Acting in character is fundamentally a dramatic and comedic performance by the comic. Cohen and Colbert are masters of this art.

A gimmick, on the other hand, relies primarily on those external tools. When you dress up in a full-body Dr. Doom outfit and tell street jokes modified with Fantastic Four references, the jokes themselves are only incidentally the point. The novelty of the gimmick itself is the act’s main center of gravity.

This is not to say that one is necessarily better than the other. It’s certainly more difficult, in most cases, to conceive and execute a really good character… but in the end, a laugh’s a laugh.

At the margins, the differences between the two begin to blur together. The very funny, very famous Jeff Dunham opens his act with ten minutes of solo stand-up, then brings out his wildly popular ventriloquist dummies, each of which he inhabits with a separate character. Is he doing characters, or are the puppets a gimmick? It’s hard to say, and in the end probably doesn’t really matter. It’s a great act that audiences love, and I know that I wouldn’t sweat the semantics if I had Dunham’s truckloads of money rolling in.

If that wasn’t all confusing enough, there’s also the comedian’s stage persona, which is a special, customized character based on the comic’s own personality. I’ll address the unique nature of the stage persona in an entry of its own later in the week.

Related entries in Creating a Comic:

• Stephen Colbert has huge brass balls
• Gimmick Acts in Stand-Up Comedy
• Crowd Work: Playing with the Audience
• Stand-up Comedy Glossary

 — Posted by CJ under Creating a Comic. Please comment or trackback!